What do CEO’s care about ERP?

Today is no different than yesterday, nor will tomorrow be different.  CEO’s have a lot on their mind.  Vision of the future, productivity, profit, competition.  How will my organization “get-it” and work as hard as I do?  How do empower them?  Are my people interested in a pay check or succeeding? 

 

Do they believe in me, in my vision?

Will my shareholders support my vision of the future? 

How do I make management care about our market share and stock price?

 

Do I care which Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution we use or do I care how well we service our customers, grow our market share and provide value to our stock holders and owners?

 

Does my management team care about the company’s stock value?  Do they have a monetary interest in the company?  Too often they forget that stock means ownership.  How do I make management understand that their job is to produce gains for the shareholders?  Although a manager has little or no direct control of share price in the short run, poor stock performance could, over the long run, be attributed to mismanagement of the company.

 

Successful organizations know that if you care about the growth and prosperity of your company, that your primary focal point has to be that your customers come first and foremost.  All the best bells and whistles mean nothing, if at the end of the day they do not drive efficiency in your organization to the point that you can service your customers better.

Who purchases your products?

To move forward it helps to document your challenges and identify metrics by which you can measure change.  This might be something simple like implementing an automated pick-pack-ship process that allows you to track and identify lag areas in between the actual picking, packing and shipment processing.  Why is it taking so long to pick orders?  Can the warehouse be better organized to minimize travel to pick the most popular items?  Can the pick list be sorted in the order of the products in the warehouse?  Would it be more efficient to bulk pick orders, stage and then sort or is it better to pick individual orders?  Why does “Joe” take twice as long to pick an order?  

 

Time is a commodity of which we all have the same allotment. 

 

Managing lost, non-productive time is one definitive way to increase productivity.  To do this, an organization first needs to set this as a priority and then look to their current resources to see if it has the tools needed to track and measure results.  Most ERP solutions have both direct and indirect time tracking capabilities. 
 

Workforce management is just one of many components to building a productive enterprise.

 

Communication both internally with employees and externally with the supply chain and customers is another critical function in productivity and ultimately customer service.  ERP systems that are properly implemented have the functions and features to enable better data collection and communication between all business entities.
 

An organized environment where everyone knows what they are supposed to do and which is reflected in a centralized system provides management the information they need in a time frame they need it to make better and quicker decisions. 

 

An environment where management has the information to make key decisions is the foundation for less frustration and savings. 

 

Do your employees provide feedback, do you have a system for them to provide feedback?  What good are your plans, if no one understands them and how they can be implemented?  By establishing key metrics and implementing automation in stages you enable management to go after tasks that are inefficient and pull waste from those functions.  These are the building blocks to lean processing.  Tracking, measuring and reporting needs to become a philosophy in your organization. 

 

Acknowledge your customer’s issues.  Treat them like you would like to be treated.

 

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solutions should be based on understanding the real business needs.  The solutions can be found if you know what you are trying to solve and what you want to achieve.

 

What is the CEO’s vision of the future?

 

If you are considering a new ERP solution or updates to an existing one, you need to determine if any of the proposed features and functions are related to the challenges you are trying solve?  They could be nice features, but do they enable you to provide better customer service (who buys your products?). 

 

Perhaps you would like to move to a newer, more feature rich accounting solution, but your ERP solution is still satisfying the needs of your organization and since you are continuing to grow, you do not want to disrupt the business by replacing it.  The very thing that attracted you to your solution is now holding you back.  Because it is tightly integrated, you cannot just replace a single module without replacing the whole thing.

 

No software is a solution to poor management or business practices. 

 

Function/Feature is not nearly as important as Challenge/Solution.  Just ask yourself which impacts the bottom line quickest. 

 

A fully integrated and implemented system enables better business planning activities, which include financial planning, procurement, logistics, supply chain and customer service.  Happy customers mean better profits. 

 

Customer Service To-Do list focal points:

1. Keep your existing customers happy and you will have a strong business.

2. Concentrate on providing value, not hype, to find new customers.

3. People learn about you by using the Internet, so keep your website updated.

4. Deliver what your customers want, not what you think is good.

5. Planning is good, but implementation is better.

 

 
Dolvin Consulting works.  We work to help you help yourself.  We are not here to take up residency in your organization. We are here to help you identify challenges in your operations and customer service and find solutions that address those challenges through Enterprise Solutions.  Contact us, today, to see how we can help.  That is why we are here.  To serve.