By Anish Kanaran, Channel Director for Epicor in the Middle East, Africa & India
IDC’s 2014 IT Services Survey results reveal that as we look ahead to 2015, the industry is entering the most critical period of disruptive transformation — what IDC calls the “innovation stage” of the 3rd Platform era. IT will be the most important catalyst and enabler, to facilitate this trend, the study suggests.
Given this background, the quote ‘adapt or die’ has really become ubiquitous with businesses needing to move with the times if they wish to thrive. However, is adaptability enough? As we all live and work in a world of ever decreasing timescales for everything we do, success and survival is as much about our ability to respond, as it is to simply adapt.
Responsiveness Vs Adaptability
The difference between responsiveness and adaptability is subtle, but critical. Adaptability means change but it doesn’t specify the pace or agility at which it must take place. But being responsive is about being fit and fast. That could be to outrun the competition, react to changing internal and external market conditions, deliver higher levels of service or innovating more. In truth, the best businesses and manufacturers will, in the future, need to be both responsive and adaptive. Responsiveness is a corporate state of mind and day to day action in equal measure and must be delivered from the boardroom to the shop floor.Increasing responsiveness can help a business improve operational performance and accelerate its productivity, through information being available at people’s fingertips and allowing more informed and rapid decision making.
In many sectors the need to be extra responsive is being driven by an increased focus on selling and delivering services rather than capital projects and equipment. Take, for example, the number of areas where products are leased and supported by value-added services, rather than simply manufactured and sold. Manufacturing trends demanding responsiveness include the pressure to differentiate in highly competitive globalised markets, tightly manage costs through inventory control and manufacturing to order, the ability to deliver bespoke and high value manufacturing, such as unique products, and working within multi-tier supply chains where complexity can easily put the brakes on your processes.
Reinventing the ERP
The need to be responsive has changed the goalposts drastically in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Fifteen years ago ERP was purely a back office system, and its primary function was to provide robust transactional support. Now ERP is an all-embracing tool for businesses, touching employees, customers, partners and suppliers alike. Customers demand ‘single instance’ ERP platforms that not only manage all core processes in synchronicity, but also deliver real-time insight to the business about what is happening and what action needs to be taken. Good ERP has answered the call for increased responsiveness, becoming much more focused on supporting critical relationships, decisions, change and innovation, rather than just efficiently managing the status quo.
Responsiveness is one of the key reasons organisations are looking to improve their ERP software performance. We see four main areas where businesses are trying to be more responsive and these are operationally, strategically, externally (with customers) and personally (with employees).
Operationally responsive
Being responsive operationally means being able to react to day to day requirements and changes to the benefit of the business. Optimising inventory is one example in manufacturing. Being able to respond to constantly changing customer and product requirements means that you can dynamically manage stock requirements and reduce both waste and cost. Operational responsiveness is also about driving subtle changes that lead to big benefits. An example of this is looking for new market opportunities from your existing business.
Strategically responsive
Business strategy is in many ways the key area where responsiveness can make a real difference. The management team’s ability to access information and respond to changes in the business and market allows them to be in greater control. Doing so requires getting the right information out of your systems, not only in formal reports but intuitively, in the context of the decisions that need to be made.
Externally responsive
Businesses are constantly working harder to differentiate on service, around speed, accuracy and quality, but also predicting the customer’s next move so that they can be ready to act. In a business sense,customer responsiveness is about having information to stay one step ahead. This can mean knowing what the customer will want to buy,or being able to nip potential problems in the bud before they even happen. If we can be more responsive to customer needs, we minimise the chances of them looking elsewhere and can enjoy longevity of relationships and all of the associated benefits.
Personally responsive
Of course, underpinning all three of these areas is the ability for an organisation’s employees to be responsive personally – with each other inside the business, as well as with customers and suppliers. Personal responsiveness is about giving people the means and information to take action quickly, decisively and accurately. People don’t want to have to dip in and out of separate systems to find information; that creates the likelihood that they’ll bypass correct procedures, and there is a higher risk of errors. Systems need to be integrated, for example linking ERP into core tools such as Outlook to manage tasks. Key applications also need to be accessible on a wide range of devices, including those specified and owned by the people themselves.
The Darwinian theory of adapt or die has long become a commodity quality in businesses; responsiveness is truly the new era of business evolution.
