Best Practice business process development
“Future competitive advantage will be gained through processes – not what you do but how you do it. The companies with the best processes will win.”
Professor Martin Christopher, Cranfield School of Management
Many companies that have invested in SAP have failed to achieve the true benefits that this software is capable of providing. Of these companies, most of them will have used SAP to replace a legacy system and in doing so will have attempted to re-create that legacy system on SAP.
This is a fundamental mistake, and one that leads to SAP being used as a 'retrospective transactional recording system', rather than a 'proactive business planning and execution system'.
The reasons why business fail to understand the differences between using the system to record what they've done and using it to plan what they are going to do is down to a number of factors, one of which is the methodology used during implementation. The methodology should ensure that significant effort is spent on a number of key factors including:
- Strategic direction identification
- Utilising as much capability from current resources as possible
- Issue diagnostics and opportunity identification
- Geographic and Logical Process Modelling and Re-engineering
- Change Management and Process Education
- Metric identification and measurement of existing performance
- Training and documentation
Our approach is specifically designed to enable our consultants and the customer to work together in order to develop the optimal business and technological solution.
It also enables us to work with the customer and use our skills, experience and tools such as our Maturity Profile Maps in order to determine a roadmap for continuous improvement; thereby developing not only the next evolutionary stage of the business, but also the next stage and the stage after that. This allows the customer to plan each individual strategic piece of work in conjunction to a wider goal, and also to ensure that benefits of one stage are achieved before moving onto the next.
One of the key ways SEVEN consultants will be able to allow their customers to visualise the 'new' business processes, understand the new roles and responsibilities, define the training requirements and understand and address the change management issues, is through thorough and detailed Business Process Modelling (BPM). Careful analysis and continuous optimisation of business processes can deliver a real competitive advantage and greatly improve the success rate of any business process or technological implementation.
For Supply Chains we use the SCOR, DCOR and CCOR models, which link accepted industry standard processes, with recognised best practices that drive improvements and the associated metrics to measure the Supply Chain processes.
The Supply Chain Maturity Model
Using a combination of our business process, technical and SCOR knowledge, and using our SAP and Supply Chain experience, we will be able to establish where you are on the current Maturity Profile, what the logical next steps should be, and what the optimal level looks like for your company.
