Designed to Support?

Does your software support your business or encumber it? When you have NO supply chain software (MRP, PLM, PM) any tool can seem like an improvement. You dream of going from an entirely manual system to one where you can access and use information freely. You dream of a system that frees up your Team to take action and get ahead of issues, that frees you up to see live data when you want to without having to wait for someone to gather and compile it. Budget and implementation time/resources factor into the decision heavily and once landed a system is chosen and launched.

The system is limited and set up of information is time-consuming and resource draining. After some time, maybe you find yourself needing a bolt on system to access additional information/tools. And another and another.

The next thing you realize is that instead of supporting your existing processes and goals, you are adapting your processes around your software. You now need entire Teams just to enter and maintain the data or your existing Team has now inherited new required functions that are not valued adding.

Flash forward a bit, and what was once an agile but manual supply chain becomes a cumbersome, slow process that increases your lead times and delays action/decision making. Your talent that you hired is now bogged down trying to work inside of a world of redundant workflows and information. The people you now have to seek to hire require an entirely different set of skills that you would have never sought to add to your business.

Selecting software for your business, especially when it comes to managing your supply chain, should always enhance your speed to market. Should always reduce the amount of manual maintenance for your Team. Software should enable not encumber your business.

Yes- you will ultimately need a software tool to allow for access to data. But the overall goal should always be front and center- is this supporting your business in speed, agility, ease or actually changing your entire business structure to a slower, heavier, less effective one?