The Inovis Blog

Driving change and improvements for your business can be a daunting task. The good news is that it isn’t just great ideas and big strategies which can significantly improve your business; it could be just a minor change or a simple improvement to an existing process leveraging existing capabilities in place at your business.

Improvement is about doing things better, and sometimes better is just simpler. So, as you look throughout your normal day, what do you do as a supply chain leader, I.T. member or operations lead that seems overly complicated? Business communities, just by their nature, are complex, so there may be plenty of opportunities for improvement. So, how can we look at what we do day-to-day and find an opportunity for improvement? Is it better/richer content? Is it better data quality? Is it adding a transaction to mix to remove manual follow up and resolutions for something like a PO change? Is it improving how you connect to your partners—AS2 vs. FTP? Are there data quality issues which cause translation errors or delay payments?

The options vary based on how you are automating your trading community. Data synchronization can be a way to improve the downstream processes from product introduction. It’s a way to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of what you do. It’s got great traction in the retail segment, manufacturing segments, growth around health care, opportunity in pharmaceuticals, and helps to better manage items that are in a supply chain. Effective information and product information management includes not just the vendor and retailer, but the contract manufacturer and the vendor.

Those items move not just from supplier to buyer, but also move from company to transportation provider and from transportation provider to the actual customer. Often times, we think of hubs/buyers and spokes/suppliers/vendors. That’s often not just the case. It’s a little more complex than that for most implementations. There are people that sell things, people that move things, and people that buy things. If you have a way to understand where your stuff IS, what those items actually are, and if those items are synchronized across that process, then that drives value. It also save a good deal of time when researching items for buyers, merchants, the accounts payable team, etc…

Many of our customers are starting to increase the number of documents they support in a single transaction life cycle to address exceptions which may pop up. The type of improvement many are making are building on the implementations they have in production today. Many organizations are seeing that the opportunity’s there to put a new document in a given process by examining the types of exceptions which happen in a typical business process, such as Order-to-Cash .

The most simple way many folks are improving their automation is by asking questions of others throughout their organization. For example, “What happens if our company needs to change my purchase order?”, “What happens when forecasted demand changes?”…. Often times, these questions end up in responses which indicate that faxes, emails and phone calls are how they are addressed. The impact of such manual changes/exceptions can be fairly labor intensive and time consuming for companies.

Just because you’ve been doing things the very same way for a very long time doesn’t mean their aren’t opportunities for improvement. That’s really how you can drive value for your business, by finding just one thing to improve.
I had the opportunity to see a speech by the author of It’s Your Ship, D. Michael Abrashoff. The core message in this book and his keynote is that no matter what you do for an organization, there are things you know and things that YOU can improve.

Take the opportunity today or tomorrow or the next time you see something that needs to be improved and make those recommendations for improvement inside your business. Everybody has the opportunity to impact his or her business, increase efficiency, improve the green aspect of the company, or make his or her job just a little bit easier.