Implementing IT
Let's take a look at how the Lean concept affects resource productivity.
Corporate and business functions fall in the middle of the need to standardize and optimize processes, but due to the reluctance of organizations not to undertake long-term and costly IT projects that are important to joint operations. Advances in IT are now making the automation of massive numbers of tasks more technically, economically and managerially feasible.
We can gradually see how complex and bulky IT systems for human resources or financial management are becoming outdated. For example:
- There are advanced but simply used analytical instruments that can be 'stitched' into current systems to work more efficiently with large datasets. This approach could help to move systems away from support for specialized reports.
- In addition to the aforementioned, we can observe the development of search engines that are now capable of answering questions asked in a natural language rather than in the form of structured enquiries. As a result, it is possible to extract the necessary information from the underlying structures both for the client and for the contractor.
So what is going on in the companies?
The consolidation of support functions becomes cheaper and simpler to administrate and operate thanks to the cloud delivery of corporate software. However, young companies are limiting customization options, which in turn is driving organizations to implement more standard processes for overall activities, often prove to be more reliable and cheaper than bespoke development.
Although there are plenty of technology innovations that are very interesting, proposals are just beginning to emerge, and as a result, the great number of different alternatives makes it difficult to find the best solution.
Organizations must consider a number of basic principles when exploring new opportunities to further exploit technological advantages:
Big is significant
But the little can also be great. "Sprawl" can become a serious issue for companies that have overcome opposition to spend on the IT business functions. When this happens, the best thing organizations can do is:
Financial Optimization
To minimize the budget overspending, delayed implementation and rapid technology obsolescence that are a feature of large projects like ERP replacements.
Organize Process
At the same time, companies should focus on small improvement steps, with a clear plan, that can lead to visible results in the shortest possible time. We help find solutions in the enterprise Enablement .
Take the example of a company providing business services that decided to employ a specialist to develop a new website to become its business card, instead of spending millions to update its failing employee self-help web portal. Although all former technologies used in the development of the site were unchanged, the simplified interface drastically increased the number of visitors by leaps and bounds. This procedure allowed both managers and human resources specialists to spend less time. As for overall costs? Less than $200,000 was required for all of this.
Using a front-end hosting or cloud architecture can benefit even rather ambitious IT projects.
For example, a large industrial group with more than one hundred ERP software systems found out that it was possible to reach most of their integration objectives with an external-hosted “front-end middleware” solution.
This solution helped to save millions of dollars and several years of software development time, because after its implementation the company's accounting department continued to use the same system interface and features, despite the fact that core data was still provided by different operating platforms.
Making changes to an existing product rather than developing from scratch.
Nowadays, many corporate software projects are structurally flexible enough to allow the necessary customizations to be made easily, unlike in the past where it was necessary to write a huge amount of code from scratch in order to customize the system.
As an example, we can cite the case of a professional services company. When attempting to migrate more than the four million personnel records into a new software system built using the vendor's core platform, it was assumed that a minimum two hundred code amendments would have been required. However, the organization’s IT team managed to achieve the goal in under two months, implementing around 30 standards-based add-on components.
Keep a clear plan in mind and stick to it.
Even with a significant increase in configuration variants, organizations need to keep an eye on customization, based on what is really needed.
Similarly, IT managers need to oversee overall plans to ensure that small "enhancements" do not translate into increased demands or unnecessary applications. Each improvement must be fully thought through and worthwhile. As an example, a worldwide raw materials production company is capable of completing its accounting on a monthly basis in only a two-day period. First day would be required for every department and the second day for the entire organization. They have achieved these results because the chief IT architect of the financial services function has set up a strict sequence of queries and approves only those, which have significant support in the organization. As a consequence of these actions, the company works simultaneously on four counterparts of one and the same ledger, which enables quicker and smoother collection of information from the entire organization.
Must be allocated based on value.
Organizations with the most efficient enterprise enablement features concentrate more on delivering new opportunities than on incrementally improving legacy systems.
Such organizations additionally analyse every project to assess the influence it has had, even if the technology still might be outdated, instead of evaluating the existing weaknesses in IT. For one company, this approach allowed them to prioritize investments in particular fields where minor gaps had a significant impact on effectiveness and productivity.
Consequently, areas where large gaps had a low impact were relegated to the end of the priority list.
Faster and economically more efficient improvements to enterprise and business functions are driven by the development of technology options. The analysis of both employee responses and social media data allows enterprises to improve their offerings to employees and learn how effective their media campaigns are. In turn, the use of budget sensors in some company enabled analysis and found that big conference rooms should be divided into a larger number of smaller conference rooms to meet the needs of the staff.
Consequently, we come to the conclusion that the implementation of IT is frequently considered a costly and complex process to improve enterprise Enablement business processes and functions. Through the examples mentioned above, however, we can see that following a number of simple rules can significantly enhance the situation on a very budget and in a very short period of time.