New tech can affect staffing and accountabilities
Your selection of technology tools determines which activities need to be performed by your staff vs being automated. Or, how your staff will perform their responsibilities, or how your customers will interact with your business. Technology also can provide options as to where your business functions can be performed geographically.
Saved by the Cloud
Now that Cloud technology has advanced, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is available. Third party vendors, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, can provide packaged software, eliminating internal configuration and maintenance, saving a great deal of resources, money, and headache. With the exception of companies that may have security restrictions, SaaS is a great added choice. Even then, there are secure SaaS solutions with heightened protocols.
Plan ahead and trust the proven SaaS best practice
SaaS tools have the industry best practices built into them, so it is usually wise to adjust internal operations to accommodate to the software rather than make changes to it. As the decisions are being made to new technology, it helps to include key staff right at the beginning. They will be instrumental in understanding what is proven best practice of the software, and what is an indelible aspect of your business.
Selecting a vendor package for a specific business function
Evaluating the use of a vendor package is a fairly straight forward process of listing the needed functionality, weighing it by importance, and mapping it to the available software. Vendor packages typically focus on a single business function such as sales or client relationship management. They then provide a step-by-step set of processes from start to finish with all of the necessary data requirements, reviews, and approvals in order to accomplish the function. Both Salesforce and Zendesk are popular are excellent packages, but the choice between them would result in significant differences in the procedures followed by the employees in terms of their day-to-day work – Salesforce being the more scalable of the two. Again, having an understanding of the technology tools and choices at the onset of the operational transformation will save revisiting the analysis later.
Selecting a vendor package to outsource complexity and reduce risk
In some situations, such as meeting regulatory compliance, a SaaS vendor can offer the advantage of economies of scale to amass the resources necessary to stay current and ensure compliance. For example, in the heavily regulated Pharma industry it is quite a challenge to maintain compliance with Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs) and the FDA Clinical Trial Phases. The details of the process along with complexities of staying current with pending regulation and court decisions are best handled by an organization with specialized expertise. In this case, SaaS can relieve an operations burden allowing you to focus on your core competency and reduce regulatory exposure.
Providing cohesive systems across the organization
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been around for a while now and come in many shapes and sizes. A few of the more established packages are SAP Business One, Oracle NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics – all of which designed for larger installations. ERP packages provide a cohesive set of software covering all core functions of the organization. Thinking in terms of a manufacturer, all of the events that occur from engineering design to purchasing, manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping are coordinated within the same system. Also, all of the data is defined and staged in a consistent manner throughout all functions. ERP systems are also built on industry best practices and firms would be wise to adapt to the package’s way of doing things – otherwise inconsistencies in the event sequence or data are likely to occur. Technology is involved early on in the huge task of data analysis/conversion and infrastructure transition.
Conclusion
Perhaps you were already of the mindset that transformation should be a joint business operations/IT endeavor. Congratulations. However, I do have some past history of business operations management attempting to “not complicate matters by bringing in IT too early in the process,” that might not be helpful. Technology certainly drives today’s operational efficiencies and needs to be at the forefront of considerations, but done right.
