Business change is redefining a world where decisions and transactions must be faster and quicker. Is your organization ready for the next normal?
How can something so good be so bad? Most often the world’s nemesis is not the panacea.
In this case, technology innovation is the duel-edged sword. It will be the savior for millions of people suffering from the current pandemic, while at the same time serving as a catalyst for strife.
Most believe the world changed due to the recent global health crisis, and while in principle I agree, the economic impact is the result of the world becoming smaller due to technical advancements that started long before the pandemic. In the last decade, for example, global organizations began leveraging low cost labor available in emerging economies to improve margins without reducing quality. The key to accessing the low-cost labor pools is technology that supports the ability to “follow the sun.”
Technological innovations have maximized profits, improved global economies, and created dependencies on global and often remote supply chains. With every advancement, technology shrinks the world a bit more. We collaborate effortlessly with colleagues working in distant time zones, and we order goods made in countries we’ve never visited. When product manufacturing occurs in far off lands, organizations must respond by optimizing their global supply chains. It’s only through technological improvements that they can minimize the incremental costs associated with both the logistics and shipping of products to consumers.
Set a Course of Action to be Prescriptive, Preventive, and Resilient
No matter where you live, the current health crisis has intensified the impact of global supply chains. One unfortunate byproduct is that consumers have faced out-of-stock items and long wait times for common goods due to the logistics or producers being quarantined. With 100-percent reliance on production in low-cost labor geographies, organizations have no choice but to wait on resuming production until employee and logistic providers are healthy and no longer in lockdown. Having products stuck in remote locations wreaked havoc on the profitability and financial health of every organization, stressing their long-term viability. These supply chain inefficiencies also put intense pressure on workforce and internal operations.
So, what’s next? In the next normal, organizations must leverage technology to become more prescriptive, preventive, and resilient. They must prevent outages and poor customer experiences by anticipating needs before consumers ask. Thoughtful, introspective organizations that leverage data to anticipate extreme loads on their supply chain and workforce will be the ones most prepared for whatever comes next.
What can you count on? Data will drive the future. Artificial intelligence and business process automation will augment existing business processes or force an organization out of business. If you are not automating and streamlining, you can be sure another company is.
Don’t Use Old Maps to Reach New Places
To avoid future upheavals in your supply chain and to capitalize on the next normal, organizations need to plan and predict their business inflows and outflows more effectively. Here are six tips to consider when moving your organization to a more dynamic environment and better financial performance and organizational health:
- Data latency is the killer of all insightful business transformations. Don’t move your data. There’s a saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” same holds true for your enterprise data. Keep your data close and analytic tools closer to the source. Once you start moving data to another data repository or analytic tool, you lose real-time decisioning power.
- Real-time is table stakes in the new economy. If your products are not available when a consumer attempts to purchase, you have lost the sale. Consumers move on fast nowadays, and they are trading brand loyalty for speed and convenience. Developing a real-time architecture means everyone in your organization can respond and react from the same view of the business.
- Planning and predictive capabilities are symbiotic. Having different tools to plan and predict creates inefficiencies in an organization’s ability to respond. To drive the most organizational output, combine these two intertwined disciplines that have a circular dependency on each other.
- Custom integration is dead. Writing your own integration into a packaged application is a fool’s game. Instead, leverage pre-built integration from your source application provider. If your teams are building their own integrations, you are investing your capital inefficiently.
- Data warehouses enable functional decision-making. Having a data-decisioning environment that applies the previously mentioned principles fosters smarter decision-making, and it allows executive leadership to raise the value to the ecosystem.
- Artificial Intelligence and robotic process automation are only as good as the source data. See tip number one. Once an organization has streamlined and rationalized its business process to leverage the advances of a real-time business, they can start automating routine processes and decision making.
The future is very bright despite the damage from the pandemic. We’re seeing change that has needed to happen for a long time. Consumerism has changed. Supply chains are changing. Mindsets are changing. These changes and technology innovations will continue to propel our world into faster and quicker transactions. Organizations must be ready with agile software architectures to capitalize on the fast-moving, ever-changing global economy.
To learn more about how to set a course of action by leveraging enterprise analytics that will allow your organization to maximize profits, improve global economies, and manage dependencies on global supply chains, please register and listen to the following recording:
https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/2949578/F2DC548945592CF1A21E13FE8A50A80E.
