ERPodcast – The Post-Covid Digital Future
Episode 13 – Unlucky for Traditional ERP
MFX Up and Under
Late May 2020, as the business world emerges post covid-19 – what are the lessons we take forward – what are the initiatives for an uncertain future – where do we find the tea leaves, the tarot cards, the stock tips, the market whispers – where do we go from here? Given this production is named the ERPodcast from Profit From ERP – you can imagine what direction we’ll take the topic….
Most of the information we’re given these days emanates from the Pandemic Panic – and as any good economist knows, the numbers can lie and often do - - - especially when our source of information is a media rewarded for sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake - - – so we need to look deeper, find the success stories, actual business cases, find the moneyball concepts, the underlying economic theories that we can bring into our daily business lives – so today, On the ERPodcast we’ll take a look at one of the greatest supply chain stories our national media ever ignored. In the software consulting world, we’ve been working non-stop gathering information to guide our clients. Nationally, Thousands of companies experience in today’s market has been compiled. Regionally, hundreds of client companies have added input - that mirrors the research we’ve done through our Profit From ERP website. Let’s breakout a few of the winning strategies - It’s the ERPodcast and I’m your host, Gene Hammons, telling you nothing you don’t already know, just in a way, you might not quite have thought of it before.
The Alliance of Excellence
Today’s Podcast is brought to you by the Alliance of Excellence Software Coalition – a loose federation of software resellers, partners, consultants and resources who share one thing in common. They’re all really good at what they do.
You know, I’ve been in the ERP business for a long time - seen a lot of things and people come and go. When I’ve worked on a very successful ERP engagement – the kind where the software pays for itself in short order? I remember those folks – the partners who implemented and did such a good job and I look forward to working with them again and again. So today, with Profit From ERP, we’re not selling software, we’re not doing implementations – we’re simply helping make sure our clients get the Profit, or the return from their investment in ERP. We don’t sell the software, we don’t sell the services, we simply sell the Profit from ERP – so we have to work with the best in order to give every engagement the potential to work. And another thing about ERP – there’s a great fit for nearly every ERP platform, Infor, Sage, Microsoft, NetSuite, Acumatica, Intacct – I could go on listing for a while. But the point is, with our clients, whatever ERP they need, we’ve likely got an Alliance of Excellence company to work with. .
How does an ERP partner or reseller join the Alliance of Excellence Software Coalition?
There’s only one way. Personal Experience with Gene Hammons and past Experience with Profit From ERP clients. If it sounds exclusive, it is. But it means you end up with the best.
Our job is to connect clients who are planning to improve their business through ERP with the right partners, the right ERP platform. Different industries, different sized clients, different budgets – the fit is the thing. It really doesn’t matter which software you pick, unless you have a good partner, well, there’s a lot of reasons the industry sports an 80% failure rate. So if you’re thinking about a successful ERP project, connect with us at Profit From ERP, and when it’s time to pull the trigger, make sure one of the members of the Alliance of Excellence Software Coalition is right there with you. You’ll be halfway there already.
Welcome back to the ERPodcast . In a massively successful supply chain operation, the Trump administration in a unique public private partnership has gone from a huge shortage of ventilators in the US to a huge glut – at a time when it was first believed our governors would be selecting ‘who must die’ from a presupposed ventilator shortage. It was an astounding turnaround in a critically short period of time. Didn’t get near the press it deserved, because it’s good news – but that’s the thing about the business pages –
business is a story of accomplishment.
Doesn’t make headlines usually,
but those are the real human interest stories as far as I’m concerned –
What humans can accomplish and do accomplish – and from my way of thinking, those are the stories of encouragement, inventiveness, hard work and achievement that we all need to be hearing to come up with a balanced view of our world.
Here's the other thing – when we take these success stories and scale the underlying economic theories into our businesses, we improve our chance of coming out on top.
Do you have the technology in your current business to be able to do that same thing? I mean, you may not be a multinational company or even a manufacturer/distributor, but let’s take a look at the technology underpinnings – and examine how you could leverage the same technology, albeit perhaps on a more appropriate scale to your operations – to manage some impressive turnarounds in your own business.
Plus over the past few months, at Profit From ERP we’ve talked with hundreds of businesses, all types of industries – because that’s been what we do, since the beginning.
Profit From ERP is a concept I developed over a lot of years with a lot of software companies – I may have told you the story before. I worked with Sage, Epicor, Microsoft, Ross, Lawson, NetSuite, and a few dozen other ERP brands over the years.
One thing that always bothered me – you could take the same software, same implementation team, go into two companies, same industry, same size – and one company would come out of the ERP project with guns blazing – the software would work so well it would actually pay for itself by increasing bottom line profit within one or two quarters. Productivity would shoot up. Efficiencies would snowball on each feature rollout.
Meanwhile, the other company that implemented same ERP, same consulting team, same industry, ahhh, when it came to project success, not so much.
Yes, they’d report that things were quote – better – unquote. Things improved with the new ERP, business ran smoother, less errors, duplication, rework – but no huge success stories.
Why? I wanted to know why one company did so much better than another.
And what I eventually found was that the approach, the methodology of the internal company side-of-the-project made all the difference. I studied that difference. And the common things successful companies did? That became the consulting methodology that formed ProfitFromERP. Like I like to say, nothing new you haven’t heard before, just in a slightly different way of hearing it and I was able to replicate that pattern of success for my clients – now going on 7 years.
So in our post covid or emerging from the covid lockdown era – what are we seeing that’s working? Let’s follow the Profit From ERP original methodology – identify and isolate the factors common to companies who are having success in the covid, post-covid era. .
Take what works elsewhere and bake it into our own businesses, whatever size cake we’re dealing with, we simply adjust the recipe. It doesn’t mean you’ll have a nationwide supply chain of ventilators in 6 weeks – but it may help you have better operations appropriate to your business in 6 weeks.
Back to the Ventilator Story. Late March of this year, the Federal stockpile of ventilators was about 16,000. Average manufacturing capacity was about 30,000 – that is, about 30,000 ventilators were produced in the entire country every year. Early FEMA estimates said we might need 130,000 by April 1 – so we needed more than triple the number we could normally produce in a year – only we needed them in three weeks.
Or so we thought.
Increasing Manufacturing Capacity - A public/Private partnership was immediately formed, with some urging from the Defense Production Act, eventually General Motors, Tesla and Ford and many others got involved – it usually wasn’t about profit for these manufacturers, they were happy enough - keeping what could have been - - idle factories open and workers getting paid for production instead of unemployment – remember, we were in the middle of a lockdown – no one’s was buying cars at the Ford dealership anyway.
Next item of interest – Fluxuating Demand. States at this time were asking for huge inventories of ventilators – 8- thousand of the existing 16 – thousand reserve were sent to New York State alone. You may have heard a bit about this – the state distributed half of the ventilators to hospitals, but held onto half in a warehouse so they could distribute when needed where needed – turned out to be a critical data point.
We also began to see the country was reacting differently in different areas – it wasn’t a nationwide outbreak all at the same time, it was a series of regional outbreaks – so actual demand varied. Only every state was requesting peak capacity reserves of ventilators.
The covid response team formed the Dynamic Ventilator Reserve. We talked about Ford, GM, Tesla – but Dyson got into the act – Airbus in Great Britian, McLaren, Siemens – and the first thing was to connect all the output forecasts from these different plants and combine when and where ventilators would be produced and available.
Here’s the Question for you now, do your current internal systems give you that flexibility to understand production that’s been changed on the fly?
