A term that reminds me of my early Shared Services days is, “if you don’t measure, you can’t improve”. Over the years this has been my basis for improving operational, financial and supply chain processes, organisational models, behaviours and introducing fit-for-purpose technology solutions.
Unless you’re able to translate your strategic goals into operational and/ or financial metrics, and identify periodic progress metrics, which guide you towards these targets, you’re unable to know if any steps that you take, any projects that you run or any innovations that you execute are actually delivering to your strategic goals.
Over the years, we have been requested to work with our client's teams to deliver their expected benefits on their proposed Supply Chain Innovations. We have, first hand, seen how many of our clients have setup innovation departments, innovation intranet sites, etc. which don’t provide the ROI that was envisaged during the setup or expected by executive management. Unless the Supply Chain Innovations add direct value to the operational or strategic metrics, and goals, we have seen that innovations will never be effective.
At Unique Excellence, we have been taking our clients through a very pragmatic approach;
We translate the organisation’s strategic goals into measurable targets
We compare these targets with industry SCOR benchmarks
We propose periodic metrics to show progression aligned with the expected client timeline, to meet their strategic goals
We create clear, measurable verification criteria to validate the innovative solution. This will be at feasibility and/ or foundation phase, but also during the execution phase
We continuously assess the innovative solution against these criteria - at the start and during the innovation process
We create a long-term partnership with our clients to execute and/ or monitor the impact of the innovation, aligned to the progress and strategic metrics
This allows us to create an innovation environment that allows quick assessments to understand if the innovative solutions deliver the value that was envisaged at the feasibility or foundation stage of this process. If not, we “fail fast” and continue with a new or adjusted direction.
One challenge that we have seen on multiple occasions is that organisations often only benchmark once, at the start of a “transformation” or business case. But as Supply Chain Innovation is continuous, and business/ technology change is developing faster every year, we advise our clients to benchmark at least every 2-3 years (preferably more often) to ensure that they are not striving for sub-optimal results.
Only by conducting periodic benchmark measuring, we believe that organisations are able to deliver substantial value to meeting their strategic and operational goals...
For more information on how we use benchmark data to deliver Operational and/ or Supply Chain Innovation, please visit us.