Building the Foundation for the Smart Enterprise
Business enterprises must capitalize on market opportunities, provide current customers with exemplary service, develop new products, control costs and reduce lead-times. One of the key business strategies to achieve these objectives is to develop a smart enterprise that changes information access and business response from weeks and days to hours and minutes.
The foundational systems must provide accurate data if information is to be up-loaded into analytics to achieve decision support capability. These include ERP, Supply Chain, Engineering, CRM and Distribution systems that can be positioned to perform greater intelligence gathering and processing.
Building the intelligent enterprise requires business systems capable of providing a stream of viable data to analytics. Analytics use the data gathered to produce the intelligence needed to everyone within the value chain.
The Pathway to Adaptability was written as a tool to evaluate the capability of the current systems to support the adaptive enterprise and discusses ways to fix the broken components.
Pathway to Adaptability is divided into core components.
• The Lean concepts are put into executive terms and applied to
governance. Creating the foundation for the intelligent enterprise starts with the Board of Directors and Executive management. They control the policies and strategies that drive the actions of the business. The board establishes the operating principles including those affecting employees.
These latter policies determine how the employees will interact on issues such as flexibility, innovation and the application of Lean principles.
• Systems concepts are applied to enterprise business and software
systems. These concepts establish the foundation for the integrated convergence of markets, systems, processes, and products.
• The eight-step approach builds on the Lean and Enterprise
Information structures to summarize the process any company must travel to build adaptability.
This book is must reading for those who need to understand how to build an adaptive, intelligent enterprise. One of the criteria was to keep it short by giving the readers credit for comprehension. The result is a fast read that summarizes a significant amount of relevant information.
To order: Pathwaytoadaptability.com
