However, NOT ONE of the five ways offered up in this recent Supply & Demand Chain Executive article are included! Let’s look at the feeble five suggestions profferred up for (what I can only assume is for) our amusement:
- Partner Collaboration
By it’s very definition, collaboration requires people to work together. It’s irrelevant if your systems talk to each other if your people don’t … and no fancy UI is going to get people talking if they don’t want to.
- Clear, Concise Communications
If your people don’t speak the same language, no piece of software is going to fix that. You need to invest in training to overcome the cultural divide, not technology.
- Process Improvement
All technology does is take your process and accelerate them. It doesn’t fix them. Unless your people undertake a project to methodically improve your processes, you’ll just end up executing your bad processes, 5, 10, 50, or 100 times faster.
- Invest Wisely in IT
HUH? This isn’t even an action … it’s what you have to do! Is the article saying that IT can help you invest wisely in IT? I hope not! There’s no such thing as BI, SI, or any other XI vendors want to sell you. The intelligence is in your head, not the software. All the software can do is present you with the ability to look deep into your data to make a good decision.
- Manage Metrics
Wrong again. Five for Feeble Five. Software tracks metrics. It doesn’t manage them … people do. And, as per my piece on why dashboards are dangerous and dysfunctional, if you track the wrong ones, your performance will only worsen over time!
While S&DC Exec usually isn’t at the top of my list when you ask me what the best publications in the space are, it’s usually not at the bottom either. I can’t tell if the editorial staff was sleeping at their desks when this article came their way or if they were jealous of all the recent attention I gave Purchasing who recently told us about Purchasing 0.3 and got it wrong again. What do you think?