We do feel proprietary about our data, don't we? The importance of our IT systems in maintaining our competitive edge, and in the evolution of our business identities and internal workings overall, has placed data at the very centre of our closely held treasures. And our increasing anxiety over its security, as new species of predators emerge and cause us to shore up our defenses, make us want to double the guard at the database door and demand strip searches of users.
So perhaps you're not ready to hear that this thinking may be wrong, wrong, wrong for your business. Nevertheless, take a moment to consider the possibility that opening up, rather than closing off, the door to your company's data may be your surest path to strategic advantage in your marketplace.
ERP has second-guessed us all
When Enterprise Resource Planning first began emerging as a new paradigm, it had a two-fold task:
Whatever promises ERP has delivered over the past decade, there is more distance to go before its potential to re-engineer us is exhausted. Let's give ERP the benefit of the doubt and confront the question above: Is there any reason we would want to open, rather than close, the door to the company's data? This raises two more questions: (1) Why in the world would we want to do it, and if we did, (2) How could we do so safely?
ERP provides us with answers to both.
Timing is everything
The bottlenecks to your success and the central challenges to business performance in today's climate are all linked to the clock. Immediate response to an increasingly global and impatient customer base is mission-critical. IT systems have been evolving to slash response time and permit rapid reconfiguration. But no matter how fine-tuned a company might be internally -- no matter how well-integrated and coordinated its constituent departments may be in the lattice of a well-deployed ERP platform -- it is still constrained by the cycles it shares with partner companies in responding to customers. Wherever you sit in your particular supply chain -- manufacturing materials, components, products, providing distribution, or selling the end result -- you are tied to the clocks of your partners.
For example, you as a builder of widgets might provide them for sale to retailers. You can employ ERP to fine-tune your manufacturing process to frightening efficiency, cutting your manufacturing costs to the bone and implementing just-in-time such that you don't need to keep any inventory. But you still crank the widget-making based on the receipt of purchase orders from retailers, and retailers insert steps into the process, such as querying as to the current availability of widgets and your immediate capacity to crank out more. Down-line decisions are made based on such information, just as your levels of production are dictated by the demand you derive from incoming purchase orders and your projections, based on history, of how it might increase or decrease.
Consider that the purchase order process, as well as these queries, and the decision-making that goes on across the retailers' fence all add time to your cycles -- time you can't directly control. Why? Because of the order-invoice interaction that you've always adhered to. It's how business is done, right?
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