Production rising

Production rising

It has been a great week. As a business we are really growing into our new fase of maturity. Proud to see that what you have started years ago begins to thrive on it's own. The last week was all about setting the pace, agreeing on who-should-do-what and then simply start doing.
But let me start at the beginning...

Over the last few months we were growing. This was not by chance, but strategically planned due to development plans. The hourly-based services we traditionally deliver should be enriched in the future by full-solution-products. This would take two changes within the firm:

Add capacity: we would not be able to combine sufficient turnover with qualitative product development with the capacity on resources we had. So growth was the answer.
Simplify the message in the market: selling solutions instead of only consulting asks for a very clean and clear message, so the core business of the firm had to be identified even more as we already did. A split in two companies with both their own, clean, message was the answer.

Since March 1st we are active with two firms, one focussed on Procurement from a business perspective, one focussed on Procurement from an IT (SAP) perspective. But both with a clear objective: start developing solutions for customers besides only staffing their projects!

It was a hectic month to get the ideas channelled, but last week the business plan for one of our new Interim Procurement Initiatives was closed up. On top of that, yesterday the developers started the build of our first end-to-end (SAP SRM based) software solution..

..the plant is in power, the production is in session!

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com

Long hours of testing and fixing

Long hours of testing and fixing

...and discussing what to fix. Check the dashboard picture, see the time, third working day in a row that meal time has long passed before we went home from the customers' site. SAP SRM in an implementation that is divided in Template versus roll-out localizations. Interesting days full of discussion-based fixing of test-defects.

Template-based implementations: hard to do it perfectly. Either you run into unhappy local users that do not feel themselves fully at-home in the new environment, or you will run into an un-manageable (and thus way too expensive) project/investment when you manage the template not strict enough and want to please users! Caught between that rock and that hard case...

What to do then, how to make it work? To my opinion, after some years of seeing it happen, one golden rule: anticipate the localization-factor before you start your template. Sounds simple, here is what I mean.

1. Have a very clear picture of what it is you want to safeguard with the template strategy! Is it a certain policy you want to uphold, or is it just a manageable and maintainable system? Be sure to clearly state that within your managed change process.
2. Make sure that a proper sounding board is enabled before you start workshops. No inbalance between bloodtypes in your company or different attention to importance of Business Units. Every person in that group should count, from content, expertise, as well as validity and mandate perspective.
3. Design and build your custom developments in such a way that not only the development works as designed, but also easilly allows added development in those spots that allow localization from the basic strategy-standpoint.
4. The first thing that needs design in the project is the "request for change" process, only after that you can start your template P2P design.

Having concluded this from the position I had in some of the projects that I have seen: yes, for sure, it sounds simple enough. But having it managed for a few times as well, I know it is certainly not. But then again, long hours for a few weeks make a real project team, and that is priceless...

Doede van Haperen
www.lakran.com
www.postulit.com