Your organization not only leaves footprints with your customers in your markets. It also leaves a valuable footprint in your ERP system. Each organization’s footprint is different, however, if you can properly read it, you can find out many things about your organization with high efficiency.
During an Organizational Footprint, an inventory of all used process variants is automatically created with data of the SAP ERP system.
Performance is Attached to Process Variants
For each implemented process variant, the correspondig cycle-times are calculated. To understand process behavior even more, statistical deviations of cycle-times are calculated. An average delivery time of 3 days can consist of all orders delivered on day three (good for customer satisfaction) or many other combinations involving shorter and longer delivery times. This is usually bad for customer satisfaction and often is also a sign for internal inefficiencies.
With these patterns in mind it is possible to critically review current process performance and compare bad and good behavior. Delivery-on-Time, Invoice-to-Pay or usage frequency of products are other typical KPIs. And all of them are attached to the correspondig process variant (e.g. repair process, Make-to-Stock proces). Without this innovative technology, delivery times of repair orders would be mixed with delivery times of stocked materials, which would lead to a unusable number.
Order Changes as Indicator for Inefficiency
Because order changes are again very good indicators for problems, all changes done to Sales Orders and Deliveries are evaluated and put into relation to particular process variants. A process for spare parts should have a much lower change rate than a process variant for a complex product or service.
Most changes involve manual rework. Therefore, they are very expensive.
Organizational Footprint vs. Interviews
We do interviews, but only after knowing the facts in your ERP system. Compared with the conventional approach performing only interviews, the footprint reading is faster and more efficient because you have a much better entry point for later discussions. You can start the workshops with exact questions or hypotheses. All based on facts.
TYPICAL QUESTIONS
- How long takes do our overall Order-to-Cash cycles for the different process variants/organizations and where do we lose time (and cash)?
- How do our process compare to similar processes used by other companies (benchmarking)?
- Where do we lose productivity by doing manual or wrong things?
- Why are we not able to automate certain process steps?
- Who changes what in which process variants? Why are these changes needed?
- Where does the customer pay for complexity, and where are we just complicated?
- Where is the most productive organization in our company (to foster best practice)?
- Which production processes fit the customer needs best (MTS, ATO, MTO, ETO)?