Frameworks and Technology to Achieve Clarity in Operations

The author provides links and a teaser to previous work while at Barkawi Management Consultants. These articles cover themes that help companies achieve clarity in their operations.

As a consultant at the boutique firm Barkawi Management Consultats, I had the opportunity and privilege to author or co-author articles. While I will not reproduce these articles here, I would still like to link to them and give a teaser of each, as there is some valuable content in them about supply chain management and technology.

Targeted Transparency

Has your supply chain grown via M&A? Then it is almost a guarantee that your process and systems landscape is too heterogenous to exploit synergies effectively and make optimal resource allocation decisions among your sources of supply and sales affiliates. Full integration is going to be prohibitively expensive. Instead ensure key processes and systems, as traced to the few critical KPI, are aligned.

Read the full article in the Barkawi Management Consultants site or its new iteration in the Genpact site.

Process Mining

Process mining is an exciting new technology. It has made its entrance in finance and order management and supply chain is now warming up to its adoption. In short, process mining connects to your ERP system (or really, any system) and analyzes the logs to create a picture of how a process (say, order-to-cash) runs in all its complexity, showing all the variants (read, deviations from the happy path), time-stamps and how they connect to KPI.

It's not uncommon to discover that there are hundreds of thousands of process variants and that the proportion of process instances that get it first-time-right is surprisingly low (40%-60%). Of course, such instances perform significantly worse as measured by KPI, so simply increasing the rate of first-time-right is a strong performance improvement lever.

Read this article to learn more, including some ideas for first use cases of process mining in supply chain. In this other article, I talk about the potential of process mining to become the tool that helps companies understand and exploit the drivers of ROI behind every single decision made in the supply chain.

Supply Chain Planning and Execution Systems

Supply chains are just too complex and dynamic to be managed with the ERP system and Excel spreadsheets. Dedicated planning and execution systems are required to make efficient business decisions. However, the sheer amount of software vendors is overwhelming.

This booklet provides more information on supply chain planning and execution systems.

Achieving Clarity in Operations

These articles were written independently from one another but they all share one theme: achieving clarity in operations. With targeted transparency, a company can standardize and connect the processes and systems that matter. With process mining, a company has a tool to get visibility of their processes to the most granular detail so that the root causes of underperformance stand out and can be resolved. And of course correct fit-for-purpose planning and execution systems are the backbone - serving as the right system of records and providing proper functional features.