Irrespective of what department you work for, IT (especially enterprise systems) is probably an important success factor. If you are worried about the market downturn, this actually may be an opportunity to improve your Enterprise IT ROI. Your organization is probably shackled by budgetary constraints but that does not mean that you cannot exploit the situation to your advantage.  Contrary to popular belief, simply cutting head count does not save a company much money (unless yours is one of those bloated organizations where people have no idea what/how they are contributing).  Why not take the opportunity to exploit the time freed up by production cutbacks to improve your process efficiency. Use the downtime to educate you workforce about your systems and processes. Kick off a re-engineering program and get the people involved in something that will lead to both process improvements and innovations.

Most organizations today have multiple enterprise applications such as ERP/CRM/WMS/SCM/ECM etc.  This applications landscape may or maynot be integrated.  Irrespective of integration issues, the people who use these systems are the ones who can drive the value offered by these applications. Sadly, these very users are often the weakest link in the value stream and most often due to no fault of theirs. Poor management practices lead to silos in organizations which runs contrary to the philosophy of having an integrated IT applications backbone. Lack of proper training and the absence of a forum to participate in process discussions compunds the problem. A market slowdown allows for the time which is often not available to be spent on learning projects.

Re-engineering processes is starkly different from continuous improvement programs. Even though they are all the rage, continuous improvement can fall into a rut of trying to continuously tinker with a process that has no potential for innovation. Try to use the free time to foster process innovation. Imagine that the group is starting with a blank slate and open up the forum to as wide a group as possible. See what ideas bubble up. You may as well end up with a radically different process that copes with future growth opportunities in a much better way.

Identify the growth plan that your company/department needs to support and build the solutions to support that. Often software enhancements are not well thought out and the final users hardly get to provide any inputs. This may be the time to take another look at the current and future solutions with a critical eye. Ensure that your business apps (ERP/ECM etc) enable these new processes and facilitate in contolling/managing the processes. Use this review to also create or supplement the documentation. If job-aids and tutorials are not available, take the time to put them in place. Setup online training processes and institue a continuous learning program. Ensure the learning program is relevant to your company’s business.

The organizations that take the time to shape up with overhauled process to meet market imperatives will be the ones that outperform their competitors. Growth is the product of innovation powered by market insight, combined with good processes. The lines of communication opened up by the above efforts will drive the innovation.

If you have some thoughts on the subject, feel free to share your opinion via a comment. We routinely help organizations with their Re-engineering efforts. If you would like to discuss this directly with us, please use the “contact us” link for our site.