Boosting your business performance with IT - make sure your IT solutions are aligned with your business processes.

Today, the sky is technically the limit. It often sounds as if a technical IT solution is by definition available to cover whatever kind of business challenge or request. And that's awesome news. This means that IT is technically almost never a bottleneck anymore.

But businesses seem to get lost sometimes in the overwhelming number of options available. Should I tweak my ERP system, should I buy a bought in solutions, is a dump in Excel sufficient OR should I make this fully visual, should I become fully paperless, etc, etc.

And of course, the more complicated your IT solution platform becomes, the more it will require to maintain. "Rubish in is rubbish out".

And although a single perfect complete solution doesn't exist to get this fixed, three easy but critical elements which are often forgotten are relatively easy to be applied:

1.) you MUST align your IT solutions to your "day to day" business processes - example: if you're deducting your inventory at a certain production cell/step, then make sure your (ERP) system does the same generating work in progress at the correct time. Your warehouse locations as setup in your system must be set equal to your physical warehouse locations. Otherwise you keep on talking different dialects when working with your systems versus working from a business perspective.

2.) you MUST separate critical DO'S from any efficiency discussions. The fact that you have to "enter" some critical data does not mean that you need to slow down. There are tons of technical solutions available to help you out in a as quickly as possible kind of manner. Barcode scanners, IOT sensors, uploads, etc, etc.

3.) you need to realize that you're working with people. So, you need to apply a change management approach. 2 steps forward but 1.5 back still means that you're making progress. 1 step back short term BUT 2 steps forward longer term still means you've made progress on the long run. Show people the data generated. Does that match? If not or in case of too many doubts, revamp your process and try again.

And yes, this may not sound too fancy. We all want to see results as quickly as possible. But due to the complexity, it's required to have patience.

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