Unique Me!

When faced with the need to implement or upgrade a critical business system, a common, if not natural reflex is to state how unique you are among all in industry and start to write a lengthy list of custom requirements. The truth is, for example, a manufacturing company still manufactures and while a company’s product may be unique, the processes that brings about the creation and delivery of that product are not, at least not in a meaningful way. The facts support, that within any industry the companies that make up that industry are ~80% the same.

Sure, you might get extra points for the interesting way you mount and dismount your pony but the bottom line is you are merely getting on and off of a horse. To try and make it any more than that is to cling to those systems that are not working for your business and what was once industry leading can quickly become an anchor your business wears around its neck in ever-deepening waters.

Though human nature drives us to take great pride in those things we create such as when we develop, refine and perfect the processes and select the systems across our company, we must put away the notion that our business processes are so unique, different or special among our competitors that an out of the box solution won’t work. Each time someone in your business says we are unique, simply assume a greater cost in your estimation for any upgraded or new capability.  

A simple example of this scenario plays rather loudly when a company is considering replacing their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. The top companies who develop and offer these solutions have gathered intel and feedback from across hundreds of customers in order to develop a set of capabilities that speak to the broadest audience possible in their targeted industry. They literally have years of vested interest in developing a product that will address every conceivable need for any company within a particular industry. What this means is that once you have identified the top 3-5 ERP (substitute any system of your choice) providers for your industry you can feel relatively comfortable they can serve your challenges using capabilities native to their suite of products or at the very least, well integrated suite of products. This is not to say that when you tell them how unique you are among your competitors that they won’t excitedly agree with you and do everything they can to customize their applications to suit your desires. This represents the effortless upsell from their perspective and one with what is potentially, a very long tail.

The cautionary tale is that any customization represents a gift that keeps on giving over the lifetime of the solution. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the risk related to the complexity of your customized solution both go up. For example, developers, either internal to your organization or consultants hired from the vendor will need to be employed for the life of the product to integrate your customized product with each new version release of the vendor product. You will not be able to take advantage of enhancements directly from the vendor. The risk to your company also increases as each person you employ to maintain the custom code will represent the only person alive who knows the details of the customizations and the secret sauce for integrating those customizations to the upgraded product during each release cycle. Should one or more leave the company, the risk only increases.

As stated in the first paragraph, your company’s processes and systems are ~80% identical to your competitors. If this were not so, you wouldn’t be a member of that industry. A focus on the 80% and simply refusing requests for any customization of that 80% would represent a competitive advantage to your company. This is to say that you would do well not to spend a single minute considering or a single dollar customizing anything in the 80%. For the remaining 20% employ a “5-Why’s” methodology for each customization request. If experience has revealed anything it is that the answer to the fourth and fifth why are virtually always, “that is the way we have always done it” and “because I want it that way” respectively. It is important to understand that every service or differentiating practice becomes commodity or ubiquitous over time so holding firm to what was once industry leading can lead to disastrous results over time.

Perhaps, begin with a couple of questions such as: Who is identifying our business processes or operating model as unique or at what level within the company should we define how or in what we are unique, or better yet should our uniqueness be driven internally at all or instead, by our customers? Our very nature says we all feel the desire to be unique but as this unique mantra is driven down into each function of the organization and each person applies their portion of individual uniqueness into the equation, the process is flipped on its head and becomes 80% unique and 20% common. What this does to the process of selecting and implementing a system is each participant wants their module customized to resemble how they have always done their job. In effect, nothing changes. However, paying to customize 80% of every business system and/or process will increase cost and complexity significantly. Maybe the best question you could ask yourself is, can we achieve uniqueness or better yet competitive differentiation by simply using commodity, off-the-shelf products and services?

On the other hand, you can consider that you in fact are unique, special and different but keep in mind that in business, they are all spelled identically -