You Have More Software Than Ever. Why Are the Same Operational Problems Still Here?

We’ve encountered manufacturers where an integration between enterprise systems stopped working and, instead of restoring the integration, employees were added to manually re-enter information. Over time, the workaround became the process.

Employees:

• copy data from one system to another;
• email someone when something needs approval;
• maintain spreadsheets because the ERP doesn’t provide the visibility they need;
• message colleagues to determine status;
• manually reconcile information;
• remember exceptions that aren’t documented anywhere.

When people spend their day moving information between systems, people have become the middleware.

Management may see the official process: Order → ERP → production → shipping

But the real process might be: Order → email → spreadsheet → employee → ERP → Teams message → approval → employee → production → manual status update → shipping

And eventually nobody questions it. The workaround becomes institutionalized. Executives often have visibility into the system of record without having visibility into the actual process.

When organizations discover gaps, the natural response is often: Buy another application. But now employees have: ERP + MES + QMS + SharePoint + Teams + Excel + specialized applications + another workflow tool. Each might solve a legitimate problem. Collectively, they can create another one: fragmentation. So the question shouldn’t always be, “What software are we missing?” A better question may be, “Where is the actual process breaking down?”

An organization can possess data about:

• supplier lead times,
• historical consumption,
• inventory,
• predicted demand,
• production schedules,

and still have employees make purchasing decisions based largely on experience or gut feel. That’s not necessarily a technology gap. It’s a gap between
information → decision → action.

Having the data isn’t the same as using the data.

Having the workflow isn’t the same as following the workflow.

Having the software isn’t the same as changing how work gets done.

Tell an Operations VP to walk through the organization and ask:

“Where are we using people to compensate for gaps in our systems or processes?”

Then give them five questions:

1. Where are employees re-entering information?
2. Which important processes still depend on spreadsheets?
3. Where does someone have to email, message or call another person to keep a process moving?
4. Which processes depend heavily on one experienced employee knowing what to do?
5. Where does management lack real-time visibility into status, ownership or bottlenecks? 

Don’t dismiss those as minor inefficiencies. They may be telling you where your real operational gaps are.