Is change your friend or your enemy?

Change has become constant in global markets. Globalization and digitalization have created new market dynamics, lowered traditional barriers of entry in many markets, revolutionized distribution in many industries and have given customers more choice and influence than ever before.

This kind of environment creates exciting opportunities but is also makes and breaks organizations at a much faster pace. They face increasing number of challenges in global competition and their strategies need continuous revising and refining. This means that strategy execution has to be more agile than ever. Change is good for those who understand their position in this new environment and are able to pursue arising opportunities faster and more effectively than the competition. Change is their friend.

This is why we have taken as our mission at QPR to make customers agile and efficient in their operations. We provide insight to their business operations – through modeling, analyzing, measuring and performance monitoring. This insight enables customer organizations to streamline and improve business operations and to execute their strategies swiftly and effectively.

In these economically challenging times, there is a strong demand for this. Last year, our net sales growth accelerated towards the end of the year and reached +16% organic growth in the fourth quarter 2014. This development shows that in tightening competition, there is a growing demand for tools to drive profitability and operational improvement initiatives. This is why we are forecasting that our growth will continue also this year.

How are things in your organization? Is change your friend or do you sometimes feel threatened by it?

Jari Jaakkola

CEO

http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/jari-jaakkola/4/3ba/2b 

Process discovery from SAP data isn’t rocket science

SAP, the omnipotent ERP system with many mysteries. It is often regarded as complex, or a black box, so unfortunately organizations actually use a fraction of the wealth of information they collect to improve their business performance. Let’s take supply chain as an example as its state has direct impact to business. The performance is usually followed through numerical KPI reports giving statistics on lead times, delivery accuracy or stock rotation. But is this enough to ensure the optimal running of such a core process? Wouldn’t it be great to have timely access to information which gives basis to make relevant changes with the wanted impact rather than just guess WHY the reported delivery time has gotten longer.

Getting the WHY from SAP, and even quickly, is just about knowing, which data tables are needed. And then a process mining software that has the built-in capability to acquire the right information directly from SAP and transform it to an end-to-end process visualization. Automated data acquisition is key and our software QPR ProcessAnalyzer delivers just that. When talking to customers, the value of being able to see how their supply chain runs in reality is almost priceless. Yes, they systematically follow performance metrics, have different dashboards but what has been lacking is the visibility to the process itself, the process reality.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, or numbers in this instance. This truly is the case when looking at a process flowchart that is based on facts. Keeping with the supply chain example, from the flowchart, organisations can see immediately at what stage of the process the promised delivery time is compromised or an order is not handled according to guidelines. And it takes just one click to get to the root cause, the WHY. With the right process mining tools, organisations can harness their SAP data to build an understanding of where the issues lay so that they know what needs to be corrected in order to improve the supply chain performance. The time spent on trial and error is removed, saving money, enabling better sales and ultimately delivering better customer experience with a smoothly working process.

When striving to best possible process performance, it’s not enough to rely just on statistics. You need to understand the real underlying problem before you can effectively improve anything.  It’s the same with your own performance or condition. If you notice a pain, a problem, you get an expert to tell you what you need to do to fix the issue right away rather than randomly try different things, hoping one would eventually work. Or do you?

Teija Räsänen

https://fi.linkedin.com/pub/teija-r%C3%A4s%C3%A4nen/3/7b3/71b