External Collaboration: A Granular Approach

The answers are relatively obvious. External collaboration is usually customer focused and is often mandated or strongly recommended by one of the parties. Lack of compliance can carry severe business consequences.

Internally, there are often conflicting imperatives between operational groups and even within groups. Different departments are measured against objectives that, in isolation, have significant benefits. Meeting one department’s objectives may, and often does, puts it in conflict with another department’s objectives and undermines the incentives for collaborating to meet the overall corporate goals.

In spite of all the difficulties in bringing parties together, the bottom line is that collaboration - the activity - is very much alive. It has the potential for dramatic bottom line benefits and shouldn’t be ignored. Collaboration, both internal and external, requires commitment from the respective parties to work together to achieve a common goal that is ultimately for the benefit of both parties. Underlying a strong collaborative relationship is a foundation of trust and a willingness to share - at times - sensitive information. The ability to have accurate and accessible information is a key cornerstone of a collaborative business relationship.

3rdwave clients have the ability to enter into a highly sophisticated collaborative program - now. 3rdwave captures information at the most granular levels, validates it, and allows it to be accessed across virtually any network. 3rdwave’s ability to share real-time, highly accurate and normalized data across functions and organizations enables collaboration. It allows senior management the visibility across the entire supply chain so that they can more accurately align the goals and objectives of their internal groups and external collaborative partners.

They can be established through critical internal analysis and realistic operational expectations. In general, it is the application of what is learned in benchmarking that delivers the marked and impressive results so often noted. The determination of benchmarks allows one to make a direct comparison between what is and what is expected. Any identified gaps are improvement areas.

Metrics
Metrics are measures used to evaluate how you are doing against the benchmarks established. They are the measurements by which management and operations can see how they are doing at any moment in time.

There is an old adage that remains as valid today as in the past: what you can’t measure, you can’t manage. Benchmarks and metrics are significant measurement tools that when used effectively allow organizations to improve their bottom line performance by managing their business operations proactively instead of reactively.

Several imperatives in establishing metrics to work effectively within an organization.

• Metrics must support the overall corporate vision and strategic direction. They must support improvement in business process. Setting functional metrics for departments without taking into account how they impact and benefit the overall organization may lead to very efficient functional departments but marginal bottom line benefit.
• Metrics must be scalable. They should be built on a hierarchy and rolled up from the most granular levels to the highest levels.
• Metrics at all levels must be kept manageable. A manageable number metrics for any level of the organization is 5-8 metrics. The KISS rule applies to the type of metrics designed for the managers. Metrics should have significant value to the organization or department and be actionable.
• Metrics must be visible and easy to retrieve.

Four categories of metrics are important to measure: Financial, Asset Utilization [Inventory], Customer Execution, and Organizational Efficiency [Human]. Several metrics from each of these categories provides a broad overview on the health of the organization at any point in time. Used actively they allow the organization to see problems evolving and provide time to take proactive corrective action.

3rdwave supports a comprehensive metrics program because it captures detailed information at all functional levels of the organization and makes them available for analysis.