Process Implementation
Whether organizations need to adopt best practices or tailor their planning process, top-level managers usually tend to look over a new process implementation in consideration of business transformation and impacts of change. Regardless of the business process in scope, the ideal goal is to create a community of users and planners who are capable of focusing on identifying critical incidents and take business decisions relying on the new system. Adapting standard business solutions to the needs of each organization requires superior consulting skills, industrial know-how, and competence in supply chain planning processes. In current times, computing power is accessible to customers of any size. Accordingly, the companies need to select implementation partners that not only deliver in time and quality but also become instrumental in developing a competitive advantage to stay ahead of the curve. Business transformations often require organizational changes with a very strong focus on the quality of the data. Business users rely on the new system only when the planning data reflects reality, and they get an understanding of the outcome of the planning algorithms. A successful process implementation requires an orchestration of multiple management dimensions while each part is organized individually. Bizbrain consultants have been accumulating experience in supply chain planning and collaboration solutions with SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) for more than 20 years, having a thorough understanding of the needs of companies of any size.
Application Management Services & Support
At Bizbrain, we are aware that not all support services are created equal. Bizbrain set up two major offshore centers upon receiving a demand of a lighthouse customer for the management of full supply chain planning solution of its entire global operations. The support of a $40 billion global chemical company planning process requires much beyond the typical monitoring data integration job. It takes a fully dedicated team responsible for handling data and understanding the optimizer planning algorithms. Since then, Bizbrain has developed a set of dedicated services to fit the needs of companies of any size. One of the major challenges in this line of business is the resources turnover: Bizbrain’s resources rotate from support for project implementation to keep the team motivated and the service level up to the highest standards.
Value Prototyping
Value Prototyping is an exercise based on Design Thinking leading the organization to define pain points, improve opportunities, and value levers. It enables the IT and business team to get together and work on the business transformation on a smaller, representative business scope. Within a couple of months, Bizbrain’s consultants and the customer experts will build a prototype and then analyze the challenges (i.e. data, integration, process) to prepare a sound and predictable business transformation. Bizbrain started this practice under SAP Value Prototyping and later continued the same approach following customer requests.
Training
The amount of new functionality of solutions like SAP Integrated Business Planning or SAP Supply Chain Collaboration can be overwhelming. The business planners are the main agents of change who need a specific set of learning resources, as well as a new way of learning the nuances of the business process and the path to higher productivity. Learning should become a weekly activity and the understanding of the software should be easy and relatively quick. The training for business users is a key activity that requires the support of practitioners and functional experts. The content needs to be accessible at the business planners’ pace.
Advisory
Shifting paradigms pose multiple change management challenges. Managers need to organize investments, understand the impact of new systems landscapes, organize teams with new functions, refocus energies towards new organizational models and ensure that the transition will be manageable and sustainable. Mapping an entire IT landscape may take days of work and many whiteboard sessions. Making sense about how to reorganize multiple systems into simpler architectural paradigms can soon become a daunting task, particularly when assumptions on the unknown need to be made. Any wrong assumption may lead future programs into dangerous territories. For large transformation processes involving planning, customers need experts that have insider knowledge and have applied it multiple times in very different situations. We all know there may be multiple solution approaches to the same problem, but how can one be clear about what the implications of a decision will be? Shall one decide to build an internal team dealing with the system configuration? Or what shall the support model be? How can one maximize the time to value in each specific situation while minimizing the risk? How can one replace APO and evaluate the previous process and understand how to migrate the functionality to SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP)? What is the best possible roadmap that minimizes the risk of change and the potential of process disruption? These are examples of the typical questions C-level executives and top managers need to answer before presenting a business transformation case: Bizbrain leadership team comprises experts with decades of experience in supply chain processes and SAP software who have supported multiple companies to make the best decisions for their investments.