Productivity the UK and Europe's Achilles, enter SAP
This Dragon ERP blog looks at "Decision paralysis" the industry 3.0 curse impacting growth, liquidity and EBIDTA.
Cometh the hour, in every crisis #SAP appear to have the answer, Netzero, Covid even Russian aggression SAP are front and centre in helping the global economy get out of jail.
Its the debate shaping UK and Europen politics as we head into recession with sluggish economic growth for both the Eurozone & UK economies.
Its an emotive conversation in the UK, pre banking crisis 2008 the UK economy had seen a decade's worth of growth which subsequently went backwards due to austerity and then BREXIT, political and economic self harming.
Our Ex PM essentially said the UK workforce is work-shy and unproductive, late to the party with tech and innovation, with the trade unions resistant to adopt new tech and ways of working.
Whilst trade unions and business forums counter and say that they do invest and embrace new tech and ways of working.
So what is causing the mismatch ?
The devil is in the detail... and we know politicians hate detail
Well we know $2 out of every $3 invested in digital is wasted (WEF2019) and 70% of Digital programmes fail to deliver any business benefit, with only 7% reporting and business value derided ?
At the same time the global economy has over the last three decades embraced digital with ERP being the central catalyst for Industry 3.0 by embracing ERP. ERP Digitally enabled organisations became people lean (optimised) and highly automated, primarily this impacted the middle management layer, the glue between the operational workforce and C suite and investors.
The heavily optimised middle has to handle the key decision and approval making. Its clears to me and evidenced to me time and time again by way of scheme of delegation design that in many organisations the key decisions and approvals reside within single resourced roles.
At the same time the middle layer are asked to not only perform their day job but are asked to support business model transformation, so they suffer from burn out.
The middle layer in UK & Europe take Easter off, a long summer extending into mid September, pre Xmas Skiing, Xmas, Post Easter skiing, obviously that equates to 13 weeks unproductive time ! And that's because most decisions and approvals are part of an inter-dependent chain with limited substitutions meaning that we then have decision paralysis for 20% of the year.
Sales and Marketing, SC Fulfilment, Manufacturing, Revenue recognition and Cash collection, the engine room of the enterprise is constantly spluttering.
And this is where SAP is stepping in and I can genuinely say I'm blown away by SAPs new "situation handling" solution which links together all the blockers to a productive operating model.
Embedding Situation handling will drive tangible business benefit and can be deployed with little business impact per business domain by a very small team.
If you need help getting the best out of your SAP investment and improve productivity, then contact a dragon.
My name is Alisdair Bach
I’m a Dragon ERP founder, SAP Enterprise architect and CTO with 30 years SAP delivery expertise, working across many of SAPs largest global clients.
If you want to learn more about Dragon ERP or SAP S/4HANA then contact me.
