Chapter 6
Driving Operational Outcomes
Driving better outcomes involves improving accuracy, efficiency, or both. There are a multitude of ways of doing this. The hallmark of business analytics is that, for every problem, there are hundreds of possible solutions. However, despite this flexibility, teams tend to face a number of common challenges:
- Being constrained by inflexible operational processes
- Becoming a bottleneck because of a lack of enterprise investment
- Struggling under the overhead created by managing complexity
- Losing the ability to innovate due to systems constraints
The solutions described in the next section focus on techniques and approaches to overcome these challenges.
AUGMENTING OPERATIONAL SYSTEMS
CASE STUDY: WHY READ THIS?
When will this help?
Read this if you’ve made a large investment in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and you’re struggling to see ongoing incremental returns from your investment.
How will it help you?
Using this approach will leverage your existing investment to drive continuous returns.
What are the guiding principles?
- Think about competencies, not functions
- Automate everything non-value-added
- Start flexible, become structured
- Design your platform for use, not purity
- Function should dictate form
What else should you read?
- Encouraging innovation
- Coping with information overload
- Moving to operational analytics
- Linking analytics to value
- Blending rules with models
The Background: In the Quest for Standard Processes, Flexibility ...
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