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Start With The ‘Why’: How Good Project Leadership Drives A Digital Transformation

digital visibility acceleration

Start With The ‘Why’: How Good Project Leadership Drives A Digital Transformation

The term “digital transformation” has become embedded in the business world’s vocabulary for companies large and small, as more of them incorporate technology to streamline their processes and customer interactions.

Recent research shows 61% of IT decision-makers agree that the global pandemic forced their organization to begin or implement a digital-first strategy. It’s a big step of change for any company, and having the right project leadership in a digital transformation is crucial to navigating chaos, organizing a business and winning the battle for customers, says Denise Brinkmeyer (www.jumptechnology.com), author of Project Orienteering: A Field Guide For Project Leadership and president of Jump Technology Services®.

To simplify and coordinate what can be a complicated process, she says a digital project leader’s first step must be establishing the “big why” behind every aspect of the project.

“Asking and clarifying answers to ‘why’ questions must happen at the start of every project,” Brinkmeyer says. “If you haven’t defined and fully understood context and purpose, your project will be increasingly vulnerable to all the challenges it will meet along the way to completion.

“There will be pressures and conflicts, there will be temptations to go off track, and there will be some delays along the way. That’s what makes it critical to be clear at the outset about why a specific project should be pursued. Ensuring that you’ve done your best with this first step will also enable you to act as your project’s salesperson, ensuring stakeholder investment and support all along the path to completion.”

Brinkmeyer has these tips for project leaders when determining the “big why” during a digital transformation:

Know your constraints. Brinkmeyer says three primary constraints – time, cost, and value – give focus and concreteness to any project vision. “Knowing, for example, that you can’t mandate overtime unless you’re outsourcing work is important to establishing a realistic project timeline,” she says. “Having a grasp on your constraints helps determine how to convert the project’s wish list into objectives that can actually be achieved. As the project leader you’ll have to coordinate resources, address potentially conflicting needs and concerns, and problem-solve. For those reasons, you need a very strong sense of the why that motivates and joins all the pieces together.”

Ask these questions:

Why do you want to do this project? Brinkmeyer gives an example of one answer to this question, geared to what current or potential problem a company is trying to solve: “We must have a new system, so that if we don’t hire more staff and we take on more customers, the work can continue at the same level of quality.”

She says a project leader’s job entails both having a strong sense of the whole with its parts and articulating all of it so that the entire team can understand and act on it. “The words we use to articulate the big why matter dramatically to a project’s trajectory,” Brinkmeyer says.

Why are these the proper objectives for the outcome you seek? In the end, the project leader needs to prove that the project has been successful, which means they need the ability to measure results accurately. “Asking ‘why’ can help clarify the relationship between objectives and vision,” Brinkmeyer says. “You need to provide a clear context for your objectives. The more you leave open to interpretation, the more vulnerable you leave the project to expensive detours and even failure.”

Why are these the people to help you achieve your goals? Brinkmeyer emphasizes spending time finding a vendor whose initiatives and capabilities actually suit your project. And reference-check your vendor options. “Find out if they’ve told the truth about their past projects,” she says. “Then, when you interview vendors directly, ask them, ‘Based on your history, when are we going to start receiving value from this project?’ And be wary of the promises attached to a single, mammoth system that’s said to take care of all your needs. It could take years to learn and implement.”

Regarding the core team in the company involved in the transformation, Brinkmeyer says the project leader’s goal is “to inspire and motivate the people you’ve been given in order to make possible the most positive impact for your project. The question, ‘Why are these the people I’m working with?’ needs to be followed with, “Knowing how they work, how will I activate them to achieve the project goals?”

“Setting yourself up for project success begins with establishing the big why behind your vision and objectives,” Brinkmeyer says, “so that the way you explain it and what you really need come together for the sake of the project’s success.”

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Denise Brinkmeyer (www.jumptechnology.com) is the author of Project Orienteering: A Field Guide For Project Leadership and president of Jump Technology Services®. She has over 20 years of diverse business experience with various-sized companies and develops business consulting service strategies. Brinkmeyer focuses on the development and implementation of software project management and software design methodologies that dramatically increase both customer satisfaction and department performance.

expansion

COVID-19 Introduced a Backdrop of Uncertainty, But Also Opportunity: How Businesses Can Navigate International Expansion

The global pandemic has reminded us all of how inter-connected the world is. As countries emerge from the global health crisis, and economies show steady signs of recovery, companies with global exposure are increasingly optimistic about opportunities outside their home markets, despite a number of headwinds. Expanding a business beyond one’s domestic market requires long-term planning, utilization of complex global supply chains, managing risk exposures and being nimble enough to flexibly respond to changing market conditions.

The results of J.P. Morgan’s 2021 Business Leaders Outlook (BLO) survey highlight how leaders are adjusting to this new environment—and finding opportunities to grow globally despite the current challenges.

In the survey, most midsize U.S. businesses are optimistic, even as they plan for continued unpredictability. Having learned in 2020 how to manage well remotely and deal with disrupted supply chains, U.S. business leaders are staying the course; global expansion plans remain at the same levels from pre-pandemic years. Most project continued steady sales growth outside their home market. This indicates the confidence they have gained from pivoting throughout the year, including accelerating technology adoption, increased digitization of core processes and managing global ventures with much less in-person travel.

Ultimately, the rollouts of COVID-19 vaccines continue to be a core component impacting the global growth outlook for businesses. In addition, geopolitical events, new trade and investment policies and continuously changing business regulations will continue to challenge business leaders seeking sustained profitable international growth.

Why Expand Globally in This Climate?

With issues such as labor shortages, severe bottlenecks in global supply chains and evolving customer expectations, it can be discouraging to consider international expansion at this time. However, according to the survey, executives remain optimistic. Those surveyed cited access to new customers/markets (72%), better opportunities to serve domestic customers with global operations (37%) and access to suppliers/materials (34%) as key reasons for expansion.

The pandemic will not deglobalize the business landscape. Business leaders have tried-and-tested remote workforces, seen governments become more flexible with business applications, and they have been leveraging new approaches and technologies to keep their business moving forward. In short, they have experience under their belt, have a long-term vision and see opportunity in international expansion—and are not letting the pandemic stand in the way. After all, adapting is what business is all about – and recognizing that extraordinary environments demand tailored strategies based on an accurate reading of market opportunities.

The World Has Changed: Three Key Strategies For Navigating International Expansion

1. Developing Strategic Partnerships & Understanding Trade Policy

Trade barriers and tariffs were cited as the top international business concern for globally-active middle-market companies in the 2021 Business Leaders Outlook survey. Complying with local regulations and the intricate differences in policy between nations can be overwhelming and time-intensive. Any little error may lead to wasted time or resources, complications, and added expenses. Developing strategic partnerships with businesses, banks, and vendors—those who already have the local intel—goes a long way in effective global expansion.

The many cultural nuances and varying consumer preferences by country also benefit from local expertise. Furthermore, the insight around local competition and market opportunities is more easily obtained through these kinds of partnerships, especially when acting quickly is critical to success.

Increasing global political changes in recent years that are challenging the status quo require extra diligence in this environment.  Additionally, the economic reforms underway in many developing countries are impacting both the volume and direction of foreign investment. We especially see this in China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and parts of Europe. For businesses navigating expansion in countries experiencing political and economic reform, it’s important to consider the impact these governments will have on fiscal, monetary, regulatory and foreign policy—and how significantly or quickly this may affect foreign investment opportunities.

As a positive example for businesses in North America, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) brought timely improvements to trade relationships in today’s volatile landscape. The USMCA has the potential to offer more certainty and a stronger safety net for trade and investment by promoting fairer trade and robust economic growth.

2. Investing in Technology & Digitization

Trade finance is the nucleus of the day-to-day global economy. It supports every stage of the global supply chain and ensures that buyers receive their goods and that sellers receive their payments. Yet the world faces a massive and persistent trade finance gap. The World Trade Organization estimated between 80% to 90% of global trade relies on trade finance, yet there was a $1.5 trillion gap between the market demand and supply before the pandemic.  That gap has only increased since 2020.

COVID-19 accelerated a transformative period for trade finance, primarily through digitization. The global challenge with trade finance centers around inflexible business models, paper-based and tedious processes, regulatory constraints, and outdated legacy systems.

Technology can help bring down operational costs while also increasing efficiencies, encouraging new revenue opportunities, optimizing resources, enhancing the recruiting process…the list goes on. Businesses are investing heavily in digital transformation, with cloud-enabled technology becoming the new standard of operation. This brings immense advantages, including the immediate ability to access data and machine learning (ML) with virtually unlimited computing power, in a split second. The value of AI and ML can clearly be seen across business functions including trading, risk management, marketing and operations. It enhances outcomes by streamlining processes and increasing overall efficiency.

Additionally, blockchain—a highly secure, decentralized digital record of transactions—offers a multitude of international trade-related applications, bringing high security, automation and traceability to important finance functions.

3. Streamlining Supply Chains

More than ever, managing global supply chains has become a critical skill for companies expanding internationally. Surging demand with various bottlenecks has disrupted global goods transportation and logistics. Gaining visibility over cross-border supply chains, while meeting profitability goals and evolving needs of customers, is an ongoing obstacle for most business leaders. Streamlining the global supply chain and focusing on visibility can lead to increased efficiencies throughout the entire production/solution life cycle. It entails optimizing processes by improving the accuracy of demand forecasts and schedules and improving production lines to reduce costs. This can help make businesses more agile and profitable. Secure data integration is also critical, so information can be shared across channels swiftly and seamlessly.

While concerns around tariffs and trade barriers again led the list of business leaders’ global concerns in the 2021 survey, managing global supply chains overtook currency risk for the second spot. Instead of focusing on the next crisis scenario—whether it be a pandemic, natural disaster, or cyber attack—business leaders must continue their focus on making global supply chains more resilient for future disruptions.

The Road Ahead: Global Outlook Optimistic for Well-Prepared Business Leaders

The overall global business outlook is optimistic, with 66% of leaders in the 2021 survey expecting their international sales to increase in the next five years. U.S. midsized, multinational businesses know that sustained growth requires access to new customers in new markets. That won’t change. However, today’s increasingly complex landscape will require greater investments in digitized products and processes, more customized local solutions in widely different international markets, and leveraging the expertise of reliable partners to understand the nuances of operating in challenging foreign markets. At the top of the list is having effective market entry and supply chain strategies, supported by a strong understanding of trade and investment policy to help shape your global market expansion.

edi deployment

EDI Deployment: What are the Obstacles and How to Overcome them?

Sending commercial documents physically, by fax, or even by email is over. Since the late 1990s, these exchanges have been gradually replaced by electronic messages (order or delivery vouchers, invoices, etc.), which allow the automation of processes. To do this, companies are now using EDI, an acronym for Electronic Data Interchange. EDI is the exchange of commercial documents from one computer to another, in a standardized and automated manner. Despite offering many advantages such as speed, reliability and traceability of exchanges, EDI is still not used by all companies. How to explain this situation? What are the obstacles to implementing EDI? Focus on the main obstacles to making EDI the norm in companies, and how to overcome them.

 

Implementation costs

Developing an EDI solution is a substantial process for a company. It is a two-pronged project involving:

-Full-fledged IT project management, with its classic phases of analyzing existing information, choosing a solution, configuring it, then deploying and maintaining it;

-an impact study related to the digitalization of manual processes in the company and its business environment

In fact, the ROI – Return On Investment is faster and more substantial when exchanges between partners are regular and recurring, regarding significant volumes. This is why small organizations rarely benefit.

To reduce these costs, there are many ready-to-use services available on the cloud. Offered by experts like Generix Group with Generix EDI Services, they allow for a quick start-up at a lower cost. Additionally, their use is charged per use, which favors small and medium-sized companies.

Difficult implementation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

Beyond the financial investment required, small businesses often lack the expertise to begin an IT project like this. If they can call upon an EDI supplier to handle such considerations, the process undeniably requires time to acutely understand the offers and analyze their needs.

This is a necessary step to find the pricing model that best meets the business needs of the company. Choosing an offer and an EDI supplier requires a preliminary analysis of the commercial transactions to be processed, and thus the volumes of data involved. Without this initial review, the company may face significant additional costs.

Several alternative solutions are offered to SMEs or very small companies that do not wish to invest in a fully automated EDI solution. They have the advantage of being inexpensive to both buy and use. They are mainly offered in SaaS mode, but are also compatible with EDI solutions used by client partners. These solutions include WEB-EDI, SmartPDF and online OCR.

Diversity of technologies and rules of standardization

EDI is even more interesting for a company as its entire ecosystem can use it. When deployed among different players in the same sector, it generally encourages partners and competitors to do the same. Thus, EDI has a strong presence in:

-Mass distribution

-The Agri-food industry

-Automobiles

-Electronics

-Aeronautics

-Pharmaceuticals

This dynamic therefore most often depends on the main contractors in the sector. If Airbus and Boeing adopt EDI with their suppliers, the entire aviation ecosystem moves in this direction. Indirectly, this impact can extend to nearby sectors with common suppliers, such as the naval or automotive sectors.

For an industrial company at the crossroads of several industries, it is complex to master the different standards and technologies of each sector.

In this case, the ideal scenario is to use EDI services in SaaS mode offered by mature players who have already deployed their solution in several sectors. By sharing processes, it is then possible to reuse at lower cost connectors and technologies that are already proven and financed.

Implementation and deployment time frame within each entity

Faced with relatively long implementation times, companies sometimes turn to alternatives to EDI to digitize their data exchanges more quickly. This may be a document entry and collection portal, or an OCR solution. Keep in mind that they do not offer the same automation capabilities, so these intermediate solutions will never bring the same quality benefits as EDI.

Again, the best way to bypass delays and implementation difficulties for an EDI system is to retain a service in SaaS mode. Hardware and/or software costs are eliminated, and configuration costs are significantly reduced due to the pooling of technologies between network members.

Synchronous trade dynamics

With the development of internet and e-commerce technologies, integrations between application components increasingly require real-time interactions. It involves knowing, for example, the position of stock, obtaining updated prices, or the status of a completed process.

During its start-up period, EDI relied on asynchronous file-sharing technologies. This still corresponds to the need to exchange certain commercial transactions. Additionally, it is necessary to associate it with API management, usually with REST and JSON technologies.

Be attentive, however, not to oppose EDI and API. Digital data exchange can be based on all forms of syntax or language such as XML or JSON. Data transport can also be carried out by protocols close to web services such as EDIINT AS2, SOAP, or REST.

In summary, it becomes necessary to combine the management of EDI and APIs. Fortunately for businesses, most EDI services offered in the cloud are actually open to most B2B integration technologies including MFT, EDI, API, MOM, etc.

Deploying EDI brings about several obstacles: limited adoption in small businesses, diversity of technologies and standards, and sometimes long deployment times. However, the emergency of technologies such as APIs and blockchains alleviates these challenges, thereby ensuring a bright future for EDI. Want to know more about EDI’s benefits and its development prospects?

VIEW THE GENERIX EDI SERVICES SOLUTION

This article originally appeared on GenerixGroup.com. Republished with permission.

BYD Improves Quality and Safety Team with New Leadership

Robert Matute and Peter Hale are the newest names to join the Build Your Dreams Lancaster, California manufacturing team, according to an announcement from the battery and battery-electric vehicle pioneer company, also known for its critical zero-emission initiatives in the region.

“The appointment of world-class quality control and safety experts like Peter Hale and Robert Matute to our team are additional catalysts in our leadership advancement of this innovative and disruptive market,” said Stella Li, President of BYD North America. “We are committed to the highest quality products and experience for our customers as a total solutions provider, and the ongoing, safe workplace for our team.”

Peter Hale brings with him over 35 years of overseas and U.S.  public transit and private sector bus manufacturing experience. He will step into the new role as Quality Assurance/Quality Control  Manager and oversee BYD’s Quality Management System. A few of the tasks assigned in this position include verifying conformance to customer, internal, ISO 9001, and regulatory/legal requirements, inspection of incoming materials,  monitoring, measurement, and review of internal processes.

“Following a lifelong career in the bus transit industry, it would be normal to stand down and reflect on the career experiences that have taken me around the world,” says Hale. “But, I have been an admirer of BYD since their early days, and the innovation level is so exciting. So applying my technical and industry knowledge to their team is one more piece of my journey, and in the evolution of this technology. I am proud to lead a 40-person strong team of quality engineers and inspectors dedicated to keep BYD advancing and at the top of the industry.”

Robert Matute will evolve into his new role as Safety Manager with  over 20 years of experience of safety management experience in assessing, designing and implementing safety guidelines. In his most recent role as Safety Project Coordinator, Matute worked to spearheaded the coordination for training of workers on safety law and regulations, conducted job site safety inspections, and managed safety documentation for the Nevell Group.

“My goal is to achieve sustainable, best-in-class, safety performance,” Matute said. “We do this by building a strong unified leadership safety culture that engages and empowers employees at all levels to take ownership in reducing unsafe acts and exposure to accidents and injuries. Our actions and behaviors demonstrate that safety is a core value.”

Source: BYD

Leading Global Software Firm Rolls Out First-of-its-Kind Time Management System, Targets World’s Growing Mobile Workforce

Leading global time management expert HMS Software – publishers of the TimeControl timesheet system – has announced the release of TimeControl version 7.4.1, a first-of-its-kind system targeting medium to large enterprises and their mobile workers. With nearly half of the total global workforce expected to be comprised of mobile employees by 2022, the newest release of TimeControl delivers unprecedented smartphone and tablet features, enabling users to do much more from their devices than simply collect time.

“This release represents a major leap forward in functionality,” said HMS Software President Chris Vandersluis, noting that the new mobile interface for the TimeControl Mobile app – available to Google Play for Android device users and on the Apple Store for iOS users – allows users to create, view, edit and approve timesheet data, as well as perform historical searches, right from their phones. “With every new release of our product we reinvent the way companies manage their time,” Vandersluis said.

Additional new features found in TimeControl 7.4.1 – a multi-function system that includes support for Time and Attendance, Time and Billing, Project Tracking, Human Resource Tracking, and Research Tax Credit Tracking – include:

-Support for multiple timesheet periods at once, meaning some parts of an organization can start their timesheets on a Sunday and others on a Monday, while other parts can choose to use a bi-weekly, bi-monthly or other length of timesheet, making it possible for large global companies to operate efficiently from one single timesheet.

-Unparalleled flexibility in how charge codes are displayed with the launch of a new Hierarchy view that allows the configuration and display of timesheet charges to be selectable for each part of an organization while maintaining a common enterprise view in the background.

-Major changes to the TimeControl Application Programmable Interface (API) that make it easier to integrate the software with other mission-critical corporate systems such as Finance, ERP and Project Management.

TimeControl was originally released in 1994 and was immediately successful in the project management sector. Today it is a comprehensive enterprise timesheet solution used by companies worldwide. TimeControl is designed as a multipurpose timesheet able to serve the needs of both Finance and Project Management simultaneously. Features include: a multi-browser, multi-device interface; vacation approvals; executive dashboards; extensive approval functionality; flexible reporting and integration with other project management and corporate systems. TimeControl is available both as an in-the-cloud subscription service and for purchase for an on-premises installation.

TimeControl 7.4.1 will be upgraded automatically for TimeControl Online subscription clients.  The upgrade is available to existing on-premise clients with a current support and maintenance agreement at no additional charge from the TimeControl upgrades site: TimeControl.com/support/updates. A free Hosted TimeControl Trial is available at freetrial.timecontrol.com.  For further information about HMS Software, please visit http://www.hms.ca or email info@hms.ca.