In the latest issue of Theory & Practice, a complimentary, biweekly newsletter from IDC’s Manufacturing Insights, IDC talks about fast decision making processes. The article is entitled “Collaboration and Fast Decision Making Processes are the Key to Survival in the Manufacturing Industry.” Anyone who’s read this blog knows that this is a core theme that we’ve talked about repeatedly.

The article goes on to say that “a company that is able to make decisions quickly due to visibility over the operations and with a connection to strategic goals is a company that has a competitive advantage as it is able to quickly react to unforeseen events.” This is precisely what we focus on and the value that our customers realize.

The article also talks about the challenges in large companies of achieving this. We have found, however, that as our software “grows” within an organization, it tends to move into various groups and get broad adoption. Why is this? Because the response process is inherently a distributed and collaborative process that requires active participation from throughout the organization to succeed. So, focusing on empowering the organization to respond more effectively to change by giving them the information and tools to do so inevitably helps break down the walls of the silos and gets the organization working more closely towards a common goal that increases customer satisfaction and reduces operating costs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Best practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.