August 20

This is a story about integration and process design, although you may not know that immediately.

Just before Christmas, I bought a scarf as a gift in appreciation for a client's assistant. She has helped me tremendously in a number of projects I've done there. Owing to pressures to wrap up year end matters, I bought the gift on December 20, making it necessary to ship by Fedex to assure she got it in time. With that big picture in mind....

The scarf purchase itself was rather painless. I took the scarf to the gift wrapping desk. They asked me to choose the wrapping, nothing else, and I made my choice.

Now how big is a scarf? Perhaps 10" by 12" folded flat, maybe half an inch thick? I'm not paying much attention, but the next time I look at what the wrapper is doing I see she has used a box perhaps 4" square in cross section and about 12" long. Next, she applies the "ribbon", and the "ribbon" has a wire in it so it can be shaped to stay lifted off the package and bent just so, a nice 3-D touch. At this point, I'm starting to ask myself how I'm going to ship this by Fedex. Next comes the fir-sprig look-alike and a couple of 1" glass balls. I suggest that this may not ship well, but she makes the point that it does look so much better. I take it.

Off to Kinko's-Fedex. Clearly, there's no way this will fit inside a standard Fedex bag, or even the 2" thick box. Now I knew this long before I got to Kinko's, but I see this story unfolding and I want to see how it comes out. I ask to have the package wrapped for shipment. As I'm watching, the agent wraps the gift box in a clear plastic bag and places it into 9" by 12" by 13" shipping box, with lots of bubble wrap to protect the curled ribbon and fill the otherwise empty space. He finishes, and it weights 1.75 pounds.

There is not anywhere near 1.75 pounds of cashmere in the box. I'm shipping air.

So what makes this an integration story? It's not a great leap to see that had I kept the whole process in focus from the get-go, I would have taken the Fedex box with me to the store, and I would have made sure that the gift box with ribbon would fit before the wrapping started. Short of that, I would have wrapped the scarf without a box and shipped it inside the Fedex box. With the broader view - spanning the "gift wrapping department" and the "shipping department" - I could have acted more intelligently at the beginning.

This is rather small-scale and quite concrete, but the image may not be a bad one to contemplate when talking about processes and systems. Consider the following scenario.

A company's sales and ordering system produces a printed order, and a clerk manually re-enters it into the accounting system. The two "orders" are structured differently:

• The order in the sales system includes one or two parties - a buyer and, if different, the bill-payer - and it contains line items of purchased products and services, some of which are package deals (e.g., a seminar and a book offered at a discount);
• The accounting system only accepts a billing party and it doesn't understand packages.

To make the process work, the clerk has to choose a party in the sales order to be the billing party in the accounting order. He also has to enter each line item, calculating the actual item price with a calculator to account for the bundle discount.

How real is this scenario? At the start of one engagement, we observed that orders were manually entered in a contact management system, re-entered into a desktop quotation writing application, then shipped in batches to another office where they were entered into accounting.
In my gift experience, wrapping, the drive to Kinko's, and shipping took me three times as long as shopping. In my consulting engagement, the process from closing a sale to recognizing it in accounting took three to five days before we started. (We collectively got it down to real time.)
In the world of systems and processes, the implications of deploying without the broad view in mind are not so visible. But they're there.

Suggestions

• Take a complete look at your business process without regard to the systems. Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and design the right business process.
• Within your process, make sure each concept has one definition and structure, so that an order is an order is an order, no matter where it appears in the process.
• When building and upgrading your systems, make sure to implement your concepts and processes. Don't blindly make a "locally convenient" choice, such as accepting an application's off-the-shelf concept or process. Think globally, act locally.
• Integrate as early as possible.
• Even if you can't integrate now, stay true to your concepts and processes so that each system deployment lays the foundation for integration without re-design.

Our Services
Is your organization suffering from lack of technological support, or worse, from technology that obstructs more than it enables? If so, we can help.
Stephen E. Lipka, PhD
slipka@AvatarSP.com
(978) 440-844