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Pilot
Projects can help win Buy-in.
The
Irish plants of a multinational company were already
using electronic data interchange (EDI) with major supermarket
customers to receive and process electronic point of
sales (EPOS) data.
The company in Ireland conducted a review of how
greater use of the Internet could improve its operations
but decided, that apart from some possible marketing
and promotion benefits, it was difficult to see how
the Internet would add value. It already operated a
successful just-in-time system with its suppliers and
most of the company took the traditional view: 'if it
ain't broke, don't fix it!'
However, a number of staff were aware of the benefits
their major customer had recently achieved through the
introduction of a new extranet for its suppliers. They
formed a small task force (involving staff from different
parts of the company's operations) to see if they could
achieve similar benefits working with their suppliers
and came up with a project proposal.
It was easy to convince their suppliers of the benefits
of the project, as they were keen to co-operate with
their biggest customer. It was much harder to convince
their own staff of the benefits. A small pilot exercise
was undertaken with a cluster of suppliers. A CD-ROM
was produced to demonstrate the system and help staff
to understand the benefits. Although the project absorbed
more staff time and costs than originally budgeted it
did demonstrate that significant improvements in supply
chain efficiency were possible with the added bonus
of more transparent operations.
The success of the pilot exercise convinced internal
employees and has given the company the confidence to
extend the extranet to its other major suppliers.
Learning Points
-
Even companies, which already operate sophisticated
electronic procedures, can obtain large benefits
from wider application of new technology to supply
chain management.
-
You need to think through the best approach to securing
buy-in to any IT project and may need to do quite
a bit of work to implement such efforts.
- Pilot
exercises can be a useful tool in securing buy-in.
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