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"Fostering a Culture of Adaptability"
Discover how you can foster a culture of adaptability in your organization by using the SAP Business ByDesign solution to
engage in a cyclical process of taking stock of your needs, evaluating the necessary changes to your business operations,
and putting these changes into effect to gain a competitive advantage. "
Source : SAP
Fostering a Culture of Adaptability
Adaptability is also known as :
Theory Adaptation,
Adaptability,
Adaptability Work,
Adaptability Change,
Adaptability Model,
Adaptability Skills,
Adaptability Theory,
Business Adaptability,
Change Management Business,
Change Management Consulting,
Change Management,
Change Management Implementation,
Change Management Skills,
Change Management Strategies,
Change Management Theories,
Concept Adaptation,
Corporate Change Management,
Corporate Culture Change,
Culture Adaptability,
Culture Adaptation,
Culture Change Management,
Dynamic Adaptation,
Employee Adaptability,
Flexibility Adaptability,
Implementing Organizational Change,
Knowledge Change,
Leadership Adaptability,
Leadership Change Management,
Leadership Organizational.
To
achieve profitable growth, successful companies maintain a laser-sharp focus
on executing a few key initiatives efficiently. Moving quickly and
effectively on these initiatives requires you to make changes across your
entire business so you can swiftly adapt operations to accommodate the
changes.
This document describes how you can foster a culture of
adaptability in your organization by using the SAP Business ByDesign™
solution to engage in a cyclical process of taking stock of your needs,
evaluating the necessary changes to your business operations, and putting
these changes into effect to gain a competitive advantage. SAP Business
ByDesign can help you foster a culture of adaptability because the
software changes as your business needs change.
Designed specifically for
midsize companies that want to grow profitably, SAP Business ByDesign is
the world’s most complete and adaptable on demand business solution. Unlike
any other on-demand business software, SAP Business ByDesign delivers the
following:
- Transparency and control of the entire business
- The
ability to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing business needs
- The most comprehensive set of built-in IT services and support
Adaptability Is More Than Just People Willing To Change
Your Software
Should Help, Not Hinder, When Your Company Needs To Change
Companies
That Are Designed to Grow
Achieving Profitable and Controlled Growth as
a Midsize Company, a 2006 Oliver Wyman study of more than 200 companies in
the United States and Europe, revealed the characteristics that separate
consistently profitable growth companies from others that are less
successful.
Companies designed to grow:
- Ensure disciplined execution at
all levels
- Create a culture in which people readily adapt to change
- Focus their whole business on a few key initiatives
- Make effective
trade-off decisions about investment
- Maintain strong metrics and
feedback loops
- Promote excellence in execution
Less successful companies
are often unable to make large investments in IT to support the visibility
and adaptability needed to develop these characteristics. Until recently
the enterprise software market has not offered a comprehensive, flexible,
and transparent software solution that is easy to implement and easy to
modify – at a cost that fits the IT budgets of most companies.
How can
a dynamic company like yours achieve profitable growth and still keep the
agility you need to maintain your competitive advantage? According to the
2006 study Achieving Profitable and Controlled Growth as a Midsize Company
by Oliver Wyman, a management consulting company, the key is to foster a
culture that embraces adaptability and focuses on the flawless execution
of a few key initiatives. When you do so, you can capitalize on your speed
and adaptability to take advantage of market opportunities long before
competitors or larger companies get organized and move in.
A culture of
adaptability sounds great in theory. And chances are you’ll need to make a
multitude of changes to your operations and to the technology that
supports them to drive your initiatives. For example, a new-product
initiative may involve acquiring a company, opening a new manufacturing
plant in China, or implementing a completely new business model. If you’re
expanding into a new international market, you must ensure that your
operations can handle new currencies, languages, customs, and local
regulations.
Consider an example from the Wyman study of a manufacturing
company experiencing 12% growth per year. When the CFO noticed that labor
costs were compromising profitability, the company decided to move
production from Europe to the United States to control costs. Without the
right IT infrastructure in place, the move would have been untenable because
the cost of change would have outweighed the potential savings.
In
fact, having the right IT infrastructure is critical to achieving consistent
growth and profitability. If you want to take advantage of business
opportunities as they arise – or make a business change like the one made
by the manufacturing company – your business solutions must readily
support changes to both your business processes and your company’s
organizational structure. Unfortunately, many business applications do the
opposite. They are not only inflexible, they also perpetuate silos of
business processes and information, and disconnections between your company’s
departments. Because implementing and changing them is exceedingly costly,
time prohibitive, and complex, most IT business applications actually
inhibit change.
Unlike these applications, the SAP Business ByDesign
solution is built to enable adaptability and change for midsize companies.
The software can be configured and reconfigured as business needs change.
SAP Business ByDesign delivers a broad range of business functionality and
analytical tools that combine to give you transparency and complete
control over your entire business. And a comprehensive set of built-in IT
service and support keeps IT costs manageable for companies without large
IT staffs.
Planning For A Cycle Of Adaptability
Explore. Evaluate.
Experience.
You can use a completely integrated solution like SAP Business
ByDesign to foster a culture of adaptability so you can grow and respond
to shifting market realities. A culture of adaptability means adopting an
IT business solution that enables you to:
- Explore – take stock of your
company’s needs and priorities, maintaining a laser focus on the
initiatives that drive change in your organization
- Evaluate – design the
changes you need across silos and weigh the impact of changes on business
processes
- Experience – put your changes into effect, experience them in
action, and modify them as needed in a cost-effective way
Explore
Initiatives to Improve Your Business
Every company sets a unique agenda
for achieving market differentiation and outpacing competitors, but industry
leaders maintain a narrow focus on a few initiatives that will improve their
business. Through more than three decades of working with midsize companies,
SAP has found that successful companies make it a priority to take stock
of their needs, set realistic priorities, and execute them quickly and
efficiently.
As you explore the initiatives that can drive profitable
growth, consider the potential impact on your business operations. Because
most initiatives require you to adapt the way you do business, it’s
critical that your company develops the ability to institute change rapidly.
A culture of adaptability does not drive change once; it embraces a cyclical
process of change. That means supporting today’s initiatives while setting
up an adaptable infrastructure that allows you to change your operations in
the future – again and again. Let’s look at some examples of the kinds of
changes you may implement:
- Improving operational efficiency You focus on
improving a few business processes that cross organizational silos. For
example, if you want to improve operational efficiency, consider
automating a key production or customer service process from end to end.
If you are a manufacturing or distribution company, you may want to
migrate from using bar code scanners to radio frequency identification
(RFID) readers in your warehouse, or from distributing maintenance
instructions on paper to electronic displays.
- Building new lines of
business Often an aggressive growth strategy requires building new lines
of business, which means designing a business model, setting up a new
division, developing services for customers, and instituting a whole set
of new business processes. For example, you may hire a senior executive to
head up a new line of business focused on installation services to augment
your company’s primary business of distributing construction supplies.
- Expanding into new markets Expanding into new markets can speed growth for
many companies. It also illustrates how critical business agility and
flexibility are to your business. For example, if your company plans to
obtain intellectual property for new products through acquisitions, you
must quickly set up new divisions with different operating procedures and
governance in various locations around the world. You must support an
array of languages and currencies, as well as ensure ongoing regulatory
compliance in the countries in which you do business now and in the
future.
Evaluate Business Changes to Support Growth
Once you have
identified your key initiatives in the exploratory stage, it’s time to
move into the evaluation stage. In this stage, you put your plans in
action by weighing changes to your business processes. SAP designed SAP
Business ByDesign to help you evaluate your business changes quickly and
efficiently in several ways.
First, before you license SAP Business
ByDesign, you can evaluate the software’s adaptability using your own
personalized trial system. Without calling in an army of consultants or IT
staff, you simply answer questions related to your industry and the
countries in which you operate. SAP Business ByDesign uses your answers to
automatically set up a trial system with predefined settings that are
appropriate for your company. Then, you can personalize this trial system,
experimenting with how it can support your initiatives to open an office
in Germany, acquire a company in China, enhance the efficiency of your
manufacturing operations in the United States, or set up a new line of
business. With your personalized trial system, you can preview how easy it
is to add a new product line, alter your corporate structure, or turn on
functionality that supports the languages, business processes, and
regulations applicable in new geographical markets.
Second, after you
purchase the solution and go live, you may need to support a new business
initiative or respond to unforeseen market events. SAP Business ByDesign
provides a test environment – similar to the personalized trial system –
where you can evaluate changes to your business processes and
organizational structure. Using the test environment, you can evaluate the
changes you need to make to drive business initiatives before you actually
implement them.
Because you can test the changes you need to drive your
business initiatives – both before you buy and before you make changes –
SAP Business ByDesign eliminates surprises and provides a high degree of
predictability. This level of adaptability dramatically reduces the cost
of configuring the software, making it affordable for companies with lean
IT budgets.
Experience Your Changes
In the experience stage, you
execute your personal adaptation of the SAP Business ByDesign software.
You repeat this stage during the life cycle of your solution – whenever
you need to make changes to support your business initiatives.
The
first time you enter the experience stage, you transition from your
personalized trial system to your live SAP Business ByDesign solution.
Because your production solution is based on your personalized trial
system, you don’t have to start all over again by defining the scope of
your solution when you are ready to go live. SAP Business ByDesign
organizes your go-live activities into a logical sequence and guides you
to the appropriate screens, working through a list of necessary
activities. Once you are ready to go live, you can run a go-live check to
ensure that you have completed all the necessary steps. Then, literally
at the click of a button, you go live to experience everything you set up in
your personalized trial system – from corporate organization and master data
to business operations and processes.
The explore-evaluate-experience cycle
repeats itself every time you need to adapt your solution. Undoubtedly,
you’ll want to make changes to align your operations and processes with
new initiatives – such as expanding into new markets – that you defined in
the explore phase. In addition, you are prepared to handle events that you
never expected. For example, unanticipated market conditions may require
that you cut costs by shifting operations from Europe to Asia.
You
simply adapt SAP Business ByDesign in a test environment and then go live
when you are ready to implement the changes. There is no risk of
disrupting your business operations, and there are no surprises when you
go live. Unlike other software that requires IT professionals and consultants
to customize, you simply answer questions about your new business needs,
and SAP Business ByDesign does the rest. Because the solution is so easy
to adapt, you can make changes as fast as you need them. This added
flexibility and speed can give you an advantage over competitors who must
rely on expensive consultants to modify or completely replace their
disparate systems to respond to new opportunities.
The Secret To An
Adaptable Organization
Using Sap Business Bydesign To Increase Your
Company’s Agility
The SAP Business ByDesign solution can help you
enable adaptability in your business processes, operations, and
organizational structure.
SAP Business ByDesign fosters a culture
of adaptability. You can adapt the software as your needs change in two
key areas – your business processes and your organizational structure. The
software is easy to configure, and your business managers can do it
without delving into complex settings or relying on external consultants.
Your own staff can fine-tune SAP Business ByDesign to support your
company’s specific needs when you evaluate the software, in preparation for
going live, and whenever your needs change.
When you adapt the
software, it guides you through an online survey about your organization
and its operations. Your responses to the online survey questions
determine not only the software settings but also the content you need to
support each function. You can then easily adapt the forms, reports, and
interface of your solution in the way that best fits your needs.
For
example, the software asks you where you operate, and you simply indicate
all the applicable countries. SAP Business ByDesign translates your
answers into configuration settings, choosing the appropriate features and
functions to incorporate. If you indicate that you have a plant in Germany,
the software configures itself to support the German language, convert to
and from the correct currency, and include any Germany-specific
functionality, such as reporting to meet legal or regulatory requirements.
SAP Business ByDesign helps you easily manage and change your organizational
structure, department functions, and employee responsibilities. You define
the various organizational units in your company, including their function,
accounting setup, reporting lines, and relationship to your company’s legal
entities. The function of each organizational unit determines the possible
job responsibilities of employees within the department. The software
automatically assigns default responsibilities and access rights to
employees working in each unit and role, and it sets up default management
approval policies and workflows for each employee who works within the
organizational unit.
For example, when you make an acquisition and need to
create a new department, SAP Business ByDesign takes into consideration
factors such as the department’s functions and whether it is a separate
legal entity, a separate reporting segment, or a cost center or profit
center. The software automatically proposes changes to the access rights
for transferred employees and assigns access rights for new employees.
Management then approves the proposal, allowing employees to access a
customized portal that is appropriate for their new responsibilities and that
routes tasks – such as exceptions, alerts, and requests for approval – to
them.
Adaptability Means Making Change Predictable, Affordable, and
Easy
Many ingredients contribute to a company’s success. Strong
leadership, disciplined execution, dedication to excellence, and
opportunistic market conditions all play their part. But no company can
truly achieve profitable growth if it does not quickly identify and
capitalize on business opportunities. Doing so requires a culture of
adaptability in your organization.
Whether your initiatives call for
growing rapidly or streamlining operations to respond more quickly to
market demands, SAP can provide you with the adaptability and speed you
need to set your plans in motion. SAP Business ByDesign can help you
enable adaptability in your business processes, operations, and
organizational structure. It can help you employ a cyclical process of
exploring your initiatives, evaluating the changes you need to support
them, and experiencing your changes in a way that makes business change as
predictable, affordable, and easy as possible. That makes SAP Business
ByDesign the perfect solution for companies like yours – companies that
want to grow.
For More Information
To learn more about how SAP Business
ByDesign enhances your business agility, visit us on the Web at
www.sap.com/solutions /sme/businessbydesign.
Content
- Executive Summary
- Adaptability Is More Than Just People
Willing to Change
- Companies That Are Designed to Grow Planning for
a Cycle of Adaptability
- Explore Initiatives to Improve Your Business
- Evaluate Business Changes to Support Growth
- Experience Your Changes
- The Secret to an Adaptable Organization
- Adaptability Means Making
Change Predictable, Affordable, and Easy
- For More Information