A colleague recently recounted a story to me from his own past. It had to do with a failing business. The company had numerous issues, in the areas of acquisition and execution, of revenue and of profit. The issues had gotten so out of hand that the company was on the verge of closing its operations entirely. In a last ditch effort to turn the company around, the company’s president initiated a series of process-improvement projects. The hope was that the results of these projects would provide the necessary impetus to pull the company out of its tailspin and provide a foundation for its revitalization. Moreover, the president had democratically distributed the projects across the organization–one for each department. As we all know, projects consume resources, and not all of the selected projects were of the same potential impact to the company. As such, lower-impact projects ended up pulling away resources from some of the mission-critical areas of the business, areas that had been suffering the most. Ironically, the attempted intervention had made things worse.
In one telling instance, the HR department had been tasked with implementing a new HR management system. The HR and IT staff dutifully went through the implementation cycle, soliciting requirements, selecting software, configuring the application and converting data. Leads, supervisors, and managers spent their free time logging employee metadata into the new system. And all of this occurred while the company missed shipments, struggled with quality issues, and scrambled to get new orders, while key employees fled to their competitors. The HR department rolled out its new system shortly before the announcement that the company’s assets were being dissolved. While the company overall was a disaster, the HR project was a ringing success, and when it came time to terminate the company’s staff, they were able to use the new HR system to efficiently and effectively carry the task through to its macabre conclusion.
That is, the HR department had won the proverbial shuffleboard game on the deck of the Titanic.
In my own career, I’ve encountered a few folks who were winning deck games on a sinking ship. And like my friend’s story, the game they were winning had nothing to do with the water that the ship was taking on. This seems to be a common failing business mistake, in general. During good times or bad, failing businesses more often focus their efforts on the wrong areas, and because of this, the efforts of their best employees go underutilized. Failing businesses also make the mistake of democratic project selection. Instead of business planning strategies involving a hard analysis of the key pain points in the business, management adopts generic strategies that try to support the general betterment of the company, while in truth, they are diluting their efforts with low-impact initiatives. Other times, failing companies exhibit the tendency to chase random rabbits down their burrows, mistaking the thrill of the chase for the value of the bounty. Quite often the least successful companies are also the nicest–they avert stepping on toes and pointing out obvious issues. Had they been on the Titanic, they would have been the ones to reclassify the iceberg as an upright collection of water molecules, the gaping breech in the hull as an additional sprinkler system, and would have continued with their polite game on the upper deck while the water levels rose.
In looking back at these situations, it is hard not to see this as a failure of leadership. The leaders of the company are the ones who truly have the ability to steer a company in one direction or another. Often, the direction is as simple as the projects that the company chooses to execute over a given year. But the projects selected quite often serve to have the most impact on the company’s ultimate destination.
But one might ask just what kind of business planning strategies separate leaders who safely pull their ships into harbor from the ones that send them to Davy Jones’ locker. While there are probably a number of reasonable answers to the above question, I would contend that the most successful managers from my own past were buoyant due, among other things, to their knowledge of their industry. The best managers obsess about the workings of their business, and the industry in which it resides, and base their business planning strategies and a vast and well-integrated understating of the dynamics of the environment in which their company competes.
To put it simply, there is no replacement for domain-knowledge. The best leaders I have worked with understand this principle. No leader is an expert in all areas, but when good leaders assume leadership of a company, they immediately dive into a phase of learning–about the business, its culture, its business climate, the market conditions, and whatever additional factors are required to allow the leader to be able to make good decisions. And once this knowledge has been amassed, the leaders go about applying their knowledge to their business planning strategies. They make an honest assessment of the company, its opportunities, and its issues. And in response, they make decisions that drive how the company’s limited resources are to be sequestered, to address issues or take advantage of opportunities.
And their decisions tend to be the better ones. Far away from the shuffleboard deck, they are at the helm, altering course to avoid the bergs and burglars that would threaten their business. The worst managers I’ve encountered take the opposite approach–they tout the importance of surrounding themselves with good people, while they themselves are often missing in action, preferring instead to galivant about town, wining and dining the city’s elite, seeking to impress, when they should be impressive, seeking to woo when they should be working. While I certainly do not question the importance of a manager building a first-rate team, it takes leadership and involvement to collect, engage, and focus the individual talent in the right direction. And the inability to make good directional decisions, to guide these good people, generally results from the leaders’ inadequate preparation and/or dedication to his or her craft.
To return to the title of this post–if the captain of the ship is wasting his time winning games of shuffleboard, the crew will flounder, and ultimately, the ship will founder. So contact the EstesGroup today, and take advantage of our business process review, management, and improvement services.
“So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary.” – Herman Melville.
The idea of vision is a pregnant metaphor, full of intimations and implications. In its verbal sense, vision refers to the act of seeing, of perceiving the world around us. As a noun, one’s vision has more to do with a sight into the future, to a place where one wishes, eventually, to reside.
The idea of vision, in both senses, tends to suffuse the jargon of everyday business. When customers come to us, they are not just in search of the domain knowledge related to a given enterprise system. They come to us looking to understand how to best integrate the use of a system with their particular business climate, such that they can best achieve their strategic goals, their vision. Customers tend to be strong in understanding the opportunities available to them. That is, they are able to formulate a vision for the future. Customers often struggle to put into place the processes, practices and procedures that allow them to achieve the vision that they’ve formulated.
After a losing year, the CEO of a company for whom I once worked, remarked (only half-sarcastically) that our company was “perfectly structured to achieve the results we’ve achieved.” That is, our company had a strategic vision, but our actions failed to achieve it. Our actions had achieved a different (and less profitable) vision. And I would offer that the reason for our failure to achieve our vision was in our inability to remove the paradigmatic lenses that colored everything we perceived, and ultimately drove our actions.
Einstein famously described insanity as the expectation that the repetition of same behavior will yield different results. In that light, I have worked for and worked with a few companies over the years that have gone insane at one point or another, seeking to achieve new strategic goals using the old methods that had worked in previous generations. The logic behind such an approach has some justification – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Such a an approach seems fine until a losing year leaves the CEO glowering down at you, over his horn-rimmed spectacles. The problem here is not one of vision, but of lenses. A company’s lenses serve as the paradigms that cement the company’s habits, culture and means of solving problems. As time goes by, and circumstances change, these lenses may begin to skew reality. In the most dysfunctional of environments, these lenses may even warp perceptions as to encourage the most maladaptive of business behaviors.
As ERP implementation consultants, it is of necessity that we come into a business from the outside, unaware and unaccustomed to the perspectives that shape the business in question. As consultants, we also have the good fortune of being exposed to many companies, in different industries, working with various products, catering to disparate markets. The expectation here is that our ERP implementation strategies across such environments gives us a cadre of different perspectives to use, and that we should be able to use these to the benefit of our client when they develop a vision and strategy. Because of the natural ignorance to a customer’s cultural worldview, and the access to alternative perspectives, the goal of a consultation effort has less to do with the use of an enterprise system than it does with the opportunities for a fresh perspective. The implementation of a new system becomes a means of surfacing and understanding the customer’s existing lenses and the consulting effort becomes an opportunity to try out new lenses, lenses that can be leveraged to formulate new processes and practices, that address changing business landscapes, and help companies achieve their respective strategic visions, in so doing.
So what is your vision? Come talk to us at the Estes Group, and see if we can help develop a vision and strategy to make them into a reality.
Epicor ERP is a powerful platform with thousands of manufacturers using it to run their businesses. With power often comes complexity, and that’s been the case with earlier versions of the system. There is no perfect ERP system, and the ever-changing balance between functionality and usability is a constant series of trade-offs. Epicor ERP Version 9 often required multiple servers, performance tuning was critical, it had a Progress data base layer, even when running on SQL, and the user experience was challenging. A personalized Epicor ERP demo is the perfect beginning to your Epicor consulting journey.
Epicor invested $25M in Epicor ERP Version 10, developing a completely new platform. The system was written and optimized for Microsoft .NET Framework and the Microsoft Data Platform, including Microsoft SQL Server. Users will experience a big increase in performance (over Epicor 9) and find the system easier to manage.
What you’ll see in your Epicor ERP demo
According to Epicor, here are the Top 5 user ERP system experience enhancements for Epicor ERP 10.
Responsiveness – Performance has doubled and scalability has quadrupled across virtually all aspects of the system. ERP 10 is much more hardware efficient, which dramatically lowers hardware costs.
Simplicity – ERP 10 services are hosted purely using Microsoft Windows® components, including Internet Information Services (IIS) and Microsoft .NET. An all new management architecture makes deployment and migration much easier.
Mobility – Touch-enabled devices are now supported for a new navigation system and a re-architected Epicor Web Access (EWA) browser client.
Collaboration – Epicor Social Enterprise is included with ERP 10 and is a new way for ERP users to interact with each other and with ERP data.
Choice – ERP 10 can be deployed on premise, hosted, or access via subscription. It is also much easier to create a high-performing virtualized infrastructure.
The current version, Epicor 10.2, introduces some really exciting capabilities that you’ll see in your ERP demo, including Active Home Page and Epicor Data Discovery (EDD). Here are some highlights:
Developed using the latest web standard, which makes the system mobile-friendly and responsive.
Manufacturing role-based KPIs, examples: Percentage of Jobs without Scrap or Non Conformance, Manufacturing Hours and Indirect Hours.
Finance and Supply Chain role-based KPIs, including: Price Variance, Open PO Count and Amount, and Negative Inventory Items/Out of Stock.
Customization capabilities to modify out-of-the-box KPIs or create entirely new ones based on existing or newly created BAQs.
Epicor Consulting: How can we help?
What do you want to see? Our Epicor consultants will show it to you. The best way to get an in-depth look at the new Epicor 10.2 functionality is to experience it firsthand! Our Epicor consulting team can give you a demo of the full system, or one of our ERP specialists can walk you through a specific module. We can help you with project planning, including Epicor budgeting so you experience increased revenue at every step of your ERP upgrade. Your personalized Epicor ERP demo can even show you the newest managed ERP hosting capabilities.
Are your electronic medical records safe from healthcare cyber attack?
Researchers at Microsoft are warning that several encrypted databases of medical records are vulnerable to attacks and information loss. With the increased use of cloud computing, data breaches on encrypted databases has increased, so healthcare industry cybersecurity is more important than ever. They identify the threats in multiple ways, but one is individual and aggregate. Individual attacks are designed to gather information about a specific person where aggregate attacks are meant to recover statistical information about the entire database. These can both be very malicious.
It is still common practice to use encryption to protect against cyberattacks, and it is still one of the best defenses, however, using encryption only, is not the best solution for healthcare cyber attack prevention. Encrypted information is unscrambled in a computer’s memory, so if a cyber terrorist is able to access that, it is dangerous. In order to be useful, encryption needs to be continual to prevent progressive decoding to occur.
Heathcare cyber attacks, like the ones most notably against Anthem and UCLA Health System, are on the rise. The healthcare industry has become a target due to their lack of security. It also isn’t just medical records, attacks against the accounting databases, which store significant information, are also at risk. To date, over 90 million patients have been affected by data breaches from such attacks on healthcare industry cybersecurity.
The largest concern with these attacks is the resulting identity theft. Due to privacy laws such as HIPAA, it is extremely difficult to remove misinformation on medical records, including something as simple as a blood type, and this could result in the wrong blood transfusion in an emergency medical information.
The best solutions for healthcare cyber attack prevention include password protection strategies, encryption, firewalls, backup security, web filtering, and IT security action plans. These strategies for healthcare industry cybersecurity can all be created and implemented through IT Managed services and must comply with current HIPAA Security standards.
Your password must be complex, 7 or more characters with UPPER, lower, #’s and Symbols
More than 10 bad password attempts will lock your IP address for a time, so please be careful!
You (and your users) can change your own mail password via webmail at mail.estesgrp.com.
If you are the domain administrator, login to the Web Hosting Control Panel to manage your mail accounts.
Mail Protocols
You’ll probably use IMAP4 instead of POP3, as it keeps your mail on the server, ready to be consumed by more than one device. If you have only one computer that you are checking email with, then POP3 is OK, as long as you don’t mind all your email being on your one device and NOT on the server! If you remove mail from the server, then it’s your responsibility to back it up.
A colleague recently recounted a story to me from his own past. It had to do with a failing business. The company had numerous issues, in the areas of acquisition and execution, of revenue and of profit. The issues had gotten so out of hand that the company was on the verge of closing its operations entirely. In a last ditch effort to turn the company around, the company’s president initiated a series of process-improvement projects. The hope was that the results of these projects would provide the necessary impetus to pull the company out of its tailspin and provide a foundation for its revitalization. Moreover, the president had democratically distributed the projects across the organization–one for each department. As we all know, projects consume resources, and not all of the selected projects were of the same potential impact to the company. As such, lower-impact projects ended up pulling away resources from some of the mission-critical areas of the business, areas that had been suffering the most. Ironically, the attempted intervention had made things worse.
