“When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table” – T.S. Eliot
When I first began dabbling in the field of Business Process Management, the terminology of this new and strange body of knowledge perplexed me greatly. The concept of elevation, for one thing, was utter babble to me. Or Babel, perhaps. My notion of “high level” carried with it certain ancient connotations—height was a luxury in the ancient world, and only the most powerful civilizations were able to get a view from above the tree tops: from a Babylonian ziggurat or an Egyptian pyramid, for instance. Height, therefore, implied greatness, or to use one of Aristotle’s favorite terms Eudaimonia, sometimes translated as “flourishing.” At the highest Olympian point, one breathes the rarest of airs, or so I thought. But I was breathing the ether of an entirely different allegory. Height, in this new world, dealt not with levels of greatness, but rather with levels of precision and abstraction. In the business world, for something to be “high level” inferred that it was at some level of aggregation and abstraction as to be disconnected from the tactical nuances of day-to-day operations. News to me.
Back in the day, it was common war room parlance to utter something to the degree of “we’re looking at this from thirty-thousand feet” at least once a day. It was not until my first airplane flight that I truly understood what it meant, to look at something from that kind of distance—beautiful, and a little terrifying. I’m more of a pavement-and-pothole kind of guy. The other day, I was skidding down the highway in another rental, that was fortunate enough to still have a CD player hidden amongst its many modern accoutrements. I had borrowed Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” in CD form the local lending library and spent the better part of my ride listening once again to his seminal work. It was a fun listen: Collins began by underscoring some of the key principles of successful companies, and then went on to expound on some examples of excellence, such as…Wells Fargo, and um, Circuit City, and well…Fannie Mae? My ride, all at once, seemed a little…dated. I thought to myself that Collins would do well to write a follow-up to his earlier work and title it “From Good to Great to God Awful.” Now that would keep me engaged while ripping down the interstate! So, maybe Lord Jim’s examples have not stood the test of time. But I believe that the good leadership qualities that underscore successful organizations have outlived their exemplars.
To that point, whenever I think of flashy and charismatic leaders in business process management, I smell pizza. Not because of any neurological condition that would make me a risk on the open road, but due, rather, to a story a man recounted on a flight from Minneapolis to Memphis, regarding the former executive of a large manufacturing company.
Let’s call this former executive “Pep.” Now Pep came to his role of eminence in this company not as an internal promotion, but as an outside hire, touting a flashy resume from one of America’s well-known pizza chains. And his demeanor was more flashy than his letterhead, and greasier than the pizza he peddled. He’d bound down the hallway in a shiny suit, talking like a sailor and firing off one-liners, like the proverbial mouthy guy at the end of the local bar. One of his favorite lines was “yesterday’s news wraps today’s meat.” It was a line, with his delivery, that could drive a man to veganism. Another time, his personal assistant heard him cussing out his computer and rushed to his aide, not to discover that the company’s earnings report was unfavorable, but that he had just lost another game of solitaire. All of this from a guy with a Fortune-500 pedigree. It was his story, among others, that led me finally to realize that CVs are like statistics—they can be twisted to tell you whatever story you want to hear.
Of his many witticisms, one line stood out to me from the others. When commenting on the company’s long-standing issues with the accuracy of its outside sales staff, he exclaimed. “If they wanted you to be exact, they wouldn’t have called it estimating, they would have called itexactamating!”
Exactamating. As you might have guessed, Pep was a rather high-level guy. He sounded like such a high-level, that I imagined him bantering aboutexactamatingin the first-class section of a transatlantic flight, sucking down a gin & tonic, while eating a big greasy slice of pizza, all at thirty-thousand feet.
As you might imagine, he was also afflicted with many of the ailments that bother high-level fellows of his ilk. For one, he didn’t sweat the details—he liked to make big decisions, make them fast, and then walk out of the room and have someone else fill in the finer points. If you locked him in a board room with the VP of engineering, he’d find a way to slip out the ventilation shaft for a smoke before the hour was quartered. To the folks in the trenches, it seemed like simple impatience—he seemed too impatient to be bothered with the details, and similarly too impatient or just incapable of holding any of his people accountable at any kind of detailed manner. But at any level, the company’s failing business results empowered the CEO to request that this high-flyer to take the next flight out of town.
Back to Good-to-Great, one of Collins’ key observations from the book has to do with the demeanor of those with good leadership qualities. Good leadership qualities for business process management, according to Collins, tend not to be of the flashy variety, full of id and ego. Rather, they tend to be soft spoken, less interested in their own presentation than in the success of their company. Interestingly enough, this same company, who sent Pep the Pizza Man packing opted to replace him with a leader who fit Collins’ model. For one, the new executive was a hire from within the company, and not a fly-in, as had been his predecessor. Moreover, the new leader was much less of a showman. Most importantly, the new leader’s obsession with the company’s success drove him to understand the company’s inner-workings at all levels. Don’t get me wrong—he was never going to replace any of the data entry clerks, but his willingness to engage the organization, and its members at all levels was one important part of the success that the company went on to have under his leadership.
I’ll admit it: one of my guilty pleasures is the legalized blood-sport commonly referred to as mixed martial arts, or MMA. As you may be aware, MMA involves the combination of multiple fighting arts, and they best fighters are often the ones who excel in combining these disparate arts into one integrate skillset. One related skill in this field is the ability to “change levels”—to convince your combatant that you are going to attempt a strike, and then drop down for a wrestling takedown and quickly haul your opponent to the mat. In my work as a consultant, I have had the good fortune to meet and work with many different managers and leaders, each with differing motives, differing personalities and differing intensities. I find that the most successful leaders are those who similarly have the ability tochange levelsas needed—to move from high-level strategic thinking, down to tactical or operational problems, and then back up again. The high-level folks often struggle with this: they are the proverbial kick boxer in a wrestling match—great when they’re on their feed, but hopeless at the ground-level. All that being said, the next time that I have to take a flight, I think I might sneak a New York slice in with me, before I leave the ground.
Ask us any question you many have about good leadership qualities for business process management and ERP Software Implementations, we would love to chat.
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.
The HR System Success Story: Missing the Forest for the Seas
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.
Common Mistakes of Failing Businesses
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 breach 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.
The Leadership Factor
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.
What Separates Successful Leaders from Failed Ones
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 on a vast and well-integrated understanding of the dynamics of the environment in which their company competes.
The Importance of Domain Knowledge in Leadership
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 allocated, 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 their craft.
The Contrast Between Effective and Ineffective Leadership
To return to the title of this post–if the captain of the ship is wasting their 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.
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“So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary.” – Herman Melville
ERP Vision vs. Reality: Seeing Beyond Legacy Business Lenses
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 speaks to foresight—a glimpse into a future state, a destination one hopes to reach.
This dual sense of vision—perception and projection—permeates the language of business. When customers come to us, they’re not just looking for domain knowledge around a given enterprise system. They come to understand how best to integrate ERP into their specific business climate so they can achieve their strategic goals—their vision.
Vision, Lenses & ERP Strategy
Customers often have clarity around the future they want to create. What they tend to struggle with is the bridge between vision and realization—the processes, practices, and procedures required to bring that vision to lif
After a losing year, the CEO of a company I once worked for remarked, only half-sarcastically, that we were “perfectly structured to achieve the results we’ve achieved.” We had a vision—but our actions delivered something else. The failure wasn’t due to a lack of strategic thinking. It was because we failed to challenge the paradigmatic lenses that shaped our perceptions, our decisions, and ultimately our outcomes.
Einstein famously described insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” In that light, I’ve worked for—and with—several companies that seemed to lose their grip on sanity, trying to reach new goals with outdated methods. The logic behind it makes sense—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? That works until a losing year ends with the CEO glowering down over his horn-rimmed spectacles.
The real issue here isn’t vision. It’s lenses.
A company’s lenses are the paradigms that shape habits, culture, and problem-solving methods. But over time, and as conditions change, those lenses can distort reality. In the most dysfunctional cases, they can even warp perception enough to encourage the very behaviors that prevent progress.
As ERP implementation consultants, we have the advantage of coming into a business from the outside—unfamiliar with the cultural worldview and, therefore, unbound by it. We also bring with us the experience of working across industries, product types, and markets. This gives us a rare opportunity: the ability to offer new perspectives to clients whose internal lenses may be limiting their view of what’s possible.
In these cases, ERP implementation becomes more than a technical initiative. It becomes a catalyst for transformation. It surfaces existing lenses, challenges legacy assumptions, and allows space to try on new ways of seeing and doing—new paradigms that align with evolving market realities and strategic objectives.
So, What’s Your Vision? Let’s Talk ERP Strategy.
If you’re ready to move from legacy perception to modern execution, we’d love to talk. Let’s explore your vision and see how a fresh set of lenses—and the right ERP strategy—can help bring it into focus.
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From Beetles to Butterflies: Why ERP Digital Transformation Matters More Than Ever
“Digital transformation” is a phrase that’s gotten a lot of air time lately—and not without a fair share of suspicion. That’s no surprise. From the moment humans began putting thoughts to paper (or clay or stone), we’ve been wary of change.
Consider the Roman poet Ovid. In Metamorphoses, he catalogs the tragic transformations of mythic figures—humans turned into animals, trees, constellations. These changes weren’t celebrated; they were punishments, warnings, laments. Transformation, in Ovid’s view, was often a fall from grace. I personally wouldn’t mind being a tree, at least until a Roman arborist came lumbering by with an axe and a sense of purpose.
Fast forward to the 20th century and Kafka’s Metamorphosis. One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find he’s no longer a man but a giant, grotesque insect. Yesterday you’re stepping on bugs, and today—you are the bug. Small wonder Kafka didn’t get a lot of Saturday night invitations.
The point is: writers and thinkers have long been skeptical of change. They’ve searched for the timeless, the eternal, the unmoving. ERP digital transformation is the antithesis of that quest. (And for the record, Socrates wasn’t much of a businessman. Just ask Asclepius about the rooster he was owed.)
But business? Business has no such luxury. Businesses can’t afford to romanticize stasis—because stasis doesn’t keep the lights on. In fact, it’s usually what shuts them off.
I once met with a company in the middle of scaling up. “We’re trying to go from being a big little company to a little big company,” one of the leaders told me. That meant changing the way they operated. It meant redesigning business processes. It meant reconfiguring their ERP system to support growth.
Another company I met was struggling through the early phases of an ERP implementation. For decades, they’d relied on paper-based processes—familiar, yes, but unfit for a modern, digital marketplace. Their world had changed: their customers had changed, their suppliers had changed, and they realized they couldn’t keep up without changing too.
For companies like these, digital transformation isn’t an abstract concept. It’s not literary. It’s not philosophical. It’s survival. It’s the practical reality of building the systems today that will support the business tomorrow.
At EstesGroup, we see ERP digital transformation as more than a software install. It’s a reinvention. It’s the restructuring of business processes, data flows, and organizational roles. It’s change that is both technical and cultural.
And yes, it can be painful. Change often is. But we’re here to help guide it.
Sometimes, implementing a new ERP system or redesigning your application architecture feels like being a caterpillar sewing itself into a cocoon. There’s a period of quiet, intense work—then, if all goes well, a butterfly emerges.
Of course, it doesn’t always go well. The risk is that you emerge as something else entirely. Another beetle, perhaps.
But with the right partners, and the right plan, digital transformation can be a true metamorphosis—for the better.
ERP Digital Transformation: From Consultation to Change
If your systems are holding you back, let’s talk. Schedule a free ERP consultation and take the first step toward a better future.
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Epicor’s Product Configurator is among its most enigmatic and elusive modules. Configurator has been diversely characterized and mischaracterized, as everything from the cure to all that ails you to the straw that broke the company’s back. This presents a daunting task for Epicor customers operating in engineer-to-order and configure-to-order environments, for there are a lot of answers and partial-answers out there, and getting to an answer specific to a given business is more easily said than done. Different companies, in different markets, have specific questions, and Epicor’s introductory materials tend to serve a general audience. Moreover, the experiences of customers from different industries and earlier versions of configurator may or may not apply to a company looking to implement or upgrade to the current Epicor release. The place of the customer within the Epicor implementation lifecycle also greatly affects their needs. For companies implementing Epicor for the first time in version 10.1, the questions may relate to the applicability of Epicor’s Product Configurator module to the company’s product offerings, or to the ease with which Product Configurator instances can be constructed and maintained. For companies moving from Vantage 8.03 or Epicor 9.05 versions, the questions may relate to the ease with which they can convert their configurators from Epicor’s older architecture to its new platform, and how to get their staff ready to maintain them, moving forward. Customers already in the heart of an implementation effort may just need someone to look over their shoulder and ensure that best practices are being followed, or even help expedite the configurator design and development.
For these reasons, The Estes Group tailors its Epicor ERP implementation services to meet the specific needs and circumstances of the client in question:
Configurator Upgrade Assessment: For existing Epicor customers considering the move from Vantage 803 or Epicor 905, but are concerned about the ramifications to their existing configurators, an assessment of their current use of Epicor’s Product Configurator module is often of great value. Estes’s consultants have configurator experience going back to Vantage 803 and moving forward into its current 10.1.600 release. Moreover, Estes’ consultants have experience uplifting and rebuilding configurators from earlier versions to Epicor’s current architecture, capturing the business requirements from the original versions, while leveraging Epicor’s new features, such as the expanded user interface, the elaborated method rule architecture its user-defined method capabilities and its highly-flexible configurator lookup table competencies. Such an assessment is most often a combination of remote and onsite effort, analyzing the existing solution and mapping its requirements to the Epicor 10 configurator.
Epicor ERP Configurator Business Process Review:
New or existing customers often benefit from the traditional business process review (BPR) format, tailored to the areas affecting or affected by Epicor’s Configurator (quoting, order entry, planning, manufacturing). The goal of a Configurator BPR is to help the client understand whether Epicor’s Product Configurator module will address their business needs. It is common to incorporate a Business Process Review at the onset of an upgrade assessment when working with existing Epicor customers. These events normally extend from a few days to a week in duration, depending primarily on the size and complexity of the business and follow a detailed agenda, designed to explore the customer’s products and processes from multiple angles.
Epicor ERP Configurator Proof-Of-Concept:
For new customers in greater need of verification, or for customers looking to get a jump-start to their implementation, a Proof-Of-Concept activity (POC) is often the appropriate direction. Normally performed on the heels of a BPR, POC events involve a configurator and a production consultant working with the client team to develop a working prototype that can be processed through the quote-to-ship cycle, for purposes of business process prototyping and configurator verification. For companies in need of a definitive answer to specific questions, a Proof-Of-Concept activity is the most concrete way in which to provide them. And for companies struggling to gain project momentum, these events can be highly beneficial in gaining much-needed project traction.
Configurator Development Support: For customers in the midst of an Epicor implementation, but in need of some “extra muscle” in the area of Product Configurator, Estes offers trained consultants who can step in, roll up their sleeves, and immediately assist with design review, configurator development, and related system consulting. These activities can be performed remotely or onsite, based on customer need, and can vary in scope from a few remote hours a week, to an onsite intensive session, to ongoing engagement.
Ask us any question you have about Epicor ERP Configurator. We have answers.
Are your teams constantly behind? Working 12-hour days and weekends just to keep up with orders, fix quality issues, or manage late shipments?
That’s where a Business Process Review (BPR) can help. At EstesGroup, we work side-by-side with manufacturers and distributors to uncover inefficiencies, modernize operations, and build a roadmap for continuous improvement—across people, process, and technology.
Our BPRs aren’t just about ERP systems. They’re about helping your business run better.
What is a Business Process Review?
A BPR is a 2- to 3-day on-site or virtual engagement where our experts dive deep into your operations—from production and procurement to quote-to-cash. We talk with the people doing the work. We examine how information flows (or gets stuck). And we help identify problems:
Inefficient, redundant, or broken processes
Communication gaps between departments
Opportunities to streamline with automation and best practices
Underutilized ERP functionality or misaligned configurations
The goal? To help you work smarter, reduce stress, and get your technology and team working in sync.
Why EstesGroup?
Our consultants bring decades of real-world industry experience—inside ERP, outside ERP, and across every functional area of your business. Whether you’re preparing for digital transformation or just trying to improve operations, we meet you where you are and help you get where you want to go.
We’re not here to sell you software. We’re here to help you fix what’s broken and build what works.
Ready to Take Back Control?
Let’s start a conversation. Schedule your free consultation, or explore our proven Business Process Review methodology. Stop letting your business run you. Let’s build a better path forward—together.
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No spam. No pressure. Just strategic insights and clear solutions.
