Category: ERP

Digital transformation is a pivotal change reshaping how businesses operate, utilizing digital tools to revolutionize strategies, processes, and customer experiences. It goes beyond technology adoption, fundamentally altering traditional approaches to drive innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness.

Digital Transformation activity sometimes might feel exhausting because tt involves too many people, takes far too long and by the time the project is over, users are too exhausted to celebrate the benefits.

While all this is not untrue, seldom do organizations remember why they chose to undertake this massive activity in the first place. Digital Transformations are organization’s door to the future, and users get to decide on the architectural style of it.

We tell our clients that this activity requires a mindset shift and this is why we say so –

Sweeping Away the Cobwebs of Obsolete Systems: In the world of business, some processes feel as ancient as dial-up internet. Digital transformation is the ultimate broom, sweeping away those cobweb-covered relics and introducing a fresh, streamlined approach.

Letting Go of Technological Antiques: Remember the days of floppy disks and fax machines? It’s time for them to retire to the museum of nostalgia. Embracing digital transformation means bidding adieu to these relics and welcoming cutting-edge technologies.

Revamping Business Processes: The Marie Kondo Way: Just as Marie Kondo revolutionized decluttering, digital transformation revamps business processes. It’s about discarding what doesn’t spark joy in operations and embracing tools and systems that do.

Smooth Collaboration & Heightened Efficiency: Digital tools eliminate the chaos of sticky notes and endless email threads, fostering seamless teamwork. And, with automation taking the reins, tasks are completed faster than a birthday cake vanishes at an office party.

Thriving, Not Just Surviving: Digital transformation isn’t a mere upgrade; it’s a leap toward flourishing. It’s about seizing opportunities, innovating, and staying ahead in a landscape that changes as swiftly as fashion trends.

So, let’s toast to a tech savvy, personalized future. Here’s to shedding the old skin, refining the outdated, and diving headfirst into a world of possibilities. The digital transformation journey promises a buffet of opportunities as vast as an endless brunch menu. Cheers to a fresh start in the digital realm!

Orbrick wishes you a very happy new year!

As Gandhi Jayanti comes to a close, we reflect upon the teachings of the Mahatma.

Mahatma Gandhi has taught the world a lot. His Experiments with Truth resulted in many learnings which he shared with the world and led by example. His life and his legacy are a rich source of lessons. Gandhi asked us to be slow in forming our convictions, but once formed defend them against all odds. Here are 3 of his quotes that reinforce our convictions about doing better Digital Transformations.

“Be the change you are trying to create.”

Probably the most famous Gandhi quote. It’s been plastered on graffitied walls, countless internet articles and motivational posters – but repetition doesn’t make anything untrue.

Many projects start with the leadership wanting to change things in their organizations. They sponsor the projects, hire a vendor, select a product, get the teams together, and then somehow leave the implementation and operation of their new tool to the teams that are key users but may or may not share their overall vision. True transformation needs both – the view that keeps the North Star or the purpose of the project in sight, and the view that keeps practical realities and details in sight. A project without active sponsorship will not usually result in the kind of change that the project sponsors hope for unless that are hands-on and participate in steering committee meetings, decision making and keep a finger on the overall pulse of the project. They have to not only be involved during the development, but perhaps even more importantly during deployment and adoption. They have to “be” the change and be the first brand ambassadors of the new tool. They should be seen using it, and involved in the process of rolling it out. They should be talking about it to their people right from the get go. This causes a lot of people to see it as a more organic change and not something sudden and unwelcome.

“There is more to life than increasing its speed.”

Speed is typically one of the main things we want from any digital transformation, right besides cost savings. This, while understandable, sometimes becomes a hindrance to getting something better. We must decide on other, and better metrics besides just speed of execution. Afterall, we are what we measure.

If we take bad business processes and digitize them to make them a whole lot faster – we have created ways to be terrible, faster. We have to descend into the details of each project, understand how we can re-engineer our processes to make them better processes, and then make the execution of those processes faster!

“My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.”

He believed that truth is self-evident. He said truth emerges when we remove the cobwebs of Ignorance. His famous Satyagraha is simply the insistence of truth. His autobiography isn’t called “The Truth” or “My Truth”, but rather consistently with his overall believe – is called “My Experiments with Truth”.

All ERP/EPM implementations are done, at their very core, to collect data that can be reported on. The entire point of large, cross-functional systems like Oracle Fusion is that a single environment helps with cross-functional reporting. But all too often we using reporting as just that – a report to be read. What’s worse – sometimes we use it to feed our Confirmation bias. The aim of these transformations is often to support great reporting. But that reporting will only turn into value when we design for truth-prompted and data-guided actions. We at Orbrick build solutions that represent the truth of the organization we work with. Analysis, KPIs and KRAs that accurately show the reality of businesses and organizations, and not just an aggregation of data left to be interpret. We don’t lie with statistics. And we make our analytics actionable. We want our partners and customers to be able to spring into action when the truth changes from what it was a while ago.

We want to grow with them, from truth to truth!

India, and the world at large, held its breath as the Chandrayaan-3 touched the surface of the Moon. The South side of the Moon is in our reach for the first time since man saw the white orb in the sky some 300,000 years ago.

We thought of launching our updated website (sans propogation delay) to match the date of the Chandrayaan-3 landing because there is something quite universally optimistic about uncovering the unknown.

Humanity has a history of flourishing when someone has made us “look up”. The sky has been an infinite inspiration to insatiable curiosity that has pushed the entire expanse of humanity forward. There are literal songs about going to the Dark Side of the Moon. But on 23rd August 2023, people once again looked up in unison, and aspired to be more.

We feel it is symbolically in line with our vision to help consulting as an industry “look up”. That is our moonshot.

There’s a lot that the Moon landing can teach us. Here’s the top three lessons from the mission with a direct relationship to Consulting and ERP.

Think Big

In 1969, Kennedy succeeded in putting a man on the moon. He said “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 500 million people watched the Moon landing. 6 decades later we are only the fourth country to land on the Moon’s surface, and the first to land near the lunar south pole. This is a huge deal.

I had a professor who used to tell us, “you are only as big as the biggest problem you try to solve” or “you can only be as big as the cause you champion”. Too often we get bogged down into unnecessary operational details during either implementation or enhancement phases and miss the bigger picture. This leads to over-customization, needless delays, over-shot budgets, unmet requirements etc., missing the primary purpose of the transformation project. We end up focusing on the smaller, almost irrelevant aspects of the project and getting hung up on them.

As explained by Daniel Kanheman, humans have a subconscious bias towards substituting a hard question to a simpler one and then answering that. So “do I like her idea?” becomes “do I like her?”. And “improve customer happiness” becomes “get a high rating on customer index score”. When you over-optimize for the smaller vision, you get issues such as a car service brand I know (and won’t name) which calls customer informally asking for what their rating is (before the formal call where they log the rating). If the customer gives a low rating they ask if they’ll give a higher rating against a voucher. If the customer is still inclined to give a bad rating then that customer gets spuriously dropped from the “random sample” of customers being asked for reviews! This improves the CSAT score a lot without actually contributing at all to customer satisfaction. Such things also happen in ERP implementations where instead of making the system aligned to the transformation’s vision, it gets aligned to a particular page layout or a step in a process derailing the project.

This can be avoided by agreeing on the right metrics from the get go and reflecting regularly on whether the investment is giving the right results.

Failure is the road to success

“I never lose. I either win or I learn” – Nelson Mandela

Chandrayaan-2 was a partial failure. ISRO still went ahead with Chandrayaan-3 and used all the mistakes made during Chandrayaan-2 to come out successful.

A lot of ERP implementations fail. This breeds an understandable amount of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress) to customers who either don’t want to reinvest time with a new partner on another project, or start from a position of mistrust and pessimism. That’s not a good way to start a project. Each failure brings a valuable trove of learning which can be carried forward to all other projects. What’s important is to take failures in projects as lessons and path correct to realign to the bigger vision.

The aim has to be to not repeat mistakes. That’s why we have made significant investments in ensuring we capture and distill the learnings from our team’s previous experience from hundreds of both successful and failed implementations to put them into actionable insights.

The Part is the Whole

Each part is a partner in making the ‘whole’ function well. You can’t have a functional whole if a part malfunctions. Chandrayaan-2 didn’t fully succeed because of a failed valve and a software glitch. Chandrayaan-3 solved for those issues.

The infamous King’s Cross Fire in London is also a case study in why oversegmentation of responsibilities with no regard to how the whole is impacted may be a bad thing. The initial fire went unattended because of many organization culture abd structure issues as well.

Some of them were:

1. There was no single person responsible for safety. It suffered from diffusion of responsibility.
2. The organization structure was isolated, and internal communication was very strained. They didn’t even have an organization chart.
3. Every department did their own function without much heed to how the whole thing had to function.

In the context of ERP systems, too often we see key stakeholders being left out of conversations, very little attention being paid to the net positives and how organization wide impacts are created in such transformations, compartmentalization (and therefore a lack of a big picture view) of responsibilities, and not enough work done to adopt the change. Every department and consulting team becomes bogged down in screens visible to them and don’t pay enough attention to how things impact the whole.

These issues can be addressed by keeping the purpose of the implementation front and center, looking at net positives, and having a mixed team structure that brings in all the right stakeholders. It is also important to have regular training sessions during and after implementations, and transparency in progress, outcomes and challenges to all parties.

As you take your next moonshot with Digital Tranformations, keep these 3 lessons from Chandrayaan-3 in mind and we’re sure you will land safely! And of course, if you want a trustworthy partner in your journey – please don’t hesitate to get in touch.