Company Annoucement - It’s a long time since Charles Darwin wrote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” Since then the quote ‘adapt or die’ has become ubiquitous with businesses needing to move with the times if they wish to thrive. However, is adaptability still enough? As we all live and work in a world of ever decreasing timescales for everything we do, success and survival is as much about our ability to respond, as it is to simply adapt.

The difference between responsiveness and adaptability is subtle but critical. Adaptability means change but it doesn’t specify the pace or agility at which it must take place. But being responsive is about being fit and fast – able to adapt more quickly and flexibly. That could be to outrun the competition, react to changing internal and external market conditions, deliver higher levels of service or innovating more. In truth, the best businesses and manufacturers will, in the future, need to be both responsive and adaptive. Responsiveness is a corporate state of mind and day to day action in equal measure and must be delivered from the boardroom to the shop floor.

The need to be responsive has changed the goalposts drastically in enterprise resource planning software. Fifteen years ago ERP was purely a back office system, and its primary function was to provide robust transactional support. Now ERP is an all-embracing tool for businesses, touching employees, customers, partners and suppliers alike. Customers demand ‘single instance’ ERP platforms that not only manage all core processes in synchronicity, but also deliver real-time insight to the business about what is happening and what action needs to be taken. Good ERP has answered the call for increased responsiveness, becoming much more focused on supporting critical relationships, decisions, change and innovation, rather than just efficiently managing the status quo.

Increasing responsiveness can help a business improve operational performance and accelerate its productivity, through information being available at people’s fingertips and allowing more informed and rapid decision making. Historically information in businesses was limited in volume and ‘passive’; i.e. there when (you knew) you needed it, if you were lucky! This stifled responsiveness because you usually had to put time and effort into getting the right information. As businesses increased their use of systems, information became more prolific and ‘active’ – structured data analysed to drive answers to key questions. This helped organisations to know what they needed to do, but problems of data overload often limited the organisation’s ability to act. It was difficult to see the wood from the trees in the time available. Now, information is becoming intuitive – it’s hidden from us in plain sight and doesn’t weigh us down, but is increasingly fed to us in the right format and context at the time we need it, in the form of succinct answers to questions. This evolution of data in organisations is one of the key reasons we’re able to become more responsive, but it also is the reason we continue to demand more responsiveness at the same time.

In many sectors the need to be extra responsive is being driven by an increased focus on selling and delivering services rather than capital projects and equipment. Take, for example, the number of areas where products are leased and supported by value-added services, rather than simply manufactured and sold. This service orientation means greater and continual touch points with the customer. It also means organisations need to be more innovative as they change their business models, and may mean working in continually disruptive markets where change never really stops.

Other specific manufacturing trends demanding responsiveness include the pressure to differentiate in highly competitive globalised markets, tightly manage costs through inventory control and manufacturing to order, the ability to deliver bespoke and high value manufacturing, such as unique products, and working within multi-tier supply chains where complexity can easily put the brakes on your processes.

At Epicor we find that responsiveness is one of the key reasons our customers are looking to improve their ERP software performance. We see four main areas where businesses are trying to be more responsive and these are operationally, strategically, externally (with customers) and personally (with employees).

Operationally responsive

Being responsive operationally means being able to react to day to day requirements and changes to the benefit of the business. Optimising inventory is one example in manufacturing. Being able to respond to constantly changing customer and product requirements means that you can dynamically manage stock requirements and reduce both waste and cost. Operational responsiveness is also about driving subtle changes that lead to big benefits. One example of this is looking for new market opportunities from your existing business. We recently experienced this with a timber company, which used to throw away its timber offcuts but was able to spot and leverage an opportunity to turn its waste into a sales opportunity – producing sawdust for pet supplies.

Strategically responsive

Business strategy is in many ways the key area where responsiveness can make a real difference. The management team’s ability to access information and respond to changes in the business and market allows them to be in greater control. Doing so requires getting the right information out of your systems, not only in formal reports but intuitively, in the context of the decisions that need to be made. Within our manufacturing customer base we’ve seen many organisations becoming more responsive strategically. This includes finding ways to knock down barriers to export, building new supply chain models and driving innovation within highly competitive timescales.

Externally responsive

When we think about responsiveness in our own lives we may easily relate it to our expectations of customer service. This applies to business too – they are constantly working harder to differentiate on service, around speed, accuracy and quality, but also predicting the customer’s next move so that they can be ready to act. In a business sense, customer responsiveness is about having information to stay one step ahead. This can mean knowing what the customer will want to buy, or being able to nip potential problems in the bud before they even happen. If we can be more responsive to customer needs, we minimise the chances of them looking elsewhere and can enjoy longevity of relationships and all of the associated benefits.

Personally responsive

Of course, underpinning all three of these areas is the ability for an organisation’s employees to be responsive personally – with each other inside the business, as well as with customers and suppliers. Personal responsiveness is about giving people the means and information to take action quickly, decisively and accurately. Again, considering technology and information, embracing enterprise apps, mobile information, intuitive workflows and context-based information allows people to not only work wherever, but respond far more successfully to whatever is thrown at them. People don’t want to have to dip in and out of separate systems to find information; that creates the likelihood that they’ll bypass correct procedures, and there is a higher risk of errors. Systems need to be integrated, for example linking ERP into core tools such as Outlook to manage tasks. Key applications also need to be accessible on a wide range of devices, including those specified and owned by the people themselves.

The Darwinian theory of adapt or die has long become a commodity quality in businesses; responsiveness is truly the new era of business evolution.

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