We are living in a time of huge technological change with increasingly uncertain, unpredictable and challenging market conditions. The supply chain has seen major disruptions, the labour market is incredibly demanding and the number of regulations and tariffs continues to grow. At the same time, companies are expected to drive down costs, pursue efficiencies and do more with less. In short, companies need to be running at peak efficiency, they must be flexible and agile so that they can adapt to market changes quickly.
How Can Companies Best Address the Challenges Associated with Disruption?
The secret to success can be summed up in three key areas:
- Business Alignment
- Strong Governance
- Right Resources
To achieve business alignment, we provide a clear vision of what ‘great’ looks like; focus on best in class for your industry; ensure involvement of executives and business stakeholders throughout the process and align expectations across the board.
Governance is always discussed but rarely applied effectively. The key to successful governance is change control, sticking to the plan and saying NO to scope change. This can be time consuming and difficult but being consistent and adhering to agreed processes will save time, ensure quality and deliver required results.
Key resources are always busy so you must protect the time they spend on a project to ensure that they are available where and when needed. Ownership and self-sufficiency are critical for the success of a project, post go live, as this ensures adoption and flexibility as your market and business changes. To achieve this, we must work together to transfer knowledge and deliver the business outcomes required.
How Can QAD Help?
At the heart of a QAD project are the Effective On Boarding (EOB) best practice processes, which have been pre-defined and meet industry compliance requirements. We support MMOG/LE V6, IATF 16949 for Automotive; ISO 13485 and FDA 21 CFR 820 for Life Sciences Medical Devices, Eudralex Volume 4 and FDA part 211 for Life Sciences Pharmaceuticals, HACCP and ISO 22000 for Food & Beverage, and APICS for Industrial, High Tech and Consumer Products.
Our project approach is to drive business alignment by focusing on results. Clear communication of goals and business problems is essential to ensure that project requirements and processes target the goals and business problems and achieve the desired outcomes. Delivering benefits is at the core of our methodology as we work together to maximise the value of your investment and provide a solid foundation for future growth with an emphasis on a standard solution. This approach will provide greater flexibility due to a reduction in/elimination of customisations; it will lead to reduced dependency on specialist resources; reduce risk and enable ease of future upgrades.
The key to good governance at all times is structure, structure, structure. An essential part of our EOB methodology is the planning and control phase, which creates the groundwork for the project and is run by our Program and Project Managers. Here we finalise the project management strategy, define the project organisation, detail project governance and management procedures and document everything in the Project Management Plan. Important controls built into our methodology include:
- A communication management framework with details of project status reporting requirements;
- A structured gap management and approval process;
- Managing and controlling changes using an agreed change control process;
- Managing, analysing and mitigating project risks
The most valuable asset you have is your team and their time. We aim to give you everything you need to protect and maximise this time. Our projects include all the tools, templates, work instructions and metrics you need, all of which are aligned and compliant with your industry requirements. This means that your project team members are not wasting their time during the project. You have a starting point which is aligned to best practice that supports the business processes. Your team’s focus is therefore on finessing as opposed to creating. Built into our software are over 2,200 work instructions, 400 training materials, 1700 test scripts and 116 action centre metrics. We have made this investment to save your project team time and to provide solid materials for future, as well as current employees.
Discover QAD Advisory Services
QAD’s latest offering that brings these three key areas together is Advisory Services. Advisory Services, a core feature of the QAD ELEVATE Program, is an executive level engagement requiring business involvement and customer commitment. Our aim is to assess where you are today, understand your business problems, recommend changes and propose outcomes that will enable you to meet your goals using industry best practices at all times. Our experts will work with you to prepare your organisation for the project ahead and provide monitoring, measurement and consistency throughout the project. The benefits of using Advisory Services is to build the agility and flexibility of the organisation whilst reducing risk. Adhering to industry best practice, eliminating customisations and driving standardisation throughout the business ensures customers are always able to use the latest version of the software. By doing this we meet challenges head on and enable customer success.
