Why Businesses Struggle with Real-Time Operations (and What to Do About It)
Embracing real-time operations is a major benefit for companies of all sizes. It brings better business agility, responsiveness and greater overall efficiency.
Achieving real-time operations is sometimes harder than it looks, however.
With that in mind, here are five areas where businesses struggle with real-time operations, and what to do about it.
(Spoiler alert: most ultimately involve getting better business systems in one manner or another).
Challenge #1: Using Systems That Don’t Process in Real Time
Not all supposedly real-time systems are actually fully real time. A challenge that many businesses face with real-time operations is systems that have some measure of real-time processing, but also manual or batch processes.
“For real-time to be of value, the ERP solution implemented must be designed to accept and execute transactions in real time,” says Jim Errington, executive vice president of sales and service at ERP maker Fujitsu Glovia.
This means that at the time of material receipt, for example, all validation aspects must be performed in real time. This includes checking date and quantity, as well as issuing to manufacturing if something is on back order.
“If an ERP system has to do all this work as a batch process, it will always struggle in displaying the current situation to management and system users,” he notes.
Overcoming this challenge comes from making sure that your ERP solution processes data in real time, not relying on batch processes or manual intervention.
Challenge #2: Lack of Supplier and Partner Visibility
Companies may have visibility into their inventory and optimal stock levels, but they sometimes lack visibility into their entire network of suppliers, vendors, vessels and fleets.
“An extended network view or control tower helps manufacturers apply real-time data and determine when shipments will arrive and delays may occur,” notes Rod Johnson, general manager and head of the Americas for ERP maker Infor.
When businesses lack systems that connect with supplier and partner systems in real time, the chain of real-time visibility is broken.
Businesses can remove this obstacle by either connecting their ERP system to middleware that connects with supplier and partner systems, or ideally upgrading to a solution that does support this level of real-time connectivity.
Challenge #3: Not Analyzing Real-Time Date
Real-time data is meaningless if it is not used. The problem is that often businesses have access to the date but let much of it go to waste.
“There is an ever-growing amount of information being collected from the shop floor, and organizations are struggling with analyzing it,” notes Terri Hiskey, vice president or global product marketing for ERP maker Epicor. “We are starting to see new positions pop up in the manufacturing world, like data scientist, to help companies analyze what they are seeing.”
Aside from hiring data nerds, businesses also can invest in cloud services or analytics engines that automatically process data and deliver meaningful insights from it. Many modern ERP solutions also have this functionality built in, and it just takes configuration to set it up properly.
Challenge #4: Aging Systems That Don’t Talk to Each Other
A fourth stumbling block for real-time operations is older IT systems that don’t effectively talk with each other.
“Many companies are still using loosely coupled solutions which often take overnight to sync or share the minimum amount of information,” says Paul Farrell, vice president of product management at business systems juggernaut Oracle NetSuite. “While that may not seem like a significant amount of time in today’s global business environment, this is not the ideal data model.”
There’s only really one solution for this problem, but it is a simple one: invest in a cloud-based ERP solution that is built for connectivity with other systems—and start phasing out the older systems that are not serving your business.
Challenge #5: Manual Data Entry
Any manual process that involves real-time data entry is a process that hinders real-time operations. And with the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, there no longer is much reason for manual data entry.
Still, many business processes do rely on manual data entry which inevitably hurts real-time performance.
“Even for companies who have their solutions perfectly synced, too many continue to rely on manual data entry or intervention,” notes Farrell. “This prevents real-time automation with embedded workflow engines.”
Overcoming this challenge involves a process review and taking advantage of the automation functionality built into your ERP system. This is not a quick fix, but ultimately it enables much of the advantage from real-time operations.
It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard
Each of these issues can be resolved in isolation, but the real key for overcoming the most common struggles with real-time operations is having the right tools in place. That means a modern ERP system.
Thankfully, this is not as expensive and time-consuming as it was in the past. Most of the ERP industry has moved to a cloud model, even if they still also offer on-premise solutions. These cloud solutions are less expensive, and easier to migrate to and maintain.
Really there’s not a lot of excuse for struggling with real-time operations today. But there sure are a lot of businesses that struggle with them anyway.
