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Vol 30 - No 08 - December 2004/January 2005 Branch news: London & Southern The Don Ralston Lecture on IT in Operations Management On the 30th September IOM Members of London and Southern Branch were in for a real treat. Julia Keep and Stuart Pickersgill of My'rabilis Limited joined us at EEF offices in Hook to talk to us on the subject of ‘Beyond ERP - From Data To Knowledge’. The occasion was this year’s Don Ralston lecture, held annually by the Branch in recognition of ex-IBM manufacturing systems guru Don Ralston’s huge achievements in the area of IT in Manufacturing and Operations Management. Julia is the Operations Director of My’rabilis, a change management consultancy, and has a highly successful track record in the profitable management and implementation of business solutions across a wide range of applications and market sectors, including programme management of complex manufacturing, distribution and finance projects for multi-national companies worldwide. The evening took the form of a short seminar designed to provoke thoughts and discussion on how the return on investment in ERP systems can be improved within existing business processes. And thoughts and discussions were exactly what it did provoke! Julia, who is clearly an excellent change agent and discussion facilitator, offered a number of thoughts on the reasons for success and failure of ERP. Members of the audience were soon involved in an animated debate on the subject matter on which most had strong views and a few bruises to show from their own ERP implementation running experiences. In particular the discussion of why ERP implementations are so troublesome raised a number of good points, some of which I had not consciously thought about before. For example, MRPII used to be owned and implemented by operations people. The focus was very much on resource planning in the operations area. ERP, however, has many stakeholders and implementations are more generally finance driven with Finance and HR often as the key decision makers on software selection and implementation priorities. The broad stakeholder franchise and lack of single implementation success accountability typically leads to confused, protracted ERP implementations with poor support for the wealth generating activities in manufacturing and operations management. The discussion looked at the hypothesis that a number of process-based best-of-breed systems might well be a better solution for many companies, especially these days where the technical integration of stand-alone systems is so much easier. Whilst not everyone will agree that discussion, members of the audience did realise that there are a number of issues and solutions for the implementation of IT support for enterprise resource planning solutions which are often not fully thought out by companies. Julia structured the discussion with a number of slides, supporting her own extensive experience in ERP implementations and touched on the area of: Julia was ably supported by Stuart Pickersgill, the Sales and Marketing Manager of My’rabilis who himself has a very significant technical and commercial track record in control, monitoring and information systems, across a wide range of market sectors. He introduced Julia to the audience and used his considerable experience to add to the lively discussion. The evening ended with an excellent supper buffet kindly provided by EEF, which gave members the opportunity for further discussion and one-to-one questioning of the speakers. G Kruse, FIOM Supply Chain Analytics Limited Related Topics:
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