Fixing visibility gaps

It’s a problem every organization will face - no matter how much money they have invested in costly powerful IT systems, a problem will come up that needs data to solve it but the IT systems that are present don’t have an easy way to give the data in a manner that can be used to solve the problem.

It’s often a huge deal to upgrade or change big IT systems - especially ERP systems like SAP or Netsuite.

It’s easier to envision this with a specific example. During Covid our governments in their collective wisdom pumped up our money supply such that we now have major inflationary problems. Most manufacturers are facing this problem:

• The inputs they require to manufacture their product are fluctuating a lot and rising in price.

• It’s now become a major problem to work out how they should price their products because their existing IT systems don’t give an easy way to answer the question of how should they price their own product?

  • If they price too low they could end up losing a lot of money

  • If they price too high they could end up losing market share and brand loyalty.

This is pretty significant issue!

Tyson a multi-billion dollar food manufacturer with exactly this problem.

So these are the questions a top notch integration engineer should ask:

• What problem are we solving?

• Why can’t we solve it using our existing system or by upgrading or changing our system?

• What’s the minimum set of data we need to solve this problem?

• Are we collecting this data? Yes/No?

  • If no, then how could we collect it?

  • If yes then what systems have this data and how can we get it?

• How can we use the data to solve the problem?

Let’s apply these questions to looking at what a company like Tyson could do.