Navigating Business with the Wisdom of Flocks

6 min read

birds with umbrella created with Leonardo.ai

Unlock business prosperity with a Technical Operating Model! Navigate market shifts using avian-inspired strategies: Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity

Blue sky, birds move. Wings beat, and they embark on a sharp journey. Each bird, a small part of a grand voyage, sails unseen air paths, their route silently drawn across skies. Their travel, while direct, weaves a mix of wisdom, plans, and silent unity.

In flight, they display a harmony that hides looming trials. Each flap propels them through unknown skies and shifting weather. Their route, set by ancestors, keeps adjusting, a lively dance ensuring survival through aerial challenges. This avian marvel, a blend of consistency, calibration, and capacity, becomes a mirror reflecting the path businesses carve in the ever-changing global market.

In the business skies, firms navigate through clouds of change, shaped and reshaped by tech shifts and global storms. Invisible threads of strategy and tech agility guide them, ensuring thriving amidst the unknown, not just survival.

Much like the birds, businesses sail through the market skies. The wind of change constantly shifts, demanding a sense of direction. A robust yet flexible plan is crucial. Unity propels collective movement towards set horizons. Here, the Technical Operating Model becomes the flock’s wisdom. It’s knowledge gleaned from the past, guiding the present journey. It adapts strategies for future paths, ensuring navigation through and creating new, rich routes amidst the shifting clouds of the global business landscape.

The Issue: Navigating Through the Seasons of Change

In the business sky, firms, akin to flocks, traverse ever-changing landscapes. Moving from systems like SAP APO to robust platforms like S/4HANA marks a pivotal migration. Each step, like the bird rest stops, presents challenges and opportunities.

Imagine a flock navigating through a sky that shifts without warning. A serene breeze suddenly becomes a turbulent storm. It mirrors the unexpected onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Birds must quickly adapt, finding new paths in the chaos. Similarly, businesses found new ways to operate and deliver amidst lockdowns and supply chain disruptions.

Geopolitical shifts, like sudden gusts of wind, can redirect the flock. They force a recalibration of their path. Similarly, businesses recalibrate when faced with geopolitical instabilities like trade wars or conflicts. They adjust their strategies, sourcing, and operations to navigate the altered landscapes.

The journey of a flock is not just about reacting but also about anticipating. Birds alter their path to avoid upcoming storms or to ride favorable winds. Similarly, businesses foresee and adapt to upcoming market trends, technological advancements, and policy changes. They ensure a journey that is not only reactive but also proactive and strategic.

In this sky, the Technical Operating Model becomes the collective wisdom of the flock. It keeps the journey on track despite winds and storms. It adapts and recalibrates as one cohesive unit.

The Solution: Navigating with Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity

Birds sail the skies with silent unity and purpose. Though filled with trials, their journeys unfold with a mix of powerand control, flexibility and resilience. It is not by chance. It is their Technical Operating Model, crafted through the ages.

Consider consistency in their paths. Birds stick to migratory routes. Each wingbeat, a step towards its destination, navigates through challenges. They do not just fly; they follow a path laid by generations. Each journey honors ancestral wisdom and adds to the one of those to come.

Calibration is their ability to realign paths with changing elements. A flock, amidst a storm, recalibrates. They alter their route, keeping aligned with their ultimate goal, never losing sight amidst the chaos.

Capacity shows in their enduring vitality on the journey. They manage energy, ensuring the flock maintains strength to complete the journey, supporting each other.

In business, these three Cs become pivotal to navigating the market skies. Consistency in following a strategic path, calibration to realign strategies amidst disruptions, and capacity to endure become the essence businesses must embody.

Businesses should mirror this model. The avian journeys, a marvel of nature, provide a blueprint. Observed and understood, it can guide organizations to navigate their journeys with strategic foresight, adaptability, and enduring capacity.

It ensures thriving through the business-changing seasons.

The Opportunity: Seizing Change with Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity

In the life science industry, the winds of change blow with particular intensity. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), technological advancements, and evolving therapeutic areas like mRNA and precision medicine create a constantly reshaping sky. Here, the 3Cs — Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity — become not just navigational aids but tools to carve out opportunities amidst the change, especially during ERP and APS implementations.

  • Consistency in ERP and APS means a steady hand during M&As. When a firm acquires a new entity, managing data, processes, and systems with standards ensures smooth integration and an unbroken supply chain. From procurement to production, every step sticks to a unified plan, even as new parts come into play.
  • Calibration is pivotal to adapting to tech and method shifts. For example, expanding production with Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMOs) means APS must recalibrate to align with new production models and outputs. It allows quick adjustment to new variables, ensuring production schedules, resource use, and delivery times match current capabilities and needs.
  • Capacity in ERP ensures the system can handle the twists and turns in costing models across different therapy areas. For instance, mRNA therapies might prioritize certain materials and segments differently from precision medicine. The system must manage these shifts, ensuring accurate costing, pricing, and financial management across all areas.

In supplier collaboration, moving towards transactional networks requires a blend of all 3Cs: Consistency in data sharing, calibration to adapt to each supplier’s systems and processes, and capacity to manage the increased data flow and interactions. It ensures a robust supply chain, even as it expands and integrates with external entities.

In essence, the 3Cs, when embedded in ERP and APS implementations, create a Technical Operating Model that seizes the opportunities that these changes present. It ensures that the organization is always ready to leverage new advancements, integrate new entities, and explore new avenues while maintaining a steady, strategic course toward its objectives.

The Benefits: Navigating to Prosperity Through Standardization and Automation with a Robust TOM

In the avian realm, collective wisdom, embedded in migratory patterns, ensures survival and prosperity amidst shifting skies. Similarly, businesses, through strategic TOM implementation, can navigate the digital landscape, ensuring prosperity amidst the market’s shifting tides. By embedding principles of agile innovation, a growth mindset, and adaptive scale, organizations can walk a journey that proactively charts courses through known and unknown terrains.

  • Consistency: A robust TOM, working simultaneously on ERP and APS, demands a solid change design. This design must gain executive sponsorship through valuable and feasible elements. Consistency in approach ensures that the change is embedded in the organizational culture and operations, providing a steady hand through the digital transformation journey.
  • Calibration: Employing a modular approach, the TOM uses APS visibility as a lens to identify, magnify, and eradicate bottlenecks and governance issues. This calibration aligns with the current operational realities and strategic objectives. It allows the organization to adjust its course as needed, always moving towards its goals, even as the market landscape shifts and evolves.
  • Capacity: Implementing a TOM while managing regular operations requires additional resources. Adding temporary management services provides the necessary continuity, ensuring that pivotal internal personnel can focus on shaping, agreeing, and committing to the new model. This external scaffolding ensures the organization can manage the change effectively without disrupting regular operations.

Designing a TOM for both ERP and APS, guided by Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity, provides a strategic framework that allows organizations to navigate the disruption effectively. It ensures that they are not just reacting to changes but proactively charting a course through them, ensuring a journey that is not just about survival but about thriving amidst the ever-evolving digital market landscape.

Conclusion: Crafting the Future with a Wise TOM

In the vast sky, birds navigate, embodying wisdom spanning generations. Their journey, a testament to adaptability, unity, and strategic foresight, mirrors a path for businesses in the shifting skies of the global market. The Technical Operating Model (TOM) emerges not just as a process but as a strategic advantage. It’s a beacon guiding through the unseen, ensuring readiness to adapt, innovate, and lead in the evolving market.

Businesses, like flocks, must wield the power of Consistency, Calibration, and Capacity. They navigate through technological and global disruptions, ensuring survival and thriving existence. The TOM, embedded with these three Cs, becomes a vessel. It sails and charts new, prosperous routes amidst the shifting clouds of the business landscape.

In the unpredictable market skies, TOM is the collective wisdom that guides and adapts. Organizations should not merely react to the winds of change but strategically set the course. It’s a journey not just about reaching the destination but thriving upon arrival.

Takeaways

  • Wisdom in Unity: A Technical Operating Model (TOM) helps organizations navigate the market with strategic foresight and unity, like a flock of birds.
  • Navigating Change: The business landscape is influenced by technological developments and global upheavals, requiring a solid yet adaptable navigation approach like birds flying through changing skies.
  • Three Cs as Pillars: For enterprises to navigate stable and volatile markets, consistency, calibration, and capacity (the 3Cs) are crucial to TOM.
  • Taking Chances: Embedding the 3Cs in ERP and APS installations during technological breakthroughs and M&As helps firms navigate and create market possibilities.
  • Strategic Agility: A strong TOM helps firms adjust to technological developments and supply chain interruptions, delivering a proactive and strategic digital journey.
  • Thriving Amidst changes: The 3Cs-guided TOM that integrates with ERP and APS helps firms survive and prosper during market changes.
  • Proactive Journey: A TOM with agile innovation, a growth attitude, and adaptable scalability guarantees a business journey through known and uncharted terrains, assuring prosperity despite shifting tides.
Flavio Aliberti Flavio Aliberti brings with him a 25-year track record in consulting around business intelligence, change management, strategy, M&A transformation, IT and SOX auditing for high regulated domains, like Insurance, Airlines, Trade Associations, Automotive, and Pharma. He holds an MSc in Space Aeronautic Engineering from the University of Naples and an MSc in Advanced Information Technology and Business Management from the University of Wales.

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