Strategy and detail: getting your 'e' right

elcome to the fourth of our quarterly e-business in Manufacturing issues for 2001, produced in association with the DTI and CBI, and sponsored by Oracle and SAP. With the sheer scale of supposed scope for e-business, our objective here is to help you see way beyond the hype, and cut to the real issues and benefits for you, finding what make sense – and then arming you with the detail you need to choose, implement and deploy. We make no bones about it: our collective desire is to encourage e-business adoption, but specifically not just that. We want what hopefully you want – to see targeted, pragmatic solutions being installed that bring real value in terms of reduced costs, improved efficiencies, faster time to market, greater profitability and all the rest. Most of all, we want greater competitiveness for UK manufacturing plc. But to achieve that means stepping behind the web technology scenes and getting detailed information that doesn’t just do the top line business benefits stuff but, crucially, also takes that much further with the detailed education and ‘where to go to get it moving’ bit. And that’s precisely what you’ll find in the following pages. We and HM Government believe this is extremely important. Manufacturing recession or not, none of us can afford to side-step e-business: prevarication, inertia, fear, complacency… whatever, they’ve never been good partners. And it’s rooting out both the detail and the big picture that will get you over the hump of scepticism – the failed implementation stories and the rest – and stimulate sensible action for your business that you can be confident will deliver worthwhile rewards. At the Computers in Manufacturing exhibition at the NEC earlier in November, specialist market researcher Benchmark revealed a worrying picture of industry apparently hesitating on e-business. Benchmark surveyed 1,000 IT managers in manufacturing between August and October, and found that beyond low level, straightforward website and email usage, the figures for uptake of more advanced web applications are lamentable. Worse, the firm forecasts growth of adoption in the UK still too slow right out to 2003 with, for example, remote on-line ERP access likely only to move from 25% to 46%; e-procurement from 25% to 44%, and web-based product catalogue implementations from 18% to less than one third. But dig beneath the headline figures and it rapidly becomes apparent that the reason for this may well have less to do with the power of ‘e’ per se than with users’ ill chosen ‘e’ developments delivering poor ROI (return on investment). Benchmark finds that in the last 18 months, although manufacturers that have implemented systems mostly say their internal communications have improved (33% noting improved performance, 21% not), resulting in measurable benefits, when it comes to collaborative supplier commerce, they say it simply hasn’t delivered the goods. 37% say they have had no ROI, while just 14% claim success. Why has this happened? When you hear that Benchmark found only 19% of manufacturers with a formal e-business strategy of any description, much less one linked to their IT or business strategies, failure to deliver ROI becomes much less surprising. No strategy, no idea. The real concern is that bad news travels fast, and has a profound capacity to influence developments negatively. What we need to do is learn from the experience of others, but be guided by our own diligent investigation. Fact is, everyone now understands that to get the best out of seriously enabling ‘e’ technologies you ought first to do a thorough business analysis. But we also recognise that the reality for most of us is that we necessarily have to select point solutions that provide for incremental improvement. So we’ve tuned the information provided here to help very specifically with both. In particular, we deal with the detail of the people, culture and security aspects of going ‘e’ on the one hand, and then on the other, we provide case study insights into two completely different manufacturers’ implementations of disparate, but equally effective forms of e-business. Our hope is that you will find this thoroughness of treatment – big picture view alongside specific, point-by-point requirements to get there – helps you to help yourselves to the good future and competitiveness that the right application of web technologies undoubtedly brings.