The Oscar Goes to: 3 Adaptive Case Management-powered Performances

By Deb Miller (@DebsG360) Mar 1, 2012

It's awards time for the film industry and like many, I took some time out to watch the Oscars last Sunday. It's great to see high quality performances recognized. But Oscars aren't just for the movies, so I thought it would be a good time to look at award-winning performances in our own industry.

How do you effectively make changes to your operation to improve costs and productivity while delivering greater value to your customer? The answer lies in the performance of your knowledge workers. What tool can you use to enable those knowledge workers? As might be anticipated based on my continuing articles series of the same name, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is my recommendation. So in the spirit of the film awards season, let’s take a look at three ACM-powered performances in the “Value” category that in my opinion deserve an Academy Award!

Enhancing New Product Collaboration

Consider new product introductions. Going from idea to launch can be difficult to control. Yet it is these processes when performed well that deliver both top line growth and cash to business. Cost and control challenges span from the point where a new product is conceived through the eventual delivery of the product to market. These challenges are heightened by our current economy that drives demand uncertainty, restricts credit and increases supply risk.

How do you succeed under these difficult conditions?

The previous decade has shown that improvements in automation can be achieved using tools like EDI (Electronic Document Interchange), SCM, ERP and other packaged applications. However, these tools do NOT significantly help improve how employees get work done where documents and decision-making must span system and organizational silos, and straight through processing is not possible or practical. In those circumstances, untamed and often highly collaborative processes have formed to fill gaps along the primary end-to-end business processes and act as bridges between the silos.

Here is where case management can be applied to create value. We saw the French romantic comedy and homage to the silent film era The Artist win the Best Picture prize this year, but my Oscar goes to one of my favorite French success stories La Redoute — complete with its own video clip.

A leader in the French retail fashion market, LaRedoute implemented case management to drive productivity and speed in their new product introduction process. If you want to get a sense of this internet and catalog retailer’s style, check out this clever LaRedoute YouTube video. Behind the scenes, La Redoute’s supply chain is no slouch; it includes a 24-hour service to 3,000 plus delivery points and handles over 30 million parcels per year in France plus another one million outside France. But their fortune is their fashion speed to market as you might expect and their “New Product Development” (NPD) process is critical to the creation of new product lines and to coordinate dealings between La Redoute buyers and the firm’s extensive supplier network. Every product line featured in La Redoute passes through this four-stage design and quality control process before it can be put into production.

Case management is sophisticated and flexible enough to successfully adapt to all four of La Redoute’s NPD stages — giving the buyers the review and decision making environment they need to be successful in the erratic and fast paced world of fashion, while at the same time providing the framework to assure progression through the stages and compliance to stringent security and quality requirements. And, speaking of fast paced, with case management, all four processes were successfully implemented within a nine month deadline.