/ June 23, 2021

Accelerate Time-to-Market, Don’t Constrain It

Accelerate speed

Paul McNamara

Companies must accelerate time-to-market.  Most executives wonder how hard they can push their teams before the wheels come off.  When they do push they find weaknesses in their support departments. Support departments often slow processes down by the death of a thousand cuts. The cuts aren’t always visible but they always cost – time, energy, money, and lost opportunity. They don’t accelerate time-to-market, they constrain it.  
 
Do your support departments add friction to your processes?  Can you measure it?  Do they make operating your business like driving a car with the parking brake on?  Executives acknowledge the importance of this new focus because they have no choice. Going fast and crashing is no better than going slower and crossing the finish line 2nd or 3rd. Both are losing alternatives.

The only choice is to bring support departments and functions up to standard. Speed up enterprise processes with Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management or aEAM, from Sente.

ACCELERATED Enterprise Asset Management (aEAM) Practitioners ACCELERATE Time-to-Market

They are ambitious and curious.  They know their customer’s objectives and know how to help them.  Their customers gain autonomy enabling them to achieve goals that build their identity. Why? Because they aren’t micromanaging a steady stream of problems in damage control mode.  aEAM teams get acknowledged for the significant value they contribute to the organization. They aren’t ridiculed as a “necessary evil.”

Accelerated Enterprise Asset Management teams produce these groundbreaking results.

  • 400% Increase to Utilization
  • 25% Productivity Increase for Customers
  • 25% to 50% Increase to Speed of Testing driving time-to-market

Old Department (DMV) Mindsets Worked for Years…

Departmental design and operation are a vestige of the last industrial revolution.  They enabled standardized work and the efficiency that comes from it.  While marketplace change remained slow this way of organizing produced a competitive advantage.  Large bureaucracies enabled scale, they were efficient, and efficiency was enough.
 
Alfred Sloan exploited “scientific management” to dominate the automotive market. He produced the largest and most powerful company – General Motors – in the largest industry in the world.  Other companies copied their approach creating “the” management paradigm of the last century.
 
These departments focused on their own operations. They waited for work requests, and then fulfilled those requests with standard processes. It produces a “statement-of-work” mentality. People performed the work as prescribed. They didn’t change unless or until someone told them to. It was rigid but efficient and focused only on themselves.
 
These departments worked in a “task orientation” meaning they focus only on the task at hand.  As a result, they didn’t understand the effects of their work on their customers or the rest of the business. In this orientation, they couldn’t tell if what they were doing was working anyway.  That was up to someone else to know.

…Until it Didn’t

This approach worked until marketplace forces demanding speed made it uncompetitive.  It was too rigid and slow in a marketplace requiring resilience. Companies need to accelerate time-to-market.
 
It is easy to fool ourselves that because we still see this mindset in place that it is working.  If it was working companies wouldn’t be working so hard to transform themselves. They focus on their management structures, management and leadership practices, and their culture.

Large Companies Announce Transformation Efforts to Accelerate Time-to-Market

Senior executives know that they must transform their organizations or risk their existence. To avoid this fate they must bring new products and services to market with enough velocity to win.  If they don’t meet competitive standards they will go out of business. It’s only a matter of time.
 
Companies that exploit knowledge first can dominate markets for a generation or more. Failure to accumulate this knowledge is an existential threat to the company, its employees, and pensioners.

Lessons from Titans of the 4th Industrial Revolution

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, focuses on what he calls first principles.  First-principles are deep fundamental and foundational knowledge, like physics and biology. This type of knowledge is essential in rapid change. Musk uses “first principles” to reimagine what is possible. He’s changed the game in his industries.
 
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, leads with an unflinching focus on the customer. He has transformed retail.  One of the things he says to avoid is “proxies”.  He wants employees focused on completely satisfying their customers. He doesn’t want them to use processes as a proxy, or as an excuse for not satisfying customers.  He doesn’t want to hear, “Sure the customers weren’t happy, but at least we followed the process.”  He wants to accelerate time-to-market.
 
In rapid change, impeccable communication is a major key to success.  Employees at Amazon use structured memos to present ideas in “high-resolution” detail. To humans, narratives are the most fundamental way they make sense of the world. Knowledge of their operation is critical. It drops costs.  Constructing narratives is first-principle knowledge for business.

Accelerate Time-to-Market:  Asset Management’s Essential Mindset and Capabilities

Asset management teams must focus on making their company more competitive. They must enable the speed of their customers’ new product development process.  Sente’s software suite, named Scireo, includes the Latin root “sci” which means to “know.”  Scireo contains knowledge that will help your teams to win in asset-intensive operations.

CONNECT:  Scireo CONNECTS your team members with integrated workflows that bring transparency to equipment users, their customers, and support functions enabling them all to coordinate, cooperate, and share more quickly and easily.

POWER:  Scireo POWERS your teams with contextual data and knowledge embedded in those workflows enabling teams to make better, faster, and more trustworthy decisions.

ACCELERATE:  Scireo ACCELERATES their performance with algorithms that reduce organizational friction and drag in the workflows caused by costly and destructive behaviors.

If You Really Want to Produce Big Results, We Can Help You

Ten to fifteen years after we started Sente I happened to run into the executive who first hired us.  As I brought him up to date on what Sente was up to he said to me, “You know, you couldn’t have accomplished all you did with us and saved us all that money if we didn’t want the same thing.” Thanks to customers like him and others we’ve also been acknowledged by industry analysts as well.  

It seems so obvious but true.  Producing great results is an active endeavor with constant attention to the production of outcomes and great coordination and commitment required on the team.

If You Want the Help…We Can Help!

Please contact us by clicking the contact button in the header or requesting a demo.

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See how Scireo aEAM Software drops asset and support costs by 50% while accelerating time-to-market 2X.

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Notable Quotes

“What I like about Sente’s approach is how it has turned my engineers into businesspeople.  They think it terms of investments and returns now.”

VP of Engineering