dormakaba

Angelo Dalporto

In the world of operations, supply chains and manufacturing, these have to be some of the most turbulent times on record for the individuals and businesses in these environments. I don’t have to re-list them; apart from breaking out in a cold sweat, we have all heard them, seen them and lived them for what seems like an age.

In the most recent political turbulence here in the UK, it was interesting to listen to the dialogue around growth and productivity and how, as a country, we have for so long seemed to lag behind the rest. Now, I don’t purport that what I write about here is the silver bullet for this dilemma for the entire country, but my experiences with the concept of citizen development have really shown the potential this offers to enhance productivity in a business.

Now citizen developer is suggested by the Gartner glossary as “… an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT.”.

However, my definition of it is somewhat less sophisticated, perhaps as I am referring here to how we have developed a supply chain admin department through self-learning with tools such as LinkedIn learning, for example, to unlock the massive, untapped potential of out-of-the-box solutions. Solutions that are right in front of us and wholly underutilised. A platform such as Microsoft teams fell into this category until Covid struck, and then suddenly, user acceptance and understanding of it skyrocketed through necessity. You can be sure that not all businesses rolled out an IT-driven training and implementation program for it. Instead, I am sure it was very much learnt on the job, quickly, and people with an element of technical ability became citizen developers, developing the platform and training their colleagues as they went along.

The beauty of MS teams is that it is really an out-of-the-box solution, something we can all play with and explore and try and develop, and most times with very little or no IT backing. But I would venture a healthy wager that even now, after all that, the full potential of MS teams is in most cases and businesses not come close to being unlocked to aid productivity and collaboration, something it has been specifically designed for. We took our supply chain admin department and got them learning, googling and testing all the different obvious functionalities. As a result, we have the standard chat functionality and the standard call functionality; I believe that the majority of staff in the functions I am responsible for, from production to logistics, from purchasing to facilities management, from HSQE to manufacturing engineering (I could go on) have not used a standard, traditional phone for at least three years. Connectivity and personal interaction virtually and with such ease across so many different areas has improved the level of face-to-face conversations people WANT to have. Value stream meeting outputs and quality has never been as high.

We have also integrated the use of MS planner into teams, another out-the-box solution, to allow all our continuous improvement areas to become fully digital and accessible to all hierarchies in the business, anywhere in the world, any time of the day! Now add to this the linking of all cloud storage and network file systems into MS teams, and the inter-operability between it and SharePoint has allowed us to develop our entire control tower structure in MS teams. Each function with its own Control tower channel, fully connected to files, CI hubs and projects management hubs in the planner alongside an integrated Power bi dashboard and reports feeding off all our data sources across the supply chain and operational functions.

The development of Power bi was again achieved through citizen development in the supply chain admin team, through dedicated self-learning in LinkedIn learning and Google and YouTube-based research. The level of competence generated through this has meant involvement from IT has been minimal and, most times, related to granting permissions to access functionality. 137 reports and 20 dashboards later…..!The impact of the control tower structure, methodology and access to operational intelligence has driven our performance and allowed us to drop understanding and learning of these concepts into supervisor and team leader levels, ensuring high levels of buy-in with staff.

And so the approach is now taking us to the next phase. Self-learning through LinkedIn learning, Google and YouTube research is driving our understanding and knowledge in being able to use and unlock the potential inherent in Power Automate, Process Advisor and AI builder….all functionality sat quietly within office 365, waiting to be unleashed. We are now developing a fully fledge operational excellence team with foundations in all that we already do with Power bi, MS teams and MS planner. These platforms and functionality, coupled with Power automate and these other platforms, are helping us begin to unlock true, genuine productivity gains. Processes riddled with manual intervention are being streamlined to have minimal manual intervention and high automation. Without delving into the realms of RPA (which, make no mistake, has its place with us) this automation is driving our operational excellence strategy and allowing us to shift from being a reactive problem-solving business to a proactive process automation and efficiency business.

It is and will continue to allow us to mitigate the challenges in the labour market by allowing the staff we have to do more, more efficiently, drive growth, and profitability and, ultimately, empower them as individuals keen to explore this journey with us!