Supply Chain Ecosystem Integration in Consumer Health
Project Overview
A consumer health business is a complex and nuanced landscape of roles, systems, and operational practices working together to meet the needs of customers around the world. Senior leaders in our client planned a tools ecosystem integration to improve efficiency and reduce siloed information and heavy administrative burdens for planners. This was exacerbated by the impacts of the pandemic.
To do this, they launched a digital transformation program targeting ecosystem integration to provide the planning community with the tools and processes that give greater predictability on supply and demand needs, shorter turnaround times for adjusting plans, and more transparency and greater focus on exception handling rather than inefficient system administration.
Following a successful implementation of the Supply Planning solution in LATAM, the program moved onto EMEA. The wider transformations taking place in the client and externally-influenced disruption to global supply chains had created significant pressure within the business. Getting attention and landing change in this complex environment was likely to meet significant challenge.
Our Solution
- Working with the Supply Planning and Demand Planning workstream leads, we refined and leveraged change impact assessments to provide holistic visibility of the changes while simultaneously being able to dive into the specifics with impacted users. We were able to quickly convert these impacts into real actions that would ensure all aspects of change were handled.
- We developed a readiness approach and timelines that empowered and engaged the impacted stakeholders by forming working groups that included them and used their knowledge and insight.
- Our creative teams helped bring the vision and story of the digital transformation program to life with engaging visual identities that really captured the program’s intent and place within the wider transformations. We provided multiple methods of communication and introduced key ideas such as personas, infographics, and short-form videos to bring the program to life for different audiences.
- Our training support was vital to the overall effort as the program brought significant system changes with lots of new features and capabilities. Working closely with the SMEs for each area, our team developed training methods tailored to the content, providing users with the best chance to learn while being mindful of their availability.
The Differences We Made
“I have seen how you work and what you deliver. We need more of this across Consumer Health.”
- Our biggest impact has come from listening to our clients’ insights and challenges then turning these immediately into concrete actions upon which we execute, building confidence and trust in what we do and in the transformation.
- By establishing tight relationships with key leaders, SMEs and super users within the business we were able to quickly build trust despite external pressures.
- Our team helped to energize communications, creating a program hub, animation, core deck, newsletters, and a regular drumbeat of countdown communications to ensure the planning community had the resources they needed in readiness for the change.
- Our training advice, content, scenarios, and help with training delivery provided the structured support that the team of SMEs needed. This team was heavily involved in testing and troubleshooting in parallel.
- In summary, we enabled the client to respond swiftly to supply chain disruption by embedding a people-first change strategy that built trust, empowered local ownership and ultimately accelerated ecosystem integration of planning tools and strengthening operational resilience in a time of rapid transformation.
How rapidly can you change?
How rapidly can you change?
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