Posted on August 3, 2015
By Dennis Hamaker, IT Services Director of Organica Water
In today’s world we have a lot of choices when it comes to selecting the right ERP platform to support the business. Making the right choice on the infrastructure, understanding the possibilities and restrictions long term, and making sure we do take advantage of technology when it becomes available is not a challenge, it’s rather an attitude.
When I joined Organica Water in September 2013 it was clear that we had to optimize IT resources, and make sure communication and automation were the key themes that needed to be addressed. Organica Water consists out of high skilled professionals who in their area of expertise understand the water management business as no other, and they need to have the ability to execute their work. It’s almost like working on Wall street, if the teams there had to worry about their computer working or not, they probably wouldn’t succeed in business because every second counts. Believe it or not, we consider every missed call, meeting, or mail as a missed opportunity to provide our (internal/external) support and services, and therefore things ‘simply’ need to work. It makes sense; probably most of you walk into a meeting and the conference phone or video simply works. We all know what happens if technology for some reason does not work, it simply blocks you from doing the work you wanted to do.
We made a calculated decision to change our platform, and as a result we completed the migration to office365 in November that same year. Not only did we consider the infrastructure we needed, we also took a look at the sustainability of the platform. This aligns with our core values, and is part of every decision we make. The cloud’s efficiency and scalability helps reducing the need for hardware, and eliminates maintenance and upgrades. This solution also offers less energy consumption, lower running costs, and more flexibility for our businesses as we expand, which translated for us into using office365 and using cloud based servers for our SaaS platform.
This was a bold step, because Office365 was just launched and it would certainly be a change for our teams who work globally around the clock and rely mainly on all communication and file access tools. The move introduced us to a different (more optimized) way of working. The way we share files, how we communicate, and having more agility, align well with our business needs. By no means I am trying to promote a platform, and I also do not intend to state that all went without issues, but within the individual teams we found great support in adaptation and solving upcoming issues. Where we implemented the seeds in 2013, we grew the trees throughout 2014, and 2015 will be all about growing and harvesting the fruits.
Planning, implementation, and delivery has changed rapidly for us IT people in general. Change, innovation, and adaptation are concepts an IT strategy should be able to include and absorb quickly. Even more, you need to be able to lead towards pro-active solutions and promote these actively instead of only delivering them. One great example is our SaaS platform, Organica Central Station, which was developed and launched aside from all the core IT infrastructure changes, simply because we saw a way to improve availability and speed up the time to market by innovating the way we offer our services internally and externally.
We also found that instead of a rigid IT roadmap and delivery schedule, we adapt with our teams to deliver to the business needs as they arise, with flexibility and realistic deadlines. One of our main advantages is that within our company our colleagues are very IT savvy, and that ties into what we can deliver to our team as the IT Solutions team. We provide what is needed to have our colleagues utilize the resources THEY need. It is a two way street, and IT has become a full business partner this way, working together on solutions rather than dictating what are the technical limitations.
The key message? Be part of the overall business (move out of the admin support part and become an internal solution provider). Trust people’s capability to understand and use technology, and find out what they need as a team and individually. Map this against the business processes, create the right strategy, and use an adaptive roadmap going forward.
In light of the above I share below a small sample of the ‘fruits’ we were able to ‘harvest’ pointing to some specific changes that were highlighted in this week’s weekly email.
IT Services has implemented this week a variety of tools and changes to improve standardization and efficiency, and automate a variety of internal business processes.
The new Quality Control tool (QC) has been launched in BETA and will be tested for the next 3 weeks by the Application Engineering (AE) team, where after a full scale launch of the system is planned. The QC tool is designed to automate the process of ensuring that all documents created by AE are tracked and controlled before going to the final customer.
We have created the SharePoint VPMO (Virtual Project Management Office) location, where from next week everyone will have access to the MS Project Plan for each contracted project, a list of members of the individual project teams, and other relevant VPMO information. In addition Product Development is now also available on SharePoint, with Engineering Proposals and Finance to follow in the coming weeks.
From March 2nd we will introduce unique project codes across ALL of our systems. These codes will be created in a special project database and then be automatically be used in ICT, PGC requests, CRM MS Project, and the finance systems. The Project Code will used from the proposal stage all the way through project completion, allowing us to share information across different IT systems seamlessly and better integrate workflows. More detailed information will be shared this week, as well as a short training on how to follow the process.
