Change Management - Knocking Down Barriers to Benefit

A company is very much like a complex organism. The workers serve as different organs, each with a specialized function, and the organism as a whole thrives and exudes energy if each organ is healthy. Like every other organism, an organization is part of a great race, competing and fighting to survive and be the best. When it comes to survival, it can only be achieved through adaptation.

There are species that don’t exist anymore because they couldn’t adapt to the change going on around them. We understand that change can be uncomfortable and terrifying at times, but for companies that refuse to adapt, the metaphorical extinction becomes all too real.

Why Companies Fear Change

One of the reasons that companies choose not to risk change is that they are threatened by it. The general mentality is why fix something that’s not broken, and a common denial of the need to oil something that would go rusty and eventually become obsolete if not tended to enough. We cannot stress enough how dangerous it can be to have such a mindset.

Even if you’re the best, the unfortunate fact (or fortunate beauty) of the capitalist world is that you can lose your status in a heartbeat. If companies stay too rigid in their ways, they’re bound to lose out in the long run. Globalization and technological reform require slight adjustments in short term goals or comfortable routines. Renovation is imperative for progress and staying afloat in this fast paced world. Progress is the best gauge of success and progress comes from change.

Sometimes the change needs to be on a foundational level. But not all changes have to be dramatic. Sometimes the change could be minute. After all – less often means more.

Change Often Brings Welcome Results

Since we’ve established how important change is, we understand that this may mean slight adjustments are required on many levels. But what most companies need to understand is that such change isn’t a colossal risk if it’s made through intelligent strategy and research. For example, a minor change made through the adoption of cloud software is a cost friendly, minimally disruptive and efficient change that can provide tremendous benefit to an organization.

Take for instance an organization that already has people and a process in place for the coordination, acquisition and management of custom-printed marketing materials. They know there must be a better way to get the job done; one that causes fewer headaches is more efficient and maybe even saves money.

When this organization looks at their options, they’ll see that most require a fairly extreme level of change, which may very well make them take a step back. However, cloud based software that simply augments their own people, processes and vendors with the tools, mechanisms and insight to achieve better results isn’t actually much of a change to make.

Since that is the business we are in here at eLynxx Solutions we see this day in and day out. In all honesty overcoming an organization’s reluctance to change is often one of the biggest barriers we face in helping them get the results they deserve. But, once they open up to the slight changes required in the adoption of eLynxx software and begin reaping the rewards, they wonder why they ever feared making the change in the first place.

Being Open to Change is Being Open to Success

Whether we’re talking about getting better results from your marketing supply chain or any other area of an organization, making a change to a crucial area of operations can be scary, we understand that. In fact we’ve experienced it. You don’t stay in the business we’re in for nearly 40 years without making some changes over the course of time. Successful organizations know when the time for change is right and when it is wrong; but they must first be open to change. Are you open to change and the success it can bring? If you are, we’d like to hear from you.

Change Management - Knocking Down Barriers to Benefit

Happy 180th Birthday - and Thank You - to John Venn!

If you’ve been out to Google today you might have noticed an interesting, if not slightly obscure, interactive commemorative Google Doodle gracing the page. It is commemorating the 180th birthday of John Venn. Unless you are the kind of person who gets at least somewhat nerdy over philosophy, math or statistics; you might be asking yourself who in the world John Venn is and why you should care that, if he had not passed away in 1923, he would be 180 years old today. Well, besides the fact that a man born in 1834 managed to live 89 years – a feat unto itself, John Venn is the man whom you may thank for the wonderfully visual way of representing complex concepts like set theory and relationships in areas such as probability, logic and statistics known as the Venn Diagram.

Great, so other than the fact that there are obviously some nerds on staff, why does eLynxx Solutions care about John Venn, his diagrams and his birthday? Glad you asked! Simply put, without John Venn and his Venn Diagram it would be a lot harder for us to explain our concept of bringing your people, your processes and your vendors together with eLynxx project management software to achieve better results in your marketing supply chain. You see, at its simplest – and trust me there are much more complex ways of using one than we have, a Venn Diagram shows a relational overlap between two or more distinct sets, areas or concepts. With each area represented as a ring or circle, the intersecting portions of each illustrate the point where everything comes together so to speak. It’s a truly elegant way to present data.

From our standpoint, an organization already has a set of people doing various jobs, a set of processes that are integral to the way it operates and a set of vendors with whom it has already built a level of trust and understanding in place. When it comes to managing its marketing material projects from concept to reality, an organization already has has a lot of what it needs to get the job done in these three areas. All that are really needed are some tools and additional knowledge to bring everything together and achieve better results. Sometimes, rather than bringing these areas together, organizations try highly disruptive methods that instead drive the people, processes and vendors already in place further apart. We have found that the more disruptive the method is the less likely it is to actually achieve marketing supply chain efficiency and savings for an organization. That’s why the tools and knowledge eLynxx Solutions provides are purpose-built and tailored specifically to an organization’s needs and resources. By being as non disruptive as possible, eLynxx simply fills in what’s missing so your organization can manage, source and organize its marketing material projects better than ever. Organizations that use eLynxx think it is an elegant solution. Since we can show how eLynxx works in one of his diagrams, we like to think that John Venn would agree.

Happy 180th Birthday - and Thank You - to John Venn!

Is Your Marketing Supply Chain "Prepped" - Three Questions to Ask

The concept of preparedness is a hot topic but it’s nothing new. Anyone who was ever in scouting or the military is familiar with the practice of being prepared. It’s simply more in the public eye today. Between public service campaigns urging every household to have a basic survival kit ready for common emergencies and documentaries on “extreme preppers” outfitted to survive and thrive in the face of just about anything man or nature can conjure up, being prepared has become part of mainstream culture. Being prepared is a great idea. Whether you choose to have a box with some basics to make it through a bad storm or a bunker to survive doomsday is up to you; but logic and history tells us that you go wrong with being prepared. However, when most of us think about being prepared, we think in terms of home and family not business.

True, many organizations have a general crisis plan for when they are directly impacted by the unforeseen. Disaster preparedness and recovery plans are also common to most IT operations. But what happens when the unforeseen strikes others you depend upon and the situation is beyond the scope of internal plans? What happens when the printer who is producing materials for a critical product launch campaign is impacted by a hurricane, tornado, wildfire or earthquake? The idea here is not to wish for such a tragedy; but rather to point out that even your marketing supply chain is vulnerable to the effects of disaster at many levels. Something as simple as a major power outage in the vicinity of one of your vendors has the potential to impact your marketing operations. In many parts of the United States, the late summer is prime time for nature-related emergencies; which leads to the question of whether your marketing supply chain has been prepped for disaster? Here are three questions to consider:

Is your vendor pool deep, and well-qualified, enough that you have multiple options available?

If you rely on a very small pool of vendors you are putting your marketing initiatives at risk. If one of these vendors becomes unavailable, even temporarily, your projects may take a hit that can be hard to recover from. Solid vendor qualification is equally as important. Even if you have a fair number of vendors who can pick up the slack from an out-of-commission competitor; if they are not clearly and objectively qualified as equals you could end up with less than acceptable results. A well-prepared marketing supply chain has vendor redundancy not only in numbers, but in capability and capacity as well.

Do you have easy access to all of your project assets and specifications?

In order to be able to work around unforeseen circumstances in your marketing supply chain you need to be agile. In the midst of a situation where a vendor is unable to operate in their normal capacity, you need to be able to take all assets, files, details and specifications for a project and shift them to another vendor. Any time spent searching for assets, recompiling information and getting it out to substitute vendors is time wasted. A robust project and workflow management regimen with provisions for management of project assets, tracking of all actions and the ability to directly connect with your vendor pool is a key element of having a well-prepared marketing supply chain.

Do you know where your projects are in the production cycle?

Suppose that a direct mail project is being printed and assembled by one vendor who will send it to another vendor for processing and mailing. An unforeseen circumstance has taken the print vendor temporarily off-line sometime after you sent the project to them. If you don’t know where your project is in its production cycle, you don’t know if it has been impacted. If you knew where it was, you would know whether it needed to be routed to another printer, or if the printer finished their part before they were impacted and it’s already at the mail house. If you don’t know, you’ll need to spend precious time finding out. Having a solid grasp of where your marketing materials are in their production cycle is another key part of a well-prepared marketing supply chain.

Like being prepared for the unforeseen in any other portion of life, ensuring that your marketing supply chain is prepared for circumstances beyond your control certainly isn’t limited to three areas. However by asking yourself the three questions above and thinking about your answers you are off to a good start that is likely to lead to more considerations. Can you think of any others? If you do, be sure to share them with us!

Is Your Marketing Supply Chain "Prepped" - Three Questions to Ask