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No matter how strategic and complete a company's plan,
success is only possible if they actually execute that plan.
Execution and operations go hand-in-hand.
Operations is the "verb" of the company--what the company does.
If the company doesn't "do", the company doesn't succeed.
Operations is truly "do or die". Operations
Execution Systems (OES) help automate the "doing"--the
operations--of a company. OES systems complement (and not
replace) financial management systems (accounting, ERP, MRP,
etc). Operations Execution Systems are also known
as Operations Management Systems (OMS) and in manufacturing
as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) or Shop Floor Control
systems (SFC). 
"Doing" (operations) is really what brings about the
success of a company or organizations. It is
therefore somewhat surprising that operations execution systems
have only recently arrived on the scene. Why haven't
operations automation systems become commonplace long before
now? The answer to this question lies in the
history of computing. Computers are well-suited to
arithmetic computations, and from their earliest days have
therefore been used as a tool to help manage financial
information. Business computer systems have long been
focused on tracking ledgers of dollars and quantities.
Financial management has always been a well-defined discipline:
whether on paper or on computer, credits and debits must balance
each other out, and math is the universal language.
Operations, on the other hand, do not have the same level of
consistency even within a single industry—let alone across
multiple industries. For this reason, operations
management systems, if used at all, have largely been home grown
systems created in-house to serve a specific organization.
Another related reason for the late arrival of operations
management systems has to do with the interaction between
markets and new products. In mature markets vendors
typically respond to market demand—as opposed to innovating.
The business management software industry has arguably
reached a stage of considerable maturity: witness the
tremendous consolidation over the past few years the likes of
which makes sense only in a mature market. Ten to 15 years
ago there were numerous independent accounting software
companies with financial management systems. Now by
comparison there are a small number of very large players.1
With maturation and consolidation of markets comes
increased consistency and parity across competing offerings.
The financial management vendors provide to businesses what
everyone (vendors and businesses alike) agree financial systems
should be like.
Only recently have innovators been recognizing that
operations can be successfully automated--and not just with
proprietary in-house created systems. - Some of
the financial management system vendors have begun adding in
"workflow" capabilities to their software. (Witness
Microsoft Dynamics GP, for example.) While perhaps better
than nothing, this kind of rudimentary routing of a
financial document such as a purchase request through a few
people for approval does not come close to automating the
complete breadth of operations within an organization.
- Some document imaging companies, such as Filenet
(now part of IBM) have added in document-centric workflow to
their systems. These systems are in general more powerful
than those based solely on a financial management system,
for they can manage workflow around any type of
document--and not just financial documents. Nonetheless,
they tend to be limited to routing a electronically-stored
paper document through a series of people.
-
Some software vendors have begun releasing tools to assist
software developers with the task of creating systems to
help manage workflows (Wang and Groupware, and more recently
Microsoft). While some of these are useful tools for
developers, they are not turnkey systems ready for
deployment in a business.
- There is
a lot of buzz and confusion about "Business Process
Management" (BPM). BPM means different things to different
people, but on the whole BPM is about defining, documenting
and communicating business processes. This is a worthy
endeavor to be sure, but is quite different from Operations
Execution Management which actually helps business manage
their "doing" of work (operations).
Automate Operations, Inc. and our flagship product OpsStream™ is
different from all of these. First and foremost, it's a
turnkey operations execution system that actually keeps track of
what needs to be done and what has been done, and provides
real-time metrics on all of this. |
