The upside of disruption: Implement a business intelligence process - Part 3 of 4

Rasheed Mohamad

March 05, 2024

Abiding by our values and implementing a proactive business intelligence approach were critical to surviving VUCA. 

As a company that manufactures physical products and ships them to 60 countries across the globe, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been greatly impacted by the many unforeseen events the world has been grappling with since 2020.

Nevertheless, we didn’t cancel any customer orders… not a single one! 我们是怎么做到的? 通过坚持我们的价值观——速度和敏捷, customer centricity, and reliability – and implementing a business intelligence process to aid in hyper-informed decision-making. 

在本系列的第二篇博客中， 了解VUCA世界，我描述了和他一起工作的影响 Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and A从本世纪初开始就很模糊. Now, I will share how ALE navigated those difficult years by focusing on finding opportunity.

There are four specific areas that contributed to our success navigating through VUCA.

1. We got proactive: When we saw lead times of our manufacturing components balloon from 4 to 18 (or in some cases 24!几个月后，我们没有惊慌. Working hand in hand with our suppliers to anticipate component needs, we stocked what we needed for future customer orders to minimise disruption and continue to meet our commitments. We worked tirelessly to balance demand and supply at the best possible cost.
2. We reinforced cross-organisational communications: Taking a bird’s eye view of the situation, we quickly identified communications as a key lever for navigating uncertainty. 我们创建了跨职能的“老虎团队”,” tasked with ensuring all parts of the company were aligning to deliver the best results. 每个功能-销售, manufacturing, partner relations, and others – came together to seamlessly support our customers and satisfy their most urgent needs.
3. We reinforced automation: Faced with a mountain of tasks demanding our attention, 我们退后一步，评估如何最好地利用时间. Should we focus on taking care of the predictable or should we spend our time managing the unpredictable? By re-evaluating our processes in light of the new global situation and using technology to automate predictable tasks, we were able to free ourselves to work on more complex value-driving tasks. 我们在整个组织中应用了这种方法, 通过不同的业务功能, 获得最大的利益.
4. We used business intelligence effectively: Data is as good as gold and we mined all the data at our disposal to enable hyper-informed decision-making. Real-time data was used at each of the four stages of our sales and supply process to identify anomalies and make adjustments. This business intelligence was also applied to make improvements to the system and processes, 创造良性循环.

In sum, despite a scary outlook and of lot uncertainty at the start of this decade, ALE找到了一条路. 

We started by identifying what was within our control and implemented tools and processes to streamline our workload. We created opportunities to function better as a global team and utilised technology to boost our ability to prioritise the most valuable tasks. We acted proactively and put our valuable data to work to create a smoother road ahead and ensure we consistently lived up to our company values.

The result? We met our commitments to customers and continued to function as an enterprise through one of the toughest business environments the world has ever seen.

在本博客系列的下一篇也是最后一篇文章中, I’ll share how ALE doubled down on its commitment to sustainability despite VUCA.

In the meantime, you can watch me discuss the subjects in this post at the Deliver Americas event held this past September in Las Vegas.