Planning Beyond the Contract: Keys to Delivering Successful Supply Chain Projects
Simply signing a contract doesn’t guarantee its success. It also takes strong communication, steadfast strategy, and a willingness to adapt to change. Supply Chain Insights highlights the key factors that can make (or break) a supply chain project, and the strategies to see things through.
A successful supply chain project requires clear communication, stakeholder engagement strategies, strong corporate values, and personnel dedicated to keeping projects on track in the face of changing environments and scopes of work.
According to Jennifer Horton, Director of Projects and Sites for automated solutions provider, Dematic great teamwork, clear communication and rigorous processes are crucial to success in supply chain projects.
“When project teams are formed, they start their project journey early, and they plan together. They think creatively, they respect each other, they get excited for the journey ahead, and then when they've got that excitement, they deliver successful projects,” she says. “When I talk about project teams, I'm not just talking about within Dematic. I'm talking about the team that forms between the client and Dematic as a partnership. When they come together, they're delivering a project for that client, and they see that the outcome is a joint effort. It's not just us and them.”
So, what contracts, priorities and processes are the key to success?
Ensuring Success Beyond the Contract
For a project to deliver its intended value, there are factors beyond the contract which supply chain leaders should stay aware of. As much as any business would like it to be so, a watertight contract doesn’t always lead to a seamless project.
Supply chain projects are often cross-functional, involving a range of teams and stakeholders from within the warehouse to global boardrooms. Therefore, ensuring they are all on board is paramount to success.
“It’s important to make sure that, from a process standpoint, there's enough due diligence done before the project starts,” says Manhattan Associates Managing Director ANZ, Raghav Sibal. “The last thing we want is to be working towards certain goals before finding the overall high level end-to-end process is not fully defined, and here we are designing at a more detailed level what a solution can achieve.”
To remove the occurrence of misalignment along the chain, TMX Director of Program & Transformation Management, Alvin Fernandes, highlights the value of specialist roles to monitor project development.
“Implementation success coaches can accelerate delivery, remove roadblocks and ensure the right stakeholder and SMEs are included throughout the process. The involvement of business-as-usual employees owning part of the transformation is crucial in ensuring success and embedment post-implementation,” he says.
Similarly, Dematic’s Jennifer Horton says involvement in a project should not be limited to managers and board members, but everyday employees too.
“If the end users are included in the project journey, and they see the operational value in the system – ie. how the system can benefit their daily life and the organisation – then the project will deliver what it was intended to deliver, because they have some ownership,” she says. “When they're proud of the facility and they feel they've contributed to it, then they’ll want to own their success and want it to work well. This will all contribute to the project delivering its intended value.”
Keeping Stakeholders Engaged and Aligned
The supply chain is arguably the broadest industry in the world, and as such, most projects involve a complex array of stakeholders. These perspectives can be used to develop a holistic view of any business and implement projects which benefit countless employees. On the other hand, transformational supply chain projects also challenge stakeholders to consider both their team and company-wide improvement.
The finance team is concerned with return on investment, the operations team needs solutions to improve daily processes, and the C-Suite needs everyone to get along and commit to success.
“Different stakeholders have different lenses to define success,” TMX’s Alvin Fernandes says. “Good project governance is the key to defining success criteria. Doing so and managing these with flexibility within a framework will balance the outcomes and ensure all stakeholders have the same direction of travel from the onset.”
According to Parth Thakker, Sales Leader Software Solutions at Zebra Technologies sometimes misalignment within a customer’s hierarchy needs to be addressed before a project can continue.
Business leaders often raise different priorities because their own performance is based on different metrics. When they combine on the same project, a clash of ideologies may happen and the project’s timelines and budgets may blow out to accommodate all parties.
Manhattan’s Raghav Sibal adds: “One thing that really differentiates a successful project from a project that will take longer and cost more money, is that the scope is not managed properly. If the end goal and the vision of what we're trying to achieve is not well defined upfront, the scope just keeps growing, and we end up with what is called scope creep.”
Zebra’s Parth Thakker outlines his approach to avoid scope creep and improve stakeholder engagement.
“It's best to start by building a consensus before the project begins,” he says. “I'm a big believer of a structured engagement on whatever project that you're delivering. This includes formal kickoffs, steering committees, and weekly progress reports – think of it as running a large, multi-million dollar deployment, instead of just a small pilot project. It's equally important to be able to educate on what happened last week, what's happening this week, and the stepping stones required to ultimately deliver results.”
Adapting to Change Mid-Contract
Just as watertight contracts don’t guarantee success, they’re also not immune to changing midway through a project. According to Dematic’s Jennifer Horton, change is “inevitable on any project, so it’s crucial to ensure the right support is put in place to manage it.”
A 2021 Gartner survey found that ‘Resistance to change from decision stakeholders’ posed the greatest challenge to successfully executing supply chain transformation.
"Large transformational programmes are multi-year journeys where the business will change significantly before reaching the end point," TMX’s Alvin explains. "You have to implement stage gates to reassess what's changed between each phase. It's like going to a supermarket without a shopping list - what you thought you needed at the beginning is completely different by the end, because you don't know what you need to plan for during the week."
To ease the fear of change within an organisation and make transformation a more successful process, Raghav recommends installing a single authority who can manage changes in the project scope.
“Designating a design authority, scope manager or change manager can become super important because then everything has to flow through that one individual and all approvals are made in one place,” he says. “Without them, requests come from five different directions, everyone wants the world and the project spins out of control. Performing a cost-benefit analysis of any change in scope is important because certain changes are good and valuable for the business while others hinder the process.”
Change can also occur not as a result of stakeholder input, but in response to new findings over the course of the project. Data may change, new research may be released, or demand for the type of transformation may dissipate. For this reason, Parth says each project should be built with a strong change management component rather than including it as an afterthought.
Warning Signs and How to Address Them
While changes in direction can enhance a project and reveal helpful insights for the future, they can also threaten the project’s success. Of course, project teams can do all their due diligence, keep stakeholders aligned, and maintain agile processes headed by expert change managers. However, none of these measures can absolutely guarantee success and it’s important to recognise when results start to skew.
All four industry experts agree that regular meetings to compare and contrast KPIs are the best measure against project failure.
“Having strong and consistent project processes or frameworks is the starting point for a healthy project,” Jennifer says. “Prior to the project starting through that sales phase, we’re identifying risks in the project, and keeping open communication internally as well as with the client, as a critical step in risk mitigation.”
Some of the warning signs shared by the experts interviewed include subdued stakeholder engagement, consecutive reports showing limited progress, or the pace of progress in an agile workflow decreasing substantially.
"The worst call you want to get is that escalation from your stakeholder," Zebra’s Parth notes. "When things do go off course - and that's normal - the best intervention is to admit what happened and bring in what I call a 'tag team' approach. You need someone to run the project like they're the CEO of it, bringing all stakeholders together with daily touchpoints until you're back on track."
If any warning signs appear, then a predetermined escalation path should be activated, and a realignment session may be required.
“The challenges are made clear to the stakeholders ahead of those sessions, so that when they come together, it's a quick meeting,” Raghav adds. “We don't want these sessions to become big deliberations because alternatives should have already been discussed.”
Yet another example that communication is key when it comes to supply chain success. From the design phase, through building and execution, plenty of supply chain projects can shift from their original plans. What’s far more important to success is having the plans in place to respond to new information and maintain a course to completion, as a team and as an organisation.
