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When we talk about “Hands-On Retooling”, we talk about a deep dive into the processes that run your company. Some of them might be fully automated, some manual, some well documented, some utterly ad-hoc. What we are looking for are those that can be improved to support the embedment of Innovation. The short slide below outlines the scope of this work (click the slide to start): What Processes need to change? | Imagine trying to run an innovative business without knowing which of the products in the market are innovative, what their actual realized margins and profits are.
For this kind of information, your ERP systems need to be able to manage products with appropriate “flags” to structure reports, and remain flexible over time as products no longer fit the bill “innovative”. In most cases, this requires work deep in your financial reporting. | What we are looking for are processes that fall into these types: - Could hinder the rollout of Innovation
= prevent launch - Could hinder the efficient operations of Innovation
= prevent successes - Could send wrong or mixed messages about Innovation
= prevent decreased productivity - Could provide more performance / support for Innovation
= increase productivity Starting with the catalog of your processes (maybe structured in the way the slide above suggests it), we will take a hard look at each one of these processes to see how they will support your strategy. Those that need tweaking or changing will be flagged. Incidentally, these categories were developed by Whirlpool as part of their change initiative. It helped us understand the scope of what we went after. See “Unleashing Innovation” to the left for more details. This work is tedious, granted, and necessary. Give it to the consultants. We rely on your subject matter experts to develop the data. Then we process the data into easy-to-understand, crisp one-pager descriptions for executive management to make a call. What tools will change, and how?  That will be the executive decision: How much change can we afford and digest? In our experience, this is an iterative process:
- Determine the urgency of the change, and sort the list of projects accordingly. Ask management to give a first “Stop here, that is enough” decision, going down the list. Preferably, we identify waves of changes that will make investment easier to digest. That means running through this activity several times.
- Identify any interdependencies, and make sure that all “accepted” projects are free of punitive interdependencies with projects that will be undertaken later.
- Roughly estimate the amount and cost of change. Show the urgency list again, this time with investment figures attached. Management will most probably change their cutoff decision again, taking projects into a later stage.
This activity yields a robust investment plan plus the first rough draft of a program plan. How much Automation?  All the process changes proposed in the second step were done without thinking about the introduction of automation. Some processes are already automated, some are not. Since Innovation requires a company to speed up its internal data flows, we might have to concede that certain, currently manual processes need to be automated.
This stage determines the amount of automation that needs to be newly introduced to the organization. It will yield a final cost estimate for the investment. In this context, automation is seen as a Good-To-Have. If there is no money left to invest in automation, the processes will have to implemented manually at first. This is sometimes a prudent decision, especially if the processes in question are not yet firm. There is no greater sink hole for automation that a shifting process. This last step provides upper management with a solid understanding how the “How” will change for the people at the front lines. In other words: it will give the first glimpse of how much resistance will surface, and where.
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Innovation 
