WBSRocks: Scaling Growth with AI, Enterprise Software, and Digital Transformation

Send us Fan Mail When I was planning for this episode, I had a conversation with a friend that I could never forget. She was planning to resign from her company. So I inquired why she was planning to resign. To give you a little background, she was very well established in her career, spent roughly 20 years, and held an executive position at her current company. Her company had experienced massive...

Send us Fan Mail Irrespective of whether you are an owner who would like changes in your organization or a leader trying to convince the owners or boards for transformational changes, the journey of change is lonely. You might come across super enthusiastic collaborators who will lose interest if they don't see an immediate return. You might also come across several detractors who will take e...

Send us Fan Mail An average manufacturing facility may have ten operations to produce a part. The process of creating a chip goes through at least 500 steps. Some of these processes use significantly expensive machines and materials. They also require timely preventive maintenance and sophisticated scheduling. Operational improvements at such facilities could mean a massive difference to your bott...

Send us Fan Mail Planning through growth inflection points is difficult. You have to figure out how to find revenue. And then, if you are not able to fulfill the demand, the growth may fire back. Planning for growth requires you to build your multi-year sales and operating plan. But the most crucial part is its execution. The more alignment you have across your cross-functional groups, the easier...

Send us Fan Mail Stock keeping unit (SKU) could be a dummy number, and you might feel how important a number could be. Well, your SKU is a binding thread that ties all your business processes that interact with your products. You could quickly outgrow your SKU numbering strategy if you don't have a flexible numbering scheme to accommodate your near future requirements. The SKU numbers could a...

Send us Fan Mail Most manufacturers struggle with cross-functional collaboration, especially when it comes to engineering handoff because it requires going beyond the engineering perspective. Engineers need to think from the perspective of consumers. These consumers could be anywhere from machinists, assembly technicians, welders, inspectors, and purchasing. This thinking requires several changes...

Send us Fan Mail Paid advertising could make a massive difference to your pipeline and bottom line if done right. It could also help you optimize your organic search campaigns as you would have access to detailed insights into your customer journeys and customer behaviors. But mastering paid advertising is easier said than done. It requires you to make the entire journey congruent, starting from w...

Send us Fan Mail Manufacturers have traditionally been problem solvers. While the problem-solving mindset helps create amazing products, the same skill fires back in designing the processes. This problem-solving approach leads each department to make their decisions independently and buy software to solve their problems, limiting interoperability. This approach also promotes the culture of organiz...

Send us Fan Mail If you are trying to penetrate an account, the involvement of their procurement department is the last thing you want to see as they are hard negotiators on price. Selling to FMCG buyers could even be more challenging as they need to move fast and make quick decisions. In 2021, most offerings are fairly competitive, so you could only do so much while negotiating with FMCG buyers....

Send us Fan Mail Manufacturers carry thousands of products, and each of them requires several materials with their own dependencies. This chain can go on and could feel cyclical. That's how complex is our supply chain. One critical component could block the production and further impact the production of products that may depend upon it. The best way to mitigate the supply chain issues is to...

Send us Fan Mail There is a lot that goes into planning for a warehouse. Some warehouses are complex, while others may not be as complex depending upon the shipment types and the influx of shipments. If you don't plan well, it may lead to poor utilization of labor and inefficiencies in the warehouse. It may also lead to missing sales opportunities due to the unavailability of products or miss...

Send us Fan Mail Demand planning is a double-edged sword, and it's tough to predict. Demand planning requires you to plan enough and then be nimble and agile while tweaking the demand as the market condition changes. Most companies take an algorithmic approach to their demand planning, resulting in wasting critical resources. The agile approach is especially relevant to SMBs as they may not h...

Send us Fan Mail Complying with regulatory bodies is more than just producing the documentation when they ask for it. If the regulatory body is as stringent as FDA, they look for several red flags, including completeness and thoroughness of the documentation and confidence level. But speed is typically the most critical factor. Manufacturers with manual processes and fragmented systems might strug...

Send us Fan Mail Remember when you bought five shirts last time and ended up returning all? Let's face it. Consumer behavior is unpredictable. It is especially challenging for the apparel industry, where one loose thread or difference in perceived color could be the reason for return. But the supply chain planning for the apparel industry is not only complicated because of consumer behavior....

Send us Fan Mail What helps you compete in the market? Is it your unique product? Is it your operational efficiency? Is it your market segment? Or is it the alignment of your manufacturing and operational strategies with market needs and business goals? Since most manufacturers are part of a large process for their customers, simply thinking about your product's value prop may not be enough....

Send us Fan Mail If you are involved in vendor negotiations or expense management, it's hard to know if you may be overpaying for services or goods. What if there was a way to benchmark your expenses against other companies. Enter big data for expense management. These data lakes have amassed trillions of data points in the last ten years through several data sources. They have the capabiliti...

Send us Fan Mail Warehouses have been using automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) for a long time. While they have come a long way in their capabilities and along with their interactions with other newer technologies such as robotic arms or cobots, their adoption is still very low. Although ASRS systems provide excellent capabilities, the key is to deeply understand your specific needs an...

Send us Fan Mail How would you feel if you had a handful of customers with huge leverage decided to consolidate their vendors and put pressure to cut the prices further that you might not be able to afford? No one wants to be in this situation. What would you do if you faced this situation? Would you expand your operations to explore further cost reduction opportunities? Would you rather shut down...

Send us Fan Mail Whether you are releasing new parts or making changes to existing parts, you will likely go through the engineering change process (ECN). More often than not, engineering organizations are siloed from the downstream organizations and don't understand how their engineering decisions will impact the production floor. As you add more engineers to the department, the more opportu...

Send us Fan Mail SMB manufacturers and distributors in the personal care industry face unique challenges. These difficulties could be even more for organic products or the items that need to comply with FDA., such as sunscreens. They need to ensure enough demand for new products or struggle to find contract manufacturers and labs that will accept the lower batches of order. Also, since credibility...

Send us Fan Mail As procurement departments and buyers become more sophisticated, manufacturers and distributors will see more scrutiny from their customers, especially if they might be selling high-value and complex items. They have already been facing cost pressures from their customers, but now they might see an elongated sales cycle with RFPs to compete. The RFP process might increase your cos...

Send us Fan Mail Your CRM system is key to managing your customer relationships and providing the customer experience to help you stand out among your competitors. While most organizations may use some form of CRM system, the adoption rate is low. Most CRM systems are either over-engineered, making them difficult to use and maintain, or under-engineered with data quality issues, a roadblock to CRM...

Send us Fan Mail When you grow in transactions and have many low-dollar transactions, the cost of processing transactions could be higher than the expense being paid. You might also face this when you may be purchasing cheaper consumable items from one-time vendors. Understanding the cost of processing is critical as that allows you to introduce different strategies for such transactions. One such...

Send us Fan Mail Remember walking around a gym to find the weight you wanted for your next set of exercises? It could be even more frustrating and inefficient to locate a tool or asset in a large manufacturing facility or a warehouse. What if you had real-time tracking of your tools and assets that you could locate by tracking their real-time locations. The RTLS technology is powerful and helps ma...

Send us Fan Mail If you are building or upgrading your e-commerce capabilities, you are likely to evaluate several platforms. This evaluation needs to be comprehensive, covering factors ranging from legal contracts, deployment issues, customer experience needs, product model complexities, and your teams' skillset. If you chose a platform without performing due diligence, you might experience...