The latest management philosophy coming out of the USA is all about the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE). Amongst others, this is being championed by Barton Goldenberg of ISM Inc., a company of strategic advisors on Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

What is a real-time enterprise?

• Well it is defined by David Flint of Gartner Research as an organisation which competes more effectively by reducing the time taken for its critical business processes. These time reductions may be of the order of months or years for the development of new complex products such as a new range of cars; or a few seconds off an individual production line process. It may also mean making management decisions faster through immediate access to all the necessary information. The ultimate aim is to reduce the work in progress in order to allow the company to respond rapidly to changing circumstances.

Dell is a good example of an RTE as it continually works to reduce latency in the supply chain and builds computers to demand with ever-shorter lead times. Another example is the US clothing designer Zara which can get a new design from initial concept to the shops in 10 days.

The major advantages of the RTE are:

• The increase in its agility in a rapidly changing market place


• The cost savings achieved by taking up fewer man hours in a process
• The cost savings achieved from reducing the quantity of stock

All the experts on RTE emphasize that RTE is not about technology, it is about management looking at each process and working out where changes can be made to improve efficiency and speed it up. David Flint describes it as the moment of management outrage: looking at the time a process takes and saying, this is outrageous, and then coupling this with the determination to improve.

Even though RTE isnt about technology the process of improvement will inevitably lead to technology issues, and there are two important areas which can benefit from new technology. One is the area of process flow i.e. getting data to flow through a company in seconds so that employees have instant access to the information they need without waiting on human input. The second is the management dashboard enabling the manager to view in real time the key performance indicators that allow him to see problems arising and to act quickly to solve them. The faster this information is communicated to the manager the quicker the company can react and make necessary changes.

For the SME all this may sound like big company stuff, but every company (even a one man band) has its processes and the smaller the company the more important it is to be agile and efficient because it is often harder to compete in other ways such as price.

CRM systems such as Sage CRM MME can improve customer facing processes enormously encouraging the users to keep good records of customer contact and helping to avoid key data being kept in key employees heads. Also the increasing use of common open platforms for all business systems like MS SQL Server etc make sharing information between systems much easier. Examples of this are the ability to pass information between Sage CRM MME and the Sage accounts system and the ease of writing custom links between Sage CRM MME and other databases.

One major new technology to help the speed of flow of information is Sage CRM MME, which will run on a palm top. This allows the mobile user to dial directly into the central office system and make changes or receive updates without needing to synchronise data held on a laptop. This can make decision making on the road quicker and easier.

Remember though: RTE is about the management of processes in an organisation. The first step is to work out where the major problems are and develop a plan to improve them. After the plan comes the technology to make the plan work. Never allow the technology to take control of the process!