Michael
Hammer
Interview
MBA in één dag®
In dit miniboekje vindt u meer informatie over Michael Hammer. 1 Kijk voor meer tips, foto’s en videomateriaal op www.mbain1dag.nl MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
CV Michael Hammer •
Michael Hammer werd geboren in 1948.
•
Hij werd opgeleid als elektrotechnisch ingenieur aan het Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) en promoveerde aan dezelfde universiteit.
•
Vervolgens was hij lange tijd verbonden aan het MIT als docent en als hoogleraar informatica. Hij doceerde tegelijkertijd ook aan de business school van het MIT, de Sloan School of Management.
•
Daarna werkte hij als directeur van zijn eigen advies- en trainingsbureau Hammer & Company, schreef boeken en artikelen en gaf lezingen.
•
Michael Hammer overleed in september 2008 op 60-jarige leeftijd.
2 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Michael Hammer
MBA in ® één dag
3 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
An interview with Dr. Michael Hammer Interview by Debbie Read. Dr. Michael Hammer is the driving force behind the business process revolution. He is the originator of both reengineering and the process enterprise, concepts that have changed forever how businesses around the world do business. Thousands of companies have turned his ideas into practice and profit.
Dr. Hammer is the author of four books, including the international bestseller Reengineering the Corporation, which Forbes ranked as one of the three most important business books of the past 20 years. His latest book is The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade. His articles have appeared in periodicals from Harvard Business Review to The Economist, and his work has been featured in every major business publication. An engineer by training, Dr. Hammer’s research and teachings focus on how to transform business operations; his work is relentlessly pragmatic and immediately applicable. Dr. Hammer was for many years a professor
of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he is currently a visiting Professor at MIT and a Fellow at Oxford University. He is a founder of several high-technology companies, and he was named by Time as one of America’s 25 most influential individuals. First of all, a very warm welcome to you. You are known as the originator of business reengineering. This discipline has gained something of a negative reputation over the years because many projects have often resulted in a number of layoffs. What would be your response to the critics? Dr. Michael Hammer: The association of
4 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
The principles, ideas, and techniques in that book are as relevant today as they were then. On the other, there is much that I have
they do, those layoffs were inevitable with or without reengineering. The essence of reengineering is to eliminate unnecessary work, not jobs. By doing so, a company’s operations become faster, less complex, and less labour-intensive. Companies want growth, and freeing people of unnecessary work allows them to do more productive work for customers that will help to grow the business. The term “reengineering” became very popular in the 1990s, and some companies used it to describe projects that were nothing more than downsizing. As a result, the term acquired some negative baggage. I suggest to those who persist in equating reengineering with layoffs to look at the real experiences of companies who have done true reengineering, rather than base their opinions on second-hand reports.
learned since that book was published. Perhaps most importantly, I have learned that reengineering (or business process redesign, as it is often called now) is just part of an even larger undertaking: orienting and managing an enterprise around its end-to-end business processes. This entails creating a processcentred management structure, familiarizing all personnel with processes and inculcating them in process thinking, measuring processes on an ongoing basis, and taking appropriate interventions (of which reengineering is only one) to ensure that these processes continue to perform well. The reorientation of enterprises around their processes is in many ways a reversal of the Industrial Revolution, or at least of the principles that underlay it, and so will take decades to play out.
According to an article on Fastcompany. com, your first book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, has been “widely interpreted as getting rid of human beings”. What is your response to this? Dr. Michael Hammer: My response is that I would urge whoever made this assertion to read my books and other writings; I am
Your website states that the centrepiece of your work is the concept of business process. Can you explain more about this, and how it can help companies to improve their operating performance?
hard-pressed to imagine on what they base this statement. Reengineering the Corporation was written over a decade ago. Have your ideas changed in this time? Dr. Michael Hammer: On the one hand, there is almost nothing in Reengineering the Corporation that I would now reject.
Interview
reengineering with layoffs is a persistent myth. Most real reengineering projects do not lead to layoffs, and to the extent that
Dr. Michael Hammer: Process simply means end-to-end work, as opposed to piecemeal, activity-level work. Focusing on processes, as opposed to tasks, is a fundamental change in how we regard work. Improving the productivity of individual tasks is of course a useful thing to do, but no longer represents a major opportunity for organizations seeking to improve performance. The real problems in contemporary operations are not found in individual tasks themselves but in how tasks are combined together to create whole processes. 5
MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
“Companies that concentrate on their processes by designing them, measuring them, managing them, and constantly improving them are able to achieve sustained high levels of operating performance.” Conventional processes are rife with the nonvalue-adding work that is an artefact of poorly integrated tasks; this non-value-adding work is the root cause of the high costs, slow cycle times, errors, complexity, and inflexibility that bedevil modern organizations. This nonvalue-adding work can not be simply eliminated nor is it addressed through conventional productivity improvement. Rather the process as a whole must be reconsidered and new ways of combining its tasks together must be found. This entails rethinking who does the work, in what order it is done, where it is done, and the like. Companies that concentrate on their processes by designing them, measuring them, managing them, and constantly improving them are able to achieve sustained high levels of operating performance. In your opinion, what is the best way to implement operational innovations? Dr. Michael Hammer:There are two answers to this question: first, from the top; second, in terms of processes. That is, operational innovation will not succeed unless it is backed by senior most management. Operational innovation is highly disruptive, changing not just patterns of work but power structures within the company, and so it will inevitably founder on the shoals
of inertia and resistance unless driven from the top. Business processes are the right units for operational innovation: rethinking smaller-grained activities is unlikely to have much effect, and coarsergrained units are too abstract. You have recently been quoted as saying that “Reengineering was just a warm-up act for the collaborative economy.” Can you elaborate on this? Dr. Michael Hammer: Until now, most process redesign has taken place within the four walls of an enterprise. Accelerating product development, improving the accuracy of order fulfilment, lowering the cost of procurement: these are all instances of enterprise process redesigns. The new wave of process redesign focuses on processes that cross enterprise as well as functional boundaries; that is, the “end-to-end” of these processes extends across different companies. Supply chain, for instance, is a process that runs from the customer’s customer to the supplier’s supplier; collaborative product development is a process through which a company and its suppliers work together to develop new products. Rethinking these interenterprise processes entails unprecedented inter-enterprise collaboration and can deliver extraordinary benefits. In the long run, doing so will force us to rethink the meaning of enterprise boundaries and what defines and comprises a company. In your most recent book, The Agenda, you claim that “just as a generation of investors was permanently scarred by the Great Depression, a generation of managers has been transformed by the collapse of the bubble of the late
6 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Dr. Michael Hammer: For a time in the 1990s, there was a widespread attitude that succeeding at business was actually quite easy: all it took was a good idea and the gumption to implement it. The dot-com crash dispensed with this fiction and reintroduced a healthy reality into how businesspeople thought. Most of the managers with whom I speak no longer take success for granted nor as a natural right. They are constantly peering over their shoulders; they recall how some of the most highly regarded companies of recent years have been brought nearly to the point of extinction. Even the most successful executives now recognize that they are at the mercy of customers with unprecedented power, of determined competitors, of constant technological change, and so they are resolved not to rest on their laurels. This is very healthy for them, their companies, and their economies. My work offers managers like these tools for ensuring that their companies constantly raise the level of their performance and so do not fall victim to the relentless challenges of today’s business environment. In The Agenda you also state that “the challenges of management are eternal and extraordinarily difficult”. In your opinion what are the biggest challenges facing managers today? Dr. Michael Hammer:Today’s executives face innumerable challenges, but the most fundamental one is that power has moved, and continues to move, from the
makers and providers of goods and services to their customers. For the first time in economic history, we are living in a customerdriven world. The rise of India and China, globalization, rapid technological change, the Internet, commoditization, and a host of other phenomena are all aspects of, or contributors to, this fundamental change. Most companies have not yet come to terms with the implications of this shift, and doing so will require deep and extensive change in how they are organized, operated, and managed.
Interview
1990s. They have become fearful of their environment and uncertain about their futures.” What do you mean by this and how will your book help these managers?
On a different note, what interests you outside of your professional life? Dr. Michael Hammer:My personal interests are rather eclectic: film, literature, politics, art, ancient history, and others. My primary nonprofessional interest, however, is my family. And finally, who has had the most profound effect on your professional outlook, and why? Dr. Michael Hammer:I suspect that the biggest influence on my thinking has come from my teachers at MIT, who instilled in all of us undergraduates the imperative to think things through from first principles and never to accept the conventional wisdom. I have applied these lessons in all the fields in which I have worked, and found them to be universally applicable and valuable.
Bron: Institute of Internal Auditors
7 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Just do it –
interview with author Michael Hammer Internal Auditor, June, 1998 by Christy Chapman. If you’ve read Michael Hammer’s work, you might have the impression that he thinks internal control and internal auditing should go the way of the dinosaur. His books Reengineering the Corporation, The Reengineering Revolution, and Beyond Reengineering extol the benefits of streamlined processes with fewer hand-offs and check points in other words, with fewer internal controls and audits.
In a recent interview with Internal Auditor, Dr. Hammer shed a different light on his beliefs about control. In fact, he says, control and internal auditing do have a role to play in these streamlined environments; it’s just not the role you might expect. In your messages about process reengineering, you maintain that activities such as follow-up, approval, reconciliation, and checking are nonvalue-adding busy work that do nothing to help us provide the best product to
our customers. These busy work tasks, however, have been mainstays of the control environment. Where do internal controls fit in the new process-centered company? Control itself is still an important corporate element, but we have to separate the mechanism of control from the goal of control. Controls don’t exist to eliminate the theoretical possibility of there being any abuse, but to create a situation in which the aggregate amount of abuse is in the right ratio to the cost of preventing that abuse.
8 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
search the electronic records of completed transactions for inappropriate patterns of utilization. There are also other forms of
control, and (2) there is no such thing as free control. Control is expensive; and almost any control system you design can be subverted. The challenge is to find the right balance. Organizations have to figure out how to achieve the best return cost ratio for their control efforts just as they do for any other organizational activity.
control, such as credit limits on the card. The lesson to be learned is that it is possible to sacrifice transactional level controls and still achieve adequate levels of overall control at a much lower cost. The control mechanism is different, but the goal is the same.
Certain traditional control mechanisms, such as audits and the segregation of responsibilities, now cost too much and often fail to deliver the required level of control. We need to find new ways to accomplish the goal of control.
Such control adjustments are increasingly common, and we’re beginning to see a new set of control principles emerge. The purchasing strategy I’ve mentioned demonstrates a shift toward exception-based controls using computer systems to recognize patterns, and from transactional level controls to aggregate controls.
Can you give us an example? Consider the purchasing function. In the past, each purchase request had to go through a complex control process involving lots of paperwork, approvals, and hand-offs between individuals. When you totaled it all up, the control costs for each purchase often exceeded $100. For an item priced at $100, the control mechanism automatically doubled the cost.
So, the notion of control as 100 percent preventative no longer works? That’s true. In today’s business environment, a better approach is to let things go on the front end, but have controls in place to make sure abuse doesn’t get out of hand. Then the area can be periodically reviewed after the fact. Many organizations are beginning to recognize that this kind of exception-based control is the way to go.
Obviously, that procedure only makes sense for large-ticket items. In place of this costly process, some companies have implemented the use of procurement cards. On the surface, this strategy appears to provide a much weaker, or even absent, control environment. But in fact, control hasn’t disappeared; it has just been deferred until later in the process.
Given this new concept of control, what role can internal auditors play in today’s reorganized environments? The audit organization should look at itself as a resource for the rest of the company. Internal auditors can play a vital role by helping management design new business processes so that the desired level of control is achieved, but in a more efficient fashion. Internal auditors should change their mission from simply one of “We conduct audits,” to
Instead of every transaction being controlled to the max from the beginning, companies now
Interview
Two simple control concepts are frequently overlooked, but are becoming increasingly relevant: (I) there is no such thing as perfect
9 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
“We help create the processes that achieve the level of control required for organizational success.” How can internal auditors make this change? What’s needed is a rethinking of what we mean by controls, as well as a rethinking of the role of the internal audit organization. Internal auditors who stick too closely to classical thinking are going to go down on a sinking ship. By holding to traditional images of themselves, they cut themselves off from important things going on in the organization. But audit groups who can make this philosophical shift will have a chance to create a very exciting new role for themselves and really be able to contribute much more to the organization. Some audit groups have already successfully navigated this change. Ameritech’s audit group, for example, actively contributes to process design efforts across the company. You’ve studied and advised many large, successful organizations. based on those experiences, how many internal audit departments have made this philosophical adjustment, and how many insist on the old “command-and-control” approach to their function? I think that there is reason for optimism in this area. I don’t have statistical data, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what I’ve seen. It would be very easy for me to simply say, “All of these process reengineering ideas are heresy to internal audit organizations, and they don’t want to let go.” But the truth is that many of the internal audit groups I’ve encountered have been more flexible than I might have expected.
Modern control frameworks emphasize the importance of “soft” controls, such as effective communication and decisionmaking, management philosophy, and the quality of information. What should internal audit’s role be vis-a-vis these soft controls? This is a good example of how the internal audit function has to think of itself less as an audit organization and more as a consulting organization. I don’t think that internal auditors are going to do much auditing of soft controls. But I do believe that internal auditing should play a consultative role in those difficult, but very important, soft control areas. The audit group’s role should be to help the organization shape the soft control environment. They should be process design consultants, advising management on how to create a culture in which people believe you have to be accurate and ethical in the first place. They should not, however, take on a role that enables management to think, “Well, it’s up to the audit police to worry about that.” Many auditors would respond that they’ve not been able to sell management on the idea of internal auditors serving as internal consultants. What advice do you have for winning management’s endorsement? Nothing succeeds like success. In other words, do it, and then they’ll believe you. It’s harder to sell a concept. Find some opportunity to work with someone, and then show management what you’ve achieved. That achievement gives you credibility.
10 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
CSA is more than a passing fad. It’s part of two broader trends. First is the one we’ve already mentioned: the auditor is playing a more consultative role in the organization. Second, control is becoming a part of everyone’s responsibility. Exercises like CSA are efforts to raise the organization’s control consciousness. They’re designed to make more people aware of areas of inadequacy and of what the consequences might be. They can then take steps on their own to try to improve the situation instead of just expecting the auditors to come out and clean up the mess.
Interview
Many internal auditors now include control self-assessment (CSA) facilitation in their services. Is CSA here to stay?
Do you believe that internal auditors can add value to their organizations? Many people in the organization - including those from finance and audit - have traditionally played bottleneck roles; but they do, in fact, have a lot to offer the organization in a consultative role. They just have to do it.
Bron: Emerald Management first
11 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Q & A: Reengineering the Supply Chain: An Interview With Michael Hammer Few business books have had the global impact of Reengineering the Corporation. In that landmark 1993 work, Dr. Michael Hammer and co-author James Champy introduced the business world to the compelling notion of reengineering—a business approach since adopted by many of the world’s most successful organizations. From the Spring 1999 issue of Supply Chain Management Review MICHAEL HAMMER and FRANCIS J. QUINN Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/1999
For Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reengineering has little to do with downsizing, as many critics have suggested. Rather, it’s a whole new way of thinking about how work gets done—and who does the work. Or as more formally defined in his book: “Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed.”
Hammer’s subsequent books—The Reengi neering Revolution (HarperBusiness, 1995) and Beyond Reengineering (HarperBusiness, 1996)—built upon the earlier work and advanced the concept of the process-centered organization. As president of Hammer & Co., he now gives business seminars attended by thousands of people every year. And in those seminars, Hammer has been emphasizing a powerful new organizational capability—the reengineered supply chain. As he notes at the very beginning
12 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
That’s phenomenally important because there is a limit to how much you can achieve within your own four walls. The next big
Supply Chain Management Review Editor Francis J. Quinn interviewed Hammer recently at his offices in Cambridge, Mass.
wave of opportunity lies in knocking down the walls between you and your customers, and between you and your suppliers.
Q: In your writings and course offerings recently, you’ve emphasized the supply chain and supply chain management. Why is this so important ?
Q: You’ve said that most existing supply chains are “artifacts of the past.” What did you mean by that ?
A: The supply chain is really the cutting edge of contemporary reengineering. Reengineering started with a set of processes inside companies, typically for order fulfillment and its cousins, manufacturing and procurement. Many companies have made a lot of progress reengineering these processes, and that work continues.
Interview
of our interview, the supply chain is “at the cutting edge of reengineering.”
A: There was a set of assumptions built into the ways in which companies have traditionally worked together. One assumption I call the “Annie Oakley” theory of management. In Annie Get Your Gun, there was a song titled “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.” So the presumption is that any company can do anything or everything. Another assumption is based on the thinking
The next wave builds on that work in various directions. One, for example, is integrating the back office with the front office—extending reengineering into sales and marketing. Another critical area is supply chain. Now, I should be clear about what I mean by “supply chain.” Unfortunately, the term has been tossed around so widely of late, it’s become almost devoid of meaning in some cases. To me, supply chain does not primarily refer to intra-company activities, such as procurement, or scheduling, or logistics. They are all good things, but that’s not what I mean by “supply chain.” When I say supply chain, I mean intercompany processes and relationships—how pairs of companies, or even larger groups of companies, coordinate their individual activities to make things better for everybody.
of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was a political philosopher who wrote a book called Leviathan. In it, he described society as “the war of each against all.” And that is the way companies often operate. They look at themselves as sort of a self-contained medieval enterprise, a city-state if you like. Everybody else around them is their enemy. In fact, many companies operate as though their customers are their number one enemy, their suppliers are their number two enemies, and other departments inside their company are their number three enemies. Q: And this model remains in place today in many companies ? A: Yes. That’s the old model, and it’s awfully hard to uproot. It represents patterns of thinking and behavior that have become 13
MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
institutionalized. Let me give you an illustration. I visited one large company,
inventory holds that the vendor actually is in a better position than the retailer to
a major manufacturer, whose president had developed an entirely new cooperative approach to dealing with suppliers—really, just what you would want. A bunch of the suppliers’ senior executives were called into the company to discuss the new approach. At first, it was all cooperation and mutual advantage. Then comes time for the working sessions, where the rank and file purchasing agents get involved. As soon as they come in, they pick up a whip and a chair and revert to their old behavior.
manage the inventory, so the vendor should do it. The basic premise of supply chain reengineering is that if you improve the total system, everybody comes out ahead.
Q: In Beyond Reengineering, you enumerated a set of core principles of business reengineering. Do those same principles apply to supply chain management ? A: There is one very important principle that we have to remember in supply chain reengineering. I’d put it very simply: Work should be done by whoever is in the best position to do it. That is a very mild-sounding assertion, but it’s really quite revolutionary. In traditional situations, work is done by whoever directly benefits from it. Or work is done by everyone, repeatedly. The principle should be that, in thinking across an extended supply chain, work should not be done more than once. And the person doing the work should be the one who is best positioned to do it--whether or not he or she is the one who immediately benefits from it. Let’s take something as simple as retailer inventory management. Traditionally, it’s the retailer’s inventory, so he should manage it. Yet the whole principle of vendor-managed
Q: How do you break down those tough internal and external walls and build the inter-enterprise processes with your suppliers and customers so necessary for supply chain reengineering ? A: Your question can be interpreted in many ways. Let me try one approach: The hardest part is changing attitudes and behaviors. I think the most important thing you can do is to realign measurements and rewards. For example, there are numerous cases where, again, vendor-managed inventory has been hard to implement. One of the reasons is that the sales reps are still being measured and rewarded on volume. But when you go to a vendor-managed inventory situation, your short-term volume might decrease. On the other side, the purchasing agents are being measured on cost of goods. Now total landed costs will go down with a reengineered supply chain, but not the purchase costs. Yet the purchasing people are not being measured on total landed cost. So you have a wonderful new system, except everybody’s incentives are pushing against it. I know of one pharmaceutical company that had a lot of success by redefining its sales reps’ bonuses. They are no longer based primarily on volume or profit. The number one factor now is achievement of customer objectives. In the beginning of
14 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Interview
the year, the customer would say, “Here are the objectives that I want to achieve.” At the end of the year, the vendor would go back and see how well the customer had achieved those objectives. The sales rep would then be rewarded on that basis. All of a sudden, the reps become focused on what really counts, which is supporting the strategy and enabling the customer. This is in contrast with the old behavior, which is just pushing product even though that is not in the customer’s interest. Q: You emphasize that processes need to give real value to the customer. How do you determine which supply chain processes have customer value and which do not ? A: One technique that is widely used is to simply map the process end to end, including both what you do and what the customer does. Then ask yourself, Are there redundancies here? Is anything being done more than once? What could be eliminated without affecting the ultimate outcome? Are there things that have only indirect value and need to be minimized? Q: What are some of the skills and attitudes required to be an effective supply chain professional today ? A: A lot of skills, knowledge, and attitudes are required. On the knowledge side, people have to understand the overall business. It is not enough to know your job. You really have to understand the value proposition you’re offering the customer, what the customer’s needs are, what the competition is doing, where the money goes, and what the cost
structure is. You’ve got to know enough about the larger environment so that you can make good decisions. A supply chain professional today is no longer just a “spear carrier,” someone who performs a particular role. You really have to be—and you used the right word—a “professional” who assumes broad responsibility. To support that responsibility, you need a lot more breadth of knowledge and expertise. The skills required are things like problem analysis, problem solving, and decision making. Teamwork is a critical skill both within the company and with customers or suppliers. These are skills that we haven’t had occasion to develop all that much in the past. In terms of attitudes, you need to really care about results … a sense of responsibility, a customer focus, a self-starter. These are some of the characteristics needed if you are to make a larger contribution, as opposed to merely doing a job.
15 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Q: Are most people who have grown up under the old organizational structure able to make this transition ? A: This is one of my favorite questions. I ask it in all of my seminars. The attendees and I together will work out the characteristics needed in the new environment, and then I ask them just that question. “What percentage of the people in your organization have what it takes to thrive in this kind of environment?” The answer we usually come up with is that there are really three groups broken down into 20-60-20 percent. The first 20 percent are already there; they can’t wait for the changes and are champing at the bit. They’re frustrated. They want to make it happen and they want to do it now. There are another 20 percent who will never, ever get it. And it is not because of any genetic defect. Rather, it’s because they have been so thoroughly acculturated in the old ways of doing things that they can’t let go. Then there are the 60 percent on the fence. They have the potential, but aren’t there yet—and they need a lot of help. They need reassurance, education, support, coaching. I often quote Casey Stengel on this: “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who haven’t made up their minds.” That is the 60 percent in the middle. Q: Is there anyone within the organization who is particularly well suited to forge the re-engineered supply chain? Or is the leadership role really up for grabs ? A: I think it’s up for grabs. I don’t think that the job title is the issue; I think it is personal characteristics. I’ve said before the type of person who is really going to take the lead 16 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Interview
is someone who has a big-picture process way of thinking, is willing to try new things and take some risks, and is determined to make things happen. And they need very thick skin. Q: We talk and write so much about the supply chain’s competitive advantage. Can an effective supply chain, in fact, give you a competitive edge in the marketplace ? A: That is not a simple question. I would answer that there is no such thing as a lasting competitive advantage for two reasons: the world changes and competitors catch up. So, can a superior supply chain offer you a lasting competitive edge? No. However, if you implement a better supply chain than your competition, that can put you in a better position, competitively, for the short term. You’ll have structurally lower costs, faster cycle times, lower inventory numbers. But at the same time, every company has to realize it cannot rest on its laurels. Vendormanaged inventory was a real slick thing a few years ago. Now it has become de rigeur. So, yesterday’s competitive advantage is today’s competitive necessity. Q: And that could be true with the supply chain ?
A: Absolutely. So, you have got to look at it as a platform to the next step, rather than an end unto itself. Q: Are there any companies that you believe have done a particularly good job in using the supply chain to gain that, albeit, temporary advantage ? A: Well, I suspect you have written about many of them. Clearly, on the inbound side, Wal-Mart is a real master of this, right? Chrysler is among the very best. In a way, Dell has obviously built up its whole strategy around supply chain. IBM is doing some very good things in supply chain. Goodyear and 3M are two others. Q: How effectively are companies using the outsourcing option in their supply chain strategy ? A: They have barely begun. Most organizations have a whole set of anxieties when it comes to outsourcing. A few have been able to overcome them. Chrysler, for example, has done some very interesting things in giving more responsibility to its trucking partners. The carriers are not just picking up and delivering, but taking responsibility for coordinating the whole movement of the 17
MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
freight from the vendor to the production line. Ryder, to give another example, does more than just deliver copier machines for Xerox. The Ryder driver actually installs the equipment and trains the customer. It’s a rather remarkable idea. That is the kind of cutting-edge thing you need to be doing.
you write to the trucking companies, then the supply chain isn’t in your purview. But if you take the broader point of view we’ve been talking about—realizing that it’s not trucking, but really overall company costs and delivery to the customer that counts—you start to think differently.
Q: So outsourcing goes far beyond saying “Instead of running my own warehouse or trucking fleet, I am going to turn it over to an outside provider?”
Q: Will supply chain relationships of the future look different from today’s ?
A: Yes, that’s just the first step. There is just so much more that the transportation or logistics services provider can do. Remember that the whole theme of outsourcing is not just to save money. More importantly, it lets you focus on what’s important to you. It’s a way of combining processes to get them done better than if done separately. Q: You’re talking about a whole different mindset ? A: It gets back to the issue of measurement and incentives. You see, if all you’re thinking about is minimizing trucking costs, then you won’t want to deal with the bigger picture. If you’re a traditional transportation manager and you’re measured by the size of the checks
A: I think so. More and more, we’re going to be seeing a change in the billing and payment cycle. It will become an increasingly automated and even outsourced activity. Instead of my having to have a receivables organization and you having to have a payables organization, we can operate so that EDI transactions automatically trigger payment that’s under control of the third party. Somebody on the network will be observing the order that you send me, the ASN I send you, the acknowledgment that you send me. And when they notice the acknowledgment, 28 days later they debit your account and credit my account. I never send you a bill, you never send me a check. We concentrate on what’s important to us and get rid of the whole financial side. I also see manufacturers’ production increasingly being driven by customers’
18 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Interview
consumption. In other words, I drive my manufacturing scheduling not on my sales forecast, but on your actual utilization. This is an extension of the pull approach. We’ve already made progress in moving from push to pull, but now you are not really even going to order from me. I’m going to observe your usage pattern or your sales pattern, and use that to drive not only my delivery to you, but also my whole production cycle. Looking forward, I also see vendor-managed inventory being extended to the consumer—an idea I’ve discussed with a number of consumergoods companies. As a manufacturer, I would have a profile of you and your household and I would know how much of various products you use. Let’s say that once every three weeks a box of products with toothpaste, shampoo, and so forth automatically shows up at your doorstep without your having to make a choice. It is automatically charged to your credit card and you don’t have to go shopping for the stuff. Now, unless I make a mistake, I have you as my steady customer. Think of it as, say, a “Toothpaste of the Month” club. There is a whole set of basic products whose consumption can be effectively modeled in this way. We are starting to see some delivery services implementing this, but much more needs to be done.
Now, this isn’t strictly supply chain, but I think it is related … I see a revolution in pricing, whereby pricing is increasingly going to become highly contingent. I think we’re going to see the end of list prices. If I sell you something, it is going to be based on today’s production and today’s demand. And tomorrow it might be quite different. Q: What about the Internet’s role in tomorrow’s supply chain ? A: Technology like the Internet will be the enabler for a whole new generation of supply chain changes. More changes will happen in the supply chain over the next five years than have occurred over the last 15. Michael Hammer is president of Hammer & Co. and the author of The Reengineering Revolution (HarperBusiness, 1995) and Beyond Reengineering (HarperBusiness, 1996). Francis J. Quinn is editor of Supply Chain Management Review.
Bron: Supply Chain Management Review
19 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Michael Hammer Door Ben Tiggelaar | 16-10-2008 Managementgoeroe is een beroep waarin je oud kunt worden, maar het was Michael Hammer niet gegund. Een paar weken geleden overleed hij aan een hersenbloeding op 60-jarige leeftijd. Erg jammer. Vooral nu er net een fijne crisis aankomt.
20 MBA in ĂŠĂŠn dag | Michael Hammer
Column
Michael Hammer werd wereldberoemd in de jaren negentig met het idee van business reengineering. Reengineering draait om de vraag: ‘Stel dat je met al je kennis en ervaring vandaag opnieuw zou beginnen met je bedrijf, zou je het dan weer precies net zo inrichten?’ Volgens Hammer horen bedrijven georgani seerd te zijn rond klantgerichte processen en niet rond functionele afdelingen. Dus niet: marketingmensen bij marketingmensen en p&o’ers bij p&o’ers, maar juist een mix van functies gegroepeerd rond telkens één helder proces voor telkens één duidelijke klantengroep. Geen gefragmenteerde afde lingen die alleen op hun deeltaakje focussen, maar mensen met brede takenpaketten die allemaal weten om welk einddoel het gaat. Reengineering is bijvoorbeeld een oplossing voor allerlei problemen in de gezondheidszorg, waar de meeste artsen nog altijd op lichaamsdeel gesorteerd langs elkaar heen werken. Reengineering is ook wat nodig is in de financiële sector waar veel marketingmensen al jarenlang niet meer doorgronden wat ze bij productontwikkeling bedenken, maar
intussen wel de woekerpolissen volle-krachtvooruit verkopen aan hun publiek. Ook de crisis waar we nu inzitten, heeft hiermee te maken. Jarenlang heeft de ene kennis-silo in de ene bank onbegrijpelijke kredietprodukten doorverkocht aan de andere kennis-silo in een bank verderop. Het gevolg is een financiële fragmentatiebom. Een bedrijf echt reengineeren is niet makkelijk. Het concept werd in de jaren negentig vaak gebruikt als excuus voor massaontslagen. Iets waar Hammer zich vaak om opwond in interviews. Slechts weinig bedrijven herschiepen ook daadwerkelijk hun processen. Misschien ook wel logisch, want écht opnieuw beginnen, gewoon vanaf een wit blaadje papier je bedrijf proces-voor-proces helemaal weer opbouwen, dat is niet eenvoudig. Dat gaat alleen wanneer iedereen ervan is doordrongen dat er nu écht iets moet gebeuren. Dat lukt alleen als er een grote crisis gaande is. Het is doodzonde dat Hammer dit nu moet missen. 21
MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
MBA in één dag: ultrakort en tóch volledig Wat verklaart het succes van MBA in één dag? Waarin zit de kracht? MBA in één dag biedt antwoord op twee fundamentele vragen van managers: Vraag 1: Hoe blijf ik bij? U heeft een méér dan volle werkweek. Het bijhouden van de managementliteratuur schiet er dan bij in. Dat is logisch, maar ook zonde. Want juist met de inzichten uit managementboeken kunt u effectiever en slimmer werken. En dat bespaart weer veel tijd. Maar welke boeken zijn écht goed en relevant voor u als manager? Hoe scheidt u het kaf van het koren? Wat moet u lezen en wat niet? Iemand moet een selectie maken. Vraag 2: Hoe zat het ook alweer? Tijdens uw opleiding heeft u de boeken van goeroes als Henry Mintzberg, Philip Kotler of Michael Porter gelezen. Maar dat is alweer een hele tijd geleden. Terwijl u juist nú deze kennis zou kunnen toepassen: hoe geef ik beter leiding? Hoe organiseer ik mijn bedrijf het beste? Hoe communiceer ik de strategie van mijn organisatie? Eigenlijk zouden Mintzberg, Kotler, Porter en al die anderen eens opnieuw voorbij moeten komen. Bijblijven + opfrissen = MBA in één dag In ‘MBA in één dag’ smelten deze twee vragen samen in een wervelend seminarprogramma. Ben Tiggelaar behandelt de greatest hits in management. Hij selecteerde de beste inzichten uit acht meter managementboeken met maar één criterium: wat kan een manager hier praktisch mee? Morgen al! Daarmee is MBA in één dag uitgegroeid tot de snelste manier om managementkennis op te frissen en aan te scherpen. Een MBA-opleiding in één dag: dat kan toch niet? Uiteraard is dit seminar geen volwaardige MBA opleiding. En u krijgt ook geen titel om achter uw naam te zetten. Maar toch: managen is een praktisch vak en MBA in één dag is ontdaan van alle fratsen die veel opleidingen zo onnodig hoogdravend maken. Méér dan de inzichten uit dit seminar heeft u niet nodig om effectief te zijn als manager.
22 MBA in één dag | Michael Hammer
Ben Tiggelaar ‘MBA in één dag’ staat onder de bevlogen leiding van bestsellerauteur en toptrainer Ben Tiggelaar. Ben verzorgt sprankelende seminars waarin hij ‘inhoud’ en ‘vorm’ op een perfecte manier samenbrengt. Een dag Tiggelaar is beslist géén luierdag: Ben hanteert een hoog tempo en presenteert ontzettend veel inzichten, eyeopeners en praktische tips. Hij brengt zijn verhaal daarnaast op een bevlogen, enthousiaste en interactieve manier, waardoor u toch de hele dag op het puntje van uw stoel zit.
Reacties Dit zeggen deelnemers over Ben Tiggelaars ‘MBA in één dag’... “Met een TGV door managementland!” Martijn Kamp, Getronics PinkRoccade “Waanzinnig interessant. Een waardevolle vertaalslag van zoveel ‘guru’ informatie.” Marinus van der Steen, Ministerie van Defensie “Hier heb ik jaren naar uitgekeken! Geweldige opstap naar verdere verdieping. Uitermate motiverend om een stapje terug te doen van de day-to-day brandblusmomenten.” Karel Burger, Nielsen Nederland “Bomvol. Genoeg ideeën opgedaan om komend jaar mee vooruit te kunnen.” Marie Jose Klaren, Universiteit Leiden “Beste scholing van de laatste vijf jaar!” A. Janse, Chr. Scholengemeenschap Vincent van Gogh “Super. Volledige overview. Ultrasnel. Precies zoals ik het wilde.” Aad van den Boogaart, Aranea Consult
Ga naar www.mbain1dag.nl voor een uitgebreid programma
MBA in één dag®
Michael Hammer Op MBA in één dag passeren vele goeroes de revue. In dit boekje vindt u bij wijze van ‘luxe knipselkrant’ een aantal geselecteerde artikelen van of over Michael Hammer. Veel leesplezier! www.mbain1dag.nl
Vormgeving: Adept vormgevers, Haarlem Productie: DenkProducties
Ook op www.mbain1dag.nl: reacties van deelnemers, foto’s, meer tips en veel videomateriaal