Table of contents
Reference Link: https://www.tracelink.com/resources/tracelink-university/opus-orchestration-architect-foundations-presented-futurelink
Moiz Khanbhai: We want this to be a bit collaborative session, last session of today and ideally, it's going through what we call a blueprint. We'll go through what is a blueprint? What's a blueprint to TraceLink and our customers? Then we'll go through a bit of brainstorming, creating a blueprint, and how much you can work individually, as pairs in a group, that's all great stuff.
We'll go through the blueprint and discussion, and then wrap up with some Q&A. You can obviously read some of this information on the slide. Has anyone ever done a blueprint or been presented a blueprint by maybe another software supplier? Any ideas? Any hands?
Tereance Puryear: Or consultancy.
Moiz: Or consultancy firm?
Audience Member: SAP implementation.
Moiz: SAP.
Tereance: Ooh.
Moiz: Ooh, nice. That might be quite a thick blueprint document. What is a blueprint? It is about going through a detailed plan of the software system like what we're proposing here in terms of MINT and TraceLink, but it's everything that the solution consulting organization captures throughout the discussions we have with you.
We'll go through a few questions that we normally ask throughout the session today. Why this session is at the end is everything that we discussed previously in terms of the different orchestrations, the different pairings, is all the information we go through.
The idea of this session is just so you're aware of the kind of questions we'll be asking when we discuss an orchestration or pairing with you just so you have an idea. I think we discussed it or someone discussed it in one of the earlier sessions this morning is, we want to understand your business.
We may have worked with you on serialization and other things, but when we're talking about MINT and digitalization of business transactions, we want to get down into the nitty gritty. We really want to understand the business processes, where the challenges are, and where the pains are.
The idea we want to do that is because we want to capture all of this in this blueprinting document, which is something that you sign off on at the end of the process. Ultimately, what the blueprint does internally for us is, it forms what we call a statement of work in terms of the services outlined to implement MINT in your organization.
Going through some of those challenges and pain points helps us do what we call a value exercise, and we'll discuss that a bit later, but show you where the value is using a more of a digital approach versus the more traditional manual approach. Any questions on that so far?
Caitlin: I think bonus points if you get on a call with your SCA and you show them the magnet board, and say this is what I want to talk about, these guys would be very excited.
Moiz: Very.
Tereance: I think one thing too to add to what Moiz mentioned is that a lot of times we chat with customers, and they have to go to other people in the organization to get sign off, buy-in, some consensus around.
This document and the discussions we had help tell the story along with your perspective from where you sit to say this is what I think is best, and here's a supporting document that gives evidence to it.
Again, it's a lot for us internally, but I think it's more for the customer to make sure, does this make sense, to Moiz's point, to the pain points we've described, challenges we're having, or strategic goals you put out from the company? Does this get us closer to those mind markets of being better as a company?
Moiz: One point I'm just going to spell out here is this first one here in terms of the IT landscape. We've asked quite a few times, the data you've received, is it going into a system? Are you typing it manually in a ERP system or WMSM material? We want to know that.
We need to understand your IT landscape because if you want to integrate with TraceLink from multiple systems, we need to know which ones and what data needs to go. Some things might need to go in a TMS system, other things might be just all living in your planning system or an ERP system.
These are the kind of conversations we have, what we call during the presales cycle to really understand your IT architecture so that we can then advice better. I'm hoping everyone can maybe read some of these questions, but this is just a short list of some of the questions that we go through discussing with our customers.
Again, with the presales organization, and we'll go through and have several meetings. We need to really go through some of the objectives and strategies that you adhere to, whether it's an IT initiative, it's a business initiative, or it's a joint strategy internally.
I think Tereance asked earlier, who has a digitization strategy in the company? When we research and look through company profiles and the annual statements and documents that you have public on your website, a lot of companies have some sort of digitalization strategy.
What does that mean for you individually within your particular area, whether you it's just the external manufacturing team that we're talking to, whether it's in logistics, whether it's talking broadly against supply chain? Corporate visions are great, but when it's all nestled down into your particular team, how does your team adhere to that overall corporate mission or objective?
That's the discussions we want to go through, as well as who should we be talking to. We could be talking to the VP of supply chain, external manufacturing groups, logistics groups, but then we also need to talk to IT groups. How do we pull these people all together to ask the relevant questions to understand the current challenges?
The challenges can be different when you're talking to external manufacturing or to logistics. IT might have their own challenges as well. We, again, want to understand all of those different challenges. I'll just give you a couple of moments, hopefully, you can read a couple of questions, but to give you an idea of the kind of things that we'll be going through to understand the business.
Any questions or thoughts so far?
Tereance: You'll see the bullet point here about how often do you receive a PO, an ASN kind of thing. There's metrics that most companies track in certain ways. We ask about metrics and KPIs. Do you have them? Are you tracking in certain things?
Are there areas that you're held accountable to on an annual or quarterly basis that you now want to shine a light on and how digitalizing your supply chain can have improved or enable you to improve those metrics? We'll ask a lot about that. Do you want to track them?
Will you report some dashboards? Moiz mentioned the out-of-the-box solutions that we're going to have for some of those KPIs and metrics. Again, we ask a ton of questions to anybody who would give us a ear. The more information we have, the better solution we can tailor.
MINT may sound simple because we're connecting transactions, but I think it's spelling out that value. After all these questions, it makes it come to life and say, wow, digitizing sounds great, but this sounds better because I can tie it to a pain point or a goal when it comes to life now.
Moiz: Also, each business unit will have different priorities for those transactions list. We'll put a nice slide up with 10, 12 transactions end-to-end, but what's your priority as a business? You might have really burning challenges for POs and PO acts because you send hundreds of emails, loads of spreadsheets. It's really time consuming where that time could be better spent in the business.
We're like, let's break those two transactions down and understand, as Tereance mentioned, the metrics behind it so we can do a value piece and show you how much you could gain in terms of time or visibility, in terms of digitizing that process. What's the priority? We'd also like to understand the priority of the different transactions or the orchestration pairs that you're discussing with us.
There's just a few slides I just wanted to cover off in terms of what we add in the blueprint document so we can really understand, again, your business. We always go through a company profile. We'll go and research your company, make sure we understand all the therapeutic areas, whether you're in a cost containment mode or whether you're in a growth mode.
It's really important information that we try and capture, and then any information you can help us with in terms of any strategy or goals, digitalization strategies. Companies that are private, it's a little bit harder for us to find the information, we'll still do our best.
Again, this is where a partnership between both companies really helps us to try and go through all those necessary bits of information to try and build out the blueprint, which essentially you guys will be signing off. We go over the overview in terms of who's been involved throughout all the discussions that we've had. We like to capture all the different roles.
Again, the reason for this is, it's really important for our services teams to know who we engage during the presales cycle so that when services need to reach out to anyone, they know the right personas and people to reach out to. What we'll then do is go through these customer requirements. On this example, we've actually got two use cases.
We'll go through and detail the use cases where we've got integration with CMO and a logistics one down here. You can see the logistics one's got just two transactions in there. Again, it's where you want to start, where your pain points? Because TraceLink said we have got seven or eight in our list, doesn't mean you have to start with all seven or eight.
This is a blinded but real customer use case here. We started with gathering the transactions that they want for external manufacturing. It's PO, PO acknowledgment, ASN, inventory balance, and inventory adjustments. Then, what's the flow of that? Is it MAH to CMO, CMO to MAH, and the like on the 3PL side where we've got inventory balance and invoices?
Very different, but again, exactly what the customer wants for the first initial deployment. The blueprint also, again, with the help of maybe some of your IT teams as well, is to document any custom requirements. We've mentioned that if you need additional fields, you've got additional transform requirements, you might have a homegrown ERP system, which is a little bit different.
Again, we just capture all those different custom requirements so that when we kick off the project, we have all those details to hand. Then we'll walk through and talk about different integration options. We spoke about integration. You've heard Bob this morning go through lots of formats and integration requirements earlier on.
Again, that's another conversation we go through the different meetings that we'll have to understand the IT landscape. Are you SAP using IDOTs? Do you want to integrate? Do you want information to be push/pull from your system? How do you want it to operate?
Again, we'll try and document all the format details on your side. A little note, the value piece at the end of the last column is just going through some quantity information just to give us an idea of how many of these transactions do you send per day, per week, per month.
Sometimes that information can be quite difficult to get depending on where you sit within the different departments. We try and urge you to try and help talk to finance department, talk to billing departments, whichever departments you need to speak to so we can get a clear idea of those volumes.
The next page or section of the blueprint document is what we call the as is to be. Again, how are you operating today, and where do you want to be? I think this is really important. We need the business to sign off on this in terms of the discussions we have and what we document. Having the business sign off makes IT happy as well.
If we can get both parties to sign off, then it helps us with the successful project going forward. We touched upon KPIs. Again, in this room here, does everyone know what KPIs drive their department or the area that they work in? Anyone? We get this quite a lot. Some don't know, but there will be some.
Audience Member: It changed according to the targets.
Audience Member: We don't know what you're going to do.
Moiz: Sorry, it changed according to the?
Audience Member: According to targets...
[crosstalk]
Moiz: Exactly. Again, trying to get what drives in your department, what you're trying to strive through. We hear OTIF. OTIF is always flowing around in terms of we want to improve our OTIF. For me personally, I think that's quite broad and it impacts different departments in different ways. If that is one of your overarching KPIs, we want to get specifics.
How are you going to help the company increase it by a percent, two percent? What's important to your particular business unit? Again, we go through this KPI discussion, and try and document that information in this blueprint. Again, a document that you guys will sign off on as well. It's very much a collaborative two-way piece.
That concludes what we want to go through in the blueprint, but highlight why it's important for us to understand your business and how you operate today, because that that will help us in terms of how we can help you move towards a more digital approach.
