Aug
Logistics and Operations Working in Silos Doesn’t Accomplish Goals
All too often, it can be easy for departments within your clients’ organizations to become too isolationist or focused on their own goals and problems. Why bother with cross-departmental collaboration when they already have enough on their plates to deal with, right? We’re sure your clients have experienced this challenge in the past — if it isn’t still a problem today. But when it comes to logistics and operations, this mindset simply won’t work.
Let’s break it down: operations is how the work within the organization gets coordinated and completed. They’re the doers. Logistics is how work and goods move — both inside and outside of the organization. One could make the argument that once the operations team (which might include manufacturing, production, supply chain, etc.) has finished its work, logistics takes over, and what happens from that point on is out of operations’ hands.
This is not the case. Never before have two departments needed one another for the overall success of an organization than today. The pandemic, the ongoing tariff negotiations, e-commerce trends, and countless other topics and shifts mean that these two departments must align not only their efforts but also their end goals and metrics to ensure that the organization achieves its strategic objectives. Let’s review a few key considerations for ensuring that your clients are able to achieve this alignment between these teams.
How to Align Logistics and Operations Teams
1. Start at the Top
As with most aspects of business strategy and organizational change, sponsorship and buy-in from leadership is critical. Separate department leaders might have their own priorities and goals that prevent them from collaborating. In this instance, the best way to ensure they’re able to see past them is through having executive leadership drive the shift and the reasons behind it. While logistics and operations certainly play their parts in the greater organizational strategy, it’s important that they understand their respective impact on one another and the business.
If your clients’ leadership teams aren’t already focusing on this, one great place to start is our questionnaire for leadership teams. Consisting of six key questions for executives, the questionnaire digs deep into leaders’ logistics strategy. By asking your clients’ leadership teams these tough questions, you can open their eyes to the importance of logistics as well as its impact on multiple areas of the business — one of which is certainly operations.
2. Ensure Measurement Systems Are in Place
As a trusted advisor to your clients, you understand that you can’t move the needle forward unless you’re consistently taking your performance above and beyond the baseline. The same goes for their internal departments and teams as well. Key departments such as logistics and operations should not only have their own respective benchmarks for measuring performance, but they should also have joint benchmarks.
There are a number of metrics that can span both departments, ranging from production to bottom-line financial performance. If an operations team is able to more effectively achieve its goals, it can set logistics up for success. Conversely, if logistics is able to better move goods and bring materials into the organization, the operations team is likewise set up for success. If there are no benchmarks in place to measure performance, they should be put in place and communicated with both teams to ensure they align around hitting their shared goals.
One of the best ways to identify the benchmarks that should span both departments for your clients is a health check. Brady Partners is pleased to offer complimentary health checks for your clients’ organizations to identify any opportunities for improvement. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to take advantage of this for your clients.
3. Impart that Success Depends on Alignment
Only by ensuring that both departments or teams understand that working together is critical to success will that success actually be achieved. There are ample opportunities to keep logistics and operations teams in alignment and focused on hitting their respective and shared goals. From consistently updated dashboards and reporting structures to periodic check-ins and review meetings, it will be up to you as a trusted advisor and your clients’ leadership teams to find the best option.
Ultimately, what matters here is communication. Department leaders, managers, and employees must understand why working together matters and what it can help the organization achieve. They must understand the benchmarks and metrics put in place, what needs to be done to move the needle, and what the end goals are. They must understand that while they are separate departments, they are still part of the same team. This is a message that you can drive home no matter your capacity may be to your clients.
A Trusted Advisor to Trusted Advisors
As a leading logistics optimization firm, Brady Partners not only helps clients identify opportunities for improvement in their logistics function, but we also partner with trusted advisors and their clients to drive positive change through ongoing assessment. Our focus extends far beyond logistics alone, as this critical function impacts other departments’ abilities to achieve their goals and make a subsequent impact on the business’ bottom line.
If your clients are struggling with an inability to improve financial performance, if a lack of alignment between logistics and operations (and other functions) is stifling growth, or if your clients simply aren’t doing enough to make their logistics more effective for the business — Brady Partners is here to help. We bring more than 30 years of expertise in helping hundreds of organizations optimize their logistics, and we’re ready to do the same for your clients.
Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services and experience.