As an SAP Digital Supply Chain consulting and implementation partner, business expansion was at the heart of Rocket Consulting’s strategic road map from 2016. Our expertise and experience sat firmly in the realms of innovation and making integration faster and more flexible for our customers. In addition to this, operational excellence and sustainable competitive advantages were not just outcomes we were helping customers achieve, it was an outcome that was fundamentally necessary to ensure Rocket enjoyed sustained growth.
Over the past 10 years, many of our customers were experiencing shifts in how they remained competitive and relevant to their customers, and these new demands were placing additional pressures on how we adapted and responded in an equally competitive and efficient way.
Learn more about our personal journey in a recent interview with Lewis Marston, Founder and CEO of Rocket Consulting:
Prior to 2016, as a business we were experiencing growth pains. We'd hit a certain size and turnover that meant we needed to operate better, and have a better handle on our people, costs, utilisation rates, accounts payable and invoices.
This was starting to become a risk, so we needed to make sure our whole operation was more efficient. We knew that operational efficiency would underpin the service we were able to give to our customers, and also provide us with a competitive advantage even though it was one step removed.
Early days
The process started with understanding what we needed to do. Some things we were doing out of necessity, but to run the business well we needed to identify what we could be doing and how we could do it better.
We knew that our operations started with the sales cycle, so we needed to have a real-time view of our full sales pipeline. As a service organisation, we also needed to ensure we had the right people available at the right time to be able to deliver our projects efficiently and profitably. We recognised we needed this end-to-end view to enable us to grow.
We started to identify roles and responsibilities, and took a decision to digitise our operations. We were going from manual to systemised processes, and the process involved change management for everyone within the organisation, so we needed to communicate the impacts and benefits on everyone’s role—exactly as we do for our customers.
We went through a system implementation to cover the six key operational areas:
The implementation also provided business operations dashboards with real-time insights on our KPIs—such as resource utilisation, resource skills management and development, and financial forecasting.
As a result, we saw big efficiency gains early on, compared with our previous processes.
Real-time insights
We also now have the capacity and capability to react much faster to customer requirements. We have a real-time view of our resource availability and skills, while the KPI insights enable us to make fast business decisions, for example investment decisions on recruitment or R&D spend.
It has transformed our monthly operations and has become the cornerstone for our fortnightly sales and operations meetings, with live dashboards supporting very efficient ways of working. It has also allowed us to bring increased accountability to the organisation.
Off the back of this we have created a much stronger leadership capability, with clearly defined roles. Our monthly management meetings are also significantly faster to prepare, with up-to-the-minute information that enables us to drive the business forward at a rate never achieved before.
There is, potentially, a turbulent economic period ahead for many businesses. We believe that the strong cultural identity we have cultivated over the past three years, alongside the levels of service and operational integrity we have achieved, will enable us to ensure stability and deliver successful digital supply chain projects to our customers, helping them to weather the storm.
Led by an experienced management team from the UK Headquarters and with European operations based in Belgium, Rocket is home to a team of highly skilled experts that bring together all the essential skills to deliver successful SAP digital supply chain and operations transformation projects on time and on budget. Get in touch today.
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Want to learn more about Rocket? Check out our full list of customer case studies here.