Agility is an organization’s ability to quickly adapt and succeed in a rapidly evolving, ambiguous, and tumultuous environment.
It is an organization’s ability to act swiftly in response to internal and external changes, as well as take advantage of market conditions and capture economic opportunities.
Developing business agility can help your organization solve problems more effectively, respond to market changes, and improve organizational health.
In our hyperconnected digital world, businesses that can’t continually innovate have a short life expectancy. Opportunities come up overnight and disappear just as fast. It is important to swiftly adapt to change.
You can’t afford to wait
Due to the global economy’s ongoing expansion and globalization, businesses compete with rivals of all sizes. Despite this fact, many organizations hesitate to implement competitive business practices until it’s absolutely necessary or too late.
It is only a matter of time before competitive market conditions force businesses that aren’t agile to change.
How to increase business agility
Becoming agile means that your business experiences a fundamental shift in how it plans, assigns, markets, and supports your products and services. You may have to re-calibrate the whole company to succeed.
Fortunately becoming an agile company is not as daunting as it may sound.
Increase business agility with bottom-up leadership
Companies that want to become agile must adopt a bottom-up leadership approach. Why? Because when employees aren’t a big part of the problem-solving process, it’s harder for a company to come up with the correct solutions to challenges.
Bottom-up management is more commonly used in agile businesses. In general, employees that work with consumers and in each department are best positioned to understand the many opportunities and difficulties within an organization. It follows that involving people in decision-making increases the likelihood that choices will result in success.
Involving staff in decision-making can be challenging, and it might require some extra time to get things rolling at first. However, there are numerous additional benefits that come from involving employees in the decision-making process, including:
• Creating a higher level of employee decision ownership
• Employees feel more valued by the organization
• Increases the level of employees’ day-to-day decision making
Increase business agility with an ERP system
To improve your company’s agility, you need an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to consolidate and streamline your organization’s information, processes, people, capital, and resources.
Business agility creates a faster response to changing market conditions. An Enterprise resource planning system helps you fill that gap. An ERP system gives you greater visibility into your company’s performance. With greater visibility, you can quickly see how customers and the marketplace responds to your products and services. This means that you can respond quickly and make faster adjustments.
With more visibility, you can readily determine how customers are reacting to your products, services, and promotions.
An ERP makes important information easily accessible to employees, enabling them to monitor the effects of their own efforts. This promotes bottom-up leadership. Employees can determine which actions are doing well based on outcomes, and which actions require improvement. If they notice more serious issues, they can alert management to seek further direction.
Business agility can be severely hampered by relying solely on management to identify and resolve every major or minor issue. Businesses that embrace analytics are more likely to make timely decisions, especially when relevant data is readily available to employees.
An Enterprise resource planning system can help your organization realize its full potential. At Pahappa, we help you set up and integrate our industry-leading Enterprise Resource Planning system to further your company’s success. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more. A member of our friendly team will be happy to speak with you!