Deborah Mills-Scofield has her own consultancy helping organizations create and implement highly actionable, measurable, and profitable strategic deb pictureplans and cultures to foster innovation. She also is a Partner with Glengary LLC, an early-stage Venture Capital firm in Cleveland, Ohio.
Deborah has over 20 years of experience in strategic planning and implementation with various manufacturing, service and high-technology companies ranging from multinationals, mid-sized, early-stage, publicly and privately-held. She has also been involved in several start-ups, including her own. In the spirit of Open Innovation and Collaboration, Deb is a co-creator of the recently released book Business Model Generation.
Deborah started at AT&T Bell Lab, holding a patent for an integrated multimedia messaging service developed in the early 1980s. She was instrumental in getting AT&T to recognize and embrace the Internet's impact, working with AT&T's senior executive team to create AT&T's entré into that new market. Deb spearheaded AT&T Internet and E-commerce strategies, business plans and execution, including an AT&T “Carve-Out Startup” known as AT&T WorldNet® Services and is formerly Director of Internet Public Policy at AT&T.
In Deborah's experience, business processes are a source of competitive advantage that are often overlooked. Most people, she says, tend to focus on anticipating, meeting and exceeding their customer's needs, which she acknowledges is extremely important, because it you're not focused on your customer, you won't survive, but... more attention should be paid to competitive advantages that can be realized through streamlining, reevaluating and continually improving your business processes.
Overlooking the process side of business might be chalked up to that fact that it is not as "fun or sexy" as the front facing side of business, but as more people begin to recognize the financial and competitive advantages, the balance is shifting. Deborah believes more emphasis should be put on innovating and improving business processes, and creating a culture that is process-driven. A process-driven culture, she warns, does not have to come at the expense of creativity. "Process and innovation are not oxymorons, they go hand-in-hand," she added.
Executing Excellently
"I think, one of the biggest advantages a company can have is simply executing excellently. Even if your product is as good as the others or good enough, if you can execute, be efficient and streamline, you can have a tremendous competitive advantage that can be hard to replicate," Deborah said.
Having "grown up" at Bell Labs and AT&T, much of Deborah's early business process experiences were tied to data-driven processes -- how to capture data quickly and have it displayed in such a way that it could be analyzed. Getting the information you need applies to every company and every industry, Deborah said, but in her experience it goes much deeper than capture, display and analyze. It's really about becoming excellent at, and institutionalizing, those processes.
Deborah knows firsthand that some business processes, including those that may seem very obvious, rarely get done, like business planning as a process, and tracking measures, successes and deficiencies as a process. "I am amazed at the number of clients I’ll work with where the C-suite doesn’t even have regular staff meetings, or if they do, they’re not going over a regular-set agenda of where the plan is, what are the outages, what’s going well, what’s not going well, and a process for how to improve those,” Deborah noted.
Speaking from personal experience, Deborah Mills-Scofield says she is a big proponent of developing and implementing processes for evaluating suppliers. "There’s a phrase used in industry called ‘voice of the customer,’ where you go out and spend a day with your customer and you understand what they do and what they need," she explained, "but very few companies do that with their suppliers ."
To that end, Deborah would like to see more companies consider the idea of adopting a process she calls 'voice of the supplier,' something she has not only observed, but also applied to her own clients with great success. Using the same principals as 'voice of the customer,' Deborah advises companies to develop a 'voice of the supply' process aimed at gaining insight into how suppliers work, how their factories and plants operate, what measures might be taken to make suppliers more efficient -- even taking responsibility for identifying internal process that will make things easier for suppliers, which can translate into getting products faster and less expensively. "It's almost like treating your supplier as a customer and building up a rapport and a relationship with them that then allows you both to get more out of each other," Deborah added.
Building Flexibility and Adaptability into All Processes
Because business and industry models are constantly evolving, Deborah feels it is important for companies to build a culture around flexibility and adaptability in all processes. In fact, she sees process flexibility as a core competency at the macro level. "If it's not part of the culture of the company, it's not going to happen. It starts at the very top," she said, "and it's built into performance management, reward, recognition, et cetera."
At the tactical level, process flexibility can be built and managed by leveraging the diversity of thought found in cross-functional teams. Using supply chain as an example, Deborah said "Don't rely exclusively on your supply chain and manufacturing teams for process innovation, get sales and marketing, suppliers, and even customers involved for a complete end-to-end view of the issues."
Different views and viewpoints drive different ideas for reinventing processes, and the real key to success, according to Deborah, is questioning your assumptions. You might say to yourself, we've always received our materials this way, in this package, at this time, at this dock, but don't be afraid to ask yourself why? "Once you put a process in place, even if it’s going great, reevaluate the process, because maybe things have changed and the process could be improved," Deborah suggested. Also remember to focus on both efficiency and effectiveness, because as Deborah pointed out, you could have a really efficient process that’s not effective or a really effective process that’s not that efficient, and there has to be a balance.
In the end, process flexibility boils down to building a culture where people are encouraged to question assumptions, and providing venues for open exchanges of ideas and diverse viewpoints.
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