By Craig Rosenblum
Technology is an enabler, not a silver bullet.
To unlock technologies potential, return-on-investment, and meaningful transformation, Retailer and Wholesale organizations need to integrate a Change Management framework to prepare, support, and adopt new technology, processes and skills to achieve the desired outcomes.
What is Change Management? Change Management (CM) is the process of managing the people’s side of a transformation from a current state-of-performance to a sustainable future state that delivers results and drives growth.
Without Change Management, 70% of change initiatives fail to meet their objectives, often due to resistance or lack of management support, and, today, only 25% of senior executives feel their organizations are ready to embrace new technology and wholeheartedly adopt it.
The benefits of Change Management are vast, some examples are as follows:
- Clarity of all impacted groups/personnel across the organization and assurance that they have what is needed to perform their jobs on time and on budget
- Greater process efficiencies in new technology utilization, assurance project benefits are realized and users are set up for success, avoiding frustration and lack of trust in the new system
- Consistent and timely communication is provided, so Associates are aware of their responsibilities in advance to mitigate conflicts and avoid executive leadership intervention, project delays and budget implications
Obtaining the above benefits and more requires adhering to four key components of Change Management.
- Assessing the Change – Leadership and key stakeholders must own, identify, and outline the best way to implement change and assess its impact, identify key changes required (e.g., process, tool, skills, and data) and functions affected across the organization
- Plan and Prepare for Change – Success is achieved by having a clearly defined project and communication plans, executive champions, and a structured training approach for the organization
- Implementing the Change – Deploying clearly defined workstreams, user training and documentation, and outline of overall business readiness hurdles for full deployment are essential
- Support the Change – Organizations must provide on-going support post launch to assess adoption, technology stability and partnership, evaluation of what’s working and needs improvement, and have a designed continuous feedback loop
Without Change Management and diligent project management, many organizations never achieve the complete and timely benefits of their new technology. Focusing more on the post implementation stage with a change management plan will yield sustainable, long-term benefits and help you maximize your investments.
This blog is part of The Tech Scan, a new editorial section developed in partnership with NGA. The content features a series of short articles focusing on grocery with topics dedicated to technology news and insights.
About Columbus Consulting
Columbus Consulting delivers solutions that drive true value and have been transforming the retail and CPG industries for over two decades. We are a retail consulting company of industry experts. Our approach is simple, if you do it, we do it. We are more than consultants; we are experienced practitioners who actually sat in our clients’ seats. We understand the challenges, know what questions to ask and deliver the right solutions. Columbus offers a unique, consumer-centric approach with an end-to-end perspective that bridges functional & organization silos from strategy to execution. Our specialties include: unified commerce, merchandising & category management, planning & inventory management, sourcing & supply chain, data & analytics, accounting, finance & operations, people & organization and information technology. Let us know how we can help you. To learn more, visit COLUMBUSCONSULTING.COM.
