The upside of disruption: Implement a business intelligence process - Part 3 of 4

Rasheed Mohamad

March 05, 2024

Abiding by our values and implementing a proactive business intelligence approach were critical to surviving VUCA. 

As a company that manufactures physical products and ships them to 60 countries across the globe, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been greatly impacted by the many unforeseen events the world has been grappling with since 2020.

Nevertheless, we didn’t cancel any customer orders… not a single one! How did we manage that? By staying grounded in our values – speed and agility, customer centricity, and reliability – and implementing a business intelligence process to aid in hyper-informed decision-making. 

In my second blog in this series, Understanding the VUCA world, I described the impact of working with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity since the start of this decade. Now, I will share how ALE navigated those difficult years by focusing on finding opportunity.

There are four specific areas that contributed to our success navigating through VUCA.

1. We got proactive: When we saw lead times of our manufacturing components balloon from 4 to 18 (or in some cases 24!) months, we didn’t panic. Working hand in hand with our suppliers to anticipate component needs, we stocked what we needed for future customer orders to minimise disruption and continue to meet our commitments. We worked tirelessly to balance demand and supply at the best possible cost.
2. We reinforced cross-organisational communications: Taking a bird’s eye view of the situation, we quickly identified communications as a key lever for navigating uncertainty. We created the cross-functional “Tiger Team,” tasked with ensuring all parts of the company were aligning to deliver the best results. Every function – sales, manufacturing, partner relations, and others – came together to seamlessly support our customers and satisfy their most urgent needs.
3. We reinforced automation: Faced with a mountain of tasks demanding our attention, we took a step back to assess how to best spend our time. Should we focus on taking care of the predictable or should we spend our time managing the unpredictable? By re-evaluating our processes in light of the new global situation and using technology to automate predictable tasks, we were able to free ourselves to work on more complex value-driving tasks. We applied this approach across the organisation, through different business functions, to derive the most benefit.
4. We used business intelligence effectively: Data is as good as gold and we mined all the data at our disposal to enable hyper-informed decision-making. Real-time data was used at each of the four stages of our sales and supply process to identify anomalies and make adjustments. This business intelligence was also applied to make improvements to the system and processes, creating a virtuous cycle.

In sum, despite a scary outlook and of lot uncertainty at the start of this decade, ALE found a way through. 

We started by identifying what was within our control and implemented tools and processes to streamline our workload. We created opportunities to function better as a global team and utilised technology to boost our ability to prioritise the most valuable tasks. We acted proactively and put our valuable data to work to create a smoother road ahead and ensure we consistently lived up to our company values.

The result? We met our commitments to customers and continued to function as an enterprise through one of the toughest business environments the world has ever seen.

In the next and final post of this blog series, I’ll share how ALE doubled down on its commitment to sustainability despite VUCA.

In the meantime, you can watch me discuss the subjects in this post at the Deliver Americas event held this past September in Las Vegas.