This is a guest column from Clive Boulton who is a football fan, consultant, prior head of development for popular MRP/ERP products including Micro-MRP, MAX at Kewill and Exact, and successive online products
Willkommen in Deutschland!
As Germans rev up for the FIFA World Cup, they will first get a dose of American Football. My team, the Seattle Seahawks will play Vinnie’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers at Allianz Stadium, the home ground of FC Bayern Munich on Sunday, November 13. It is the first ever NFL game played in Germany and that stadium will look just a bit different than the Bucs home stadium with its pirate ship and sea of red colors.
Since we are in SAP’s home country, it had me thinking about the complexity of this variety of football. US football’s beauty is actually in its complexity with its wide range of roles, skills and plays. Not to mention lots of technology on the field, in the review booth, in the broadcast networks and in the fan experience.
In many ways,the NFL Head Coach, is like the blend of an enterprise architect and project manager. It is a game with many resources and constraints. Each team is allowed 53 players on active roster. Of these 53, only 46 players can dress up for the actual game. That involves navigating weekly player injuries in a sport with a lot of physical contact. On the field, each team can only have 11 players for any given play. Player substitutions are very common – within the broad categories of offense, defense and special teams. The permutations and combinations are limitless. On offense you can pass (throw) or run the ball – as a result most teams have several receivers and running backs. On defense some teams go with a 3-4 base with more linebackers than linemen. On special teams you may have 2 kickers – one more accurate to kick field goals, another to kick longer on punts.
While this may seem like the coaching team has plenty of flexibility, for each play, the referees watch for “illegal formations”. Each position calls for unique athletic abilities – wide receivers are some of the fastest athletes in the world, the kickers grow up playing more soccer than American Football, linesmen have to be strong enough to push and nullify opposing linesmen who are just as big and strong. So there is a limit to the substitutions you can make. To compensate, coaches scheme up “trick plays” to surprise the opposing team. Some of them work, some actually draw penalties and cause you to lose yardage.
The NFL has long strived to bring parity across teams and there are (more) rules for drafting new players (mostly from college teams) and trading players or coaches across teams. Similarly for each play, the refs follow a very long rule book, and throw what seems like a frustratingly large number of penalty yellow flags. Coaches, in turn, are given a quota of red flags to ask for reviews. No wonder it is a constant stop-and-go sport.
Most observers will agree the most valuable player is the quarterback who has a role in the vast majority of offensive plays. The fans in Munich will see Tom Brady, the most winning quarterback ever, with 7 Super Bowl rings and over 100,000 yards passing in his 23 seasons. In the rough and tumble sport, that kind of longevity qualifies for Superman status. Seattle has Geno Smith, in stage 2.0 of his career, who is having a phenomenal year. (Brady, on the other hand, is off to a poor year - by his high standards). It also looks like Geno will be a crowd favorite. The city has already raised several murals like this to welcome him.
Putting my architect hat on, to me the offense is like CRM in the enterprise. The quarterback. running backs and receivers are always aiming to gain yards and score touchdowns. ERP is the offensive line which does the hard work of blocking and tackling for the backs to run through gaps and give the quarterback enough time for receivers to run downfield and catch his throws
Operational systems that run on the shop floor or process insurance claims represent the defensive squad, and in many close games are even more important than the offense.
Special teams are more like MRP, a short and decisive special planning action, to re-balance resources, reposition the offense and defense after a punt return or kick off.
Sunday’s game sold out all 75,000 seats, Alexander Steinforth, head of NFL Germany said 3 million requests were processed when tickets for the game went on sale. You can watch the game at 3:30 CET Sunday November 13, or follow the game here.
As you watch the game, try and map the players and formations to an enterprise architecture graph, Now imagine if those systems were to change every couple of minutes. American Football looks like chaos to the uninitiated. It’s actually a series of meticulously planned plays, interrupted by equally creative defensive plays and referees who are trying to keep the game fair but actually provide constraints to be optimized around. Think Eli Goldratt would have made a good coach?
To conclude, American football is a game of feet and inches, a focus on the details, not dissimilar to orchestrating an SAP ERP business system. A team requires a great head coach calling the game, and the quarterback executing the calls and a number of other team members working in sync.
Just as easy as running an ERP or CRM system. Only at warp speed. And with strange language like "hut hut" and "Hail Mary".
"The most innovative period mankind has experienced"
McKinsey recently wrote:
“For many companies—and many industries—the COVID-19 pandemic set off a period of head-spinning change. They realized they were capable of moving faster than they ever thought possible. They went digital in a matter of days, not years. They offered new services almost overnight. If companies sustain this newfound speed and agility, it’s conceivable that more innovation will happen in the next ten years than in any previous decade in modern history.”
In a recent Burning Platform episode about tech industry events, I presented a few slides (see starting 24.05 in the first video. Jon Reed and Brian Sommer go ahead of me) on how the world has been turned upside down in 3 other ways beyond the COVID impact
At Deal Architect, we have seen what McKinsey is talking about the accelerating pace of innovation from three projects:
Our video series
We have recorded hundreds of video episodes in our Analyst Cam, Burning Platform and New Normal series. Even as tech vendor events and travel have been disrupted, we have had a front row seat on how business is evolving industry by industry. In reverse, we have also seen how many companies and tech vendors continue with business as usual, trying to sell what they had in their bags in 2019 and wishing they could roll back time. Others have spray painted a bit of innovation when the opportunity allowed for significantly more.
Support for IFS Moment of Service book
CEO Darren Roos and his team of executives including Marne Martin, Antony Bourne and Mark Brewer are all impressive story tellers (each has been profiled in our video episodes). IFS has complex customers like Rolls-Royce Aviation, the US Navy, Juton (one of the world’s largest maker of paints and coatings) and others which have been pioneering the use of digital twins, IoT, mixed reality and next-gen contract management and field service.
Our team had a chance to interview many IFS, customer and partner executives and Darren’s team turned that into an engaging 200-page book, Moment of Service.
IFS handed out advance copies of the book at their Unleashed event last month.
SAP’s Business as Unusual project
I would say it has been the most intense project my team has ever worked on (the publisher, Rheinwerk has been similarly pushed) and it has exposed us to new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new capital markets, new networks and new business models, and yes, lots of recycled stuff using circular economy thinking.
It gave us a chance to work with some the foremost domain experts across various industries such as Benjamin Beberness, Hagen Heubach, Torsten Welte and many others. I am not exaggerating – as you will see in the book, each of them could easily be a leading industry analyst in their area of focus. They just happen to be part of SAP. It allowed us to spend time with innovative customers who are driving decentralized grids, molecular recycling, pharma cold-chain logistics, next wave of financial instruments and more. It allowed us to learn from SAP’s expanding ecosystem – not just SIs, but strategy firms, Industry 4.0 enablers, micro-fulfillment supply chain players, digital agencies and a wide range of vertical research firms.
Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier, two senior SAP executives and authors of the book, have built an incredible team and a truly enviable range of vertical products and customers. You can see it in the heat map of industries these 8 themes cut across.
If you can believe, we started with 20 themes and narrowed it down to 8. Which means there is plenty of change we did not catalog. Every one of the 300 pages in the book drips with innovation. There is little evidence of business as usual in the book.
So, yes sure some will keep pining to go back to 2019. As for us, we plan to keep fighting for a front row seat and look forward to a small role in this coming tsunami of innovation.
November 20, 2022 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)