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".
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