In today’s interconnected and complex business environment, the future of work depends on cross-functional collaboration between departments, business units, vendors, and partners across geographical boundaries.
Businesses are not just one department or unit; they accomplish their collective goals through collaboration. Each department or functional unit has its role, and the work between these units needs to be orchestrated and choreographed to achieve overall business objectives or KPIs.
Ineffectiveness of cross-functional collaboration, and the challenges in communicating information at the right time and place leads to poor team performance. According to the Harvard business review, 75% of the cross-functional teams are dysfunctional.
One of the main reasons for this disconnect is the challenges in information and data flow between business functions. Even though individual teams may perform at their best with the best technology and talent, if other departments are not in sync, it can lead to a breakdown in communication. This lack of visibility and real-time collaboration results in a disconnect despite the best efforts of all parties involved.
Take the “Order to Cash” business function as an example, which involves cross-functional collaboration between sales, order management, and supply chain (or fulfillment). In this scenario, the sales department might use a CRM platform like Salesforce, Dynamics 365, or NetSuite. It could be integrated upstream with an eCommerce platform or a mobile order application used by field sales. Order management then dispatches items to fulfillment warehouses and suppliers. There could also be a service component, communicated to another department for field support via applications like ServiceNow. This scenario can become even more complicated when different teams or third-party service providers use various service management platforms like PagerDuty or Zendesk.
This typical “Order to Cash” process will constantly need to adapt:
- Business processes today are constantly changing and adapting. The supply chain, for example, is going through major changes and disruption due to COVID-19 requiring a constant change in suppliers and vendors.
- There is a need for constant change in technology to adapt to market demands, or improve upon existing processes. For example, the sales department may change the CRM system, or change its ordering setup. The e-commerce platform may change to adopt a new market or change in customer behavior.
- There may also be impacts from external sources like vendors or partners. The partners or suppliers may change their platforms that are connected to the supply chain. There may also be new suppliers or partners that use a system or platform that the business has not worked with before.
- There may be the desire to enter a new market requiring changes across the supply chain, CRM, and order management.
All of these changes necessitate agility for cross-functional collaboration to ensure near-real-time availability of information and keep the business running seamlessly. Without effective communication and information flow, poor customer satisfaction, order cancellations, and revenue loss can occur.
The sales, service, and fulfillment teams may be performing to the best of their ability, however, other than people and process, there is a tactical component of information to orchestrate business processes. The gaps in the information flow between departments and vendors may lead to poor customer satisfaction, or even worse, order cancellation. This affects net sales and future revenue streams.
With APIs and data integration technologies, companies can overcome these challenges. The success of cross-functional collaboration depends on the adoption of such integration technologies, ensuring that business processes are efficiently executed and the organization remains adaptable to any changes.
Bramh Gupta
Bramh Gupta is the founder and CEO of RoboMQ. He has a background in large scale real-time manufacturing systems, telecommunications and design and architecture of highly scalable and resilient enterprise systems. He is passionate about real-time integration and the value that it brings to business operations and critical decision making.
Bramh holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Business and Industrial Engineering degree from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur. Bramh combines his business insights and architectural skills to design and create highly scalable, integration platforms and tools that are needed to power the API economy.
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