Parcel - August 2008 - (Page 20) trends MOVING FROM MANUAL TO AUTOMATED FULFILLMENT Part II: A guide to weighing the options for your operations By Dennis Dearth Internal Team Factors — Obviously, the organization fortunate enough to have an internal team rich with knowledge and experience in the design and deployment of automation solutions will be better positioned for implementation internally than its counterpart that does not. This doesn’t necessarily mean a team should or should not take something like this on in either case, but the bottom line is that experience matters, and mistakes cost both time and money. Weigh the costs and time issues carefully — stretch your team to help them grow, but don’t introduce unnecessary artificial risk or set the stage for failure. Existing Project Portfolio — If the existing workload has your team covering a lot of ground already, then their skill sets and experience may not be relevant to the decision. Successful automation deployment, similar to other significant endeavors, will require both resource time commitment and continuity. Look for external help if it doesn’t make sense or can’t be guaranteed from your internal resources. Nature and Scope — The nature and scope of the automation solution under consideration must also be weighed in the context of the previously mentioned factors. In the case of a relatively straightforward deployment with minimal complexity and flexible time constraints, even a team of relative inexperience might be successful. As complexity increases and time becomes significant, then experience is an absolute must and even the most seasoned teams may need to augment or outsource completely. W elcome to Part II of our three-part series, Moving from Manual to Automated Fulfillment. In the first portion, we discussed considerations for adopting automation vs. expanding manual operations, how to arrive at “real” costs in the comparison of the two and some suggestions on how to structure the project. Part II will address how to determine the feasibility of tackling these kinds of projects internally, what level of planning and resource commitment is required from the client side, how long it may take and the pieces involved in switching over to automation. Here are some more considerations for evaluating whether or not to adopt automation, and if so, how to do it. depends directly on the experience and skill sets of your internal IT and Operational teams, their existing workloads and the nature, scope and timing of the automation solution under consideration. To some degree, these factors are interrelated, and how one is looked at may have implications on one or both of the others. In other words, there is no short answer. » Can we do a project like this ourselves? The answer to this »What are the tasks that have to be done and/or planned for by us? This will depend in part on whether you decide to tackle the selection and implementation internally or leverage external www.PARCELindustry.com 20 August 2008 http://www.PARCELindustry.com
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