Lessons from the Frontlines: The Role of Technology in Sustainable Business Growth

Meet Amy Kiefer, Visionary

Amy Kiefer is an accomplished C-Level leader with a diverse background within privately held, family-owned, ESOP, private equity, and Fortune 500 companies. With a visionary mindset, she optimizes an organization’s foundational strengths while evolving the culture to facilitate strong and sustainable growth. Her cornerstone is delighting stakeholders by positioning teams to succeed through transparency, accountability, and trust.

Amy Kiefer is an accomplished C-Level leader with a diverse background within privately held, family-owned, ESOP, private equity, and Fortune 500 companies. With a visionary mindset, she optimizes an organization’s foundational strengths while evolving the culture to facilitate strong and sustainable growth. Her cornerstone is delighting stakeholders by positioning teams to succeed through transparency, accountability, and trust.

In this exclusive interview, Amy reflects on a formative experience she had as part of a leadership team that walked through a challenging ERP implementation. Find out what worked – and what didn’t – as you read her key takeaways that you can apply to your future business transformation initiatives.

Q. Can you share about the role that technology played in one of your business transformation initiatives?

Technology plays a critical role within every organization. Technology can and should facilitate  all initiatives that deliver momentum to an organization. When done well, technology is the fulcrum to the vision that delivers sustainable growth.

In a past role, when recruited into a leadership team that was divesting a PE-owned metal and wood manufacturer, technology played a critical role. Timing was of the essence, and a 2-year sale was the deliverable. As we developed the company’s positioning for divestiture and prepared the data room, it became obvious that the organization’s technology could not support due diligence requests. Subsequently, our CFO and others on the team had to manually (and painfully), compile historical financials, market data, and other elements of validation to meet prospective buyer anticipated requests.

Fast forward 10 months. The company was successfully divested, and a strategic buyer became the new owner. As expected, technology was a critical piece to a successful integration. Specifically, the newco needed to integrate with the new owner’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The integration was far from seamless, and for nearly two years the teams comprised of nearly all functional areas, worked to reach a pedestrian level of success.

The lesson – and something that forever impacted my leadership, approach to technology, and respect for technology – is as follows: An ERP should be considered the ‘engine’ for the organization. The engine that supports and facilitates all initiatives. When manufacturing is a core competency, the bill of materials and all manufacturing elements must be planned for and executed to meet well-defined needs. When integrating a manufacturer into a non-manufacturer, keen understanding of the dual systems joining must be both acknowledged and optimized. When optimized, technology should ‘silently’ facilitate all functions, all data, all knowledge to support the vision, strategic initiatives, and objectives within an organization.

Q. How did that project contribute to your future vantage on technology?

Subsequently, in my next role as COO within a privately held holding company, this learning influenced our technology strategy and needs assessment. The current ERP was due for upgrade, and given the significant growth we were achieving, an ERP roll-out became a top initiative across three companies plus shared services (finance, HR, and IT).

As the ERP planning unfolded, critical needs and processes of all functional areas as well as each business were accounted for, mapped, and incorporated. The improved alignment of financial, operational, and revenue generating activities enhanced the greater whole, facilitated the growth already achieved, and set the stage for future growth. Consolidated reporting for the four holding companies delivered the deepest impact immediately. Other anticipated benefits to the comprehensive ERP roll-out were realized in phases and included: improved CRM tool, enhanced warehouse tracking, optimized cost estimations, and accessible scenario planning.

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Q. What are the key takeaways related to this ERP project?

Key learnings and takeaways for this project:

• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When upgrading or moving to a new ERP, ensure that duration, discipline, and rigor are adequately incorporated into the scope and timeline. This includes a full business (or businesses if multiple organizations) analysis, functional alignment of needs, process mapping, milestones with metrics and timing, and clear delineation of decision matrix (who owns which decisions). Additionally, this prework and mapping will provide an advantage if the company pursues relevant AI applications.
• Manufacturing organizations need to keenly understand (and map) the manufacturing process before deploying an ERP project, as well as discuss any optimization or changes to be made to these processes in advance of an ERP selection and/or roll-out. Often neglected is the product bill of materials (BOMs) and all related work needed to transition into an effective and new ERP model. All areas related to the manufacturing process — from product creation to product disposal — should be considered critically for all ERP decisions.
• Technology should have both a short- and long-term vantage, with both aligning emphatically with the organization’s strategy, vision, and 5-year plan.
• Contingency planning, as with all projects, should be outlined, discussed, and endorsed along with all implications if/when the contingency is deployed.
• Technology cannot be an afterthought. The best organizations have a 1, 2, and 5-year technology road map, which is updated ongoing. Significant technology initiatives should be presented, planned, and deployed for growing organizations, and are necessary for inorganic growth activities.
• If transformation and growth are crucial to an organization, technology should be the fulcrum for which to build a sustainable model for growth.

Laying the Groundwork for Successful Business Transformation

When it comes to digital transformation, technology plays a crucial role, albeit not in the way most people might expect. Amy Kiefer illustrates that technology should not be an afterthought; rather, it must be strategically incorporated to align with the organization’s strategy, vision, and long-term objectives. She encourages leaders to consistently look ahead and build an intentional technology roadmap that reflects their organization’s immediate and future growth aspirations.

A significant aspect of this strategy lies in preparation. Echoing the adage, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Amy emphasizes the importance of readiness. Having witnessed the fallout of a poorly planned ERP implementation, she experienced firsthand the disastrous results of inadequate preparation. She urges leaders to prioritize thorough preparatory activities such as comprehensive business analysis, process mapping, clearly defined responsibilities, and more. By drawing lessons from Amy’s experience and understanding the role of technology in organizational growth, you can steer your team through a significant business transformation, positioning your organization for success in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.