John Stone
Director, Product & Market Management – Global A&D, Aviation
In every company, business model, product line or service offering, there exists the inevitability of change. The world around us, and within which we operate, is constantly in flux, and that flux creates pressures on our once successful paradigms and processes. The need for change is not surprising, but the fact that we resist it and fight it often is. Good companies, or better stated, good leaders of good companies have the ability to respond to change, either quickly or pragmatically, to ensure that the organization stays on track.
The inevitability of change struck Ramco Systems, just like it struck most local and global companies, about two years ago. Collectively, the leadership talent pooled together and through a series of rather difficult and introspective collaborative discussions, was able to construct a strategy that would evolve the company to a better position and a more solid foundation. In our case, we found that a framework consisting of three areas would complement existing strengths, as well as each other. By focusing on People, Processes and Technology, we were able to drive quantitative and substantive changes into our everyday operations with an outcome that resulted in healthier resource mixes, more stable products, and a clearer vision of who we were as a company.
On the Aviation portfolio front, these changes resulted in what we now know as the Series 5 Maintenance & Engineering / Maintenance Repair and Overhaul system. Series 5, as we like to call it, has been transformed from a transaction based system into a business process based system with usage scenarios that provide direct benefit to the end user. Instead of simply focusing on the data that needed to be captured to produce the necessary report, our new full time usability team created interactions that provide insights to the user in their everyday activities. But the designs of our highly talented usability gurus were only the beginning. These designs mandated shifts in our technology, to support the new concepts, and the rapid need for our change demanded a shift in our development process. I will bore you with those details later.
Change is upon us every day. Today, I am glad to be surrounded by fellow leaders that realize this change as an inescapable fact. It gives me the confidence to know that my personal efforts towards enabling tomorrow’s successes bigger than today’s, is a realizable goal.
What about you? Are you confident in your own ability to adapt to the certain uncertainties? Is your company strategy inclusive of the change that is about to happen?
