By Ed Marshall
Most companies today pay more attention to the cost of a screw than they do to the value of their most highly-educated employees. They are fighting the international manufacturing battles of the past, instead of focusing on the true future of competitive differentiation and profit—the skillful deployment of consultants, domain experts and trainers, or the professional services economy.
Disciplines such as manufacturing resource planning (MRP) brought technology-enforced discipline to factories and shop floors in the 1980s and 1990s. Obsessing about the flow of nuts and bolts, optimizing inventory levels, and calculating fulfillment costs down to the penny may not sound exciting, but it led directly to massive efficiency gains and the ability to source raw materials and finished goods from anywhere in the world, with predictable costs and delivery times.
Today, MRP and its successor, enterprise resource planning (ERP) are not strategic differentiators, but merely costs of doing business. In fact, much of the physical manufacturing economy itself has become commoditized—bereft of significant growth opportunities. Margins on products of all shapes and sizes are shrinking. Information and expertise are the new coveted resources.
Yet the management of the high-value people who deliver that expertise is far more primitive than the systems which govern buckets of bolts and trays of silicon chips. Paper, phone calls, simple calendar programs and homebrew spreadsheets are tasked to manage six-figure talent on seven-figure engagements. The most basic client engagement tasks—time and activity capture and reconciliation—are inaccurate to several percentage points in many bureaus. Whether your business calls intellectual capital "knowledge workers
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