Understanding whether implementing technology to automate your company’s Supply Chain operations is worth it is easy.

You just need to quantify the value you will capture and compare it to how much it will cost you.

If the result is positive, you are ready to go.

However, the first step on the road opens up multiple questions and risks. And depending on how oyu answer those questions and how you manage the risks, the project will either succeed or fail.

You know how it goes: things look good on paper, but when the rubber meets the road, stuff happens.

Some examples:

• Which provider / solution should I choose?
• What aspects should I focus my attention as we Pilot/POC this new, niche solution before deploying it more widely?
• What unknown risks will emerge as I go down the  implementation road?
• What impact will the integration have on my IT ecosystem, operations, and people?
• How can I make sure the new system does not duplicate something already on-house

And what do companies do in this situation?

Easy—they turn to consulting firms. Usually the big ones. The problem is that the incentives of big consulting firms are not always aligned with those of their clients.

It is like asking your banker for investment advice. best case scenario, his advice will try to benefit both you and the bank but, when in doubt, the Bank comes first.

This leads to several issues:

1. Flimsy Frameworks: Applying standard models and frameworks to problems in various industries. On paper, they work, but they ignore industry-specific nuances that you only learn by being part of the industry for a while, resulting in ineffective solutions.
2. No Real Experience: A lack of tangible real-world experience at both the industry and functional levels. They compensate for this with proposals aligned with “best practices,” often focused more on following trends (like lean, AI, etc.) rather than solving the client’s specific problems.
3. Dependency Culture: Recommending additional projects that benefit the consulting firm more than the client, aiming to make the client dependent on the firm that developed the solution.
4. Staff Turnover: Large consulting firms have high staff turnover. Often, inexperienced and under-trained consultants end up leading critical projects. Although they present themselves as experts, they often lack in-depth knowledge of the sector or the technology.

If you hired consulting services in the past, some of these might sound familiar.

Everything seemed to come together until you discovered some of the above soon after kicking the project off. You felt like when you receive that thing you bought online. The picture looked great; the product is s**t

But I will tell you something.

This is normal.

It is the standard practice; the large consulting firms are the benchmark for all companies.

It is not your fault.

That’s why some companies turn to niche firms or integrators instead of big conglomerates. But this often doesn’t help either, because many of these companies lack the capacity to see the big picture.

They try to solve complex problems with monolithic solutions (technology and only technology!) that address only part of the problem.

For example, a company specializing in Autonomous Robots can do a fantastic job on the low-level tech side, but they tend to overlook the impact of the solution on areas like Operations, People (not just training, but aligning incentives), or Business planning because they lack the tools to harmonize technology with these elements.

This is what I call the hammer effect: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

However, there is another option.