MARCH 2025CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8s the world around us has changed so dramatically over the last couple of years, ranging from pandemic to supply chain shortages to cost of living crisis, the pressures faced by individuals has been played out in organisations across the globe. These pressures have meant that companies have had to put real, targeted focus on the bottom line, specifically on robust cost control. There is, however, another route of attack and many organisations have been forced to have a good hard look at it; productivity and efficiency. Are we as productive and efficient as we could be?As a practitioner and firm believer in process control and continuous improvement being the critical paths to ensure we maximise productivity and efficiency and drive out waste in our organisations while minimise non-value adding activities and maximising value, there have been years searching for that silver bullet to solve all issues. Ok, I may not have found the silver bullet, but I think we have become aware of and started to scratch the surface of something that could make the world of difference.Citizen development of out of the box systems and solutions available to all organisations is a truly exciting prospect. A citizen developer is suggested by Gartner glossary as "... an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are not actively forbidden by IT or business units. A citizen developer is a persona, not a title or targeted role. They report to a business unit or function other than IT." My definition is less precise and a lot simpler, since I am referring here to how we have developed a supply chain admin department through self-learning with tools such as LinkedIn learning to maximise this very approach. Our starting point is with MS Teams, which garnered increasing fame during the pandemic and lockdowns, but which had been around for some time. In fact, in our environment, we had begun developing our supply chain management processes through MS teams close to 1 year before anyone had ever heard about Covid. People were learning how to use the basic functionality on the job, but as we were discovering before this, there is a whole world of possibilities. We, too, have the standard chat and call functionality as offered by MS Teams, which you probably have as well. Our strategy was to build these into quick contact collaboration and communication streams between all supply chain and operations departments. This resulted in fostering a mix of social and business-related conversations with the rule that we should phone or chat on Teams first before sending an email, with this latter platform being used to follow up with formal notes, documents etc. As a tool, this became extremely valuable in driving Value stream team culture and performance.MS teams opened the door to MS Planner (now tasks) for us. Planner, too, is an out of the box solution, which is primarily a system allowing you to manage, collaborate, delegate, and report on projects and tasks. We were able to digitize our entire physical or card based continuous improvement systems in our supply chain and IN MYOPINIONOUT OF THE BOX CITIZEN DEVELOPER SOLUTIONS TO UNLOCK EFFICIENCY AND PRODUCTIVITYAngelo Dalporto, Director of Operations & Supply Chain, DormakabaAngelo DalportoA
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