Outcomes are Everywhere
It seems like everywhere I go I’ve been hearing about outcomes. When I visit the doctor. When I listen to the radio. When I look at grad schools. And now, even at work.
If I’m hearing about it in all these places, then chances are that it’s really important. Also chances are that it’s broad and has many meanings to many different people, like for example “big data.”
So what are outcomes, what do they mean, why are they important, and most importantly why should you care? All great questions, but the answer is: it depends.
The two most typical uses of outcomes revolve around, not coincidentally, two of the most (if not the top most) important parts of society today: education and healthcare. So let’s drill into both those areas, which at their core focus on the same thing: “the impact of .”
Outcomes in Healthcare
In previous models of healthcare you would go to the doctor for anything minor to serious, and the doctor would run tests, perform procedures, write prescriptions, start treatments, with completely varying degrees of success. The problem with this model is that those who performed the treatments were also compensated more for doing more. Which led to things like an “avalanche of unnecessary medical care.” With newer models of healthcare and the evolution of the industry, there seems to be more focus on what actually happens as a result of each treatment (outcome). This ensures that the right things are done, and the wrong (or useless things) aren’t pursued.
Outcomes in Education
Very similar to healthcare, education outcomes are focused on results. Rather than requiring exact steps be followed, some schools and curriculums have retooled to focus on a better outcome in education, and this goes for any level from preschool all the way through college and postgraduate. The process of learning should not just be about time spent in school (although more time certainly helps), but what is learned as result of being at school. Time spent learning outside of school could be vital to a child’s education. By instilling learning out of school hours at preschool age should help to keep them in a similar mindset for their future.
What About Manufacturing Outcomes?
Now I’ll pause there, because while healthcare and education are important in each of our lives, it’s not what we spend our time on every day at work. We’re in manufacturing, and at QAD we’re in manufacturing software. So why can’t outcomes be applied to manufacturing and manufacturing software as well? After all, outcomes are trying to measure effectiveness and we all want to be effective.
In fact, QAD has spent a lot of time defining and implementing what we call the Effective Enterprise which at it’s core is measuring outcomes of our customers to ensure that QAD is doing the right things for our customers through outcome-based solutions and services.
Outcomes are in Our DNA at QAD
For example we know that QAD solutions:
- Increased the number of quotes processed by 20%, with same resources, for Vitatech.
- At Cascade Engineering, QAD helped a 30% improvement in on time delivery performance.
- Inventory days on hand was reduced from 150 to 70 days for Solaft.
And we’re always looking for more outcomes. For every Global Services engagement we are part of, we now call for outcomes as a part of the project because these have mutual benefit for our customers and QAD. With our outcomes we follow a three level structure:
- A description of the desired business result: Improve on time delivery performance through improved management of inventory.
- Metrics defined to measure the business result: Improve on time in full delivery performance from 95% to 99.5%.
- A valuation of the desired business result: Improve on time in full delivery performance (to 99.5%) which will result in reduced late shipment penalties yielding a 450k recurring annual benefit.
As you work with QAD, you may hear us talk about outcomes. And we’d like to have a detailed discussion to know, what outcomes are important to you, and how can we achieve desired outcomes together.
