Remove Delays. The real-time enterprise is a business that senses opportunities and problems faster and responds to them faster and more precisely. A real-time enterprise has flexible business processes and can establish and de-establish business (and customer) relationships opportunistically and quickly.
The real-time enterprises compete by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays in managing and executing its critical business processes (internally, and with customers and suppliers).
According to Gartner Groups research, by 2006, more than 50 percent of the Global 2000 will be attempting to reduce major process cycle times by 50 percent or more (0.6 probability). By 2008, real-time processing will be a standard requirement in critical business processes.
Set Time Redution Goals. The goal of an real-time project is to radically reduce end-to-end cycle times repeatedly over the mid-to-long term. Incremental improvement is not transformational. Annual or biannual cycle-time reduction targets need to be in the 30 percent to 90 percent range.
If the enterprise sets a hard target of halving a cycle time and then halving it again, the repeated request for significant change will sponsor genuine creativity and the application of technology.
This will progressively remove the waste, inefficiency and poor customer service that remain within many organizations. This repeated reduction of changing cycle times behaves like a centrifugal improvement force.