The Tempur-Pedic Story: Aggressive Growth Through IT System Transformation
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I recently had the pleasure to interview, Stuart Scott, Tempur-Pedic? CIO. Stuart?s impressive experience serving numerous large companies including GE and Microsoft translates into a wealth of knowledge that any company, large or small, can start learning from immediately. I know I did.
When Stuart started with Tempur-Pedic in 2009, they had aggressive growth plans both domestically and internationally. He was hired to totally revamp IT and enable it to support the expanding business in 24 countries, some with unique go-to-market strategies.
You may ask where does one begin? I will try to share a few key points from our discussion, but trust me; it?s worth the 50+ minutes to listen to it in its entirety here. Read on for a few nuggets:
Look for ways to reduce the amount of traditional IT work that needs to be done like coding, customization, and connecting disparate systems; this frees up IT time to focus on business issues and growth. For example, Collaboration is very important to Tempur-Pedic?s entrepreneurial culture. Moving onto a single global footprint for communication tools, voice, phone, email and document management vastly simplified IT?s involvement and needed support.
Choose a Tier-One ERP system supplier that will grow with your company. Stuart believes every company and industry has unique attributes that no single solution can address off the shelf; there will always be gaps. Go into your implementation understanding those gaps. Tempur-Pedic had very specific ranking criteria for their selection process. They ultimately chose Microsoft Dynamics AX because rapid implementation was critical to them achieving their business goals. AX is flexible and feature-rich; its simplicity has allowed IT to quickly become more proficient in configuring and tuning. From a user standpoint, the familiar User Interface (UI) has lowered training time and resulted in users becoming more proficient more quickly.
Understand that any ERP implementation represents dramatic change and is disruptive to the business. However, if everyone understands the importance of the change in transforming the business, it?s easier to stay on track. According to Stuart, keep in perspective that a new ERP system is more about human change management and so many things you have to get right that go well beyond IT. The process changes, training, communication, education and adoption represent a whole new set of business activities and change that people have to adapt to. If you realize this, and always make decisions with the human factor in mind, you will be better positioned to achieve your goals.
There are many other topics I discussed with Stuart, including the five pillars Tempur-Pedic used as a framework for their transformation, business process re-engineering, change management, implementation process, executive involvement, their approach to customization, and more.
I hope you take the time to listen to this in-depth discussion. I?d be interested to hear what you think about this perspective, and how your company has addressed some of these important issues. You can listen to the Tempur-Pedic discussion here.
Thank you!
About Noman Akhtar
Noman Akhtar is currently the Director of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for Microsoft US. In his previous roles at Microsoft, Noman was instrumental in creating several customer facing programs, which included building a vibrant user community and sharing of best practices; his territory had the highest Customer and Partner Satisfaction across all of Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Akhtar was an Account Manager for Lawson Software. Noman and his wife, reside in Chicago and are proud parents of 4 year old twin girls, and a 1 year old boy. Noman is an active member of the community and lends time to such causes as finding shelter for homeless kids, youth education and feeding the homeless. When not involved with the family or community, Noman enjoys reading and playing racquetball. View all posts by Noman Akhtar ??
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