I had the opportunity to conduct an interview with AJ Ansari as third episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. AJ is Chief Operating Officer with Dynamics Southwest from Houston, Texas. However, more than that he serves as a volunteer in various committee roles with NAVUG, IAMCP, Dynamics Credentialed Professionals (DCP), and Directions North America, and has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP. In our conversation we also came across his passion for football and developed the idea of situational manufacturing by learning from successful football teams.
Starting the show, AJ and I exchanged some thoughts as to if and how manufacturing companies are prepared for the SaaS era. It became rather obvious that the foundation has been laid for many manufacturing companies to run their admin operations from cloud-based services.
With this, an interesting effect happens: increasingly, smaller manufacturing companies (who in the past e.g. ran on Quickbooks) start to look at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. This is an opportunity for Business Central partners, but also a challenge to re-invent some of the established Business Central manufacturing consulting best practices. In that regard, AJ came up with the idea of a "prescriptive manufacturing solution" for smaller clients, and provided a thorough level of detail to it.
We then switched the perspective from the detail to 30,000 feet above and looked at what manufacturers can learn from successful football teams. It is those teams that succeed who are capable of quickly adopting the strategy depending on what is happening on the pitch. This idea coined the phrase "situational football" and hence "situational manufacturing".
You can tune in below 👇 on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.