NU12 by Jaime Mendejar follow the sun hand over work process

New processes at work

As a brief background, I am currently employed with Hewlett-Packard as a SAP Technology Consultant wherein I support the daily operations of P*G plants in asia particularly for their material movement control systems in the SAP environment.  Basically, if a particular delivery does not come to or sent by P&G successfully, my team would be responsible to determine why this occurs.

My team currently is considered a 'Global' team, global in a sense that we support the global operations of P&G but not global in a way that everyone can support the operations of the different regions regardless of who is on shift.  So the current-set up is that there is an Asia team that covers 9AM-6PM, an EMEA team that works from 3PM-12MN, an NA team working from 6PM-3AM and lastly an LA team that works from 10PM-7AM.  These different teams have different solutions that it doesn't follow that if you know how to support the system in Asia, it doesn't mean that you can do the same for EMEA and NA. This means that whenever an incident or problem happens in an Asia plant or with an Asian user, the responsibility of handling such even if it is outside of our 9AM-6PM shift, we would still need to handle it instead of handing it over to EMEA or NA/LA team.

What's the proposal? 

Create a scenario wherein our team can follow-the-sun and handover from 1 region to another any pending or newly opened issues across the global support system. How  do I intend to do it?  First, it would involve granting access to all required specialists to be able to support all regional systems, second, I would propose that key specialists mainly those who have more experience on the application and how to support it, would go on a 3 month rotation across the different regions to train and document the different processes that is required per region. Lastly,  After the 3 month program, the rotated specialist may now begin supporting different regions as a pilot run to see how much of the training can be applied.  Once the documentation has been established, he or she can then perform the training across the original region that he/she supports.  Though, it sounds like it may take a long time to establish and familiarize ourselves with but I believe that once this is in place, the work life balance of everyone involved would be much better as it would not require work outside of the usual office hours.  3.5