Philosophy of Workcube

According to many, the world is in the VUCA era. VUCA; It consists of the initials of the words volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We live in a volatile, complex, uncertain, blurry world. Globalization, digitalization, and increasing competitive intensity feed VUCA. As of January 2021, 5.2 billion of the 7.8 billion people became part of the digital society. Digitization and the Industry 4.0 paradigm are now facing businesses as a new challenge. (1)

Against this challenge, businesses have to increase their competitive power. Workcube enables businesses to use information technologies as leverage by combining them with strategic intelligence in order to increase their competitiveness. Workcube does not worship technology, it instrumentalizes it to increase its competitiveness.

Holistic Approach
In recent years, it has started to be noticed how important it is to be interdisciplinary or holistic in many professions, especially in the medical world. For example, in the medical world, doctors began to see more clearly that while trying to treat an organ, other organs can be damaged, and if it is not considered holistically, irreparable results occur.

Each cell is autonomous, the organs are autonomous, but the body is a whole. Also, the effect of mental and emotional functioning on the body is enormous. Optimal mental-body-mind balance is not sufficient for human health. Because man is not a stand-alone being. Man in a physical and social environment. The conditions it is in need to be both optimal and compatible with humans. If family, social environment, economy, and environmental conditions are not sufficient, human life is adversely affected. Compliance with environmental conditions directly affects the quality of life and human performance.

Many scientists say that the one-dimensional and eclectic view deepens environmental and human problems. The “Butterfly Effect” metaphor predicts that the flapping of a single butterfly's wing can create a storm in the ocean.

Businesses, like living organisms, are a whole. For a business, the soul is the fire of entrepreneurship and strategy, the mind is the collective consciousness and IQ of the business, the body is the resources of the business, and the market is the environmental conditions in which the business lives. The holistic approach not only deals with perfecting the internal processes of the business but also seeks new ways to adapt to changing environmental conditions and exist.

You can think of it this way, if ERP and other inward software are the business itself, Big Data is the environment in which the business lives. If HR software is inside the business, Social Media is the environment in which the business lives.

Workcube is a business, communication, and cooperation platform that brings together the employees, customers, and suppliers of an enterprise. Applications such as ERP, CRM, HR, PMS, PAM, CMS, LMS, B2B, B2C are the intermediate stops coming to Workcube.

Workcube approaches the business in a holistic way. It treats the business holistically as a living organism. Many businesses today have to use a lot of software to consolidate their business. The first reason is historical. The world of information technologies, especially software, is younger than many industries. Many rules are newly formed. The other is that the world is going through a great change. To keep up with the change, businesses have bought a lot of software for the process. This eclectic structuring has revealed a dispersed information architecture. Many businesses have trouble seeing the whole.

One of the most important problems of businesses today is to use information technologies in a way to make better and more effective management. It has become impossible to maintain a business without the use of information technologies. On the other hand, technology is the primary factor that enables one to stay ahead of competitors as competitive power. However, it is really difficult when acting with existing established understandings. The reason is complex business life and complex technologies.

Let's take a typical business, for example. Let's list the needs of this business together. We can divide these needs into two categories, primarily hardware and software.

This business needs a 24/7 continuous on-line, on-time network. That means switches, modems, hubs. Other physical infrastructures such as servers, backup systems, firewalls running on this network must work in harmony without interruption. On top of this physical infrastructure, infrastructure software such as operating systems, databases, security applications run.

Every business needs a business-financial system software. When this need is taken one step further, it is called ERP, that is, the "Enterprise Resource Planning" application. With ERP, more effective production, stock, and financial management are aimed. However, contrary to common and misleading claims, ERPs do not meet all the business needs of a business. Customer Relationship Management, known as CRM applications, comes before ERP. Because ERPs usually start processes with an order. However, businesses need campaign management and other marketing tools before the offer, the opportunity before the offer, the lead before the opportunity. The lifeblood of businesses is sales. Every business that wants to improve sales naturally needs CRM.

Unfortunately, ERP + CRM is not enough to manage the business. A typical CRM application is not sufficient for businesses that require after-sales service, follow-up warranty and provide maintenance support services. Because service operations naturally cause problems such as spare parts, serial numbers, warranty tracking, invoicing of service, and items. However, most of this information is in the ERP. Sales force management is often included in CRMs. However, sales force means workforce equals manpower. This situation inevitably necessitates a skilled HR, that is, Human Resources software. Since HR applications in ERPs do not go beyond payroll, areas such as recruitment, planning, performance management are left open. In HR software, the training management system is not stressed enough. Moreover, it is not enough to just train the employees, it is also necessary to meet the training needs of the business partners. A good LMS (learning management system) raises the collective IQ of the enterprise. Video and audio enriched content, quizzes, syllabuses. Excel comes to the rescue in every open field. In some businesses, additional software and patches are constantly tried to be made with internal resources. This means much greater danger. Needs never end.

In the meantime, many physical assets such as automobiles, vans, computers, machines, air conditioners, and furniture must be systematically tracked, registered and their expenditures must be under control, maintenance must be done, and insurance must be remembered. The Fixed Assets module in the panacea ERP is not enough for this job. Physical Asset and Maintenance Management is decided when it's time to get the software. Duplicate transactions will occur if this physical asset Management system is not synchronized with ERP and HR.

Since a central network agenda is thought to be good for the business, a calendar application triggers Task Management of who is assigned which tasks, then Time management, which helps to understand the time your employees spend at work. A small problem arises in your project software, where you will manage your construction works, store opening, corporate development projects. A project software that cannot integrate with stock, human resources, finance, and operations in the context of time, resource, activity begins to be disconnected from the whole. For example, the real answer to the question of what is the profitability on the basis of the project, what is the cost, what do we owe due to this project, cannot be found.

Employees on intranets enter self-service leave requests, make internal correspondence, discuss in forums, explain business rules, reach the help desk, share electronic documents. In modern businesses, intranets mean corporate memory, on the other hand, knowledge management, called Knowledge Base Management, is a part of this business. Naturally, because the Intranet is a derivative of the Internet, it looks like an in-house web page. Whether it's an Intranet or a corporate website, doing all these things is basically possible with CMS, that is, content management systems. If there is no intranet, it is possible to share information by using a file server, or by using a file server, by making folders in a directory on a server that everyone can access. Accessing these folders for your remote offices presents difficulties. Whereas web technologies are currently the best-known way of disseminating and collecting information.

If there is no CMS, it is impossible to build outward-looking websites, namely extranets and websites. However, CMS – Content Management System alone is not enough for B2B or B2C sites built to integrate with business partners such as a business's dealer-service-supplier-corporate customer. because it is mandatory to share or enter information created in many back-office applications such as product information, price, stock, current account information, complaints, and orders. In addition, web-based interaction with other 3rd party institutions such as collection and shipping is required. Usually, businesses apply to a web company to get this job done. It is not easy to manage the problems of your websites that are long, tedious, and not integrated with back offices.

With so much software, logic, and architecture, trying to integrate them is either too expensive or impossible. Generally, two categories of software, BPM and BI, are recommended for businesses that have reached this stage. BPM is Business Process Management or applications that regulate Workflows. These apps are useless on their own. For example, organizing a workflow on ERP functions necessitates perfect compatibility between ERP and BPM. On the other hand, life changes, work practices change, and workflows can never be perfect. The perfect workflow or process design is more of a consultant-made phenomenon. In the world of change, it is the wisest way to adopt an "acceptable level of quality and continuous gradual improvement" approach.

BI, that is, business intelligence applications, are basically reporting systems. The information formed in ERP, CRM, HR, PAM, Service, Project, LMS, CMS, Intranet, B2B, B2C, and other additional software creates small islands of disjointed information. Consolidating this information and developing analytical reports and forecasts is theoretically easy. It really is. All business software has a database running underneath it. Relational databases have SQL -structured query language. Anyone who knows how to make a query connects to the databases of these applications runs the query they want and gets the report. There is only one condition for this job. If you do not know which data is stored in which field, you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

Even creating users for so many systems is tiring for system administrators. In this case, LDAP or its derivative Active Directory technology comes to the rescue. The purpose is to perform every operation with a single-sign-on, that is, a single password entry to all authorized applications, including what will appear on the desktop when a user opens his computer and enters his username and password. Remember, this too is a job and mostly applies to local networks. This is a complicated matter in private virtual networks called VPNs created in large geographies. Security, backup, communication, messaging, and many more sub-technology are needed.

Advanced planning and optimization tools, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications appear at the end of the digitalization process, not at the beginning. What cannot be measured cannot be improved. To measure means to record. For every business, the information system means SCI (Save-Check-Improve). In the first and second industrial phases, records were made with pen on paper, and in the third phase, with keys on the computer belonging to the enterprise. In the 4th phase, touches, sensors, keys will not make recordings only on business computers. Customers, suppliers, society, government, as well as operating a distributed network working with microservices; everyone will record everyone. An important part of the data needed for decision making is now in Big Data outside the business. More and more accurate or more refined results are obtained when internal data is integrated with external data.

If everything and everyone is on the Internet, then the management tools are on the Internet too. Machines, mice, people, cows, trucks, the government, and everyone and everything must be connected to the internet and naturally to 100% web-based Workcube. The holistic approach requires real-time integration with every component, business, collaboration, and communication.

According to the “Commercial Software Taxonomy” research of IDC (International Data Corporation), a typical company today needs more than thirty software under seven headings. Purchasing, installing, adapting, supporting, and integrating software are very difficult and expensive processes. Workcube offers businesses an integrated-holistic structure to overcome this problem.

Working with the world for the world is the basis of Workcube's holistic thinking.