I can't believe I've reached a point where I can say I've been in the workforce for over 25 years. I've seen practices that work and practices that don't. Practices that should work but didn't, and practices that shouldn't but did. So what IS best practice in the business context? In my experience, there are frameworks that have a level of applicability. There's no such thing as "best" practice.
In the pandemic of 2020, we learned through the power of 20/20 hindsight that humans react differently to social, medical and environmental conditions. We learned that supply chains running on JIT (just in time) methodologies are crippled in a supply chain crunch, and that every action we take creates a knock-on effect. This has always been the case, but it's quickly forgotten.
Here are a few more viewpoints on what's considered "best" or "good" practice.
ISO 9001
The claim: a documented, audited, repeatable process equals quality.
The standard only certifies that you consistently do what you documented you do. It doesn't intricately evaluate whether your documented process produces "good" outcomes. You can be certified while running an excellent, auditable process for producing a bad result.
Lean Six Sigma
The claim: eliminate buffer stock, run continuous flow, minimise work-in-progress. This is the manufacturing best practice, full stop, because Toyota proved it.
Toyota proved it on high-volume, low-mix production — the same few models, running down the same line, at a scale that justifies zero slack because demand is stable enough to plan against. In an industry where variability is high and you're chasing zero inventory, you get more downtime than anything.
SAP — Standard Order Fulfilment
The claim: one fixed bill of materials and one fixed routing per product, set up once in master data and reused for every order, is best practice because it keeps the system clean and predictable.
That only fits a business that actually sells the same thing over and over. If you sell tens of thousands of variants, it's a nightmare to manage.
What I do instead
The answer isn't "ignore everything that's been documented before" — most of what gets called best practice started as a genuinely good idea somewhere. The difference is treating it as a hypothesis worth testing against your actual situation, not an answer that lets you skip the analysis.
The benefit I find of being part of the CodeFish team is that we're not jailed by a framework of best practices, nor do we aspire to build generic solutions. We work with clients to deliver something far more valuable: something that actually fits you and the business. It's easier than it's ever been to get a software or technology solution fitted to the shape of your business, team and processes.
---
*Ryan Higginson is a Senior Business Analyst at CodeFish Studio, working across operational problem discovery, digital transformation, and technology delivery.*
