Archive for May, 2006

New research from AMR Research says that decision-makers report blind spots in their supply chains that add risk to their business. There’s a write-up here at Manufacturing Business Technology. Mark Hillman of AMR said “Today’s supply chains are global, running lean, and highly interconnected. Failure at one node in the supply chain, whether it’s a supplier in China or the corner grocery store, can leave a company highly exposed. Said differently, in event of failure, a supply network is only as strong as its weakest link.”

This is consistent with our recently announced RapidResponse Glass Pipeline capability. However, a big difference between our approach and the enterprise data warehouse promoted in the article is the rich analytics and toolset available to users to actually drive a proactive response to change.

Warehouse/BI solutions are focused on data presentation and lack the domain expertise-specific tools users need to actually solve problems. Instead, they believe that visibility alone is sufficient. Visibility is required, but insufficient to address the complex problems that exist in today’s global supply chains.

Here’s a story highlighting some new AberdeenGroup research that predicts an increase in technology spending to drive supply chain innovation.

AberdeenGroup splits technology investment priorities into three general groups: companies looking to achieve parity with industry norms, those looking to adopt best practices, and those interested in supply chain innovation.

“Supply chain organizations are under intense pressure to meet demands for greater customer intimacy, lower cost of goods sold, and increased global business processes,” says Beth Enslow, senior vice president of research for Aberdeen. “To succeed, these organizations are identifying that they need to change their supply chain technology footprints.”

You no doubt saw all the announcements coming out of Sapphire last week. SAP had a series of announcements related to it’s growing ecosystem based on NetWeaver. I recently attended an Enterprise Partner Summit that SAP held in San Francisco where they impressively laid out their plans for partners including a clear roadmap of how to work with the company.

I have to say that I’ve been impressed with what I’ve seen. It’s clear that they are very serious about building an ecosystem. The enterprise application space is in the midst of a major transformation with the major players (SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) all vying for ownership of the new platform and the creation of a new class of applications based on web services integrated on these platforms. It’s an exciting time. It offers customers the opportunity to gain total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages through tighter application integration while realizing greater application flexibility.

I expect to see the major players continue to excel at core capabilities while providers like Kinaxis offer unique value add that complements their offerings. This is why we’re actively engaged with an supporting SAP’s NetWeaver environment through certified solutions that add value to the SAP solutions.

It will be interesting to watch this unfold over the next couple of years, but it looks like SAP is doing a lot of things right.

Here’s a report by McKinsey describing two tools that CIOs want. One of them is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The report says “IT executives are shifting to the software-as-a-service model for some applications not only for lower licensing and maintenance fees but also because implementation is usually quicker and companies don’t have to maintain special skills in software-specific areas.”

We’re seeing tremendous interest in our on-demand offering (I’m biased, but I think our folks have done a great job in delivering a superb service) for the reasons stated here. So many companies are looking to outsource not only their manufacturing, but also their IT operations. SaaS offers compelling benefits in this regard.

Here’s a facinating site that contains world maps. According to the site, “Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.”

Electronics Exports–Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net exports of electronics (in US$) that come from there. Net exports are exports minus imports. When imports are larger than exports the territory is not shown.

Electronics Imports–Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net imports of electronics (in US$) that are received there. Net imports are imports minus exports. When exports are larger than imports the territory is not shown.

This is quite an interesting view on things. And, as we’ve all seen, the implications of a global electronics supply chain is pronounced in terms of the impact on the business where changes are now propogated around the globe.

It’s an interesting site with a variety of very interesting maps. Check it out.

In most companies, the planning process tends to be done by a small number of people over a period of time. Whether you’re talking about corporate planning, financial planning or supply chain planning - these processes tend to be very centralized with a small number of people actively participating and the outcome being used by others in the organization.

The response process tends to be completely the opposite. As one customer said “we build a good plan…then the phone rings.” When the phone rings, the business is no longer running like clockwork and the response process needs to kick in. This process tends to involve lot’s of people - the people that are involved “where the rubber meets the road” in getting things done. These are the customer service reps, the planners, the buyers, the contract manufacturers, the suppliers - all of the people that have the knowledge and insight into what’s possible.

This is critical because, at the end of the day, dealing with unexpected changes comes down to a series of tradeoffs and compromises that people need to make. To do so, these people need to have up-to-date information and the right tools to analyze options and weigh the impact of proposed actions, but the response process tends to be quite people centric and decentralized, in sharp contrast to the planning process.