Archive for the ‘Products’ Category

If you’re heading out to the 4th Annual Smart Manufacturing for Electronics event, “Capitalizing on the Full Value of Your Supply Chain”, next week look me up. I’m presenting with Devin Taylor, director of purchasing, of Jabil in a session called “A Case Study: Real-Time S&OP“.

As anyone in the electronics marketplace knows, the pace of change and increasing volatility has made aligning demand and supply a tough challenge. Jabil is at the forefront in their ability to respond to change and Devin will be sharing his thoughts on how they are able to deal with these trends.

Since many people asks for case studies, real world examples of how customers benefit from Response Management solutions like our RapidResponse, I wanted to share this recent article highlighting Lucent. Bill Roberts has written a story at Electronic Business entitled “Rapid improvement: OEMs find a tool for more efficient inventory management.”

While this article focuses mainly on the inventory and materials side of the value of RapidResponse, it does provide a nice look into how it helps OEMs deal with the unique challenges associated with outsourcing their manufacturing.

Tom Wallace and Bob Stahl have written a very good paper on “Sales & Operations Planning The Next Generation.” Tom and Bob have been studying these issues for 30+ years and have written several books on the subject. In the paper, they describe the tangible business benefits of a Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process and the market drivers that are requiring changes in the way this critical business process (which they describe as “top management’s handle on the business”) operates.

In the paper, they say “S&OP as it is currently constituted lacks the following important capabilities:

> Rapid and comprehensive simulation
> Seamless linkage between aggregate plans and detailed plans
> Enhanced financial integration
> Support for Sarbanes-Oxley and other requirements for regulatory compliance
> Combining data from disparate sources for decision-making”

They also speak to the growing complexity of businesses (driven in large part by outsourcing) and the accelerating pace of change and the impact it has on the S&OP process.

With a large installed base of global electronics manufacturers, Kinaxis sees these trends every day in our customers. I’ve heard comments from customers saying “we build a good plan, and then the phone rings.” Many of our customers have already moved to a more regular S&OP process combined with the ability to respond immediately to regular changes that occur ever day. In essence, these companies are moving to a constant process of aligning supply and demand - driven by the pace of change in their businesses. And, by empowering a broad set of participants throughout the organization (internal and external), they leverage their collective insights and ensure continual alignment throughout their extended supply networks.

I’m in Half Moon Bay, CA at the AMR Strategy 21 event. It’s the end of the first day of sessions and there’s one resounding theme - SOA, SOA, SOA (if you haven’t seen this before, this is Services Oriented Architecture). Presentations from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, salesforce.com and Rearden Commerce all touted the benefits of SOA to businesses (reusable code, more adaptable business processes, etc.).

The verbal jabs that Shai Agassi of SAP continually threw at Oracle, followed by the expected rebuttals from Oracle were actually more entertaining.

There’s a lot of talk about the emergence of Business Process Platforms and how SOA enables this to take place (SAP’s NetWeaver and Oracle’s Fusion are competing implementations of this vision). This is all based on web services (our RapidResponse web client is built on a set of web services). Whereas applications have historically been vertical silos (CRM, ERP, SCM, PLM, etc.), the reality is that users and business processes work more horizontally, with data and workflows moving across these applications. SOA helps to address these problems, allowing various web services to be composed into composite applications that align more with users and business process workflows that silos of functionality.

As someone that’s been in the software industry for a number of years, this evolution will be interesting to watch unfold. A lot of the presenters spoke of a multi-year adoption cycle and Shai suggested that we’d be in the middle of the adoption curve by about 2010. The other area of debate (separating marketing from reality) here is exactly how much are customers adopting this today and are they really asking for it. I would be interested in your thoughts on that.

Michael Bittner has written another good article at Technology Evaluation Center (TEC) entitled “Using Visibility to Manage Supply Chain Uncertainty (free registration required).” In the article, Michael details the importance of visibility on your ability to manage uncertainty.

Visibility is a critical foundation to be able to respond to uncertainty and volatility. But, as I’ve written before, visibility is not enough. Too much “sensing” without proper “response” capabilities in the hands of your front line decision makers will ultimately lead to “noise” and won’t drive the desired results.

So, visibility is really a feature that, when combined with other capabilities, can help the organization respond effectively to change. But, visibility alone can not do this given the complexity of issues related to determining the appropriate response to uncertainties in demand, supply, capacity and product.

There’s a good and relevant article by Dan Gilmore over at Supply Chain Digest talking about this ever popular topic. Despite the fact that we’re not a traditional supply chain planning vendor, as a non-ERP software company we encounter this situation quite frequently.

Justifiably so, IT organizations are seeking simpler solutions and the appeal of a single vendor is enticing. We’ve worked really hard to make sure our solutions are IT friendly and have proven that at many of the world’s leading companies where our software integrates with and complements systems from SAP, Oracle and the like.

The reality is that every piece of software in the market was designed with a specific intent - to solve a certain set of problems. And, while the major ERP vendors have very broad capabilities and offerings, they don’t cover all of the critical business needs today, nor will they ever. Our challenge is to continue to focus on solving critical business problems that require a unique solution that is not available from the ERP providers. If we can do so in a way that allows IT to address several critical problems at once with our solution while integrating easily within their current infrastructure, we can be an asset to them as they work to address the business’ key challenges.

With an increasing emphasis on being demand-driven, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is gaining additional awareness in many companies. And, it is being elevated to a more strategic business process with increasing executive awareness.

The problem with classic S&OP lies in its lack of responsiveness to
everpresent changes. The lack of a single integrated S&OP modeling tool and the need to deal with myriad data sources make the process cumbersome, and its iterative nature (due to “what-if” questions) means that it often can take up to four weeks to complete. This makes the data stale, since significant events often occur during that time.

Yet with hundreds of products and feature combinations, current S&OP cannot simulate forecast ranges in an acceptable time frame. A new approach is clearly needed—one that lets companies augment their current S&OP process by modeling the impact of many forecast scenarios in real time while quickly and asily calculating the flexibility/cost tradeoff of forecast ranges.

Response Management complements S&OP perfectly by enabling businesses to:
> Dramatically reduce S&OP cycle time by improving business performance through continuous alignment of supply and demand
> Model an environment that includes all supply chain participants, including critical outsourcing partners
> Include all relevant variables of demand, supply, capacity, and product, including new product introduction
> Frequently and easily assess in real time the impact of proposed
changes in all areas
> Instantly model and score multiple “what-if

Joshua Greenbaum has written an interesting article called “Platform Politics” on Managing Automation online. The article talks about the various platform wars being waged in the market. The big players are all trying to dominate with their platforms while everyone else works to integrate with them.

I thought this was interesting since we run into this frequently. Our customers are typically running SAP or Oracle and may have IBM or Microsoft platforms as well. Our position is to ensure an architecture based on a set of XML Web Services that is capable of integrating with any of these architectures since we acknowledge that our customer’s demands vary and seamless integration is key.