Monthly Archives: June 2008

Ten Green Ideas That Work, Part II

The April 28 (2008) issue of MacLean’s had a great environmental article on Ten Ideas That Work that consisted of ten mini-articles that is definitely worth a read. Today we are going to cover the last five. They were:

  • Windmills Under the Sea
    Tidal Turbine Mania
    This summer, Northern Ireland will be the first country to deploy massive underwater turbines to generate electricity. Developed by Vancouver-based Clean Current Power Systems, this initial system will power 1,000 homes. A second project is being undertaken in Nova Scotia, Canada in the Bay of Fundy and will be operational next year. It will be the largest commercial-scale unit in the world.
    While the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow fast enough to power a windmill, tides are always on the move. This technology has enormous potential. For example, Clean Current estimates that the tides between Vancouver Island and the mainland is sufficient to power 500,000 homes annually! Worldwide, tidal power has the potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 120 M tons annually, and this is likely a low estimate. This technology should be seriously considered by any costal, or island, state or country. While it doesn’t solve the energy problem as a whole, in some parts of the world, it can make quite a dent!
  • Orbit City Abu Dhabi
    Eco-Friendly Cities
    Last month, cranes began to dig the foundations for one of the world’s first eco-cities, which is to be situated 20 miles to the southeast of Abu Dhabi. Being built with money from the Emirati government, Masdar will be a carbon-neutral, zero-waste city of 50,000 that will encompass a university specializing in energy and sustainability issues and economic zones devoted to green industry and research. The entire city will be powered by photovoltaic cells, wind power, and biogas. Water will be conserved with vacuum toilets and high-tech treatment plants that will convert sewage into household water. And cars will be banned, as residents will be whisked about in Jetson-like driverless pods. Shaded walkways and narrow streets will be everywhere to provide cover from the hot sun.
  • One Sheet to the Wind
    Wind Dams
    Lake Lagoda, the largest lake in Europe, might soon be home to a massive wind-dam if an innovative British design firm (by the name of Chetwood Associates) has it’s way. The lake has a number of rocky gorges that act as wind funnels, and it is expected that a single 25m x 75m Kevlar sail will capture enough wind energy to produce 120 megawatts of electricity per year, enough to power 35 houses. It’s not a lot of power, but it’s cheap power, and sails can be hoisted wherever windy conditions prevail. The advantage is that, unlike conventional propellor wind-farms, it doesn’t let any wind-power escape.
  • The Power of Garbage
    Plasma Conversion Power Plants that run on Garbage
    Plasco recently threw the switch on a new energy conversion plant outside of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on a new demonstration power-generating garbage plant that is believed to be the first functioning power plant in the world that runs on zero-emissions plasma conversion. Unsorted household garbage can be fed into a chamber that contains superheated plasma gas (in excess of 8000 C). The chamber breaks garbage down into its atomic components and cools it to produce a synthetic gas that is capable of being burned in a low-emission internal combustion engines. Furthermore, most of the by-products are usable. Every ton of household waste produces 150 kg of a clean, glass-like material that can be used by construction, potable water, small amounts of sulphur (a component of fertilizer) and salt, and a little over 1 kg of non-reusable waste that has to be landfilled. In other words, landfill requirements are reduced 900%!
  • Zero Carbon Footprints in the Sand
    Carbon Neutral Resorts
    Costa-Rica is aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2021 in an attempt to be the number one vacation spot for the carbon-couting grippie (green hippy) who wants a guilt-free vacation. Already, more than 80% of its energy comes from renewable sources such as wind and water. It’s airline, that uses transitional fuel technology, buys offsets every time it flies, and it’s public transportation system is extensive. It also has a significant re-forestation initiative, which will eat the small amount of carbon it intends to produce in the future.

Open Innovation: The Value of Non-Confidential Exchange

Nine Sigma, a consultancy that helps clients globally find the best innovators and solutions for their needs through it’s Discover-Connect-Solve service offering, recently release a customer insight paper on the Kellogg Company, titled Open Innovation and the Value of Non-Confidential Exchange (with a companion video), that described how an open process connected Kellogg with novel technologies and new solution providers that were previously outside of Kellogg’s reach.

Open Innovation is a powerful approach for producing innovative new product and business solutions by leveraging cutting-edge technology and expertise from the global innovation community. The rewards from open innovation include:

  • A Robust Product Pipeline
  • Accelerated Speed to Market
  • Significant Cost Savings
  • Access to Global Innovators
  • Innovation Sustainability
  • Risk Reduction

Furthermore, an appropriate process that facilitates the free-flow of non-confidential information to identify, qualify, and ultimately activate new ideas from external sources (for productive, profitable, and innovative R&D solutions) can minimize the risks associated with any IP issues a company may have.

The process employed by NineSigma to help Kellogg build a sustainable Open Innovation program started with a combined cross-functional Kellogg and NineSigma task force that began by:

  • identifying Kellogg’s key technical challenges
  • selecting the projects that could benefit the most from open innovation
  • developing the RFPs
  • inviting solution providers to respond on how they’d address the challenges

Once responses were received, the cross-functional team proceeded to:

  • review the proposals
  • establish non-confidential discussions with potential providers

Then, once potential providers were identified, the team:

  • created business agreements, IP agreements, and NDAs
  • reviewed the technology of the potential providers
  • selected preferred providers
  • undertook negotiations with the preferred providers
  • negotiated final agreements

So what distinguishes this process from a normal supplier selection process? Because Kellogg employed NineSigma as an intermediary, they were able to keep their identify confidential until potential providers were identified and NDAs were signed. Furthermore, they were able to keep the product lines they were interested in innovating confidential until preferred providers were selected. And since they went through an intermediary who helped them sift confidential information from non-confidential information, the possibility of a potential provider guessing which company was on the market, or which product line was up for grabs was minimized, and this prevented competitors from identifying potential weaknesses in Kellogg’s operations. In addition, NineSigma experts, once briefed by Kellogg’s internal experts, could take the place of Kellogg’s experts in the initial discussions, further concealing the client’s identity until all parties were ready to engage in a confidential dialog.

Furthermore, the potential providers could also be confident that their IP was being protected, as NineSigma also helped them sift confidential information from non-confidential information and helped protect their identity as a bidder in the process. This allows each company to compete for business on the merits of its proposal and technology, not on an ill-formed opinion an executive might have based on something he might or might not have read about them a year or so ago.

It’s a great approach for companies that need to be overly protective of their IP, as well as those companies that don’t understand what their IP really is. It allows them to enter the Open Innovation Marketplace and still keep their paranoid legal advisors – who are one of the biggest barriers to innovation – happy.

Are Your Managers Sabotaging Your Business?

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference there was a presentation by Don Burke and Sean Dennehey from the CIA that’s been making a lot of buzz in the blogsphere (on sites such as Joho and Boing Boing). It seems that, as part of their presentation, they cited a page from the (now declassified) 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual on General interference with Organizations and Production. This section had eight tips on organization and conference sabotage, seven tips for office workers, ten tips for employees, and fourteen tips for managers.

But the section for managers is the best. It says:

  1. Demand written orders
  2. “Misunderstand” orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.
  3. Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don’t deliver it until it is completely ready.
  4. Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
  5. Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don’t get them, argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work.
  6. In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.
  7. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
  8. Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
  9. When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
  10. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
  11. Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
  12. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
  13. Apply all regulations to the last letter.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like your average manager to me!

Fill Your Gas Tank with Coupa e-Procurement

These days, prices at the pumps are on everyone’s mind – consumer and business owner alike. And whether you’re a 3PL or a call center, your business depends on gas. Just like a 3PL will go under if it can’t afford to keep the fuel tanks in its fleet full, so will your business if your employees can’t afford the gas they need to get to work and you can’t afford to help them offset their transportation costs. But how are you to do that if everything else is going up in cost as well?

These days, the only way many businesses can consistently keep their costs down is to use e-Procurement – which has been found to lower an average organization’s costs by 4.8% (according to a recent Aberdeen study). But if you’re a small business, or even a smaller mid-size business on a limited budget, chances are you just don’t have the cash for the solutions offered by the self-proclaimed market leaders. (Ariba and Ketera, if you’re wondering.) But all is not lost – because there’s Coupa, the first e-Procurement platform for the mass market that any organization can afford. (Not just the Fortune 3000!) A true on-demand SaaS platform that takes advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing to keep prices as low as they can go, prices start as low as $295/month or $3540/year! Chances are that’s less than you’re paying Microsoft annually for it’s bloated, unstable, operating system that you run your business on – and within the reach of even the smallest of operations!

There’s no better time than now to investigate Coupa, who just today rolled out their latest update. On their seventh release (since their initial launch in July 2006), the platform is now well rounded for buyers, suppliers, and administrators alike – and still easier to use than Amazon.com. (Let’s put it this way, if Amazon truly was “one-click”, Coupa would be “no-click”.) Their search functionality now supports lists and gallery views and sorting by supplier, price, and relevance. Their form-based ordering now allows for “requisition copy” for instant re-ordering. You can now receive notification of approvals (which can be done by system administrators through e-mail) in real-time through your Instant Messenger client! And their checkout is still a marvel in simplicity – everything that can be pre-populated (such as shipping, billing, and receiving information) already is, and most of the time all you have to do is click “submit”! And, unlike many other systems out there (including the B2C leaders) if you have to order multiple items that require different billing information, whereas most systems would force you to create multiple orders, with Coupa, you can choose to specify billing at the line item level. And if only a few items require special billing information, you only have to specify the information for those items. Default billing information will be automatically populated for all of the other items.

It’s all based on Coupa‘s philosophy that no piece of data should need to be entered twice – ever – a philosophy that is even extended to suppliers. (A philosophy that the doctor wishes more software companies would wrap their head around and stop wasting time building flashy Cadillac UI’s to mask their problematic Model-T Ford engines.) With Coupa, your supplier can automatically generate an invoice off of your purchase order with a single click, and they only need to enter information (such as shipping, billing codes, etc.) not available on the purchase order. Considering that the vast majority of EIPP systems only allow for electronic submission of a supplier invoice, this is a huge benefit. Millions, if not Billions, of dollars are lost annually due to invoicing errors – which are easily prevented when the supplier does not have to re-key in data, as every keystroke increases the chance of an error. Furthermore, Coupa supports standard catalog formats and “punch out” (and has over 2300 suppliers already enabled in its system), so the chances of a pricing error are greatly reduced as the supplier does not have to create a separate price list for every client for off-contract goods and services (and only has to create one price-list for on-contract goods and services, and never has to re-key pricing on an invoice).

But most importantly, because it’s 100% hosted, Coupa does not require anything besides the browser already sitting on your employee’s desktop. Furthermore, since it supports the creation of buying policies during set up, it’s essentially 100% touch-less buying from an administrative point of view. You don’t need any IT resources. You don’t need your approvers double checking every order to see if every good or service is on contract and at the contracted price (because you can set the system up to only allow on-contract purchases at contract prices without authorizations), and you can eliminate manual review of all purchases that represent normal business conduct (by setting up regular purchases and rules for what purchases require approval and human intervention and what purchases don’t).

And you can take comfort in the fact that as good as Coupa is today, it’s only going to get better with time! Between July 2006 and May 2008, Coupa had 7 major releases and over 13 updates! That’s at least 3 releases and 6 updates a year! And when you consider that they were

  • the first open-source e-Procurement platform
  • the first e-Procurement platform built for the mass market
  • the first mass-market e-Procurement platform built as SaaS from the ground up
  • the first supply chain platform to use Amazon cloud computing
  • the first e-Procurement platform to offer a free 30-day trial
  • the first, and still only, e-Procurement platform to offer drag-n-drop shopping
  • the first, and still only, e-Procurement platform to include “how to buy” policy support
  • the first e-Procurement platform that allows employees to contribute feedback

and that

  • the rate at which spend through the platform doubles decreases every quarter (it’s now down to 25 days)
  • the supplier count is exploding month over month (over 2300 connected suppliers and climbing fast)
  • the average “go-live” time for a new client is decreasing by the quarter (average is now 17 days to get the system fully configured for “touchless” buying and the suppliers who represent 80% + of your business enabled)
  • the average update has 100’s of improvements … and over a dozen new features
  • it also comes with extensive reporting for finance, logistics support, and even basic inventory management capabilities … with new functions being added every major release

you just can’t go wrong giving it a try if you’re an average small or mid-size business. (Especially since it has a free 30-day trial!)

And chances are, with Coupa, you’ll save enough to keep that gas tank full, even when everyone else is running on empty.

Ten Green Ideas That Work, Part I

The April 28 (2008) issue of MacLean’s had a great environmental article on Ten Ideas That Work that consisted of ten mini-articles that is definitely worth a read. Today we are going to cover the first five. They were:

  • A Better Way To Catch Some Sun
    Solar Power Farms
    In Nevada, a 140-hectare concentrated solar power plant went on-line in June of 2007 and is currently producing up to 134 Million kWh of electricity per year. While this is only enough electricity to power about 14,000 homes, it’s renewable and with current oil costs, concentrated solar power, which concentrates the sun’s rays on a single point (that generates temperatures up to 1,500 C) to heat a fluid that drives turbines, is not much more expensive than alternatives. (It’s not even a factor of 2 anymore!) And with oil prices rising, and solar power technology falling, by the day, I expect it will be break even for countries with the right climate within a year! (Deserts or semi-deserts with lots of sun is perfect – which describes just about every country at or near the equator!)
  • Turning Up The Heat in Japan
    Turn Down the AC
    In May 2005, the Japanese government changed the future of summer fashion by introducing Cool Biz, an initiative to lower carbon emissions from air conditioning that resulted in thermostats in all government offices being raised to 28 C (82.4 F) from June to September, with private companies urged to follow suit. Today, it’s the new normal for offices (with over 48% of companies complying) that have also taken up the new floral Okinawan shirt (which is the Japanese equivalent of the Hawaiian shirt) dress code.
    I think North America should follow suit, and keep thermostats at 25 C (77 F) in the warm summer months, and more importantly, keep thermostats at 17 C (62.6 F) in the cold winter months. Let’s face it – these temperatures are less than 20% off from what most of us consider room temperature, and if it’s 30 C (86 F), 35 C (95 F), or even 40 C (104 F) outside, 25 C (77 F) is refreshing. And in the winter, when it’s 0 C (32 F), -10 C (14 F), or below -20 C (-4 F), with a suit jacket or a sweater, 17 C (62.6 F) is balmy!
  • FreeWheeling in Paris
    Bicycle Rentals
    Last July, Paris launched a bicycle rental system and made 20,600 silver bikes in computerized stands available for rent by anyone. This is an idea that should be adopted by all small cities, urban-centers, and sub-urbs that are bike-friendly. But to make sure it takes off, I’d up the ante. I’d allow unlimited rentals for a small price per year (enough to cover the maintenance of the system and bike replacement). This would allow the program to quickly acquire, and maintain, enough bikes for everyone willing to use the system, and allow costs to be kept low. It would also deter thefts, because if anyone had unlimited use of a bike for a low price per year, who would buy one (and, hence, who would thievea sell to)?
  • Electric Cars on the Monthly Plan
    An Electric Car Network
    Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place recently signed a 42.3M project with Danish Energy Firm DONG to establish a network of electric cars in Denmark by 2011 in partnership with Renault-Nissan. The project is going to build 20,000 recharging stations nationwide and subsidize the cost of the cars by selling the service (recharging and replacing batteries) on a subscription plan. Each battery will be good for about 150 kms (93 miles), and when they run out, they can be swapped for recharged batteries at recharging stations. The goal is 100,000 electric cars on the road by 2010.
    This is another project that should be adopted world-wide, but the cars should be redesigned to hold 2 batteries (since much of North America lives in suburbia and 16-32 km (10-20 mile) drives to work and back are not uncommon), and get at least 320 kms (200 miles) per charge.
  • A Tax on Flatulence
    A Methane Tax on Farm Animals
    The problem with agricultural animals such as cows, sheep, and goats is that they (constantly) burp and fart methane, a gas that traps 21 times more heat than carbon dioxide. This adds up fast — the world’s meat industry is responsible for roughly 18% of total greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the total greenhouse gasses produced by transportation world-wide. In other-words, despite all the complaining by the grippies (green hippies), your SUV is not the problem (especially if it is less than five years old and has a kick-ass catalytic converter that insures that the air coming out is actually cleaner than the air going in if you live in cities like Los Angeles or Beijing). It’s your addiction to meat and the fact that North American’s eat more than twice as much meat as the global average! (Now, I’m not suggesting that you should be a vegetarian, as I’m not, but I am suggesting that you could eat less meat. Once a day is plenty. We have lots of protein alternatives, and many experts agree that you shouldn’t eat red meat more than three to four times a week.)
    In an effort to deal with this problem, New Zealand introduced a “fart tax” on flatulent animals. It was eventually dropped after heavy lobbying, but I think it’s a great idea – as long as the price increases that will result are countered with price decreases (in the form of import tax reductions, production tax reductions, or just plain old subsidies) on alternative sources of protein. If we’re going to eat more than our fair share of meat, we should pay for the privilege, but the average working person, who is feeling the pinch of continually rising food prices, should not still be able to afford a healthy diet and, thus, alternative, greener sources of protein should be very affordable.
    In addition, the animals’ diets should be altered to keep methane production to a minimum and nitrification inhibitors (which prevents nitrogen from leaking from the soil and forming the greenhouse gas known as nitrous oxide) should be used, and New Zealand’s lead in tackling this problem in this manner should also be investigated.

In our next post, we’ll review the last five.