Daily Archives: December 30, 2009

Use Your Data Analysis System to Analyze Your Green Data and Save Money

As I noted in my recent post on Why You Need Visibility, if you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing will happen: they will use about 10% less energy. And, more importantly, you can use this behaviour to drive savings, revenue, and innovation in your business. How? Consider these five uses courtesy of Andrew Winston and the Harvard Business Review which give you a green advantage.

  • Usage Reductions
    If you provide operations with information on resource use, they will be inspired to find ways to cut back.
  • Internal Competition
    Share footprint data across departments, organize a competition, and see the troops rally! Some factory heads would rather miss financial targets than green goals because its just too embarrassing to be at the bottom of the list. (And since every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line, you might just find yourself more profitable in the current stagflation.)
  • Customer Inquiry Satisfaction
    A great green story can sway customers to your product, and if you are a CPG manufacturer, get you more prime shelf space at Walmart.
  • Initiative Prioritization
    A focus on the value-chain impacts of your operations can help you to quickly zone in on those initiatives that will deliver the biggest results.
  • New Market Opportunities
    When P&G did a study on detergent, they discovered the vast majority of energy use was a result of consumers needing to heat the water to use the detergent. Thus, they invented Tide ColdWater, which generated 2B in revenue in its first year. You could find similar opportunities.

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Why Supply Chains in 2015 Will Be Substantially Different Than Today

A lot of supply chain 20xx lists are produced each year, and while many aren’t worth a second glance, Dan Gilmore over on Supply Chain Digest has one of the best top 10 lists on what supply chains will look like in 2015 that you’re going to find. But what’s even more important than the items on his Supply Chain 2015 is why supply chains are being forced to change. I’ll attempt to answer that a bit in this post.

  • Fuel Prices Will Spike Again … to $200 a barrel
    Global demand is increasing daily. Emerging markets want their western lifestyle and the developed world is doing a very poor job of latching on to renewable sources (like wind, water, and solar … combined, these sources could easily power the Global Grids, but it will take a significant change in mindset as well as a very significant up-front investment for them to do so).
  • Generation Y Will Boycot You With Their Wallets if You’re Not Corporately Responsible
    In most surveys, your CSR policy is a greater concern to most job candidates than the size of the paycheck you’re offering. That’s because environmental consciousness is part of who they are and if they have a choice between two products and one is from a company that is not known for its environmentally friendliness, regardless of cost, guess which one they are likely to choose?
  • Product Lifespans will Compress Further
    As we haven’t reached the limit yet, our market induced appetite to always have the latest and greatest will continue to push manufacturers to innovate faster to keep their marketshare. If you can’t keep up, you will be pushed out.
  • Time-to-Market in Emerging Markets will be King
    The economies of Brazil, India, and China are poised to take off like a rocket … and they want what we got. The first company to identify a need and offer an affordable product to fill it will make the $2B in revenue P&G made in its first year on the launch of Tide ColdWater (the first detergent designed for cold water) look like petty cash. (Remember, there are 1.2 Billion people in India and 1.3 Billion people in China and the middle class population in both of these countries will soon exceed the total U.S. population, if they haven’t already given the current state of the U.S. economy and the real jobless rate of 17.5%.)
  • Inventory Costs will Continue to Increase
    Not because raw overhead costs will increase, but because inventory-related losses due to theft (which costs retailers alone 33.7B in the US) and obsolescence (which will force you to sell or dispose of inventory at a significant loss).
  • SaaS Will Be Better, Faster, Cheaper in Every IT Domain
    While there may still be application domains where it’s not there yet, you can count on that not being the case for much longer. Furthermore, even if you need your own single-tenant instance or data on site, you’ll soon see full-service completely hands-off managed SaaS where the application self-updates and self-replicates because your “instance” is part of the cloud on which it resides.
  • Real Time Information Will Be Ubiquitous
    Cheaper-than-dirt RFID and the emergence of web-based SaaS will quickly take us from an age where we don’t have enough visibility to where we almost have too much. Will you be ready to deal with it?
  • New Breakthroughs in Automation Will Emerge Globally
    Japan is already giving us robot secretaries and robot cats to keep them company. New production technology improvements can’t be far behind!
  • Emerging Markets Are On Their Way to Becoming the Dominant Global Markets
    As noted above, Brazil, India, and China will soon be three of the top five global economies. (China already is, but it will soon be #2.) Germany, France, and the UK will be dwarfed in comparison. If you’re not aligning your supply chains to serve the new GDP super powers, you won’t be a major player this century.
  • Everything will be Digitized
    iTunes has already killed the CD star; even BlockBuster understands that high-speed broadband will kill the DVD star; and when every smartphone has a 10 MP camera …

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