Monthly Archives: March 2011

Build a Better Beer Widget? Yes We Can!

A recent article over on CNet, which describes the beer widget as the hollow plastic ball that rattles around the can and is largely responsible for the foamy head on the just-poured brew, highlights how a university mathematician from Limerick, Ireland has discovered a way to create a more efficient, less expensive widget.

The research, which looked into the best way to harness the gas pockets trapped within cellulose fibres as (starting) points for bubbles to grow and release when a can of beer is cracked and poured, built a mathematical model that determined how much cellulose fibre would be needed to create enough bubbles for a head that could compete with a draught poured at a local pub. Precisely, 8.3 x 10-4 square meters of fibre are required, or, a credit-card sized piece of paper added to a can of Guinness, or a layer of paper-like fibres coated on the inside of a can. No widget needed. But the draught will have to be poured slowly as the bubbles are not produced in a quick jolt, as they are with the widget.

How Many Chiefs Should Your Organization Have?

One Per Tribe. No more. No less. By definition, a chief is not a chief without a tribe, and a tribe is not a tribe without a chief. If you have six divisions — Operations, Supply Chain, IT, Finance, Marketing, and HR — you have seven tribes (one per division and the tribe of chiefs) and seven chiefs — COO, CSCO, CTO, CFO, CMO, CRO and CEO. You don’t have a Chief Blogging Officer. You don’t have a Chief Apology Officer. And you definitely don’t have a Chief Twitter Officer. If you do, you’re screwed up and not even supply chain will save you.

Sorry. But that’s just the way it is.

Can We Fix Supply Chain Education?

For the most part, supply chain education is broken. Consider this quote from a recent ChainLink Research article on the 2011 Supply Chain Education Survey Findings that was contributed by an anonymous respondent:

“Offered programs are parochial in nature, designed to drive sales of a vendor’s tools or services, or are too generic to be of value. For example, [a major prestigious university] doesn’t even understand its own legacy in systems thinking. Supply chains are complex and there are no easy fixes. Grossly simplified views perpetuate myths and drive the wrong solutions.”

From my vantage point, most of the educational options, as pointed out by this astute survey respondent, fall into:

  • Academic programs that are more outdated than bell-bottoms
    And if they are that recent, you’re lucky. Plus, most of the professors only have expertise in one or two areas, and it typically revolves around whatever technology or model they’re researching, or should I say, trying to push on the real world. And the gods forbid if you try to change the curriculum without full approval. Unless you’re a full professor with tenure, they’ll smite you down so hard that you’ll never crawl back up. (And by the time you’re a full professor with tenure, you’ve had all the life sucked out of you and don’t have any energy to make drastically sweeping changes for the better.)
  • Third-party programs from associations designed to please the lowest common denominator
    In these organizations, with boards and steering committees as large as the pool of high paying organization members, the motto is none of us is as dumb as all of us and it shines through in the program that is developed. Full of useful topics, but the content is so watered down it’s worse than a self-serve soda at a Kwik-E-Mart trying to save on syrup.
  • Private programs from companies set up by people that used to purchase (but don’t anymore)
    Unlike academic programs which at least have competing theories (but no guarantee that any will be right), these typically have one theory from the energetic individual who started it, and a big slant to whatever type of procurement or logistics management he or she was doing. If all he really did was buy office supplies and equipment, or manage 3PLs, you might as well take your check and give it to some massive charity organization like the United Way. At least 10% of the money will help someone.
  • Vendor programs from vendors that sell a service or solution
    These can actually be quite good, but the content will be carefully designed to insure that you can’t put anything into practice without a tool to support you, and, surprise surprise, it will be ten times harder to use a tool that isn’t the vendor’s.

Now, there are a few good courses out there, delivered by consulting firms who tailor them to client needs, but the consultants get big bucks for these courses, and then more money to identify the next need and design the next course, so it’s actually in their best interest to get it right. But, by the same token, it’s also in their best interest to keep the courses targeted, specialized, and not widely available.

The net effect is that, at the end of the day, the overall state of supply chain education is poor. And the question we need to ask is “can we fix it?”.

I’m not sure. I see a solution, but it would involve invalidating pretty much all of the current theories on higher education, angering large groups of people in the process, and going against the grain of modern western culture.

The answer lies in the past. Years and years (and years) ago, there was a time where only a few people went to College. Higher education was reserved for those who intended to make a career of the intellectual pursuits, and the rest of the population chose a vocation, went into the trades, and apprenticed under a master. The answer is that newbies need to be hands-on trained by professionals, using curriculums selected or designed by the organization as relevant. The masters nearing the end of their careers need to be relieved of some of their leadership and management responsibilities and refocussed on training the new generation who will be tasked with capturing their knowledge and updating the company curriculums as they learn.

These curriculums can be shared among a network of peers, who embrace a co-opetition model where they compete for sales but cooperate on curriculum design and best practices, and refine over time. And we’d solve the talent crunch at the same time.

But as long as we culturally believe that College is a right of passage and all knowledge should reside within ivory walls, we’ll never get back to a societal organization that made sense for thousands (and thousands) of years (as apprenticeships date way back to the beginnings of ancient civilizations) and still do.

The One “Ring”

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

A recent ChainLink Research piece on ERP Part One – The Tales of Technology, while addressing fusing, the myth of integration, noted that the lack of cohesion in architecture and applications led to the beginning of a silent admission by ERP, that there ultimately would never be the ‘one corporate software system’, but they would be a provider of a suite of products. I can’t say I agree.

We are moving toward the one “system”, coming full circle from the introduction of the first MRP systems back in the 50’s, but the “system” will not be so much a single application from a single vendor by a “ring” of seamlessly integrated applications by one or more vendors that address all supply chain functions supported by one central “cloud” with built-in middleware that enables multiple providers to seamless integrate their applications with applications from their peers.

And the way things are going, Salesforce could be “the one system” for many businesses. With so many SRM providers building apps for the SalesForce AppExchange that seamlessly integrate with the core platform and CRM data, it’s a logical next step. Coupa, CVM Solutions, and SupplierSoft have apps on the platform and a dozen more companies are developing apps as we speak.

Cloud services like the AppExchange may soon build the “One Ring” that binds all the systems into one cloud system. What do you think?

If You Want To Know How Green a Data Centre Is, Ask For a Verified PUE

In a recent article, Global Services asked if cloud computing [is] really green. Considering that most of your supply chain apps are moving to the cloud, and that sustainability is a must, it’s a question you should be able to answer. Unfortunately, the article was completely useless and gave you no useful information whatsoever.

All it said was that

  • a recent study from Microsoft noted that, due to increased efficiency and scalability, outsourcing companies can reduce their energy use and carbon footprint by up to 90%,
  • an uninterrupted power supply is required to keep data warehouses running and cool, and
  • energy efficiency is not green on its own, and is no longer enough.

With respect to these statements

  • we all know scale adds efficiency, and that data centres will be much more energy efficient if they use modern high-density low-power blades while you use ancient box servers,
  • classic data centres will create sauna temperatures if not kept cool, and
  • the energy source needs to be renewable.

In order to determine how green a data centre is, you need to know at least the following three metrics:

  • The Performance Per Watt (PPW) of the hardware.
    This tells you how efficient the hardware is. Typically measured in MFLOPS (Mega Floating point Operations Per Second) or LINPACK FLOPS per watt, an efficient modern IBM BladeCenter can get up to 536 MFLOPS/watt. Compare this to a desktop Beowulf cluster that maxes out at 58 MFLOPS with 4 dual core Athlon 64’s.
  • The average load of each operating machine.
    If a machine is only operating at 20% load, on average, you’re only getting 20% of the PPW. But if the average load of each operating machine is 80%, you’re getting at least 80% of the PPW. A modern data centre uses dynamic process allocation and virtualization and machines sleep until the load on the machines that are awake exceeds about 90% in a sustained manner, at which point another machine is woken up and added to the available pool. A traditional data centre does not use virtualization or have machines that support fast wake-up or shut-down or dynamic load balancing software and the machines are always on.
  • The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
    PUE is a measure of how efficiently a data centre uses power and measures how much power is used by the computing equipment in contrast to the overhead required for lighting, cooling, etc. Defined as Total_Facility_Power / IT_Equipment_Power, an ideal data centre has a PUE of 1.0. While not achievable, a PUE of 1.1 is, even though the average data centre still has a PUE of 2.0 to 2.5. Today, a data centre is generally considered green if it has a PUE of < 1.5, but the best data centre in Europe, datadock, has a PUE of only 1.21 and the Thor Datacenter in Iceland has a PUE of only 1.07 and a zero carbon footprint. With carbon emission mandates coming into effect around the globe and significant mandates for power reduction by 2020, if the data centre isn’t closing on a PUE of 1.2, it’s not efficient. And unless at least one its primary energy sources is not renewable, it can not be considered green. (At the very least, the overhead should come from renewable sources.)

So don’t get confused by grandiose claims, scale, and jargon. Ask for these third-party verified metrics. Then you’ll know how green the data centre really is.