This one is dedicated to the Cat Whisperer.
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Where to Find Your LOLCat When It Is Asleep
This one is dedicated to the Cat Whisperer.
How Do You Find an Innovative New Vendor?
Brian Sommer over on ZDNet just ran a great post on how to easily identify the up and coming innovative vendors in the space. All you have to do is look at who the big established players are trash talking! After all, if the company isn’t innovative, they have nothing to fear from the competitor, and will say something like “yes they also have a solution suite that could potentially help you, but” … “they are missing these key features that we have found to be instrumental to customer success” or “we have done more implementations in your space” or “we have a more mature professional services organization” or “we fit better with the platforms and processes that you have in place” or “we are more committed to customer success” or “we have won more awards proving the maturity of our solution” and just shrug them off. But if the company is innovative and poses a real threat, they will try to trash-talk it out of your candidate pool. And they will use predictable language like “what they are offering is a cool feature, not an application” or “they’re inconsequential” or “their solution is immature and / or will never catch on“. These phrases are your first clue that this is a vendor you should be looking at. It might not be mature enough to meet all of your needs today, but maybe if you can bolt on the innovative new features they are offing to your existing ERP, you can, with a little elbow grease, extract more value and, as the company grows, be the first to take advantage of their new features and applications as an early adopter preferred customer.
And not only did Brian do a great job of pointing this out, he also created a great table that summarizes all of the common phrases an established, fairly un-innovative, company will use to trash talk an innovative startup in its infancy, a rapidly growing new competitor, and an upstart that’s all grown up now. And then, to complete the picture, he also points out what they say when the decide to acquire the grown up upstart because it has a more innovative solution.
Click on the image to be taken to the full table, and click this link to read Brian’s full post on the Software Smack Talk Playbook. It’s awesome.
You need a Platform that Supports Sustainability
I think we can all agree that sustainability is important – very important. You might be in business to make money, but the only way you’re going to make money is if you stay in business. The only way you’re going to stay in business is if you’re sustainable, because, otherwise, you risk running out of resources, money, or, and I’m not kidding, customers. The earth is finite, so it stands to reason that there is only a finite amount of any resource. A company has a finite amount of money, and wasting it is the quickest path to going out of business. Today’s consumer is concerned about the environment – harming it will drive them away, and with no customers, you have no business.
So how do you achieve this magic of sustainability? Well, you can achieve it the same way you achieve everything else in business – hard work, perseverance, and ingenuity. But the real trick comes in sustaining sustainability – and the best way to do that is to have not only supporting processes and methodologies, but a supporting platform as well.
A supporting platform can help you keep track of your initiatives which can range from your office recycling program to your global waste reduction initiative. Recycling efforts within a single large office building can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. As noted in a now classic S&DC article on Building the Green Supply Chain, the Boulder Community Hospital reduce, reuse, and recycle program saved the hospital $600K a year. On a global scale, Walmart saved 2.4M in shipping just by reducing packaging requirements. And Interface Inc, in their effort to move to a zero environment footprint, have saved more than 260M in the first decade of their sustainability program.
More importantly, it can also help you get control of your global sustainability initiatives when it comes to environmental impact reduction, social responsibility, and prevention of animal cruelty. Unlike internal waste reduction initiatives, which often do not exceed the complexity of making sure the used toner cartridges were shipped back to the manufacturer, global sustainability initiatives require you to also insure your supply chain does not violate the initiatives you commit to. Just because you don’t have a sweatshop, pump out toxic emissions in excess of the Kyoto protocol, or skin cows alive does not mean that your suppliers do not.
In order to insure that you have a supply chain in compliance with your initiatives, you have to track relevant information from your suppliers and have them track the corresponding information from their suppliers. This is an insurmountable challenge unless they can provide you with the information you need directly into your systems, as the average large company has dozens, if not hundreds of essential tier 1 suppliers and thousands of less critical suppliers. This requires a web based platform capable of securely collecting, storing, indexing, aggregating, and unifying all of the relevant information from each supplier.
Furthermore, depending on where you want to do business, sustainability might be more than just an initiative – it might be a fact of life. If you want to do business in the EU, you need to comply with REACH and RoHS, and possibly half a dozen other directives. California has introduced its own green legislation, and parts of Asia, suffering from severe pollution as a result of the rapid build up of manufacturing capability over the last few decades to meet the demands of American and European multinationals focussed on low cost country sourcing, may not be far behind. You have to not only maintain all of the documentation necessary for compliance purposes, but have to be at least 99.999% certain you are in compliance before making a shipment into the region. If even the tiniest removable part of your electronics system, such as the removable power cord, is not in compliance, your entire shipment could be blocked, seized, or destroyed.
This dictates the need for a platform that tracks not only all information related to your sustainability programs, but all product related information from raw materials through final production. This is the only way to minimize your risk of non-compliance. That’s why you need a Supplier Information Management (SIM) solution, or an e-Sourcing/e-Procurement solution with enhanced Supplier & Sustainability Information Management. Fortunately, you have a lot of options. We’ve covered many on SI in the past and will cover more in the months to come.
Successful Supply Management Organizations are Empowered
What Works for Nations Works for Business, and what works for business works for organizations within the business — Supply Management included. This recent article, over on Chief Executive, that reviews the new book, Why Nations Fail, noted that just as nations flourish when they foster political and economic institutions, and they fail when power and opportunity are concentrated in the hands of the few, companies are setting themselves up for trouble when decision making is almost entirely restricted to top executives. Similarly, your Supply Management organization is setting itself up for trouble if all (major) decisions have to pass through the Director or, even worse, CPO.
In order for your supply management organization to be successful, your people have to not only be in a position to make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made, but feel empowered to make such decisions. They need to know what authority they have, when they have it, and feel trusted to use that authority. They should only be going to their manager, director, or CPO when a new issue arises that is beyond their experience where they should have some guidance to solve it. And if your supply chain organization is filled with talented, empowered people, this is not an event that should be happening every day.
I’m keeping this post short because I want you to read the article on What Works for Nations Works for Business and dig further into this issue, both in the SI archives and the CE publication. It’s one issue that should not be overlooked.