Monthly Archives: September 2012
Canadians Beware! Harper Wants to Throw You In Jail For Clicking a Web Link!
Prescript: It seems that the USA and Mexico are also in these talks and that all North Americans are in jeopardy!
Now that you’re back from summer vacation, take note. Harper wants to throw you in jail just for clicking on a web link! If you were paying attention, back in June the Huffington Post ran an article on the trans-pacific partnership and how Canada would fall into [an] ‘Internet Trap’ under the Asia trade deal. As per this article in the Huffington Post in July, the 13th round of negotiations closed on the TPP in July, and thanks to Harper, we have now entered a new world of threats to our digital rights.
Although we don’t have access to the current, official TPP draft, a leaked agreement would give big media new powers to lock users out of their own content and services, and to shut down websites and remove content, thereby blocking users and entrepreneurs from enjoying the benefits of the open Internet. In addition, negotiators are talking about creating a dispute resolution process that would grant big media and other corporations special authority to challenge state law, regulations and court decisions in international tribunals.
But an even scarier aspect of the working draft is that it would criminalize some everyday uses of the Internet, including mash-ups (combining different media works to create a new one) and small-scale downloading of music. Under this agreement, there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial infringement. This means that if you break a digital lock to copy a song for personal use, [you] could potentially face the same criminal sanctions as someone who copied songs to sell pirated music!
Plus, it would force service providers to collect and hand over your private data without privacy safeguards, and give media conglomerates more power to send you fines in the mail, remove online content — including entire websites — and even terminate your access to the Internet. And if you still don’t believe this is a bad thing, consider this — China, which was traditionally considered one of the most oppressive countries in the developing and developed world, is not part of the talks. In other words, the agreement is so oppressive that even China won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole!
And it’s all Harper’s fault that our rights are under threat! We weren’t supposed to be part of the TPP negotiations, and Canada was only admitted to these negotiations after the Harper government lobbied for two years to admit us. That’s right — Harper lobbied to have us admitted to a negotiation that wants to give corporations the power to be your judge, jury, and executioner on the internet. All I can say is, after you have signed the petition to Stop the Trap, that you remember this come election time!
In closing, Obama was right!
Wallmedien: A New Option for North American MultiNationals to Eke Procurement Value out of their ERP
Last week we noted that if you were stuck with an ERP, you do have options! Specifically, we noted that you could acquire a best-of-breed solution that runs on your ERP backbone to automate and enhance Procurement in ways that ERP never dreamed of (and will likely never aspire to) and extract the value that your smaller competitors, not locked into an ERP, are extracting with the big names in stand-alone best-of-breed Procurement, which, with the recent SAP acquisition of Ariba, now include relative newcomers (to this side of the Atlantic) like Coupa, iValua, and GEP (which was formerly Global eProcure and which acquired Enporion).
In addition to the traditional, known options of (CC-)Hubwoo and Capgemini’s IBX, you have a European player by the name of Wallmedien which has been around for fifteen (15) years, has over one hundred (100) customers (with dozens of big names including Johnson Controls, Continental Tire, Syngenta, Ford, Alstom, Bayer, BASF, and Alcoa), has offices on three continents, has enabled over sixty thousand (60K) suppliers globally, and, most importantly, has rolled out their solution in twenty-six (26) languages across forty-five (45) countries! In the sourcing and procurement world, this last feat is rare and somewhat astounding when you consider most of the smaller companies still haven’t hit double digits in the language metric.
Wallmedien has a powerful Procurement Automation Suite that includes all of the standard features in a new, consumer-inspired, easy-to-use cart-based UI which allows for easy catalog-based purchasing (whether it be through EDI, cXML, or a custom database), punch-out to a supplier’s online store, and services procurement as well as straight forward RFX capability which can be used with our without their private supplier network portal. Their portal is a standard web-based supplier interface that allows for easy supplier communication and document exchange. And it all runs seamlessly on top of SAP, with or without SAP SRM, and Oracle (although most of their customers are currently SAP, as that is the ERP platform they cut their teeth on).
And like BravoSolution, which is rapidly becoming a global best-of-breed leader in (e-)Sourcing, especially now that IBM has scooped up Emptoris, Wallmedien backs all this up with an extensive suite of end-to-end services that cover implementation, integration, hosting, catalog and application management, benchmarking, and, most importantly, a wide-range of consulting services including process improvement, technical backbone improvement, sourcing integration, and getting the most from your SAP (SRM) (or Oracle) ERP implementation.
And the new North American team of Wallmedien consists of the market leaders who previously brought you ground-breaking sourcing and procurement innovation at GE, TPN Register, B2EMarkets, VerticalNet, and Vinimaya … just to name a few. This company is going to become a force to be reckoned with in the global procurement space, especially since their platform works just as well if you don’t have SAP and they have pretty much been-there, done-that where all of the international (e-)procurement headaches are concerned. Keep your eye on ’em. On this side of the ocean, they’re movin’ on up.
BizSlate, an ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor
If you’re a small to mid-size distributor, with revenues under 100 M who is still running on QuickBooks (or even Microsoft dynamics), BizSlate is an ERP solution that you should be looking at — right now! BizSlate is doing for small-and-midsize distributors what Compiere and Made2Manage, are doing for small-and-midsize manufacturers — bringing usable, affordable ERP with exceptional supply chain support to the masses. And even though the official release of V1 doesn’t come out until Q4, BizSlate is already approaching two dozen distributors who are already using the solution, almost a dozen of which pre-paid for it over a year ago to be part of the usability design team.
With the sheer amount of data an organization needs to keep track of these days from an e-procurement, e-sourcing, spend analysis, risk management, and compliance perspective, it’s almost impossible for an organization with more than 10 Million in revenue to do without an ERP, but given that the annual total cost of the big ERPs still end up being in the seven figure range once implementation, training, maintenance, and infrastructure are factored in, these solutions are not affordable for the average small or mid-sized business. And while there are a number of SaaS best-of-breed solutions in each of the aforementioned supply management areas (like Coupa, iValua, Iasta, BravoSolution, BIQ, SupplierSoft, Vendormate, Lavante, etc.) that will allow an organization to collect and retain all relevant data, this data still needs to get into a centralized data store for inventory, warehouse, and logistics management; accounting; and spend analysis — a central data store that should probably take the form of an ERP solution. (And we recently pointed out how best of breed on an ERP backbone provides the best of both worlds.)
But not any ERP will do if you’re a small to mid-sized distributor. It has to be lightweight (as small to mid-size organizations don’t have the needs of large multi-nationals), SaaS (as they don’t have the IT departments either), low-cost (as they also don’t have large software budgets), and come in default configurations appropriate for distributors in different verticals (apparel, food & beverage, pre-manufactured components, etc.). And while Compiere and Made2Manage do well in the manufacturing world, and for the distributors who handle manufactured components and electronics, it can require some consulting and effort to customize them for apparel and food and beverage distributors, especially for certain organizations with certain processes.
Enter BizSlate. Before they spun it off from Ezcom software, the founders of BizSlate — who were focussed on low-cost EDI solutions for retailers — noticed the lack of appropriate ERP support for the small and mid-sized retail and distribution space, and decided to do something about it. Over the past year, they have designed a new SaaS-based ERP from the ground-up that addresses the everyday accounting, inventory, catalog management, and order management / e-procurement requirements of small and mid-sized distributors through a simple web-interface that is as easy to use as most of the new SaaS enterprise e-Procurement systems on the market. And they did it with the unique needs of the retail distribution space in mind.
The importance of their focus on the retail space, and the apparel space in particular, cannot be overlooked. In this space (as in food and beverage, but to a much greater extreme), it is generally the case that each distinct instance of a product (which is often a combination of colour, size, and style) needs to be its own line item and have its own SKU. As a result, setting up a clothing line in a traditional ERP system can often require days of manual entry as a user often has to create up to 100 products just to handle one shirt (10 sizes * 5 colours * 2 styles). If an average clothing line contains six shirts, two sweaters, four pants, three jackets, etc., and four new clothing lines are being carried, it is easy to see how thousands of new product records might need to be created in a traditional ERP, making the data entry so egregious that the ERP is almost unusable. In BizSlate, an administrator can batch-create new products simply by entering all the base product information and then defining the characteristics that define different instances and the set of values for each characteristic. A user can create hundreds of combinations in a matter of minutes.
In addition, they also looked at how orders were created and came up with bulk order template functionality that allows a user to quickly generate an order form for a product group, with a line for each instance of each product in the group, and a default order quantity for each group, or product. As a result, a user can generate an initial start-of-season order in a matter of minutes as all the user will have to do is change a few order quantities.
And this focus on process support is not limited to product and order creation. They also looked at the inventory management and accounting processes and made each step as easy as they could for the average user, focussing on collecting only the information that is required and only when it is required. The entire goal of the design is to keep the user out of the system as much as possible as success in this space depends on selling and generating orders, and then optimizing the inventory levels and logistics, not on mucking around with an ERP or trying to optimize pennies when the volume doesn’t exist to achieve FTL discounts from a big carrier.
As they are only in the process of releasing V1, there are still a few week areas, such as reporting which is limited to canned reports and accounting which only supports GL integration with QuickBooks, but even the functionality in these areas supports 80% to 90% of the needs of a typical distributor in retail or a related channel. V2, slated for Q2 next year, will have a fully integrated report writer, a (punch-out enabled) shopping cart, and support for carrier integration. But from an efficiency perspective, which was their goal, they’ve hit the nail on the head. The manpower savings alone will more than pay for the solution, and the value that a company will be able to generate through even the most basic spend analysis effort after deploying the solution for a year will be substantial.
In summary, if you are a small to mid-sized distributor, with revenues under 100M, in a retail vertical, and you don’t have an ERP, BizSlate is one company that you have to check out. They’re on the right track, and once you have your data in a centralized data store, bolting on a best-of-breed e-Sourcing or Spend Analysis engine will be a breeze, and your savings will multiply. (And yes, the doctor hasn’t been this impressed with an ERP effort since the early days of Compiere.)
What Does AmazonSupply Mean to the Business Supply Chain?
Rummaging through the Supply Management sites recently, looking for tidbits I might have missed, I came across this post over on Supply & Demand Chain Executive that asked what AmazonSupply means to the business supply chain. Given the force that Amazon is in the consumer world, it’s certainly a question worth asking, but is it a question worth answering?
If you check out the AmazonSupply beta web site, you see that they carry a wide range of products classified into thirteen categories which primarily focus on shop floor manufacturing, basic laboratory equipment, cleaning, and office supplies — which is only a sampling of the categories that are easily obtained through MFG.com or Alibaba.com. Plus, the prices on some of the products aren’t that great. For example, the LEGO Education DUPLO Playhouse Set in the Science Education Category, as I write this, is $99.58, while the same product on the legoeducation.us site is $104.95. Sure, that’s a savings of slightly over 5%, but no where near what you could get sourcing direct from the manufacturer in bulk (even at small volumes). And the DeWALT DCD940KX 18V 1/2″ Cordless XRP Drill/Driver Kit is 229.57, only 11% less than the same product on CPO PowerTools and more than what I’ve seen the same product on sale for at Home Depot – a consumer retail establishment.
In other words, it’s very convenient, and probably guaranteed not to charge you any more than the hardware / office supply / janitorial supply / laboratory supply store down the street / in your local industrial park for the vast majority of items carried, but certainly not revolutionary for anyone need to source more than one drill bit, or drill, when sourcing product. As far as I am concerned, it is NOT a threat to e-Procurement providers and, in its current form, no where near as revolutionary as Amazon was to the book distribution market a decade ago in its current form. Right now, the only people who have to worry are chains like Home Depot and Canadian Tire, Staples and Office Depot, Henry Schein and Sanplatec, and your local providers of cleaning supplies and machine parts. Basically, any store where someone would go for a one-off purchase risks losing business. But anyone who was selling in bulk, on negotiated contracts at discounted rates, hasn’t a thing to fear with AmazonSupply.
In fact, the only companies with anything to fear are e-Procurement solution providers who provide nothing more than catalogue and punch-out functionality, as AmazonSupply makes that irrelevant for many companies who will be able to use AmazonSupply as a one-stop one-off shop and the ability to easily track orders is a big plus for anyone having to deal with mounds of paper receipts. And while AmazonSupply could, with time, offer a more integrated supply management solution with financing, purchasing support, and even spend categorization and baseline analysis, I don’t see this maturing all that quickly. What good is advanced functionality that only works on a small portion of you one-off off-contract spend? In other words, for the foreseeable future, any e-Procurement platform with any level of sophistication has nothing to fear.