Monthly Archives: November 2013

Arena – Taking PLM Deep Into the Supply Chain Part I

When we last covered The Arena Solution in 2007, we stated that Arena were the providers of an effective, on-demand, PLM solution that could manage the information associated with the entire lifecycle of a product from conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal, which, for a low margin manufacturing organization, could be the difference between costly inefficiency and profitable efficiency. One of the unique features of the solution was its support for collaboration between the buying organization and the supplying organization through an online portal.

Since the release of their first on-demand solution in 2007, which was focussed around BOM (Bill-of-Material) Management, Item Management and Change Management, over the last few years they added (better) Document Management, Quality Management, and Compliance Management. The Document Management capability, built on their change management and collaboration tools, streamlines the document management process, manages the revision process, supports privilege-based access for anyone who needs to access the document, be they employee or supplier representative, and supports the meta-data categorization required for advanced search and rapid retrieval.

The Quality Management capability supports your CAPA (Corrective and Preventive Action) process and allows the organization to track progress on quality improvement processes over the long term. The Quality Management capability allows for the creation of issues, corrective action requests, and tasks necessary to resolve the issues identified by the corrective action requests. It also associates the issues to requests, BOMs, and associated documents and allows the process to be managed from beginning to end and the entire history to be archived for the institutionalization of knowledge.

The Compliance Management capability was designed to allow an organization to meet regulatory requirements and track compliance information for products and processes with BOM-level control to allow an organization to comply with medical, environmental, regulatory, safety, and process standards and regulations. From import restrictions to quality standards to safety standards to reporting regulations, a manufacturing organization often has more regulations to adhere to than it has items in its largest BOM (which can be quite large, especially if it’s manufacturing automobiles, airplanes, or automated control systems for nuclear power plants). This is not an easy task when the organization often has to track the materials in every item in its BOM, the insurance certificates for each supplier, and the third party certifications for each product. But with a proper solution that allows the suppliers to upload the relevant documents, and manage them, the process is a lot easier.

And, finally, they added more Enterprise Integration. A PLM solution that doesn’t integrate with your ERP/MRP solution has almost as many disadvantages as it has advantages. And those disadvantages revolve around data, and data entry. At some point, orders have to be placed, and those orders at some point have to flow through the ERP system that manages the payables, the inventory, and the demand tracking. If there is no integration, the BOMs for all of the existing products will have to be manually entered or loaded into the PLM solution and the BOMs for all of the New Product Introductions will have to be manually entered into the ERP. Not a pretty picture. That’s why Arena spent a lot of time integrating with all of the major ERP and MRP systems out there over the last few years. But Arena didn’t stop there. Realizing that, as they progressed up the supply chain capability curve, that demand needs to get into sourcing systems, that regular orders need to get into procurement systems, that compliance information needs to get into reporting systems, etc., they figured out that no matter how many systems you integrate with, it will never be enough so, in their current release that just came out this quarter (which contains a number of new capabilities on top of the capabilities discussed so far), they built a new Open RESTful API that can be used to push data into Arena from any system and pull any and all data out of the Arena solution that needs to be pushed into other organizational systems. We’ll discuss this more in Part II when we talk about the four new capabilities that were just released as part of the new Arena solution.

Conversant Coupa – Communicating Cybernetically

Well, almost.

This Wednesday, Coupa takes its One Vision tour online and brings the best of its One Vision tour to those of you who were unable to make it to one of the live events. In this series, which will consist of at least seven webinars between now and the end of January, Coupa will bring you insights on

  • The Vision and Reality
  • Building Your Business Case
  • Technology, Transformation, & Procurement
  • Financial Services
  • e-Invoicing
  • Amplifying Procurement with Managed Travel
  • Modern Procurement

This should shape up to be a good webinar series. the doctor was at the Toronto stop and the presentations were quite informative, especially the presentations on building your business case and the future of procurement. In addition, assuming they don’t leave out the talent, the talk on technology and transformation should be invigorating as Supply Management is all about the 3 Ts — talent, technology, and transition from where the organization is today to where it needs to be in a transformation journey.

The only thing missing from the agenda so far is a few of their customer presentations. One of the unique aspects of the One Vision World Tour is that every stop had a customer presentation, and Coupa encouraged their customers to talk about anything they wanted to share and the attendees to ask any questions that were on their mind. This is the best insight into a solution, and a solution provider, a prospective customer can get.

If you are on the market for an e-Procurement solution, or just looking to get a better understanding of what an e-Procurement solution can do, check out the One Vision webinar series.


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Will Supply Management Save the US Economy? Part III

It’s hard to say, but Supply Management could be a contender. Why?

Supply chains are more global, more interconnected, more complicated, and more prone to significant disruption than ever before — and the successful management thereof is more difficult than ever before. It requires a jack-of-all-trades that is also a master of one (trade called Supply Management). Only the best of the best of the best with the right education, experience, and EQ can manage these beasts of our own creation that are more fearsome, and ferocious (when a disruption occurs) than the great hydra of myth. And most of these people are in the US — which started the outsourcing craze in the 80s, learned the hard way when they skipped over the frying pan and into the fire, and then, as they learned the errors of their hasty ways, started institutionalizing knowledge and building best practices to help them cope, and, in the long term, succeed.

In order for the US to remain competitive, now that Europe is getting into the global supply chain game in a big way and taking advantage of their closer proximity to Asia, the current outsourcing destination of choice, and Africa, the future outsourcing destination of choice, the US is going to have to step up its supply chain game and produce more supply management leaders. This is going to require more thought leaders, more educators, and more institutionalization of knowledge and best practices. In other words, the US has to create the ability to not only produce supply chain leaders on demand, but produce world-class supply chain leaders.

Once the US has the ability to create the best supply chain leaders on a regular, and repeatable, basis, it doesn’t have to stop when the US’ needs for leaders are fulfilled. It can keep producing leaders because the entire world needs supply chain leaders, and if other countries can’t produce supply chain leaders of the same caliber (and, right now, many can’t), they will need (consulting) leadership and the US could produce the leaders to fill that gap. This has the potential to create millions (upon millions) of consulting jobs. There are over 100 Million businesses in the world, and over 10M of these are mid-sized businesses which, if they are not going global today, are likely to be going global tomorrow, and they will need help at all levels of the supply chain. That’s a lot of consulting that needs to come from somewhere. The US could produce those consultants and establish an industry around them.

And this is an industry the US could own. The continual improvement in automation technology essentially ensures that manufacturing will continue to move to lower cost locales and continual improvement in global telecommunications infrastructure essentially guarantees that customer service, data processing, and even programming will continue to move to lower cost locales as well. And even though Peter Drucker invented modern management consulting, Europe has caught up and the US really has no advantage here. In the knowledge-driven future, global leadership will be reserved to those disciplines where a country has the most advanced knowledge, and this is one area where the US has, and can continue to have, leadership.

So will Supply Management save the US Economy? I don’t think anyone can say for sure, but if the right focus was applied, in addition to saving companies hit hard by the economy by taking cost out of (and putting quality into) their supply chains, Supply Management has the potential to do the same for the economy as a whole. But will anyone realize this (before it’s too late)?