Category Archives: Marketplaces

Are you an Import Genius?

I recently had the chance to check out Import Genius, which made the top ten list of the most innovative and exciting start-ups on KillerStartups.com, and I must say that it is impressive. Billed as a site that provides timely, detailed shipment data for every ocean container that enters the United States, it appears to live up to its promise. In addition, the search interface is fast and the export to CSV allows search results with up to 40,000 rows to be exported to a CSV, which can be downloaded in an automatically generated zip file for faster transmission.

With an ability to search by product, consignee, consignee address, shipper, shipper address, notify name, US port, foreign port, bill of lading, carrier code, and vessel name for any date range, it’s quite powerful for a new offering. Testing it out, I found that Apple Computer Inc. received 42 shipments between June 1, 2008 and August 18, 2008, 30 from Amtran Electronic Co. Ltd. and 12 from Quanta Computer Inc No. 68. The Amtran Electron Co. Ltd shipments were for “LCD Monitor For PC” and the Quanta Computer Inc No. 68 shipments, all on June 1, were for “GENERAL APPLE ACCOUNT PAYABLE BY”. Take a guess as to what those shipments were for. In addition, 37 were from Shanghai and 5 were from Tokyo, 24 went to Long Beach, and the remaining 18 went to LA. The average number of LCD monitors per shipment was 539 CTNS (containers) while the average number of mystery products per shipment was 501 CTN (cartons). The country of origin varied between the Bahamas, Greece, China, Liberia, Singapore, Japan, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands for the monitors while the mystery product was sole sourced from China. Eight different vessels were used: the Hanjin Praha, Concord Bridge, Xin Yan Tai, CSCL Seattle, Dong Hai Bridge, Clifton Bridge, CSCL Hong Kong, and the Long Beach Bridge. Additional information available for export includes the shipper address, consignee address, party to notify, party to notify address, bill of lading, arrival date, weight, container, and other marks and numbers. If I’d been watching carefully, as Import Genius was between mid-March, 2008 and mid-May, 2008, I’d have noticed that Apple Computer Inc. and its logistics partners imported 188 ocean containers of a product type never before declared on its shipping manifests.

As partially highlighted in this Washington Post article, which calls Import Genius The Disruptive Shipping Database, there are numerous uses for Import Genius’ service, which include:

  • Penetrating your competition’s business strategy
    Analyze your competitor’s import activity, identify their suppliers, and discover new endeavors before it hits the news.
  • Keeping your suppliers honest
    Watch the inbound shipments of your suppliers, identify threats and opportunities, and catch cheating factories who are counterfeiting your goods or stealing your IP in the act!
  • Identify new competitors before they emerge
    Find out who else your suppliers are supplying to – if they are supplying similar products to companies you don’t know, there may be new competitors on the horizon.
  • Identify new suppliers
    Find out who your competitors are using before their new products hit the stores!
  • Find out your leverage with your suppliers
    You can figure out what percentage of US business you represent by tracking all shipments against what percentage of shipments are yours.
  • Find new customers.
    Find out who your competitors are shipping to.
  • Identify new customs brokers, importers of records, and similar third party services.
    All of this information is available in the import records.
  • Make your patent infringement suit bullet-proof.
    Upon discovering a patent violation, use Import Genius to trace the goods back to their source overseas.
  • Perform due diligence on privately held companies in emerging markets
    By examining detailed records of a company’s US exports, you can reduce the risk for investors in markets where available data is scarce.
  • Stock Market Predictions
    A detailed snapshot of a company’s imports can serve as a leading indicator for new product releases, revenues, and key performance indicators.

So check out the company that, according to Freakonomics blogger Justin Wolfers, offers Amazing New Trade Data that may enable bright economists to fine tune our understanding of the dynamics of international trade. It’s certainly worth a few minutes of your time, especially when enterprise access (which permits up to 300 searches per day across the entire trade database) is less than $5,000 per year!

MFGX.com – Exploding onto the Scene

MFGX.com, the first open global community for manufacturers, which came out of beta three short months ago, is poised to take the manufacturing world by storm. It already has 12 active communities with over 80 discussions, 40 documents, and 30 blog posts — which is quite a lot considering how traditionally silent the manufacturing and procurement communities are with respect to the on-line world.

MFGX.com, which was originally conceived as a companion site to MFG.com, is important because it’s the first offering in the space that’s open to all manufacturers, regardless of the marketplaces they belong to or the products they offer. This allows producers, distributors, and retailers to find the best manufacturer to fill their needs and manufacturers to find the producers, distributors, and retailers that they can have the best relationships with – creating a win-win for everyone.

Furthermore, it’s simple — composed primarily of plain old forums (discussions), wikis (documents), and blogs, it eschews all of the new social networking nonsense that plagues many other sites. Considering that most social networking sites are, at least in the doctor‘s view, a big waste of time, I believe that this is a good thing. The internet is one of the best tools for knowledge sharing that we have, and the best sites are those that promote the sharing of knowledge, not your latest anti-ephiphany. (After all, does it really matter that you think Britney should be boycotting her current fashion line because of sweat-shop utilization? And do you really want the world to know you read BritneyZone daily? [Hat Tip: Google Search] So next time you use Twitter, remember the definition of the word.)

However, the real beauty of the concept, is the fact that it serves as the foundation for Open Source Manufacturing, which, as Jason Busch also points out over on Spend Matters, is quite cool and forward looking. After all, some of the best innovations in IT have come from open source, and some of the best successes in R&D have come from open innovation networks like NineSigma, InnoCentive, and YourEncore, and crowd-sourcing has been used to successfully streamline process. Just think what open source could do for manufacturing. It could improve processes and products. Even more importantly, it could open manufacturing design up so that, if you’re an engineer, inventor, or just a tinkerer, you could build your own products and not have to worry about a manufacturer going out of business if there’s a product you really want to keep using. For example, imagine an open source car that anyone could build parts for and that anyone could maintain. You wouldn’t have to worry about manufacturer bankruptcies, or, better yet, unnecessarily high prices or poor quality. And this could be just the beginning.

Junket Junking with James Jin

While I was visiting MFG headquarters in Atlanta yesterday, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a few minutes with James Jin, who runs MFG’s Shanghai office (which covers all of Asia at the moment). James, who hosted last year’s webinar on Surviving China’s Rapidly Changing Sourcing Tides is a rare character who not only deeply understands both the North American business world and the Chinese business world, but who also sees what’s needed to bridge them into a more seamless global marketplace, which is something he does on a daily basis through MFG. It was a pleasure to discuss both what he thought were the most critical areas of focus for MFG, and other companies doing business in China, as well as what his biggest challenges were, because it not only highlighted the differences in doing business with China, but also the similarities – which I don’t think enough people spend enough time on.

From James’ perspective, the three most critical aspects that MFG (and other businesses entering or doing business in the Chinese marketplace) needs to focus on are:

  • Any international business can’t afford to miss the China market
    Low cost country sourcing might be going away, or changing in nature, but China is here to stay as not only a huge supply base, but an economic development opportunity.
  • There is a huge buy-side demand, growing larger by the day.
    Not only does China have one of the largest emerging middle-classes in the developing world, but they already have one of the largest middle-classes in the world. (Think about it, they have over 1.3 Billion people!) China is not just a large supply-side opportunity, but they are a large sell-side opportunity for any company that can offer the right products at the right prices.
  • The key to success is to think globally, but act locally.
    Doing business in China requires a balance and an understanding of local culture and geography.

However, James’ answer to my inquiry on the three biggest challenges to doing business in China was even more revealing on what it takes to do business successfully in China than the three most important areas on which you need to focus. In short, the three biggest challenges are:

  • People
  • People
  • People

Despite the cultural and language differences, the reality is that doing business in China is just like doing business with most developed countries. They’re very mature about their approach to business (they understand that business ebbs and flows in a repeated cycle, and that just because they’re getting a lot of business today, that doesn’t mean they’ll be getting a lot tomorrow and that they’re going to have to work to get and keep new business), they have new plants with industry leading technology (in fact, some suppliers have the most modern plants in the world for what they produce due to recent investments to keep up with Western demand), the leaders understand that it’s all about the people (as almost everything but the human equation can be automated these days), but, even with 1.3+ Billion people, it’s a constant struggle to find the right people with the right education and the right skills for the job. Especially when they have to play in a global marketplace.

As for what’s going on with the rest of MFG, you’ll be hearing a lot more from them next quarter, and I’ll have more to discuss at a future time as well, but for now, I need to hit the road again and wonder just what Willie was thinking. (Obviously, he didn’t drive his own tour bus!!!)

Open Innovation: The Value of Non-Confidential Exchange

Nine Sigma, a consultancy that helps clients globally find the best innovators and solutions for their needs through it’s Discover-Connect-Solve service offering, recently release a customer insight paper on the Kellogg Company, titled “Open Innovation and the Value of Non-Confidential Exchange” (with a companion video), that described how an open process connected Kellogg with novel technologies and new solution providers that were previously outside of Kellogg’s reach.

Open Innovation is a powerful approach for producing innovative new product and business solutions by leveraging cutting-edge technology and expertise from the global innovation community. The rewards from open innovation include:

  • A Robust Product Pipeline
  • Accelerated Speed to Market
  • Significant Cost Savings
  • Access to Global Innovators
  • Innovation Sustainability
  • Risk Reduction

Furthermore, an appropriate process that facilitates the free-flow of non-confidential information to identify, qualify, and ultimately activate new ideas from external sources (for productive, profitable, and innovative R&D solutions) can minimize the risks associated with any IP issues a company may have.

The process employed by NineSigma to help Kellogg build a sustainable Open Innovation program started with a combined cross-functional Kellogg and NineSigma task force that began by:

  • identifying Kellogg’s key technical challenges
  • selecting the projects that could benefit the most from open innovation
  • developing the RFPs
  • inviting solution providers to respond on how they’d address the challenges

Once responses were received, the cross-functional team proceeded to:

  • review the proposals
  • establish non-confidential discussions with potential providers

Then, once potential providers were identified, the team:

  • created business agreements, IP agreements, and NDAs
  • reviewed the technology of the potential providers
  • selected preferred providers
  • undertook negotiations with the preferred providers
  • negotiated final agreements

So what distinguishes this process from a normal supplier selection process? Because Kellogg employed NineSigma as an intermediary, they were able to keep their identify confidential until potential providers were identified and NDAs were signed. Furthermore, they were able to keep the product lines they were interested in innovating confidential until preferred providers were selected. And since they went through an intermediary who helped them sift confidential information from non-confidential information, the possibility of a potential provider guessing which company was on the market, or which product line was up for grabs was minimized, and this prevented competitors from identifying potential weaknesses in Kellogg’s operations. In addition, NineSigma experts, once briefed by Kellogg’s internal experts, could take the place of Kellogg’s experts in the initial discussions, further concealing the client’s identity until all parties were ready to engage in a confidential dialog.

Furthermore, the potential providers could also be confident that their IP was being protected, as NineSigma also helped them sift confidential information from non-confidential information and helped protect their identity as a bidder in the process. This allows each company to compete for business on the merits of its proposal and technology, not on an ill-formed opinion an executive might have based on something he might or might not have read about them a year or so ago.

It’s a great approach for companies that need to be overly protective of their IP, as well as those companies that don’t understand what their IP really is. It allows them to enter the Open Innovation Marketplace and still keep their paranoid legal advisors – who are one of the biggest barriers to innovation – happy.

Vinimaya : The B2B Search Engine

Last November, I introduced you to Vinimaya (rebranded Aquiire, acquired by Coupa) in my post on The Next Wave in Product Catalogue Management. With their agent technology, Vinimaya is a leader in supplier enablement for those companies that need an integrated catalog solution for their e-Procurement platform as their Product Catalog Management Solution (PCM) supports whatever mechanism the supplier already has – be it a punch-out, catalog, market-place, or plain-old web-site.

However, Vinimaya, which is a very stable and profitable company (despite some competitor’s claims to the contrary), is not content to just have the best PCM solution. They’ve spent the past six months improving their core technology and working on additional offerings to benefit the supply management space. In addition to their streamlined agent technology-enabled SmartSearch Buyer, which they are able to implement for an average large customer, who needs hundreds of suppliers enabled, in four to five weeks, they now offer a SmartSearch Supplier service for suppliers, B2B transaction services, and they are working on a new Discovery service that is likely to be launched before the end of the year.

Their SmartSearch Supplier service allows suppliers that require specialized punchouts or catalog formats to support their buyers to offer these formats without having to build these punchouts or specialized (XML, CIF, etc.) formats on their own. The SmartSearch Supplier offering, which uses the same underlying agent technology as SmartSearch Buyer, translates the supplier’s current catalog format (web-site, database, XML, etc.) into whatever format the buyer requires (because they use Ariba Supplier Network, SciQuest, Ketera, etc.) on the fly. In addition, it supports the same price override capability as SmartSearch Buyer, so the supplier can customize its prices to each buyer using a set of pricing rules.

Their B2B transaction services supports internet EDI with seven standard document formats, p-card payments, XML-EDI punchouts, and interchange and is delivered by their partners, including VITG USA and ESIS. In other words, Vinimaya is all about the internet as the network and providing you with the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

However, it is the SmartSearch Discovery offering that they are currently working on now that really got my attention when I caught up with them last week. Right now, they allow you to search multiple sites seamlessly through their SmartSearch Buyer, which is more than any other catalog solution allows you to do. However, in the near future, it sounds like they will also allow you to search third-party marketplaces at the same time, in the same view, and seamlessly integrate the best of B2C with the best of B2B. Right now, you can search by product, category, part, and supplier location – everything you can do with your standard catalog. But with this new service, you’ll also be able to search by component, manufacturer, third party rating, and any other piece of information that is out there on third party marketplaces. And there’ll be better integration into your current e-Procurement and e-Sourcing platforms. What will it look like? That’s a topic for a later post. So stay tuned!