Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Are You Ready For SI To Take You To The Next Level?

Next week, sixty four (64) months and one point seven five million (1.75 M) words into its operation, SI will publish it’s 3000th post. It’s time to ask the 64,000 Question:

Are You Ready For SI To Take You To The Next Level?

And it’s time for you, dear reader, to give me the answer.

     

On this date, 185 years ago today, the Granite Railway began operations as the first chartered railway in the United States.

In order to demonstrate that SI has achieved its primary goal of educating you and preparing you to be a Supply Management Leader, I want you to leave a comment stating why you are ready for SI to take you to the Next Level, and include somewhere in this comment an explanation of the significance of the Granite Railway to the development of the modern Supply Chain.

I’m looking for the answer that demonstrates, in my mind, that you’re ready for SI to take you on that Next Level Journey.  

Centralize or Not?

Badly judged centralization can stifle initiative, constrain the ability to tailor products and services locally, and burden business divisions with high costs and poor service. However, insufficient centralization can deny business units the economies of scale or coordinated strategies needed to win global customers or outperform rivals.
McKinsey Quarterly, “To Centralize Or Not To Centralize”

So how do you answer the question? Especially when none of the executives interviewed in 30 different global companies volunteered an orderly, analytical approach for resolving centralization decisions when interviewed. After all, benchmarks, politics, and fashion — the usual approaches — are not the answer.

In the above referenced article, McKinsey put forward a decision making framework based on three questions. According to the framework, centralization should only occur if at least one of the following questions can be answer affirmatively.

  1. Is it mandated?
  2. Does it add significant value?
  3. Are the risks low?

For the most part, SI agrees. The only disagreement is with the explanation of value. According to McKinsey, it should add 10% to the market capitalization or profits or be part of a larger initiative that will add 10%. Significant value is not always immediately quantifiable, especially where innovation is involved. Thus, SI would also recommend centralization if the following question can be answered affirmatively:

  1. Will it increase the chances of innovation without significantly reducing any of the benefits decentralization provides?

If, for example, the only downside to centralizing a certain buy is that you have to add more users to your online supply chain platform and buy a few more licenses, this would likely be a case where you would centralize the buy as it would provide opportunities to innovate in network design and inventory management.

You Can Search, Search, Search … or Just Read SI!

In 2008, Google had indexed One Trillion Web Pages. And many, many more have been added since then. According to Rick Skrenta, co-founder of blekko, there are now more web pages than there are things in the world. And while it’s likely not the case yet, as there are probably 10.5 Sextillion bugs in the world (as it is estimated that there are 1.5 Billion Bugs per person, and there are close to 7 Billion people), and we could count each individual bug as a thing, at the rate the web is growing –especially when each post, each comment, and each tweet can be its own web page — it might not be long before this is true, especially since predictions put the size of the web at 600 quintillion web pages, or one for every 17.5 bugs, by 2020 (which puts us at one page per bug by about 2021).

With content proliferating faster than even the fastest computer virus, it’s getting almost impossible to find what you’re looking for through a web search. Good luck coming up with an initial query that returns less than 100,000 pages. I tried three random combinations of unlikely words in Google, and the best I got was 190,000 pages. (Dodo, apollo, elvis – 961K; Risk, canary, electricity – 1.43M; Poppins, Hamlet, vikings – 190K.) There’s a reason that Googlewhacking died a long, long time ago. There is no one result anymore.

And that’s why blogs, which have been proclaimed dead by the twits who think tweets are the future, are going to return to the glory days. You need someone to sift through the noise and find the useful content to get you through your day, because it’s now beyond the power of even the most powerful search engines to do most of the time. So keep reading SI, and you’ll have one fewer (time-consuming) search to do each day.