Category Archives: SaaS

The Cloud is Full of Sweet Fluffy Dreams

If you want to win favour with the doctor, this is a good way to start. Over in the recent edition of the SIG newsletter, Kent Parker, COO of Ariba, wrote an article on how the Cloud represents a more scalable, efficient way to do business on a global basis because it requires no software, hardware or resources to deploy and time to value is near immediate. However, he noted that these rewards can only be reaped if the organizations providing these networked community capabilities transform in ways that enable them to deliver products and services that meet a completely new set of business challenges and customer needs. Otherwise, the benefit of the Cloud will remain nothing more than sweet, fluffy dreams.

In the article, Kent presented six new rules that companies need to follow if they are to transform in a way that will enable them to deliver the products and services that are required in today’s knowledge-based network economy. The first four were quite obvious:

  • break down application silos
    the goal is to connect all of your applications and let data flow through the lifecycle
  • make innovation a constant
    customers expect improvements on a rapid timeline
  • focus on quality
    because, simply put, no one wants cr@p
  • stay agile
    or you will be outmaneuvered by your competition

However, the last two were not and keys to success in today’s economy:

  • overhaul customer support
    In an always-on community, customers demand immediate, proactive response to their issues, particularly as they impact business commerce continuity. But if you’ve outsourced most of the function of internal IT to an external provider, then you need to make sure the provider is not only offering the service level guarantees, but that it has the competency to provide the necessary support. In the IT world, system restoration sometime between 8 am and 5 pm on the next business day is NOT acceptable.
  • redefine customer relationships
    Go-live is the beginning, not the end, of a customer relationship. In a network-driven cloud community, customers and other participants require more continuous, ongoing assistance with enabling and institutionalizing business commerce capabilities. A company that offers a cloud-based solution has to be willing to continuously work and support the customer on that solution. Or the customer will go elsewhere.

The “Cloud” is Not a Magic Mirror Nor is it Omniscient

Quotes like this one:

Organizations need the visibility of their supply chains because they never know when they might be required to make a change to respond to world and market events. They have been actually talking about this kind of visibility for the past two decades, but now with new Cloud capabilities they are advancing into that environment

from a recent article in World Trade that purported to describe “a smarter supply chain” really bug me. Not only can one argue that the speaker is implying that the Cloud is necessary for good supply chain visibility, which it’s not, but that the writer, who notes that there has been greater company acceptance of the Cloud because the Cloud … can provide answers to new and existing problems, also appears to be arguing that the Cloud is necessary for greater visibility as well as smarter supply chains. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Cloud is Not a Fluffy Magic Box (and there are more reasons and yet more reasons that this is the case) and simply throwing an application into the Cloud does not make it better. The nebulous Cloud does not enable applications that cannot be delivered over the traditional internet from a traditional data center. For most providers, the Cloud just happens to be whatever they have — multi-tenant SaaS in a redundant data center if you’re lucky, single-tenant ASP if you’re not. There’s nothing special or magic about it. And there’s no visibility inherent in it. The visibility is in the applications it is hosting (whatever it is).

Similarly, there is no “smart” in Cloud. Any “smart” is again in the application that is being hosted. And there is no magic data connector in the Cloud either. It’s not Cloud-based solutions that provide more affordable ways for suppliers to link to a common database — it’s more efficient providers that use economies of scale to offer good ETL solutions at fair prices to a large customer base.

Finally, the “Cloud” is NOT a Supply Chain Solution. e-Sourcing. e-Procurement. Inventory Management. Demand Management. Spend Analysis. Optimization. Those are Supply Chain Solutions. The Cloud? It’s just a delivery mechanism. Nothing more.

The Best Argument for Making Your Data Available Online 24/7

If your data isn’t immediately accessible online, either behind your firewall or behind someone else’s firewall or in the cloud, when your employees need it, then they are going to download it to their machines. If their machine is a laptop, and the data is not securely encrypted, and the laptop is stolen, then, as per a ZoneAlarm Blog Entry on “what is the cost of a missing laptop” from earlier this year, it could cost your organization 1 Million (or more). (And even if the data is encrypted, and it’s valuable enough, someone will invest the time in breaking the encryption.)

But if your data is always available, and, better yet, the applications that do the processing reside on the servers the data is on, then your employees and contractors won’t need to download it to their laptops to process it. And you can even implement safeguards to prevent such. Then, when the laptop gets stolen, your loss will be the replacement cost and a minimal lost productivity cost (as you can replace it in hours), which will max out at a few thousand. Compare this to the situation where you have data breaches, IP loss, and forensics and investigation costs which can be 10, 100, or even 1000 times the replacement and lost productivity costs.

So encrypt your data, put it on a VPN behind a firewall, and make it available 24/7. It will be much cheaper, and safer, than having it unencrpyted on your employees’ laptops which will, inevitably, get stolen despite their best efforts to protect them.

Compliance and Security are Top IT Concerns

A recent article over on Supply & Demand Chain Executive that summarized a survey by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) that found that the top three concerns of IT professionals were:

  1. regulatory compliance
  2. enterprise-based IT management and governance
  3. information security management

It’s kind of surprising that information security management is third and not first on the list given the headlines that come from breaches in security, such as the recent Sony PlayStation Network breach. Regulatory compliance is important, as it can result in fines for failures, but breaches are more costly, once the damage to the brand and the lawsuits are factored in.

I was a little surprised to see enterprise based IT management so high on the list. It’s an important topic, but given recent disasters, I would have expected diaster recovery and business continuity, #4, to take its spot, as IT management is a never ending issue and rarely overlooked by CIOs and CTOs, even though they might no always find the time to get it where they want it.

TradeCard: Transaction Management for the Global Supply Chain Part II

In yesterday’s post we introduced you to TradeCard, a supply chain management services and trade finance company that provides an end-to-end SaaS transaction management solution that connects over 4,000 buyer and supplier companies across the world with local support in over 50 countries. This solution, which implements end-to-end transaction management from the cutting of the Purchase Order to final settlement (including chargebacks) with support for financing, document management, 3rd party freight forwarders, and factory floor shipment packaging, is one of the most extensive SI has seen with respect to visibility into the three critical supply chain flows — financial, physical, and information.

We discussed the financial flow, which supports pre- and post- export financing, payment protection, invoice discounting, and settlement with their Procure-to-Pay solution; the physical flow, that is supported by their collaboration, Factory Xpress, and document management solutions; and the information flow, which is supported by the aforementioned solutions along with the TradeCard Advantage and Custom Objects Toolkit solution. Today we are going to dive into the physical flow and the solutions that support it.

We’ll start with the collaboration solution. Designed with forecasting and supply planning in mind, the solution allows for forecast and purchase order data to be pulled from your ERP / forecasting system / system of record of choice and pushed back when the production plan and/or purchase order is complete. Forecasting revolves around (rolling) supply plans, that can be completed from a material, supplier, forecast, inventory, (material) commitment, or demand view. Buyers and suppliers, who are given permission, can edit the forecast, and the revised forecast can be maintained along side the original forecast. The forecast can be at the product level, or the component material level, as the platform has equal support for component and 2nd tier raw material suppliers, who can also be given (read or edit) access if relevant or key. The system also allows the scheduled production runs to be collaboratively decided upon (and updates the projected inventory automatically). There are no built-in forecasting models at this time, but that may change in a future release. (In the interim, Tradecard can integrate any forecasting system that can provide data in a standard format such as EDI, XML, or CSV.)

The UI is similar to many web-based supply management platforms, and includes a “taskboard” that keeps track of all of the current tasks for the current user, which can be ordered by action type, transaction, or assignment date. With respect to transactions, which the suite is designed around, a user can query and track transactions by purchase order, invoices, payments, packing & shipping, financing, (goods) receipts, contracts, adjustments, events, and customs filings in addition to supply plans. Purchase orders are extremely detailed and can contain all of the information required by the supplier, freight forwarders, and any customs authorites (including order terms, parties, freight terms, destinations, items, components, additional terms, and required documents). This allows for the easy generation and submission of appropriate trade and customs documents (with over 10 import and export document formats supported out-of-the-box). The system maintains complete document history and allows an authorized buyer to query exactly who did what when. Events allow the buyer to track the transaction after the PO is issued and record actual production, shipments, receipt, distribution to warehouses, returns, chargebacks, and other relevant events.

Factory Xpress is the “shop floor” solution that is designed for the personnel who are actually packing and shipping the orders. The users can access, and (if they have permission) edit the packing plans, create and print packing slips and/or shipping labels, and even scan appropriately barcoded labels to indicate when an order has been packaged and shipped. In addition, orders for packing labels and materials can be sent directly to Avery Dennison, whom the solution was developed in conjunction with. The system supports bulk packing, multi-packing, and free-packing plans and can automatically regenerate packing plans based upon changes in order quantity, delivery location, carton sizes, or item mix. Once the shipment has been packed, packing manifests can automatically generated from the packing plan and purchase order.

One very neat feature of the platform is the “discrepancy preview” that a supplier can run before finalizing the invoice. When the discrepancy preview is run on a draft invoice, it compares invoice data to shipment/packing manifest data and PO data and reports all discrepancies in pricing, order quantities, factories, origins, destinations, and other comparable data and checks that all terms and/or documents have been completed. This allows the supplier to correct any data that can be corrected before the invoice is sent, minimizing the chance of the buyer rejecting it or sending it back for correction. It also allows the buyer to verify that the invoice they received is consistent with what they expected, or if its not, immediately determine what the discrepancy is and whether or not it was approved (due to a change in forecast or demand).

With respect to reporting, there are dozens of built in report types and the user can select the attributes and value ranges for each report, but TradeCard does not yet possess a generic report builder tool, although custom reports can be created by way of their Common Objects toolkit if required. However, complete export of all in XML and CSV format is supported and the buyer can use a third party data analysis and reporting tool to construct whatever report they want for more detailed analysis.

Finally, the TradeCard platform currently supports English, Traditional, and Simplified Chinese with Spanish coming later this year, and most implmentations, which includes integration to your ERP and forecasting systems, and onboarding of 80% of your relevant supply base, and user training, are accomplished in 90 days. It’s a solid solution and one worth looking into if you need to manage end-to-end transactions across the global supply chain.