Category Archives: Technology

Done Innovating? No Problem. You can still succeed!

And you don’t have to go waiving NDAs around either. You can stop pretending that you’re still innovating when we all know discovery ended long ago. Thanks to the breadth of today’s marketplace, you have options beyond selling out to a bottom feeder who’ll amalgamate your technology with five other dying products, cross-sell existing product lines, and then milk the maintenance dry.

You can instead choose a strategic “bold retreat”. So if you lack the finances, necessary capabilities, or simply the drive to transition to new technologies and invent new solutions, you can choose to retreat to a defensible niche where your old technology conveys a decisive advantage. Just like Linjett continues to succeed in the leisure sailboat market by focussing on the enthusiast, like Continental continues to succeed with piston engines by focussing on small private aircraft, and like StorageTek continues to sell magnetic tape drives (yes, magnetic tape drives) by focussing on large scale data archives, you can succeed too!

Haven’t upgraded your e-Negotiation platform in five years? No problem! Just ditch the Fortune 500 market and focus on the mid-market where most companies still haven’t adopted a solution. It’ll be new to them for five more years!

Haven’t upgraded your BI tool in five years? No problem! Streamline your integration with the big ERP tools that your average Fortune 500 can’t get rid off. Become the BI tool of choice in that market and continue to rake in recurring maintenance fees at 22% year after year.

Haven’t upgraded your catalog-based e-Marketplace in five years? No problem! Follow the crowd and rebrand it as a “supplier network”. Now it’s new for five more years!

In other words, you can fail at modern technology but still win if you’re bold about it! (Of course, whether or not your customers win is a completely different story.)

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Analysts, Schmanalysts

According to Gartner’s latest blog post (in Thursday’s thoughts), the super secret formula to gaining information about a vendor’s product is the “scripted demo”.

Here’s the Big Idea: you ask the vendor how to accomplish the “applicable tasks you do most often”, and then you ask the vendor to demonstrate, step by step, how to do them.

Well, that’s a terrific idea if the vendor has nothing new or innovative to show you, and if both of you are as dull as dishwater. If all you want the vendor to do is show you how to accomplish some mundane  business task that you already do every day, then you’ll never see anything the least bit interesting or innovative. Plus, given time, the vendor will “polish” that part of the demo so it looks much more impressive than it really is.

Here’s some free advice to business and technology analysts who have to evaluate products:

  1. DON’T ask the vendor to do ordinary things.Ask the vendor to show you extraordinary things. Sometimes those extraordinary things can be quite ordinary on the surface, like making it possible for ordinary users to employ highly complex technology successfully and usefully. Problem is, you actually have to understand what’s going on under the covers to figure out whether it’s extraordinary, or just something that’s actually quite simple, or even something that’s just plain technically impossible, and therefore a load of bull (see point 3, below). If all you have is an MBA, chances are that you can’t make that evaluation.
  2. DON’T count mouse clicks.Count innovations that could really make a difference for your clients and their businesses.
  3. DON’T assume that you know anything about technology.Instead, hire (or rent) someone who does, to save you from drawing uninformed conclusions about stuff you don’t (and might never) understand. If you bring someone to the party who can’t be buffaloed by technobabble and a pretty UI, then you don’t have to worry about “scripted” or “unscripted” demos.
  4. DON’T test for “100 features and often many more — up to 500 features” to finalize a rating.That’s just “checklist testing”, and it’s not very useful. Fact is, only a few features matter; the rest are bells and whistles that nobody cares about. You need to do a deep dive on what’s important, not worry about who has the longest checklist. It’s exactly this “please the reviewer” attitude that contributed to bloatware like Microsoft Word — a product that, after years of introducing new whiz-bang features that only ever half-worked, still couldn’t get basic bulleted lists to function properly as late as Word 2003.

The other Big Idea in the Gartner article is References. Well, references are a slippery slope. Does the reference customer understand the technology? Probably not. Does he understand what else is out there? Almost certainly not. Does he think his (pick one: RFx engine, spend analysis tool, contracts management system, etc.) is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Maybe, but who cares? He could be using a crappy tool of marginal value in comparison to what he could be using and have no clue. You could interview him until the cows come home, and not learn a thing, except that he’s a happy lemming with no idea he’s about to run off a cliff.

Fact is, the old model of analysts running around interviewing and briefing the vendors that pay them, and then running off to interview the customers that the paying vendor has teed up, and therefore thinking that they’re somehow “getting a feel for what’s out there and what’s good”, is so … over. All you end up creating for your final report is an unappetizing mashup of the marketing nonsense of all the big vendors.

No wonder everyone is running to the web for guidance. Or running for the hills.

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The Enterprise 2.0 Emperor Has Nice Looking Threads …

… but they might not keep you dry and warm if a storm blows in!

Allow me to explain. Intelligent Enterprise recently asked if “the enterprise 2.0 emperor has no clothes” because, when it comes to collaboration:

  1. it’s already going on in enterprises, just as it always has and
  2. it’s not that interesting if it doesn’t impact the core business processes of the intended users.

The new tools may look great, and may streamline the processes with their aerodynamic properties, but the fundamental fact remains that if the users aren’t using them regularly with the intent to collaborate, then the tools won’t help when it comes to identifying small problems that can quickly escalate into full blown supply disruptions, or when it comes to working together to make sure the disruptions never happen. Just like a stylish polyester jumpsuit isn’t much help when a cold, heavy, rainstorm blows your way.

So before you go buying an Enterprise 2.0 solution (like those offered by Hiperos, Rollstream, etc.), make sure you have your processes and culture in order. Otherwise, you’ll never realize the benefits that these systems have to offer (which, if you’ve read the SI reviews, can be numerous) and are better off sticking with your tin-can communication system as modern technology is useless if you aren’t ready for it and won’t use it properly.

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Will Apple Save You More on Print and Marketing than Negotiation Ever Will?

As I mentioned in my recent post on how marketing is a huge savings opportunity, last year, the Marketing Supply Chain Institute released “Define Where to Streamline: Making Marketing Supply Chains More Efficient, Agile, and Enviro-Friendly” (registration required) that noted that, with good visibility, an average marketing organization can easily find 20% to 25% savings with Procurement’s help.

About ten pages in, the report lists the top five areas where the marketing supply chains could realize sustainability gains (which are the ultimate key to long term savings). These are:

  • print, production, warehousing, and delivery
  • transportation and logistics (of material)
  • packaging and material
  • meetings, user conferences, & events
  • merchandising & point-of-sale displays

And they all have one thing in common: printed paper. First you print the fliers and brochures and inserts and then you transport them to your facilities and events and points of sale for distribution and use. If you could reduce your paper costs, which aren’t ever going to go down as wood becomes more precious, and printing costs, which are going to stay as high as the price of ink, you could substantially increase your savings.

Thanks to Apple, and the iPod, iPhone, and iPad madness, you can now do just that! 3 Million iPads in less than eighty days, and sales are still going strong. Pre-orders for the iPhone 4 racked up to 600,000 units so fast that the providers had to stop taking them. And there are over thirty million iPod Touches in the wild already. (With many more on their way now that Apple has a promotion that students get a free one with a new Mac.)

Thanks to Apple, the paperless world of ST:TNG is almost here and it won’t be long before everyone has their own personal electronic pad (be it an iPhone, an iPod touch, or, more likely, an iPad). And if you take advantage of it (like other early adopters), you will save a fortune in the long run. (Many conferences have already put their schedules and proceedings on Apple’s iPlatform, including the 2010 International Builders’ Show, Social Media Week Toronto, and the GameHorizon Conference 2010.) If you’re an organizer, you can choose to go i and dictate no printed materials. If it’s a large conference, you can negotiate with Apple for an “educational” discount and anyone who doesn’t already have an iMobile can have the price of one included in their conference fees.

But events aren’t the only opportunity for saving on printed paper — the boardroom is another great opportunity. How many bales of paper does your organization print out each day, only to see it used for a single meeting before it goes to the shredder? Considering that the average employee in the US uses 10,000 sheets of printer & copy paper every year, if we take an average blended per-sheet cost of just 5 cents, that says that your average employee is using at least $500 worth of paper each year. If we’re talking executives and predominantly colour print-outs, we’re looking at a minimum of $1,000 worth of paper each year. A 16 GB WI-FI iPad, which will hold all the documents they need at one time, is $499 (+ $99 for 2 years of Apple Care). If you institute a zero-printing policy for the boardroom (and meeting rooms), and buy a stack of corporate iPads that can be quickly loaded with whatever documents are needed for the meeting, you can reduce your internal printing costs by at least 50% (as there will be no costs in year two), even assuming you always upgrade every two years when AppleCare runs out. (Many of the devices will probably last three or four years, considering Apple’s track record of quality hardware, so you can sell the old devices at this time and recover some green if you wish. Or you can be a good corporate citizen and, after having the batteries refurbished, donate them to a needy school!)

Think about it. Paper + Ink + Printers + Energy to Print + Transportation + Shredding & Recycling is costly. e-Printing is almost free, as it’s just the cost of the e-Reader, which is much more energy efficient than a printer!

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Finance Needs Spend Analysis and e-Procurement, Part II

In our last post, we noted that Basware recently released its annual “Cost of Control” study for 2010 and pointed out that Finance’s top 10 challenges could be easily solved with good, modern, spend analysis and e-Procurement solutions. The study also outlined the top 10 strategic finance priorities for 2010 … which can also be addressed by the adoption of good spend analysis and e-Procurement systems. For example:

Spend Analysis would address:

  • Increasing Profits and Top Line PerformanceProfit = Cash In - Cash Out

    Spend analysis reduced cash out.

    Therefore, spend analysis improves profit margins.

  • Maintaining or Improving Profit MarginsSpend analysis allows you to consolidate spend among fewer suppliers and fewer SKUs. This reduces overhead and increases profit margin.
  • Planning, Budgeting, and Revenue ForecastingOnce you know your actual year-over-year spend, volume trends, and market trends, your forecasts and budgets improve greatly.
  • Risk AnalysisAugment the data with (financial) risk information and quality/performance metrics, and you can quickly see which suppliers likely pose the greatest risk to your operations.
  • Regulatory ComplianceYou know what suppliers you’re spending on and how much is going to socially responsible suppliers and how much isn’t. Augment the product data with carbon emissions spending and you know if you’re within limits or not. Etc.

E-Procurement would address:

  • Reduce Overall PurchasingA modern e-Procurement system with approvals, checks, and balances would insure nothing is bought that isn’t approved, on-contract, and within-budget without managerial exception.
  • Cash Flow and Working Capital ManagementYou can see how many purchase orders are outstanding, how many invoices are upaid, what discounts are available to you if you pay early, how much cash is actually free, and even take advantage of receivables financing.
  • Improving Short and Long Term Operational EfficiencyYou can cut DPO and DSO in half, eliminate paper processing, and make your team 80% more efficient. Over the long term, you can reduce the headcount devoted to tactical “paper pushing” and increase the headcount dedicated to strategic spend analysis and sourcing, which increases organizational savings per employee.
  • Environmental PracticesNo paper. Spending to environmentally irresponsible suppliers can be denied. Etc.
  • Accessing CreditIf you know what you have, and you can demonstrate the reliable payment history, even if the banks turn you down, you can get receivables financing.

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