When Are We Going To Wake Up and Stop Wasting Food!

Recently, Italy introduced a new law designed to reduce food waste which is being celebrated by farmers and restaurant owners as it simplifies the donation of excess food that ends up becoming food (or field) waste. Approximately 100 Million tonnes of food across the EU is wasted each year. (Source: European Commission) That amount of food would sufficiently feed at least at least another 100 Million people annually (as the amount of food a person needs in a year varies between 0.5 and 1 tonne depending upon diet, weight, etc.). This is just in the EU. In the US, recorded food waste exceeds 30 Million tonnes, and is probably much higher. (Source: Feeding America) That’s at least another 30 Million people that could be completely fed. Putting these numbers together, and assuming the average amount of food consumed by a person a year is 0.75 tonnes (and not 1), that’s about 175 Million completely satiated. There are almost 800 Million undernourished people in the world. If we assumed that they were surviving on only half the food they needed (which is not reasonable, as that’s barely sustenance, and a lot of these undernourished people are in developed countries and still eating enough to work), this says that the recorded food waste in 1/7th of the world’s population could cut the number of undernourished people in the world by half! By Half!

Italy is only the second country in the EU to adopt such laws (following a similar move by France earlier this year – Source: The Guadian), so let’s hope that at least in the UK, sanity reigns. Because in North America, and in the US in particular, it does not. It’s illegal in many cities to feed the homeless (Sources: NPR and MIC), even if the food is not passed its expiration date and untouched, or you are a Pastor (Source: The Daily Signal)!. In some states, game meat donated to shelters is burned (Source: Daily Caller). And even if you can donate food without getting fined and arrested, and someone gets sick because, while it was still good when you donated, by the time it was prepared and eaten it wasn’t (or it was contaminated when you received it with e-Coli and you didn’t know), then you can get sued for millions of dollars, so why take the risk?

This is why, as per our post from August, 2012 on why it’s Not Criminal, But it Should Be, America Trashes 40% of its Food Supply. It’s insane!

Food reserves have not recovered from the all time low, over 800 Million people, including almost one third of children in developing countries, are malnourished and the two richest economies in the world (the US and the EU) are collectively wasting enough food to solve over HALF of the problem. All this in a time when agriculture produces 17% more calories per person per day than it did 30 years ago. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kCal per day, which is 30% more calories than an average person needs. Instead, the cost of staples is rising, access to food by the lower class and malnourished is falling, and, because of stupid, stupid laws made by stupid, stupid lawmakers, the situation is getting worse. When it should be 10 times better!

As per our research from four years ago, there is no excuse for wasting more than 4% of food. (That’s still too much, but the 100% solution is always difficult to achieve right away. And when the 90% could be achieved tomorrow, let’s start there!) Not only would sanity (and laws mandating food donations and feeding the homeless instead of laws preventing this) reduce costs by $150 Billion and methane emissions by 22.5% (as rotting food makes up 25%), but the US would NOT have anyone undernourished! (14% of households in the US are food insecure! Fourteen Percent! The US is the richest country in the world, how can this be???)

Bravo France and Italy for finally doing something right! Let’s hope the rest of the EU follows suit so at least some people won’t go hungry!

RIP to the Big Idea!

This post appeared in its original form almost 5 years ago on August 31, 2011 when it was titled What’s the Big Idea. Since nothing has changed, we’re knocking it up a knotch with our borrowed spice weasel.

Seriously, like your predecessor’s Procurement, it’s dead and Buried! Inquiring (not enquiring) minds are in mourning. Because, as far as any of us can tell, there aren’t any big ideas any more. As Neal Gabler said in the New York Times article on the elusive big idea, we live in a society that no longer thinks big. And that’s bad. Why? In many fields of technology, there have been no big ideas for decades. Sure, we see new and better devices every year and sure the iPad Air Mini just came out and now you can chase Pokemon in the real world with your Pokemon Go app, but, let’s face it, the iPad Air Mini is a netbook with a touchscreen. A netbook is just a miniaturized laptop, and a laptop is just a miniaturized portable computer, and portable computers have been around for over 35 years. (Yes, you read that right, over thirty years, with the first portable computer manufactured in 1979.) And touch-screens have been around almost as long (with the first commercial touchscreen computer released back in 1983). Apple just took the technology to the next generation, while making sure it was easier to use than all of its competitors products. And as for virtual Pokemon tracking, let us remind you geo-location technology has been around for civilian use since the 1980s.

The cloud? Well, I hate to burst your bubble (actually, not true, I love to burst that bubble), but the cloud is just a return to the fundamental concept of mainframe computing with dumb terminals — one big shared computer that services a whole bunch of users who are remote and don’t want, or need, to know how the big computer works. Except this time the big computer is a whole bunch of smaller computers networked together and, since the network is very big (and, in fact, global), the computers can reside anywhere. I could go on, but, even in computing theory, almost everything traces back twenty to thirty five years (or more).

I’m almost ready to agree with the author of a recent Forbes opinion article on the New York Times article that asked why did big ideas die when he said that we live in a post-idea society where people don’t think at all. With exceptions fewer and further between by the day, most people don’t think [deep] anymore.

Why is this? As Gabler says, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them.

Who’s to blame? Gabler blames the usual suspects — the web, Twitter, and everything else that, instead of facilitating a lively intellectual life, instead drowns us in information. And while some of these suspects, like Twitter, are indeed a problem, the reality is that they are a symptom and not the root cause. (Even though it was demonstrated back in 2010 that excessive use of Twitter and similar real-time communication platforms makes you dumber than a Pothead.)

The problem lies with Wall Street and VCs. They’ve convinced the business world that nothing matters beyond the current quarter and any idea that can’t be brought to market overnight isn’t worth it. We did not come further in the last 100 years than in all of human history by only focussing on products that could get to market quickly. (We have to remember that the first cross-Atlantic transmission did not occur until 1902. This transmission, and all major computational and communication advances since, did not happen in a quarter. Most of the advancements took years of research and decades to perfect.) If you’re trying to change a market — to go from a Model-T to a Jaguar — that takes years, but VCs won’t support anything that can’t be done in more than a few months. As a result all we get are small incremental improvements, with significantly diminishing returns as time goes on, as no one is investing to take the big leap forward.

And, despite claims to the contrary, we haven’t really reinvented the organization (as telecommuting and outsourcing have been common for at least a couple of decades), education, health care, or ownership. We’ve simply redefined management and, in some cases, who foots the bill. I’d like to see some fundamentally new big ideas, but unless someone from a parallel universe where they invented time travel finds away to break into this one and give me a time travel machine to go back in time, I may not live to see that day.

One Hundred and Fifteen Years Ago Today …

Gustave Whitehead, a man of great mechanical skill in the creation and construction of lightweight engines, claimed to have made the first powered flight in his Number 21 that supposedly achieved 60m above ground for 800m. Still disputed to this day, with the waters made murkier by the fact that thirty years ago a replica successfully made 20 successful flights of up to 100m, it was an important day in aviation history as it certainly would have inspired more, better, avaiation inventors to build powered planes that would actually fly and, not much later, carry cargo.

DirectWorks: SaaSifying Co-exprise

Co-exprise was founded back in 2004 with a goal of building a new-type of direct sourcing solution not yet available in the North American marketplace. The goal was to integrate the new sourcing tools of the day — namely RFx, auctions, project management, collaboration, product information management [PIM], dashboards — with bill of materials, supplier engagement and management, and workflow management — capabilities not found in standard sourcing tools but desperately needed by manufacturers to handle their direct sourcing needs. In fact, it was so revolutionary that the doctor described it in 2007 as the first solution on the [North American] market to make a serious, honest, effort to address the complex direct sourcing problems that other systems cannot handle because these types of problems are unique and require a distinct solution.

The Co-exprise platform was relatively unique in its day in that it was built on a number of basic building blocks, including workflow management, business process rules, collaboration technologies, a centralized repository, project management, cBOMs (collaborative Bills of Material), cost models, and analytics, that were inherent to, and invasive across, the platform. This meant that all of the technologies were integrated into one collaborative workflow where all of the common data required by a direct sourcing professional was always accessible and analyzable. But, fast forward a few years, the platform had one failing — and that was that it wasn’t designed to be multi-tenant SaaS from the ground up.

Why? Back in the early 2000s, fast internet wasn’t pervasive, third party data center and application management was expensive and, most important, manufacturers wanted to keep their proprietary data in-house and valued deep security over remote manageability. But now that cost is paramount (and SaaS is always cheaper than in-house for non-IT enterprises), the cloud is accepted, and multi-tenant SaaS managed by professionals is often more secure than the corporate intranet, the playing field has changed and modern manufacturers want a SaaS platform.

So, shortly after a regime change, Co-express decided that it needed to go true multi-tenant SaaS, and that it would re-build from the ground up … as DirectWorks. Doing this would allow them to take advantage of new web development capabilities, such as better UI and distributed processing, that might not be doable if they just tried to do a straight port. So was this the right thing to do?

Yes and No. The new platform has a very easy to use and clean UI. Is extremely simple for the mid-size manufacturers that still use a traditional BoM sourcing approach that it was designed for. It allows manufacturers to organize items into products and products into programs so that sourcing and management can be done at the appropriate level. It still has good RFQ capabilities and a supplier repository. And a graphical dashboard with reporting capability.

But it still doesn’t have many of the features in the original Co-exprise product. There are no auctions. They may not be common, but sometimes it’s the fastest way to source commodity raw materials and items at market prices. Co-exprise had a fair amount of configurability and a workflow manager with some capabilities to customize the application to the buying organization, and the new SaaS product doesn’t really have either yet. The BoM structure and sourcing process is very inflexible, and there are no hints of true SRM.

However, while the indirect sourcing platform space is quite large, the direct sourcing space is quite small. The only players are DirectWorks, Pool4Tool, and SupplyOn — the last of which is mainly oriented around electronic interfaces and document exchange (but which also includes proposal, auction, and contract management capability). And while Pool4Tool, which used to lag in usability and integration among its modules, has now caught up and surpassed DirectWorks, Directworks has managed to port over half of the capabilities they built over ten years in two years, so it’s conceivable in two more they could be back to their glory days and a major fighting force on the market. Time will tell. And SI will be watching.

For a much deeper dive into the new DirectWorks, watch out for the upcoming Pro series by the doctor, the prophet, and the maverick over on Spend Matters Pro!