Monthly Archives: June 2013

Twenty Five Years Ago, Nippon Made Air Travel Safer … For Birds!

Twenty five years ago today, Nippon Airways announced that it gave birds everywhere the clear message that jet planes taste bad. In an industry where birds caused over half a million dollars worth of damage to airplanes in 1985, Nippon Airways managed to come up with an innovative, cheap solution to keep birds away from its planes. They painted eyespots on the rotating fans of their jet engines.

An eyespot is an eye-like marking found on butterflies, moths, and certain other insects that taste bad to birds. After they painted the eyespots on their jet engines, in the following year, only one bird struck one of their engines. Nippon later announced that the eyespots cut mid-air bird collisions by 20%! Sometimes innovation is easier, and cheaper, than you think!


Engine Eyespot

Supply Chain Resiliency: More than Supplier Management!

We have a thorough supplier (performance) management program in place — all of our strategic suppliers are appropriately managed and monitored. We don’t have to worry about unexpected bankruptcies, lapses in quality, or shipment delays.

Falser words could not be spoken!

Just because your suppliers are well managed and not likely to be a source of risk unless an external event causes one or more of those suppliers to shutdown or become inaccessible, that doesn’t mean your supplier’s supplier is managed! According to the BCI 2012 “Supply Chain Resilience Survey”, 39% of analyzed disruptions originated below the immediate tier-one supplier! In other words, the best (tier one) supplier management program in the world is only going to mitigate 60% of supplier-based risks that can be mitigated! Given that, depending on the study, somewhere between 73% and 85% of companies experienced at least one disruption last year (with the average survey respondent experiencing an average of 5), and that 21% of companies suffered disruptions that cost more than 1 Million Euros, can you really rely on your world-class supplier (performance) management program?

So how do you identify and assess sub-tier risks? We’ll get to that in a series of posts on supply chain visibility that will begin this summer, but if you want a leg up on your competition, I would suggest that you strongly consider the forthcoming webinar on “Assessing Sub-tier Risks” by Resilinc, who will be doing a deep dive into a proper process, the benefits it will produce for your organization, and the high cost of doing nothing in today’s global economy.

You can Register for the webinar, which will take place on June 19, 2013 @ 11am PDT / @ 3 pm EDT, at your earliest opportunity.

General Dynamics, Why Aren’t We On Mars Yet?

We’ve already conquered extra-planetary supply management with our ability to supply the International Space Station on a regular basis and keep our astronauts fed, which means the next challenge is for us to supply inter-planetary supply chains between Earth and Mars.

Fifty years ago today, Andrew Kalitinsky a spokesman for General Dyanmics told scientists at a two day symposium called “The Exploration of Mars”, hosted by the American Astronautical Society that a manned mission to the planet Mars could be launched in 1975 and would likely consist of a convoy of four multi-ton spaceships. (Fifty years and one day ago, one day before this announcement, NASA announced plans to send two satellites to Mars in November 1964 as the first step toward a mission.)

Since then, we’ve only successfully sent:

  • Mars 2, a Soviet probe that crashed into Mars in 1971
  • Mars 3, a Soviet probe that landed on Mars but stopped transmitting after 14.5 seconds
  • Mars 4, a Soviet orbiter that flew by the planet and sent back images and radio occultation data
  • Mars 5, a Soviet orbiter that transmitted 60 images
  • Mars 6, a Soviet fly-by / lander that failed on impact
  • Mariner 4, an American spacecraft that few past Mars on July 14, 1965
  • Mariner 6 and 7 American fly-by probes that reached Mars in 1969
  • Mariner 9, an American orbiter that was the first probe to successfully enter Martian orbit
  • Viking 1, an American orbiter/lander module that was the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars
  • Viking 2, an American orbiter/lander module that was the second spacecraft to successfully land on Mars
  • Mars Pathfinder, an American spacecraft that landed a base station with a roving probe on Mars on July 4, 1997
  • Mars Global Surveyor, an American orbiter that entered Martian orbit on Sep 12, 1997
  • 2001 Mars Odyssey, an orbiter that reached Martian orbit in 2001
  • Mars Express, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiter that reached Martian orbit on Dec 25, 2003 (giving the ESA a Merry Christmas 10 years ago)
  • Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an American spacecraft designed to conduct reconnaissance and exploration of Mars from orbit that attained orbit on Mar 10, 2006
  • Rosetta, an ESA probe that flew within 250 km of Mars on Feb 25, 2007
  • Curiosity, the American rover that landed on Mars on August 6, 2012 (and may have spotted a Martian Lizard)

Not a single manned mission in the lot of them! And not a single planned manned mission in the next 10 years! the doctor wants to optimize those inter-planetary supply chains. GD, you’re 38 years late. Get a move on!

The Cloud is Not a Crystal Ball Either!

Despite the fact that I’ve told you that The Cloud is NOT a Fluffy Magic Box, given you More Reasons the Cloud is Not a Fluffy Magic Box, reminded you Yet Again, the Cloud is NOT a Fluffy Magic Box, told you that The Cloud is Filled with Hail, and pointed out that The Cloud is Not a Magic Mirror Nor is it Omniscient, it seems that there is a new brand of silicon snake oil salesmen who want you to believe that that the cloud is a crystal ball that you can use to talk to people everywhere in the world.

Just yesterday someone informed me that a new company is going around trying to sell a cloud business phone system.* What the heck is that? And how does it work? Do I walk outside and shout up to the sky? What if it’s a clear sunny day and there are no clouds in site? Or the middle of the night and I can’t see the clouds through the fog? And how does it handle inclement weather?

And no, the doctor is not being silly. Given that we don’t know what cloud really is**, and that, with (tele)communications, you HAVE to know the origin point AND the destination point, how the heck do you send a phone signal into the cloud and ensure it reaches the right person. Presumably it is built on dynamic, replicated, peer-to-peer IP routing, which sounds great in theory, but may not even be legal in practice considering your business might be in a locale where your phone system has to be 911 compliant. Since no one would know where the signal is coming from, this type of system would never be 911 compliant!

Basically, as I pointed out in Dogbert Translates Cloud-Consultanese, they’re pulling a Dogbert hoping to find a Pointy Haired Boss who will believe their mumbo-jumbo and buy their silicon snake oil solution at a ridiculous mark-up before anyone else in the company realizes that significant money has been wasted on betaware that’s not even as good as products you can get for free (like Skype and Google Voice, for example).

You’ve been warned!


* They didn’t tell me the name of the company, presumably to protect the guilty and give them a chance to smarten up knowing that this absurdity really grinds the doctor‘s gears and typically results in a rant.
** If Larry Ellison has to ask What the Hell is Cloud Computing, that’s telling!

Ditch the Dashboards Before they are Your Downfall!

How many times do I have to tell you that (real-time) dashboards are dangerous and dysfunction, that dashboards really are dangerous and disfunctional, and that integrated dashboards are deadly? Seriously! How many times?

There’s a reason that Dashboards are one of the seven deadly software sins, and it has nothing to do with vanity or pride (as they are the idiot lights, after all). It has to do with sanity.

But still, I see ridiculous articles like this recent article over on Inbound Logistics on business intelligence in the supply chain that discusses reporting and real-time dashboards, neither of which have even the slightest connection to “intelligence”.

Dashboards have two big problems. First of all, as SI has repeatedly pointed out, they give you a false sense of security. The ship could be sinking but because the “pump performance” light is green, you think everything is okay. If the pump can only pump 158 Gallons per minute, but the ship is taking on 790 Gallons per minute, you’re not going to be in good shape for very long!

Secondly, they often give you a false sense of urgency. For example, the “on time delivery” light could be red, indicating that 30% of your shipments are late. If you’re a CPG executive worried about hitting your number, you’ll quickly calculate that this could increase your stock-out rate another 3% (based on an average stock-out rate of 8%) and decrease sales by 5% (as fast moving products sell more), go into panic mode, and start screaming at your suppliers, ruining the good relations that your Supply Management team had spent months building – when, in fact *every* delivery was on time. How could this happen? Let’s say the warehouse workers are slow and consistently get to supplier X’s shipment at 9 am, which is ready and waiting to be unloaded at the scheduled time of 7 am. Now, if the technology illiterate warehouse worker enters the receipt time at 9 am, even though the truck was there at 7 am, the binary logic dashboard will say the shipment was late (even though it wasn’t), along with every other shipment that really wasn’t late. However, you will have already ruined the relationship with what was likely a key supplier, who will likely quote you significantly higher at contract renewal time, because you assumed the system was right. And if demand is greater than supply, you might even be dropped as a customer, and experience a supply disruption as a result. And with every disruption comes a 40% chance of business failure within five years. In other words, SI is not exaggerating when it says that a single dashboard could ultimately lead to the downfall of a large organization.

So next time someone tries to sell you a sleek new dashboard, tell them to go back to the cloud they came from and shove it somewhere the sun don’t shine. Real intelligence comes from applications that let you slice and dice data, not from applications that give you cookie-cutter reports that were slapped together quickly by a low level coder who doesn’t really know your business.