Author Archives: thedoctor

You Can Have Your Google Chauffeur. I’ll Choose Good Ol’ Alfred Every Day of the Week!

For those of you who thought the doctor was needlessly calling #badwolf last Sunday in response to the automotive industry’s push for autonomous automobiles, SI would like to point out this recent BBC News article stating that Toyota is to recall 1.9 Million Prius hybrids.

Why is Toyota recalling 1.9 Million Prius hybrids? A software fault that may cause the vehicle to slow down suddenly. To date it has identified more than 400 reports of the problem, with the bulk of them occurring in (the heavily congested streets and highways of) Japan and North America. According to Toyota in limited cases, the hybrid system might shut down and the vehicle will stop, perhaps while being driven.

In other words, all a hacker has to do to cause multiple fatal multi-car pileups is hack the OnStar network and send a signal to all Prius’ vehicles to execute that specific part of the code. They don’t even have to break the OS and figure out how to craft a small virus that will hijack the control system or execute a dangerous set of commands — the hacker just has to send a signal telling the OS to execute the set of commands already there.

Now, presumably, this would (hopefully) result in the brake lights being triggered and the outcome may not be as deadly as it would be otherwise, but what about the other 99 Million Plus lines of code. How many similarly dangerous, untested, and, as-yet, unexecuted code sequences are also in the Prius? And every other electronically controlled car on the road?

They’ve yet to release a personal OS that isn’t riddled with more holes than there are potholes in Canada’s winter roads*1! I’m all for technological advance, but until we figure out how to write more bullet-proof, and secure, operating systems, let’s keep the OS out of the car and on the desktop where it belongs.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go help LOLCat tell some meddling kids to get off my lawn!


*1 A slice of swiss cheese is quite solid in comparison!

Think China Trade is New? Think Again!

The first ship to trade with China, the Empress of China, set sail from New York 230 years ago today, transporting the first official representatives of the American government to Canton.

The outsourcing craze to China may be relatively recent, but American trade with China began a mere 8 years after they declared independence and within a year of Great Britain accepting that the United States was an independent nation.

The (Board) Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management Part VIII: Agricola


It’s 1671, the plague that has raged for the last 323 years has finally been overcome, and you and your spouse are a simple farming couple living in a two-room hut somewhere in (very) rural Austria. Your goal is to improve your quality of life by improving your home, expanding your fields, and multiplying your animals (to sell in the nearby markets).

In Agricola, you do this over a 14-round game where each of your family members can take exactly one action (that has not yet been taken) in a round. In this round you can acquire resources such as wood and clay, harvest your crops, acquire livestock, or expand your family. Each of these actions will need to be taken, but must be timed appropriately You cannot expand your family before you can house (and feed) another mouth (or one or more family members will have to beg), but you cannot plant and harvest more crops without more family members. As a result, some actions will almost need to be paired and you will have to plan action sequences in order to not only survive the game, but win. The winner is the player who builds the best overall farmyard (which is judged on a variety of factors which include fields, pastures, stables, crops, animals, homestead, and improvements).

In this post we will discuss the basic “family game” play, which leaves out some of the more advanced components, as you will need to master the basic game before moving on to the more advanced one. (Just like you have to master the basics of multi-round sourcing sourcing negotiations before trying to do real-time optimization-powered auctions after a multi-round RFX to qualify the final bidders.) The difference is that occupation and minor improvement cards are left out and only the major improvement cards are used.

You start the game with 2 units of food if you are the starting player, and 3 otherwise. You can get more food from the harvest that comes at the end of rounds 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 14. (Just like in the real world, crops take time and you can’t harvest immediately after planting.) Food is produced from raw grain and vegetables, and grain and vegetables can be converted to food one-to-one at any time. (If you have a hearth, you can convert vegetables at better than a 1 to 1 ratio.)

Each round without a harvest has four phases:

  1. Begin: Flip over a new round card that makes a new action available.
  2. Replenish: Acquire new goods and food from any previous actions that have a recurring result.
  3. Work: In sequence, each player puts a family member to work by assigning an available action to them, which they will take. The action may yield an immediate or future result.
  4. Go Home: At the end of the round, the family members have finished their assigned tasks and go home.

If the round has a harvest, there are three more phases:

  1. Field: players remove one food unit from each sown field and places it
    into their personal supply
  2. Family Feeding: each player must feed each family member who was born in this round 1 food and each other family member 2 food; a player who does not have the food has to beg and borrow food, but that comes at a cost of 3 points (think 3 food units) in the future
  3. Breeding: any player with at least 2 animals of the same type may breed 2 animals to receive exactly one additional (baby) animal of the same type, provided there is space in that person’s farmyard for the animal

The following actions are always available:

  • Extend Your Hut or Stables : you can extend your wooden hut, ore renovate your wooden hut into a clay hut or your clay hut into a stone house if you have enough reed and wood, clay, or stone to do so. Alternatively, you can build stables to keep (more) animals
  • Extend Your Family: if you have more rooms in your hut than you have family members, and less than five family members, then you can add one offspring to your family (to put to work in later rounds)
  • Tend Your Fields or Bake Some Bread: you can plow an unplowed field, sow one or more plowed fields with grain or vegetables, or (if you have a fireplace, hearth, stone, or clay oven) convert grain to food
  • Raise Your Animals: in order to raise animals, a player must fence pastures or build stables (in a pasture),

Additional actions that may become available during the game (in the form of major improvement cards) include:

  • The Well: produces extra food (as your fields are better irrigated you produce more crop that becomes food)
  • Fireplace: allows you to convert grain, vegetables, and animals to food
  • Cooking Hearth: allows you to convert grain, vegetables, and animals to food
  • Basket Weaver: allows reeds to be converted to food
  • Stone Oven: bake bread from grain
  • Cabinet Maker: makes cabinets from wood that are traded for food
  • Pottery: makes pottery from clay that are traded for food

It’s just like managing an industrial farm at the back-end of agricultural supply chains. The amount of crop you can produce depends on how many fields you have, how many people you have working those fields, and how capable you are at optimizing the output, but the amount of fields you have available and the amount of people to tend those fields depends on how many of those fields need to be used for, or grow food for, the animals you are raising to supply meat to your customers who want grain, vegetables, and meat to stock their shelves and freezers. A field can only be used for one thing at a time, a person can only do one farm task at a time, and those farmhands need to be paid and fed. You have to balance supply with demand with profit and need. If you train your people, they can be more productive, but it costs time and money to do so (and maybe they’ll quit and go work for your competitor). And if you go into debt, the interest accumulates quickly because you’re essentially borrowing from legalized loan-sharks due to your low profit margins and limited clout.

And winning isn’t just profit, it’s sustainability and depends on a number of complex factors that influence your performance over time.

Are you the best agriculture supply chain manager? Play Agricola, challenge (up to four of) your teammates, and find out!

Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology: What Questions Should You Be Asking?

Join Sourcing Innovation and the doctor for the next NLPA Members-only webinar on Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology; What Questions Should You Be Asking. Taking place next Wednesday, February 26, at 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 am Eastern, and 16:30 pm GMT (London) time.

This webinar, which follows Novembers webinar on Making Sense of e- in Sourcing and Procurement, will outline the critical questions that must be asked when searching for an e-Sourcing or an e-Procurement solution.

In our last webinar, we clearly defined the sourcing and procurement cycle, indicated where each technology (e-Sourcing, e-Negotiation, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing, e-Auction, e-RFX, e-Contract, e-Payment, Procure-to-Pay, Source-to-Pay, etc.) fell, outlined what each technology did, and indicated the conditions that needed to exist for each solution to potentially be appropriate for your organization. This provided your organization with a set of questions it could ask to determine what technologies it needed to focus on as it looked to acquire new sourcing and procurement technologies to support it in its Supply Management Journey.

However, just knowing that your organization needs a solution is not enough, especially if its biggest need is a basic e-Negotiation suite that is theoretically available from over two dozen vendors. Which solution, or solutions, are right for your organization? Depending on the needs of the organization, it might be the case that only two out of twenty solutions will appropriately address the organizational needs, but unless the right questions are asked, it might look like six meet the needs and the organization will have a 66% chance of selecting the wrong solution.

That’s why the doctor of Sourcing Innovation is hosting this follow-up webinar on Acquiring e-Sourcing and e-Procurement Technology; What Questions Should You Be Asking. You’ll learn the critical questions that must be asked when searching for an e-Sourcing or an e-Procurement solution, some important questions that should also be considered for each major module, and how to structure a (multi-round) RFX for Success.

To register for this free event, login to the NLPA and navigate to the “Webinars” tab where you’ll find a registration link. Be sure to enter a valid email address as attendance details will be sent to you by email. Registration is free (as is basic NLPA membership) but attendance is limited, so sign up soon to ensure access to this event. (If you have forgotten your NLPA password, please visit the NLPA password reset page.)

See you next Wednesday, February 26, at 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 am Eastern, and 16:30 pm GMT (London) time.

The Storm Clouds Are Coming!

Fifteen years ago, enterprise software was installed on-premise and managed locally. This required organizations with no knowledge of IT or IT management to create IT departments to manage servers and the software services that ran on them. For an organization that didn’t use software in it’s daily operations — such as a manufacturing organization that used manual production lines, an advertising agency that deals in existential image and not physical product, or a real-estate agency that only has to take listings and take cheques — it was an expensive proposition.

Then came the Application Service Providers, better known as ASPs. Using the power of the internet, these software solution providers built their own data centres and hosted the solution for their customers on dedicated machines in their own data centres. However, this solution was not optimal either, as the organization was not only paying for machines, energy, and administrators to run the software, but also paying for these through a thirdparty that added overhead and markup.

This provided an opportunity for more enterprising software delivery organizations that were able to build their applications to be multi-tenant and host multiple clients on the same platform. This reduced the number of machines, kilowatts, and system administrators that were required and thus reduced the overall operating cost. This allowed this new breed of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor to take business away from the ASPs and advance the state of the art.

But this wasn’t the end. New enterprising software delivery organizations, who realized that their expertise was software and not data centre management, decided that they could do even better if they designed multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service solutions that could be run on someone else’s platform. This would bring more economies of scale into play as not only could multiple solutions could be run on the same platform, but the platform provider could be replaced by another platform provider with a lower-cost at any time. Enter the Cloud, which, like a real cloud is ephemeral, suspended in space, and, in some cases, full of security holes.

Cloud services are ephemeral as any specific instantiation of cloud services last as long as the company behind it has the means and the desire to continue supporting the cloud services. Cloud services are suspended in space since the instantiations may move over time as the service owners switch to lower-cost and/or more secure data centres. And, with the recent revelations on the PRISM program, the cloud is full of security holes to the point where the EU Parliament has called for suspension of the multi-billion ‘Safe-Harbour’ deal over NSA spying because some cloud providers don’t, either because they don’t have the expertise or won’t spend the money, secure their part of the cloud properly.

As a result, supply chains are exposed to additional risks of disruption (if a cloud provider unplugs overnight), security breaches (as some platforms are significantly less secure than others), and privacy risks (as some governments claim the right to all data on servers on their shore that is not associated with citizens or entities of that country or that might pose a security risk under acts like the US Patriot Act).

And this is only one of 14 significant threats to the supply chain in 2014. Would you like to know what the other 13 are? If so, download SI’s latest white paper on the Top Ten Transitions To Tackle in 2014 to Tame the Tolls, sponsored by BravoSolution. (Registration Required) Or, you could just wait and be surprised as the other 13, riding on black swans, one by one, strike at each full moon. Your call.