Author Archives: thedoctor

Do We Need Flexons to Adapt to Transient Advantages? Part II

In Part I, we noted that today’s business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. As a result, there is an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions than ever before as organizations have to swiftly move from one temporary advantage to another to remain relevant in many constantly-changing industries. This is requiring these organizations to essentially innovate on demand.

However, innovation on demand is hard. Really hard. There is no one approach guaranteed to work for any particular problem, and given the wide range of problems facing today’s organization, there might not be any approach with a chance of success that exceeds the your chance of winning the lottery. We have the situation where some problems are so challenging that your odds of success are only favourable if you simultaneously attack the problem from multiple angles with multiple approaches. This is where flexons come in. Flexons, which are essentially problem solving languages derived from the social and natural sciences to accomodate the world of business problems, used in concert, provide a way for you to tackle a wide range of very difficult problems that will arise in the course of normal operations. They might not solve every problem, but, properly applied, have a good chance of solving a decent number of problems and are a good addition to your toolkit.

Flexons come in five flavours:

  • Networks
    The network flexon helps decompose a situation into a series of linked problems of prediction (how will ties evolve?) and optimization (how can we maximize the relational advantage of a given agent?) by presenting relationships among entities. A properly constructed influence network can be used to determine who can best influence the adoption of a certain viewpoint, product, or solution; a properly constructed transportation network can help you optimize deliveries and shipments through various intermodal channels; and a properly constructed organizational map can help you determine which organizations your organization could partner with to quickly create a new servitized product offering.
  • Evolutionary
    Based on the concept of an evolutionary algorithm, which uses randomness (to generate diversity) and parallelization (to generate multiple possible solutions) to quickly identify unworkable and/or sub-optimal solutions in a directed search process to get to a workable and/or near-optimal solution, the evolutionary flexon embraces a model where a series of low-cost, small-scale experiments involving product variants pitched to a few well-chosen market segments are preferred to a large all-in strategy. With every turn of the evolutionary-selection crank, where losers are discarded and winners are evolved into a pool of potentially better solutions, the company’s predictions will improve and the distance to the marketable solution will decrease.
  • Decision-Agent
    Based on the definition of social behaviour as the outcome of interactions among individuals, each of whom tries to select the best possible means of achieving his or her ends, the decision-agent flexon represents teams, firms, and industries as a series of competitive and cooperative interactions among agents. The basic process is to determine the right level of analysis (such as the firm), ascribe to each agent at this level the beliefs and motives that represent their actions, consider how their payoffs change as a result of the actions of others, determine the combinations of strategies they might collectively use, and seek an equilibrium where no agent can unilaterally deviate from the strategy without becoming worse off.
  • System-Dynamics
    Making the relations between variables of a system, along with the causes and effects of decisions, more explicit allows you to understand their likely impact over time and using a system dynamics lens that shows the world in terms of flows and accumulations of money, matter, energy, or information serves to shed light on a complex system by helping you develop a map of the causal relationships among key variables. This helps you identify the impacts of different decisions and is a great tool for identifying potential risks, and mitigations, in a system.
  • Information-Processing
    This flexon focuses attention on what information is used, the cost of computation, and how efficiently the computational device solves certain kinds of problems with the goal of determining how to transform information in an intelligent way into an insight that a decision can be made on.

The approaches contained in these flexons can prove quite insightful in a wide range of industries. In their article on “five routes to more innovative problem solving”, the authors provide examples in biofuel manufacturing and telecommunications where the biofuel manufacturer wants to improve researcher productivity and the telco wants to predict future usage and customer desires. SI highly recommends reviewing the case studies if you believe that flexons would be a good tool in your innovation toolkit, which SI believes they will be for most organizations.

Do We Need Flexons to Adapt to Transient Advantages? Part I

Last week, in our series on The End of Competitive Advantage (Part I, Part II, and Part III), we explained that the notion of sustainable competitive advantage is now a pipe dream in many industries and many markets and the only way some companies can hope to survive the new chaos is to swiftly move from arena to arena where they can temporarily acquire a transient advantage and profit.

Last Thursday, in our post on Maintaining Competitiveness – Adaptable Supply Chain Structure, we noted that a company would only be able to deftly move from temporary advantage to temporary advantage if it had a supply chain that could keep up. This supply chain — which needs to focus on risk, use a variable cost structure, support flexible capacity, and use shared services — will have to be innovative at its core, and may require the organization, and Supply Management, to innovate radically new solutions to existing challenges.

As noted in this recent McKinsey Quarterly article on “five routes to more innovative problem solving”, today’s business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. We now have a situation where the number of variables at play can be enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions. But how can an organization do this? There’s no one blueprint for innovation that will work for every company, and no one approach that will always work.

Some problems are so challenging, that your odds of success are only favourable if you simultaneously attack the problem from multiple angles with multiple approaches. One way to do this might be to use McKinsey’s flexon approach, where flexon is short for FLEXible Objects for generating Novel Solutions. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions, they have limited applicability. In comparison, flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges.

The creators of flexons have developed five flexons, or problem solving languages, derived from the social and natural sciences, to accomodate the world of business problems. Just like the Gang of Four’s* five creational design patterns (which provide ways to instantiate single objects or groups of related objects) may not be sufficient for every object oriented system you can imagine, the authors don’t claim that their five flexons will be exhaustive, just that they are sufficient, in concert, to tackle a wide range of very difficult problems that will be sufficiently inclusive for most individuals. Furthermore, as with (object oriented) design patterns, it will often be the case that serious mental work will be required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each will retain blind spots arising from its assumptions, but multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.

Flexons are not the ultimate problem solving methodology, but they are a good methodology to have in your toolkit, because the more methodologies you have, the better your chances at solving a particular problem and innovating on demand. In Part II, we will describe the five flexon patterns.

* If you don’t know who the Gang of Four are or what Design Patterns are, it’s not critical to understand this post but it is worth researching, especially if you want a better understanding of how good software (which you will rely on) can be constructed.

Make Sure Your Savings Don’t Perish With Your Perishables

A recent article over on Inbound Logistics on Cutting Costs When Shipping Perishables had some great tips on how to reduce your perishable related costs while shipping. This post will cover them, and provide some more tips for reducing perishable related costs while also increasing your sustainability.

All ten tips were good, but the following five were very good and often overlooked:

  • Know the seasonality trend in the regions you source from.
    This will allow you to adjust your shipping patterns to take advantage of excess capacity in advance.
  • Become a C-TPAT member.
    This expedites the release of your cargo, which is very, very, very important when shipping perishables. Sometimes it only takes a few extra hours on a truck on a scorching hot day to ruin a shipment.
  • Include ALL commodities to be imported on a single USDA import permit.
    Not only does this save time and money, but it minimizes the chance of a permit being lost and the entire truck held up for one item!
  • Purchase an annual bond.
    Not only does this save time and money, especially if you’d file a lot of single entry bonds otherwise, but, along with C-TPAT membership, it shows you are a serious, regular importer of these goods and not a fly-by-night operation which might exist only to smuggle drugs in the citrus boxes.
  • Do not load produce at night.
    When it’s easy for insects and other pests to get in unnoticed. Not only can a family of spiders ruin the grapes, but they might be illegal in the company you’re importing into, which would result in your truck getting stopped at the border and turned around.

Other ways to save money include:

  • Always home-source during harvest season.
    Unit prices might be higher, but shipping will be lower, and loss will be lower still as you won’t risk losing product in long shipments, which happens regularly when trucks break down and/or get held up at the border. Plus, many people will pay a slight premium for local produce.
  • Know the seasonality for key staples in every region, not just the ones you generally source from.
    This will make sure you’re always sourcing from the region with the most supply, which will help you to get you the lowest costs as you will be able to negotiate better unit prices and secure transportation in advance when prices are low.
  • Always import full trucks.
    With the current cost of fuel, shipping adds a considerable cost component, so you want to minimize it as much as possible. This may require an optimization solution as you have to figure out whether to:

    • order more of a seasonal item to fill the truck, and then make sure an appropriate special is offered by sales to insure the extra units are sold before they perish
    • rebalance out-of-season items from one locale to another – i.e. you would normally buy oranges from Argentina, but moving the order to Mexico during banana season will fill the truck
    • order more of an out-of-season item with a longer life span, keep it properly refrigerated, and increase the length between orders
  • If the perishables will be processed, re-optimize the processing network.
    If you’re going to can, freeze, or otherwise process the perishables into a less perishable product, do it as close to the source as possible, even if it means using new suppliers or investing in new manufacturing plants. These refined products, which are typically denser, and which may not even require refrigeration, will be much cheaper to ship and suffer a lesser risk of loss.
  • Have a plan to sell excess perishables once they reach their prime before they perish.
    50% off at the store is not always good enough, especially if they are marked down an hour before closing on a Tuesday night and will not be saleable tomorrow. For example, even overripe, tomatoes are still great for pastes and soups. You could have each store strike a deal with local restaurants that allow them to buy perishables at prime at a discount before they are unuseable, or, if you are socially responsible, setup a donation program with a local shelter or soup kitchen where the shelter can pick up perishing items each day before close before they perish (and take your cash with them). Done right, you could probably even get a charity tax write off (as long as the items were donated while still edible). You may consider these ideas beyond the scope of sourcing, but you shouldn’t when you consider that 1 in 7 people in the world are undernourished and almost 40% of food is wasted in North America. Fix this. You have the power.

Why You Need a Master Data Strategy to Properly Do Supplier Information Management

Supplier Information Management is more than just buying a Supplier Information Management (SIM) solution and plopping it into your data centre. Much more. But yet, it seems that some people — anxious to deal with the visibility, risk management, and supplier performance issues facing them — believe that merely obtaining a SIM solution will solve their problems. A proper solution properly acquired, properly implemented, and properly used will go a long way to increasing supply chain visibility, enabling risk management and mitigation, and providing a solid foundation for supplier performance management, but the mere presence of such a solution in your supply management application suite is about as useful as a drill in the hands of a carpenter holding a nail.

You see, Supplier Information will never be restricted to the SIM system. Supplier information will always be present in the ERP system used for resource planning and manufacturing, the accounts payable system, the transactional procurement / procure-to-pay system, the sourcing suite, the contract management system, the risk management solution, the performance tracking and scorecard system, the sustainability / CSR solution, and other systems employed in your organizational back-office to manage the different supply management AND business functions. Supplier data is everywhere, and without a strategy, just shoving it into the SIM system won’t help.

In order to get a proper grip on supplier information, the organization needs a master data strategy that dictates the sub-records that define a supplier record and which system holds the master data for each sub-record. What do we mean by this? For example, the ERP may hold the core supplier identifier sub-record that defines the unique supplier number in your system, the supplier name, the supplier’s tax number, and your customer number in the eyes of the supplier and be the system of record for this information. The accounts payable system, referencing the supplier by it’s supplier number, may be the system of record for the headquarters address and payment address. The contract management system may be the system of record for the list of employees authorized to sign contracts on behalf of the supplier. The CSR system may be the system of record for the suppliers’ carbon rating, third party CSR rating, and your internal sustainability rating. And so on.

If this is the case, the SIM system, to truly be a SIM solution for your organization, needs to integrate with all of these systems and encode the proper rules to resolve data conflicts as required. Specifically, three things need to happen. First of all, whenever a system of record updates data, that data must be pulled into the system and overwrite the existing data. Secondly, anytime data is updated in the SIM system for which it is the system of record, that data must be pushed out to all systems that use it. Thirdly, and this part is sometimes overlooked, whenever data is updated in a system of record, the data not only needs to be pulled into the SIM system, but it then needs to be pushed out to any system that also uses that data. The SIM solution is the centre of a hub-and-spoke data architecture — all updates flow in, and all updates flow out.

This can only be properly accomplished with an appropriate Master Data Strategy. Don’t overlook it. Otherwise your SIM solution will turn out to be a Stuck In Muck solution. An SI is not kidding about this.

It’s the 75th Birthday of the Civil Aeronautics Authority!

That’s right. Seventy-five (75) years ago today, the Civil Aeronautics Act was signed into law and the Civil Aeronautics Authority was formed. Responsible for determining the routes that air carriers can serve, and regulating the fares, the Civil Aeronautics Authority, later split into the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) and the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) by Roosevelt in 1940, the two authorities split from the Civil Aeronautics Authority collectively oversee air traffic control, safety programs, airway development, safety rule-making, accident investigation, and economic regulation of the air carriers you depend on everyday to get your air freight to or from its US destination.

With air travel and air shipping an integral part of everyday life, it’s sometimes tough to imagine that the first controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight occurred only 110 years ago (on December 17, 1903) and that the first attempt to move freight by air occurred only 103 years ago on November 7, 1910, when Phil O. Parmalee carried two bolts of silk on his Wright Model B from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio. The first round-the-world shipment was only 74 years ago when Kellog’s Corn Flakes sponsored the first air express round-the-world shipment that departed Battle Creek, MI on February 22, 1939 and arrived back on March 22, 1939. Furthermore, the first commercial airline dedicated to cargo did not emerge until two years later, in 1941, when the big four airlines banded together to create Air Cargo Inc. Civil aviation and commercial air cargo hasn’t been around all that long. The only shipping mainstay that is younger is the freight container, which revolutionized ocean shipping in 1956 and has done more for global trade than any government or treaty ever did.

So let’s all wish the Civil Aeronautics Authority a happy 75thbirthday and drink a Keith‘s*. It’s clear they did something right!


* 75 is a Keith number, after all!