Category Archives: Manufacturing

The (Board) Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management Part XXIII: Oddville

Do you sometimes feel like your Purchasing Department is the Island of Misfit Toys? Then OddVille is the game for you!

Oddly enough, several of you have been hired to build the city of OddVille, home to four powerful worker guilds. You will use your workers to obtain resources, coins and building projects in order to build the most valuable buildings and to gain the favour of guild members.

A city-building card-game, OddVille is a resource management game where, like in your real-world Purchasing department, you have limited resources to secure your contracts (buildings) and competing shareholders to appease (guilds). And you win by securing the most contracts (just like you typically win in OddVille by securing the most buildings).

In OddVille, at the start of the game, each player gets:

  • four worker cards in her colour (which may be used to obtain coin, resources, or building permits) which represent the classes of workers you have available to task
  • nine worker meeples
  • one resource (wood, clay, stone, or crystal)

Just like in the real world, you have a small team and limited resources to work with.

On each turn, a player can take one, and only one, of the following actions:

  • use an available worker (to obtain coin, resources, or building permits), dictated by the current worker classes available
  • build a building

Just like, in the real world, a Purchasing pro can only do one thing at a time — like executing a buy on contract to save money, building up the corporate intelligence, negotiating for a contract, or executing a contract.

The complexity of the game is that each worker, at a different experience level, has different skills, which means each worker can generate different amounts of coin, acquire different resources, and acquire building permits at different costs. Furthermore, once a worker has been committed to a task, that worker is unavailable for another task until your pool of available worker classes is empty (to model the amount of time a worker would be unavailable in the real world) or you are willing to spend coin to reclaim a worker class (as workers will work overtime for money). And, victory depends not only on which buildings are built but where they are built in OddVille (as bonuses can be obtained from orthogonally connected buildings and victory points are often dependent not on the building but its neighbours). (Similarly, sometimes the victory in a negotiation is not in the primary product or service being negotiated, but the value-adds or related products you manage to negotiate a deep discount on.)

Obtaining coin is straight-forward, a worker is tasked and coin is received. In order to acquire a resource, the worker must be given coin equal to the current cost of the resource and tasked with obtaining it, and to acquire a building permit, the worker must be given coin equal to the cost of the building permit desired. The cost of resources depends on how many other players are currently seeking that resource (and go from 0 to 2 coin, as the first seeker is able to acquire extra and sell enough to cover cost) and the cost of building permits depend on the skill of the worker who is negotiating them (and go from 0 to 5). In order to build a building, the player must have the required resources (shown on the permit) and a free worker meeple to staff the building. When a building is built, the player obtains any bonus associated with the building (such as a resource, coin, or guild member) and any adjacent connected buildings in the town. If the player gains the help of a guild member, he or she gets to use the special assistance of that guild member whenever applicable for as long as she has the help of the guild member. For example, if a player builds a building for the blue guild and gains the help of the Human Resources Manager, she can use any worker card to gain any resource (as her workers have access to the special skills of the Human Resource Manager).

The game ends when a player has placed her 6th worker in the city. Her score is the sum of the value of each building she has a worker meeple on, the value of the special guild members she has acquired the help of, and 1 point for each worker meeple on the resources board. (Similarly, the value of a Purchasing department is the value of each contract cut, the value generated for each stakeholder, and the value of value-added services she has managed to obtain on behalf of the Purchasing Department).

OddVille is a very odd little game, but has the advantage that, unlike many more complex worker placement games, you can generally finish a game with 10 minutes per player once you get the hang of it. You can play multiple head-to-head games against your cube mate, or a couple of 3 or 4-player games in a lunch-hour.

IBM is Predicting the “Software-Defined Supply Chain”

In a recent article over in the Supply Chain Quarterly, Paul Brody, the Vice President and Global Industry Leader of IBM, told us that we need to “Get Ready for the Software-Defined Supply Chain”, and SI agrees. But the big questions of when, how, and where the transformation will start are still up in the air.

According to the article, this is the most exciting time in manufacturing since Henry Ford put the Model T on a moving production line. A wave of new technologies is emerging, maturing, and converging in a way that will reshape product design and manufacturing, shifting from a world defined by hardware and logistics constraints to one that is largely defined by software. However, despite these exciting new opportunities, the supply chain leadership at some of the world’s top companies is more focused than ever on perfecting an increasingly obsolete business model.

This is because most big manufacturing companies are overlooking the three critical technologies [that] are transforming manufacturing: 3-D printing; a new generation of intelligent assembly robots; and the rise of open-source hardware. Individually, each of these trends is transformational; together their power is multiplied.

This is all true, but the transformation is still limited to design and prototype production. Why?

While it is true that, with 3-D printing, solid parts are convertible from software design to reality at the touch of a button which instructs the machine to gradually build up an object one layer at a time by depositing materials like plastics and metals in very thin layers one atop the other, this process is slow. Something that can be moulded in a few minutes will take at least a few hours, and maybe a day, with one of these printers.

And while it is true that a new generation of robot assembly stations may cost as little as $25,000 per robot and require minimal effort for installation, which often equates to a day, or less, of a technician’s time, these low cost robots are still limited in the scope of tasks they can perform and rely heavily on complex programming which can be very hard to debug.

And while it is also true that the shared-resource model of open-source software development has spread into the realm of hardware design and that, from mechanical systems to networking equipment, hundreds of product designs are now available to anyone, no reverse engineering required, not many companies are producing this hardware. They’d rather produce their own proprietary hardware and sell it at a(n extravagant) profit. So unless you can produce the hardware you need to produce the products you need, you’re stuck with cobbling together your own designs using low cost parts (like the raspberry pi with controller add-ons or the upcoming $99 Intel board).

The reality is that while all of this technology, as it matures, will get cheaper and become more available, will start to transform manufacturing, manufacturing based on open source platforms, low-cost robots, and 3-D printing is not going to become mainstream for quite a while. However, it is going to transform design — since a designer can custom print in less than a day, on his workshop desktop, a prototype for any part he can design and conduct initial testing and analysis without having to configure a custom mould or manufacturing process. He can then use low-cost programmable robots to test streamlined, automated, production processes, and then build a test line out of open source hardware. However, once everything works as expected, because manufacturing requires economies of scale, the small-scale programmable robots are going to be replaced with larger, customized, high-speed robots; the printers with traditional moulding, bending, and cutting; and the equipment with proprietary equipment under a 24/7/365 support contract with a 1 to 4 hour response time.

Design is being revolutionized by those ready to move into the 21st century, but it will be a while still before large-scale manufacturing is revolutionized.

How BizSlate is Bringing Sexy Back to ERP! Part II

As per our last post, ERP used to be sexy, but hasn’t been that way in a while. That needs to change, because ERP should be sexy. Fortunately for us, BizSlate has decided to do something about it. They agree that ERP should be appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué and are doing something about it. In our last post, we discussed what they are doing to make it appealing, exciting, and even glamorous. And if that isn’t enough to whet your whistle and take a look at what a modern ERP should be, today we’re going to discuss some of the things they are doing to make it trendy and even risqué!

Trendy

When it comes to ERP, Icona Pop got it right:


You’re on a different road I’m in the Milky Way
You want me down on Earth, but I am up in space
You’re so damn hard to please, we gotta kill this switch
You’re from the seventies, but I’m a nineties bitch

Fundamentally, ERP hasn’t changed since the nineties, which is two decades behind where it needs to be. When ERP came out in the late 80’s, the World Wide Web didn’t even exist. It was 1992 before the first commercial sales website was put up, and 1995 before the US National Science Foundation lifted its strict prohibition of commercial enterprise on the internet (which, as per our recent history lesson, was almost immediately followed by the release of the first commercial spam — damn you, NSF!). One-click on-line shopping? It wasn’t even a pipe dream! By the time Amazon.com hit the mainstream in the late nineties, the ERP, formally defined by Gartner Group back in 1990, was quite mature and, like an old dog, unable to learn new tricks.

That’s why BizSlate went back to basics and rebuilt its ERP from the ground up. This allowed it to replace old-fashioned OLAP with real-time reporting, offline down-time forecast generation with real-time what-if forecasting, batch-mode accounting/procurement system integration and reporting with real-time integration and query execution, etc. For the first time in over a decade, ERP is trendy again — and it’s not even 2038!*

Risqué

It’s disruptive — in addition to the appealing, exciting, glamorous, and trendy features discussed above, it’s re-built the ERP from the ground up to follow and support the life-cycle of the product through your supply chain. Additional features that have been included to support this are cross-reference SKUS, which allow you to track, and use, all of the different SKUS used by your suppliers and customers seamlessly and interchangeably; a full-featured web-based API that allow a front end interface to be developed for any web-based browser (so a slimmed down interface can be developed for your smartphone, should you so choose, and their product already supports the iPad, allowing your sales people to check product availability and take orders in real-time on the trade show floor with 100% confidence that all promises made can be kept); support for multiple types of e-Document exchange and the ability to define the type of e-Document exchange (EDI, XML, e-mail PDF attachment) that will be used with each customer or vendor for each type of communication; fine-grained roles and responsibilities and appropriate support for company, agent, supplier, vendor, and licensor representatives; multi-order receiving capability (which isn’t even found in mature products like NetSuite), multi-order shipment update; an API for shopping cart integration (in alpha); etc.

All this is in addition to the unique bulk order functionality, tight GL integration, multi-edit capability, pre-pack/re-pack functionality, and document generation discussed in our first two posts on how BizSlate is ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor that was Released to Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers to the Masses last year.

BizSlate wants to redefine what it means to be ERP. And bring sexy back to ERP.

* ERP hasn’t been trendy since it was promoted as the cure to the year 2000 problem, brought about by mainframe, mini-computer, and windows programmers that decided to save bytes by representing years using two digits instead of four. The next impending disaster isn’t until 2038, when all Unix-like systems that store the system time as a signed 32-bit integer, reach their maximum value. (Unless, of course, you think the Network Time Protocol will fail when it reaches it’s max value in 2036.)

How BizSlate is Bringing Sexy Back to ERP! Part I

As per our last few posts, ERP used to be sexy, but hasn’t been that way in a while. That needs to change, because ERP should be sexy. Fortunately for us, BizSlate has decided to do something about it. They agree that ERP should be appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué and are doing something about it.

Appealing

Built from the ground up to be 100% web-based SaaS, and taking lessons from best-of-breed SaaS e-Supply Management solutions, which themselves took lessons from best-of-breed B2C consumer e-Commerce solutions, the system is friendly, streamlined, easy on the eyes, and useable. Realizing that success stems from use and use stems from desire to use and desire to use stems from knowing it’s easier, and more satisfying, to use the system than to bypass it (which is a common problem among all types of systems in a modern organization), BizSlate put a lot of effort into designing a system that
was not only easy to use, but that a person who needs an ERP would want to use.

Exciting

New catalog season used to mean new headache from hell. As per our recent post on how It’s Time to Bring Sexy Back to ERP!, if your new product line contained 20 pairs of footwear in 7 different sizes and a minimum of 2 colours each, and each needed its own SKU, that was at least 280 products you needed to create one at a time! With all of the coding and cross-coding required, it was probably 15 minutes a product, or 30 products a day, or two weeks of data entry for some poor intern just to create a starting product catalog! But not with BizSlate. With its batch create capability, you define a template, define the characteristics that define the variations, define the different instantiations of those characteristics (e.g. size, 6-13, and colour, black and brown), define the starting SKU, define the ending SKU pattern, and press a button and — BAM! — it generates all 280 draft product entries. If you’re happy, press another button, and — BAM! — 280 products created and added to your ERP. If not, go back, alter the template, characteristics, and variation rules and go again. If there are custom values that need to be defined, you can populate just those fields in a spreadsheet view during the validation step. Retail and distributor customers that used to spend weeks and weeks creating new product entries for new product lines now spend a few days and generate hundreds of entries in just a few hours. It’s an exciting development in ERP usability.

Glamorous

As per our last post, traditional ERP is unsophisticated. This means a number of things. First, as per our last post, if you wanted to define multiple, sophisticated, commission plans for internal and third party sales people based on category, product, volume, and stock-type, you had to buy an ERP from Imaginationland, because that was the only place an ERP exists where such a task is possible. But not with BizSlate — they’ve thought through this need and built a commission definition and management system to support even the most demanding client. But this isn’t the only feature that makes this modern take on an ERP glamorous compared to the dinosaurs it is competing against.

Traditional ERP is quite dumb. Typically it’s not even as smart as the relational database it is built on. For example, let’s say the value list for shoe sizes is the same as the value list for sneaker sizes, think you can abstract that list and re-use it? Not a chance — create it every time you need it, buddy. Building a goods receipt and the value is already in the purchase order and want to re-use it? Copy and paste.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Want to re-use similar types of reporting structures or entry forms, because you use the same data in inventory management, order management, invoice management, etc. and don’t want to re-invent the wheel? Fat chance! Rebuild for the use-case and repopulate as above.

But not with BizSlate, who have built their streamlined ERP around repetitive mechanisms. Value lists, forms, and report components are all implemented as reusable components that can be reused wherever they are needed. Need that size list across your clothing line? No problem. Need that discount percentage by spend across your electronics category? No problem. Want to re-use the same entry form template for entering order details for your suppliers and invoice details for your customers? No problem. Repetitive Mechanisms take the repetition out of your job and allow you to focus on the job and not the data. That makes ERP glamorous.

BizSlate: They’re Bringing Sexy Back … to ERP!

BizSlate, first introduced to you on SI back in September, 2012 in our post about an ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor, and covered again last February when BizSlate Released its ERP for Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers to the Masses, has decided that it’s time to bring sexy back to ERP.

BizSlate, who, like the doctor, noticed a void in useable and affordable modern ERP solutions for the mid-sized distributor, retailer, and manufacturer, decided that they needed to do something about it and built a new ERP from the ground-up, that is custom-designed to meet the need of the mid-market distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that are under-served, and released it last year. But working closely with their initial customer base, they noticed a few things that typical ERP and implementation providers overlook. Among other things, they noticed that:

  1. Traditional ERP is Ugly
    Black and Green screens are functional, but belong in the server room. There’s no reason that ERP can’t be functional and appealing.
  2. Traditional ERP is Cumbersome and Boring
    Does your new product line contain 20 pairs of footwear in 7 different sizes and a minimum of 2 colours each? And does each need its own SKU? Guess what, that’s at least 280 products you need to create one at a time! With all of the coding and cross-coding required, it’s probably 15 minutes a product, or 30 products a day, or two weeks of data entry for some poor intern just to create a starting product catalog! Talk about cumbersome and boring. High-tech is supposed to relieve your burden and excite you!
  3. Traditional ERP is Unsophisticated and Unglamorous
    Do you use third party agencies to sell your stuff? If you’re a mid-sized distributor or manufacturer or even a mid-sized retailer who focusses on the core business of distribution, production, or store-front retailing, you probably do (since sales, distribution management, and e-Commerce aren’t your forte). And you probably (want to) pay based on commission. But if you’re using an old fashioned ERP, you’re probably stuck with one simple commission plan, or, if you’re really lucky, one per third party agency. What if you need multi-tier? Or different rates based on category or component (since you want to push new product lines but don’t want to pay a lot for end-of-life products where inventory is being sold off at reduced rates)? Better luck next time. But what if you could manage commission plan by agency, by product line, and even by salesperson? And what if it was easy? That’s a level of sophistication that would make your life, and the life of Accounts Payable, easy! An ERP that solved this obvious need would be glamorous.
  4. Traditional ERP Works Off the Nineties Model of a Back Office System.
    The nineties were two decades ago. Traditional ERP hasn’t kept up with the trends and can’t support the modern sourcing, procurement, distribution, inventory, and order management needs of a modern organization that has to respond to customer inquiries and adapt to customer needs on the fly — not on a weekly reporting schedule. Given the critical nature of an ERP solution, it has to keep up with e-Business trends.
  5. Traditional ERP is Non-Disruptive
    The core functionality and process flow of ERP hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years. This is a problem because true innovation that brings true leaps in productivity and generated value comes from technology that is willing to take a risk and disrupt the status quo.

In other words, BizSlate realized that ERP was ugly, boring, unsophisticated, out-dated, and non-disruptive and that it shouldn’t be this way. So they’ve spent the last year streamlining and improving the core of the new ERP that they’ve built to make it appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué. Because that’s what ERP should be. As per our last post, we have to remember:

ERP used to be sexy. It’s time to make it sexy again!