Category Archives: rants

2010 Was A Sad Year for Innovation

After reading “the top six innovation ideas of 2011” on the HBR blogs, it only re-emphasized my belief that 2010 was a dead-end year innovation-wise. I don’t even want to think about what could be worse. Consider:

  • Contestification
    Can’t sell your product? Use digital media to crowd-source your marketing ideas from your customers while overpaying your CMO!
  • Keep Touching Me and I’ll Screen!
    Why read an article when you can touch, tap, stroke, finger, fondle, and pinch content-free videos?
  • WWWabs
    Why spend money doing proper software development and quality assurance when you can release crappy beta and let your customers QA for you?
  • That’s Quite A Coup, Onward Group!
    Digital coupon sites are now a six billion dollar enterprise.
  • From Farmville to Pharmville: We Got Game in Business
    As the economy went down the tubes, mindless games became a trillion dollar industry.
  • A Beautifully Designed Lobby
    In 2011, a marginal dollar invested in a lobbying campaign may yield far greater returns than a dollar invested in a brave new technology innovation.

All-in-all, it’s depressing.

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Proud To Be Fox News Free!

Especially since a recent “study confirms that fox news makes you stupid”! (Fark.com)

Check out this recent article on AlterNet that describes a survey conducted at the University of Maryland that found that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources and that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation. Wow!

This is scary considering that 85.7 Million Americans watch Fox News every month (source: TV by the Numbers). That’s 27.5% of the population being misinformed every day!

And before you go dismissing the study, read the article in full as it also mentions a previous study by the University of Maryland and a Wall Street Journal poll that found the same results. As a result, the
conclusion is inescapable. Fox News is deliberately misinforming its viewers and it is doing so for a reason. Every [reported] issue above is one in which the Republican Party had a vested interest.

That’s why Sourcing Innovation is, and will continue to be (as our gift to you), Fox News Free! Happy holidays and happy new year!

Are You Really a Futurist if You Predict a Future That’s Already Here?

I found a recent article over on SupplyChainBrain on Five Fearless Visions of the Future very entertaining, and not just because I found a few of the predictions to be out of left field, but because some were not really predictions at all … as the predictions were simply describing the current state of affairs.

Consider the following:

  • The cloud is upon us.
    The “cloud” has been hovering over us for a few years now. There’s been a strong movement to SaaS for the last five years. When even companies like Ariba buy SaaS players and start converting all their legacy systems to SaaS, you know its time has come.
  • Companies that blindly outsourced their manufacturing to Asia will start bringing some of that capability back to the U.S.
    Already happening. I’ve been reading articles all year about companies that are pulling manufacturing back to North America, and not just Mexico. Area Development had a good article back in January. Yes, there are still more companies on the outsourcing bandwagon than off it, but it’s already started. Outsourcing will continue, but not for items with high shipment costs or low production costs where it makes more sense to produce them locally. Also, we’ll start to see more service outsourcing. With goods, you have to deal with ever-increasing shipment costs, but with services, it’s just the cost of the pipe that carries the bandwidth.
  • We are in the midst of a transition to electronic software delivery.
    This was my favourite as you’d pretty much have to be Rip Van Winkle to come up with this one. When was the last time you bought software that came in a box? That wasn’t out-dated the minute the CD was burnt? If this were 2000, it would almost be timely. But this is 2010!

When you get right down to it, the only good prediction that wasn’t either already happen or mostly obvious to anyone knee-deep in supply chain was Jim Miller’s (of Google) prediction that Fifteen years from now, the world will realize that China is not the juggernaut that we make [it] out to be. The nation faces a number of systemic problems, including the prospect of the mother of all real estate bubbles. Here, here! They won’t be #1 GDP for another 2 decades, and then they’re going to have to face all the problems the US has faced since WWII. They’ll always be a major player, but they won’t be the only one.

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Car Companies Do It Again!

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.)

For a blog post, I don’t often get off on international issues but this one has been making me crazy for years.

From an op-ed in last Wednesday’s New York Times:


In addition, even when it comes to the trucks and S.U.V.’s that Americans actually do want to buy, the bailed-out automakers are building vehicles faster than they can be bought. Inventory levels at both companies have ballooned this year, to the point where G.M. now has nearly three months’ worth of sales sitting on its lots and Chrysler’s excess inventory (in terms of days of supply) is exceeded only by such marginal players as Saab, Mitsubishi, Suzuki and Mazda.


Allowing new cars to pile up on lots may well be the most deadly of Detroit’s new-old bad habits, as the practice not only artificially inflates sales numbers (which, ridiculously, are booked upon production, not when a vehicle is driven off the lot), but also lead to yet more incentives, fleet sales, subsidized leases and subprime lending.

from A Green Detroit? No, a Guzzling One by Edward Niedermeyer

The auto companies’ manufacturing people love to brag about low in-plant inventory. But can you think of a more expensive way to hold inventory than in the form of finished goods?

Between inflexible supply contracts and labor contracts that required paying laid-off employees, the car companies had really no short-term variable costs, so it paid to continue to run factories when there were no sales. However, the labor contracts should have gone away, and I hope they negotiated more flexible supply contracts. Maybe this is just habit?

Thanks, Dick! (Global Supply Training)

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Another Headline from the Land of D’Oh! Parallel Picking Improves Order Picking Efficiency

Let’s see. One order at a time. Ten orders at a time. I wonder which methodology is better?

But seriously, parallel picking, done right, is always going to be better than serial picking. The issue is, how do you do it right? An efficient parallel operation is going to not only have multiple people picking orders at the same time, but multiple people picking multiple orders at the same time.

But which way is best? Does each person run around picking multiple orders at the same time, collecting multiple items from each zone to minimize their steps? Or is each individual assigned to a zone and required to find all of the items in the zone for all orders being processed and bring them to a central area for packing?

And if you use the latter method, how do you insure that an order is packed as soon as all items are available? How do you simplify the packer’s task of finding the right item if items from multiple orders are continually poring in? How do you prevent the pickers from getting in each others way if they are converging from all over the warehouse to a small central location? How do you make sure the packers aren’t overwhelmed with too much product at once or underwhelmed with too little product at once? Those are the real questions, and the ones that went unanswered in this article in “parallel picking” in Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

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