Category Archives: SaaS

10 Mistakes You Make When You Try To Build a Private Cloud

VentureBeat recently ran a great article on 5 Mistakes You’re Making When You Try to Build a Private Cloud that did a great job of covering 5 mistakes you make, but why stop there? SI can easily come up with 10 mistakes, more if it gives the issue a second thought. So, since some of you still don’t believe that The Cloud is Filled with Hail, let’s review the VentureBeat 5 and throw 5 more into the mix to see if that’s enough to convince you that The Cloud is Not a Magic Mirror — especially when you take a do-it-yourself approach!

VentureBeat’s 5 Mistakes of a Private Cloud are:

1. You believe the cloud will solve all your problems.

With so many vendors touting it, you believe that a cloud must be the answer, so why not control your own? There are a host of reasons, including those that will be discussed in response to the other wrong assumptions, but the most important thing to remember is that not all applications are good candidates for the cloud. Applications that are intermittent, that run full tilt, or that spike unexpectedly are not always good cloud candidates — public or private.

2. You think everyone will automatically love the idea.

You keep hearing that clouds bring agility, adaptability, and actionable data — so you think that you can convince everyone else to fall in love with the cloud too because you believe that these are reasons to fall in love with the cloud. A cloud is as adaptable as the software that drives it, as actionable as the data you can get into it, and as agile as your organization — if it takes 3 months to get a product to market using the best processes you can come up with, it takes 3 months to get that product to market — cloud or no cloud.

3. You think it’s cool.

Clouds aren’t cool (although the rain they bring may cool you off). And unless you are in the business of selling “cool” technology (i.e. private clouds to suckers who buy private clouds), the last thing you should be basing a business decision on is the “cool” factor. You buy technology to solve your problems, not because it’s cool.

4. You think you will succeed in boiling the ocean.

A private cloud is a huge IT project similar to trying to replace 3 ERPs across your global organization that have been entrenched for 10 years across 3 continents in one fell swoop while trying to add 4 modules you never had before. It’s like trying to boil the ocean with a single giant magnifying glass — brave, maybe even visionary, but ultimately stupid.

5. You think your plan will fit the organization.

The typical private cloud relies on converged infrastructure (CI) stacks which break down the typical organization walls of application teams, server teams, network teams, and storage teams. How many Global 3000 organizations have one single version of the truth across the enterprise? Maybe the few dozen organizations that successfully achieved enterprise wide deployments of SAP and Oracle?

That’s just the beginning. Here are 5 more mistakes courtesy of SI:

6. You think a private cloud will be cheaper than a public cloud.

You might think that a cloud is a fluffy magic box that can be obtained with a handful of magic beans that you can get by trading a simple cow, but that’s about as far from reality as you can get. Clouds require hardware, software, dedicated network connectivity, and power. Lots of power. You will need backup generators in addition to a wall of UPS units (to keep the machines humming until the generators kick in), multiple fibre connections, racks of machines and storage area networks, and a lot of specialized software. And, instead of sharing the cost, you get to pay for it all — as well as the staff to build it and maintain it 100% — 24/7/365.

7. You think all modern technology was built for the cloud.

A lot of software is, but not all — and chances are that a lot of the software you are using, even if still under maintenance, was not built for the cloud. So, you’ll have to update your current software and migrate your current data stores while you are at it.

8. You think it is the best way to interact with your trading partners and the private clouds you wrongly assume they have.

The cloud is connective, but only if it is shared. Otherwise, it’s just one massive local area network that needs to talk with other massive local area networks used by your trading partners. Clouds don’t create connectivity – data interchange standards do, and you don’t need clouds for that!

9. You think you can secure it better than the experts.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho.
It’s off to work we go!
We block the ports and tune the firewall
In our ‘Net the whole day through
We block the ports and tune the firewall
It’s what we like to do
It ain’t no trick
To lock down quick
If ya block the port
With a sniffer on a ‘NIC
In the ‘Net …

And you can block every port, patch every firewall, and sniff every ‘NIC, but the reality is, your network is only as secure as the weakest link — which is probably the software you’re using and the ports you need to have open. Which you don’t know how to protect because your IT staff is struggling to patch your firewall, scan the ports, and upgrade SSL before the heartbleed bug bleeds you dry of your corporate secrets. When it comes to security, you need true security experts — and you’re not going to have them in house.

10. You think the cloud can actually be secured.

The only way to truly secure a network is to unplug it. So if you think you have a hope in Hades of securing your private cloud …

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!

Is MRO Inventory Bogging You Down? Maybe You Need a Bit of Xtivity? Part II

Yesterday, we finished Part I by asking What is Xtivity?

Simply put, Xtivity is a solution for your MRO Inventory Optimization Needs and only your MRO Inventory Optimization Needs. If your organization is regularly managing tens of millions of dollars of inventory, or more, you probably know that MRO Inventory is costing you Millions and your current ERP/MRP/CPG Inventory Management systems aren’t helping you curb these costs while making sure that the part is always there when you need it. (Because, in the MRO world, unlike the CPG world or back-office world, availability always trumps cost savings. If you’re a retailer and you are out of stock on 2% of your catalog, no big deal, especially when the average stockout rate is 8%, and if your supply cabinet runs out of toner when the CFO wants to print out 500 pages of financial reports, you can just send a low-wage employee to the local office supply store to pick up a replacement. It’s annoying, but the most it’s going to cost the organization is an hour of someone’s time and maybe a 20% markup on a $50 cartridge. Big whopping deal, NOT! But if it costs 1 Million a day to run the production line and the company’s entire factory workforce sits idle for three days while your repair technician waits for a part to be express shipped to the Brazil factory from a supplier in China, a single stock-out can be the difference between the organization turning a big profit and suffering a big loss for the quarter.)

Accepting this reality and realizing that traditional ERP/MRP/CPG Inventory Management systems weren’t going to solve this problem (which is typically solved by the average company by significantly overstocking a critical replacement part in multiple locations), ten years ago, Xtivity formed to do something about it and nine years ago launched one of the first SaaS solutions to address the issue.

The xIO Software-as-a-Service platform is a 100% web-based MRO Inventory Optimization Solution that can plug into your current inventory management and procurement solutions, suck in your inventory (related) data, pass it through a number of proprietary and statistical models and algorithms, developed by Dr. Stephen Pearce (formerly of Texas A&M and author of Strategic MRO: A Roadmap for Transforming Assets into Competitive Advantage) and refined over the last decade for optimal performance across all of the major MRO industries (including Pharmaceutical, Oil & Gas, Automotive, Power Generation, Pulp & Paper, Automotive, Food Manufacturing, and Transportation), and output, on a monthly basis (or any other regular interval that makes sense from an operational perspective) the optimal order point, order quantity, and average lead time required for each MRO inventory item (by location) — taking the client’s business rules into account. The net result is increased part and material availability and fill rate, accurate lead time calculations, and cash-flow savings from reduced inventory across the board. Based on this information, the xIO solution then generates reports that recommend the suggested changes to future orders and calculates the expected savings both in inventory carrying costs and year-over-year cash outlays for MRO inventory.

But it doesn’t stop there. For each individual item it creates a detailed inventory report that shows the trend over the last 36 months, the projected trend, the expected savings from the initial change to the order frequency, and the expected MRO inventory savings over time. All of the data that go into the summary reports and report by inventory category (defined by inventory velocity) can be drilled into and all of the data (and reports) can be exported to Excel (if desired). And once the suggested changes are accepted, the Xtivity solution can push the new order points, order quantities, and lead times back into your inventory management solution which will take over the ordering, tracking, and classic inventory management functions.

Xtivity, which is well known in the reliability, maintenance improvement, and big MRO space, if not in the broader supply chain management space as a whole, has become so good in its niche that they are at the point where their average client sees a ROI in 90 days or less and 10x ROI over time. Plus, 99.99% of clients can use their solution out of the box. They support so many inventory systems and data formats (in addition to being SAP and Maximo certified) that they only had to do a custom data conversion project for 2 out of the last 1,000 global companies (of a solution that supports, and supports users in, 6 languages) that have tried their platform.

When Xtivity says xIO is a true SaaS solution with no hardware, software, or integration requirements that plugs the MRO optimization hole with virtually no effort (beyond an inventory manager reviewing the order point, order frequency, and lead time recommendations and approving them for push-back into the inventory management system), Xtivity means it. The entire application has been streamlined to not only optimize MRO inventory management and free up as much cash as possible without increasing operational risk, but to minimize the amount of effort required to get results. This is important because you generally don’t generate business value by wasting time on software support, you generate value by implementing and maintaining better (MRO) inventory management policies. And the Xtivity solution allows you to focus on operations, not software, and thus get a quick return. It fills its niche very well. So if you are looking to improve your MRO inventory management, and potentially free up Millions of dollars in cash-flow, check out the Xtivity xIO solution, it’s easy to try and very easy to use.  (For more information on Xtivity, they can be contacted at optimize@xtivity.com.)