Category Archives: Technology

The Elusive Right Path to Engineering Offshoring

A recent article in Strategy+Business attempted to address The Elusive Right Path to Engineering Offshoring. They proposed a five step plan to making it work, and while the advice was okay, I think the article missed the point. In my view, the right path to engineering offshoring is not to do it at all if you are developing products for the local marketplace.

While I will freely admit that there is innovative talent in the outsourcing hotspots of India and China, it’s not necessarily the right innovative talent for you. As a for-profit enterprise, an innovative product alone is not enough — you need an innovative product that will sell in your target market, and, frankly, just because something is hot in India or China does not mean it’s going to be hot in North America (and vice versa). In terms even a layman could understand, just like most of the population in India would not buy a Big Mac, most of the population of North America would not be that interested in a McVeggie or a Lamb Maharaja Mac (although the doctor would prefer if his local MacDonald’s served a cheese-free Chicken Maharaja Mac instead of a Big Mac and a McAloo Tikki Burger instead of a Junior Hamburger).

Taking a more technical focus, while sales of a low-cost affordable car like the Tata Nano will probably skyrocket in India, such a small, cheap car would never even leave the showroom for a test-drive in North America as long as fuel prices are half of what they are in Europe. And clone merchandise will never reach the mass market in North America that it has in China (and not just because of much better intellectual property laws, but because of the high status North Americans bestow upon to brand name goods).

However, on the flip-side, if you are trying to create innovative products for international markets, you should certainly, at the very least, augment your R&D organization with a local-team on the ground in the target market. An experienced engineering or development shop in China or India would be much more adept at producing killer products for the local market than you would be thousands of miles away in the midst of a different culture. In this circumstance, the advice of the article applies, and I encourage you to read the article and take its advice.

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2010: The Year of CUTS?

According to a recent piece over on Supply Chain Digest that chronicled the Supply Chain Guru Predictions for 2010, this will be the year of CUTS:

  • Consolidation,
  • Uncertainty,
  • Training, and
  • Specialization.

In other words, the year will be pretty bleak. We’re already at the point where, with the exception of BIQ’s inclusion of a new Computed Measures Language as part of their spend/data analysis package , I haven’t seen anything truly innovative on the technology side in over a year.

I’ve seen lots of great stuff, but almost all of it falls into the better, faster, cheaper category. For example, the recent upgrade to Trade Extensions’ platform, which can now handle Billion-dollar sourcing projects with over 60,000 lanes and 400,000 bids in a single model, is incredibly powerful and really (really) cool (because even five years ago it was hard to imagine being able to solve such a problem on anything less than a supercomputer), but it’s still just a (large) incremental improvement on fundamental technologies and capabilities they’ve had for a few years. Rollstream’s enterprise community management application, built on the better principles of social networking, is really slick, but not a fundamentally new idea. And SupplierSoft‘s integration of their full SRM platform into SalesForce, which gives customer organizations a 360° supply chain view through a single platform, is a unique implementation, but P2P, SIM, SRM, and (Environmental) Compliance solutions are not new.

Now, you might say that the fact that organizations are finally expected to focus on training is a good thing, because it makes your people more productive and, in supply chain in particular, can deliver amazing ROI, but most companies are not going to do it out of respect for their employees. They’re going to do it because they think it will allow them to shovel even more work onto their already overworked employees, delay hiring, and continue to contribute to the jobless recovery in a negative fashion.

And when you dig deeper into the predictions, you see that consolidation is referring primarily to consolidation of supply chain assets, which sounds good at first (more use, revenue, and thus profit per asset), until you realize that having all assets almost 100% utilized allows no room for growth. And you see that uncertainty means that no one is willing to step up and say “this is the year we’re going to recover, economy be damned” which means another year where the majority of companies are going to just hunker down and hope “magic happens” before they go broke. And while specialization, or, in the words of Art Mesher, selective specialization, sounds great, since that presumably means that supply chain systems will get better and better, until we have an open source standard for supply chain data interchange, the visibility nightmare is going to get worse before it gets better.

All I can say is that it’s time to Shape Up or Ship Out, and by that I mean either get on with your business or shut down operations and make way for someone who will. Magic isn’t going to bring the economy back, hard work and forward momentum is, and someone has to start it. Due primarily to the large positive impacts that Supply Management has on the balance sheet, it has the potential, but only if it’s willing to step up, use it, and drive the business.

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What’s New in the Lift Truck Marketplace?

A recent article in Logistics Management titled “2010: Loads of Innovation” chronicled some of the new lift truck product introductions on the slate for 2010. Now, lift trucks might seem like a pretty boring topic, but they are the little workhorses of your physical supply chains, and if any of the improvements can improve efficiency, then they’re worthwhile.

So what improvements are coming?

  1. Better Information Management
    More monitoring devices tied to better fleet management systems that track numerous metrics on lift truck utilization that can be used to create better fleet allocations. The systems also track driver certifications and operator checklists to ensure that trucks are only assigned to personnel certified on the trucks and that all daily operator checklists are completed and captured electronically on a daily basis.
  2. Improved Safety Systems
    Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America is adding presence detection as a standard feature on CAT trucks. If an operator leaves the seat, the transmission automatically disengages to halt travel or hydraulic movement.
  3. Better Internal Combustion Engines
    Models are now available with oil pressure management, on-demand cooling and self-clearing, which can remedy an issue that can cost operators up to 4,800 a year if they’re always blowing out the radiator. Other models track fuel utilization and allow operators to choose between economy and productivity modes. The trucks are being built to last longer.
  4. Powerful Electric Engines
    A new generation of 80-volt trucks, which have been employed in Europe for years, are coming to North America. These trucks can easily handle up to 10,000 pounds with a much better battery life.
  5. New Hybrid Engines
    For example, the new hybrid from Toyota Material Handling USA that uses a battery to power all drive and hydraulic functions will cut your emissions in half and be twice as efficient as traditional IC trucks.

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Has Twitter Already Turned Too Many into Twits?

Last Saturday, I pointed out a recent article on how “students [are] failing because of Twitter, texting” (Canoe.ca), covered in a CNet video which asks “does Twitter make you stoopid”?. The article pointed out that, at the world renowned University of Waterloo, thirty percent of students who are admitted are not able to pass at a minimum level, a failure rate that has increased five percentage points in the past few years. The cause, according to experts in the field, is “cellphone texting and social networking”, which are collectively degrading writing skills. And as we all know, Twitter combines both into one happy little medium that will zap your IQ much faster than your backyard bug-zapper solves the mosquito problem.

Shortly after I penned that piece, I found this piece on CNet that noted the “blogging decline among teens, young adults”. Now, while it’s true that most blogs will eventually be abandoned (with the abandonment rates in line with the 3-3-3 rule), relatively speaking, the average number of blogs that survive over time, and, thus, the average number of relative bloggers, should still be increasing slowly as the online population increases. However, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that while 28% of teens (12-17) and young adults (18-29) were bloggers in 2006, by 2009, the number of teens and young adults blogging dropped in half (to 14%).

The Pew Research Center attributed the decline in blogging to changes in social network use, arguing that people use social networking sites less as they get older. While this may be true, it’s certainly not true for teens and young adults, which are using social networking more by the day, and it misses the fundamental cause entirely. Simply put, they’re not blogging because Twitter has made them stoopid and given them ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

If you can’t spell well, compose an expose, or think beyond 140 characters, you can’t write a blog post worth a damn. And all this leads me to the very important question posed in the title — Has Twitter Already Turned Too Many Of Us into Twits?

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iValua: Tackling End-to-End Sourcing And Procurement, Part II

In my last post, I described how iValua, a ten year old French software and solutions company, has one of the broadest supply management suites on the market today. From RFX to payment, the majority of the key steps in the sourcing and procurement cycle are covered in one of iValua’s many solution modules. And while it is true that most of the modules aren’t very deep, it’s also true that many small and mid-sized companies, and even some of the larger Global 3000’s that don’t have that many complicated buys, don’t need deep functionality where sourcing and procurement is concerned. Over thirty of France’s largest companies use the solution, including Air France Industries, La Poste, and Arcelor Mittal, the largest steel company in the world.

In this post, I’m going to describe some of the capabilities of the product in more detail. But first, some global capabilities. The platform, which is built on .Net, is delivered via SaaS through your browser. As a result, it is accessible anywhere. Many of the screens are built using a widget-based architecture and, like dashboards, the layouts are customizable by each user. The user can sort by, show, and hide any column of any table. Quick search and advanced search is available for every screen (and table), a navigation history is maintained for quick back-tracking, and the user can customize a favorites link for quick access to specific screens and reports. Finally, all data can be exported to Excel and all supported objects (bids, contracts, purchase orders, invoices, payments, reports, etc.) can be imported from Excel as well.

But the best platform-wide capability is the ability for the platform to be integrated to any ERP, Database, or external data source (due to the existence of appropriate abstraction layers in the platform). Before iValua decided to become a provider of a SaaS supply management platform, they were a custom software development shop. As a result, they had deep development skills and broad experience with a number of platforms. Thus, when they decided to focus on supply management, they were able to do custom integrations for each client. Now that they have over 100 customers, they have integrated with almost every major ERP and Relational Database in France, most of the major ERPs and Relational Databases in Europe, and some of the major ERPs and Relational Databases in North America. If they haven’t integrated with your environment yet, it probably won’t take them long to do so. Plus, using their partnerships with Bureau Van Dijk, D&B/Altares, Vigeo, and EcoVadis, they can enrich your supplier related data when they pull your data in.

Sourcing

Sourcing starts with the definition of a project. Once basic information is defined (type, process, owner, dates, and scope), the owner can define a team, create a message center, define currencies, outline a schedule, and keep track of relevant documents. Then the user can invite suppliers, create RFXs with selection and evaluation criteria, track responses, save analysis, create awards, and create an implementation plan. RFXs and Auctions support multiple lots and multiple rounds and the buyer can determine whether or not suppliers can see bids, whether or not the bids are displayed anonymously, and when they can see the bids.

Procurement

In addition to requisitions, budgets, purchase orders, expense reports, invoices, goods receipts and recurring receivables, the procurement application supports catalog-based buying. The system can be integrated with any EDI, XML, or punch-out catalog, which can be augmented with user-defined items (which could include custom items or services defined in contracts). The expense reporting module supports p-cards, advance requests, standard expense, and travel expense reports. In addition, a supplier evaluation form can be attached to every purchase order (in addition to every award and contract) and reports can be run at the purchase order level, award and contract level, and global supplier level.

Reporting

They have a very extensive reporting tool that allows you to look at data over the time periods of your choice (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly), in the organizations of your choice, in the spend category families of your choice, for the suppliers of your choice, along the dimensions, or axes, of your choice in a wide variety of tabular and graphical formats. Basically, the application builds a master spend cube and allows you to view any sub-cube, or sub-cube summary of your choice. While it might not allow you to do arbitrary spend/data analysis, it will more than satisfy your average procurement professional and manager. (And you could always augment the suite with off-line analysis for your senior analysts if you needed.)

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