QuickREAD

November 8, 2006

Enterprise Apps All Neatly Rolled Up in a Mobile Device? Uh, Well, Sorta.
Hang in there! Maybe the promise of "anywhere, anytime" computing hasn't quite materialized, but there are still ways to optimize a mobile project that will reap benefits for your organization. It just has to be done right.
Some shops develop mobile applications the way a Boy Scout rolls his sleeping bag: fold, press air out, roll, press, and repeat until you can stuff it in the nylon sack and tie the pull-string tight. Companies likewise take a desktop app, remove all the white space in forms, rearrange fields to fit tiny screens, shrink the database, and jam the package into a mobile device. In this case, though, it's not a pull-string but a noose they're pulling tight, damning the application project to a slow, painful death at the hands of its own inflexibility and dearth of usability. Repeat after me: Mobile applications aren't the same as desktop applications. Mobile-application deployment can't be compared with rolling out the latest version of Microsoft Office to PCs on the corporate network. Mobile applications feel different, the hardware is smaller, and connectivity is limited and sporadic.
Unfortunately, the mobile-application ecosystem has been thoroughly polluted by the consumer-focused character of wireless carriers. It isn't easy for an enterprise to completely meet its needs without assembling the parts itself.
Source: Optimize, http://optimizemag.com

Dutch Bookseller Shows How to Use RFID at the Item Level
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. may have made radio frequency identification a household word, but the mega-retailer may no longer be the technology's lead adopter. At least one company has managed to implement RFID at the item level--rather than on pallets or cases--the Holy Grail of supply-chain management.
That company is Boekhandels Groep Nederland's Selexyz, Holland's largest bookseller, with 42 stores, 11 million customers and $4.8m in revenue. Selexyz is using RFID systems to help optimize store operations, improve customer service and, most important, sell more books. How? The company recently completed a pilot program that tagged all inventory at the item level--every book on every shelf--at its 1,000-square-meter store in Almere, Netherlands.
Source: CIO Insight, http://www.cioinsight.com

The Supply Department Is More Relevant Than Ever Before
Several outside forces have led to the emergence of supply as an organizational imperative today. Because of increased speed in competition, globalization, market shifts, product and service life cycles, and other factors standing still today leads to slipping behind tomorrow. Supply and supplier markets are more complex and involve more players than ever before. Thirty years of buyers' markets are no longer. This may mean going back to the drawing boards, with supplier quality training, meetings of the mind, and "new" old approaches that require the price inflation fighting and supply reliability tactics that we last used in the 1970s.
This complexity also gives rise to increased business risk from supply chains that are more difficult to design for sudden disruption recovery. Social responsibility is a mantra that most developed-country organizations use as a way of doing business and gaining a competitive advantage, and much of this theory falls upon supply professionals to apply throughout the world.
Inside the supply organization, there is a heightened expectation from senior management for higher business performance from supply. This opens the door for showing how supply can be a lever for competitive business and organizational performance.
Source: Inside Supply Management, http://www.ism.ws

Chinese Government Prepares for When Its Cheap Labor Is No Longer an Advantage
China has a well educated, disciplined and highly motivated work force. Its government is investing heavily in infrastructure. They seem determined to become lean and take advantage of technology instead of continuing to rely solely on cheap labor. Chinese companies are also beginning to develop innovative new technologies, rather than being content to manufacture technologies that are developed in other parts of the world. It seems that no country can sustain superior competitiveness on the back of cheap labor forever. Eventually, a cheaper labor market will be found.
Source: Industry Week, http://industryweek.com

Cost of Reverse Logistics About $58bn a Year. Think Maybe You Should Have a Plan?
The recent recalls of Dell and Apple batteries expose an aspect of the supply chain that has gained prominence in recent years: reverse logistics. Reverse logistics is the product distribution process traced backward--from the consumer to the manufacturer. It involves processing product returns because of damage, recalls, excess inventory, end of life, and other factors. Plus, it not only involves products but the packaging of those products as well.
The cost of reverse logistics equals about half of one percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. Think big here. In 2004 this amounted to roughly $58bn. Reverse logistics is increasingly becoming part of a total product and customer experience model, especially in the consumer-electronics-driven economy we live in.
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com

Data Management Not About What You Did Yesterday. It's About Suppliers, Customers and Partners Today.
Data warehousing hasn't stayed the same over all these years. When the discipline broke out in the 1990s, it was enough to give business strategists, financial managers and marketing specialists accurate and timely reporting. Most received data through homegrown tools or emerging independent BI products and reporting functions embedded in leading-edge applications. In recent years, the vision has evolved beyond reporting on what happened yesterday to forecasting what needs to be done tomorrow--if not initiating action today. Data warehousing is moving out of the back room to play an important role in what front-line employees do with suppliers, customers and partners, as well as what suppliers, customers and partners do in a self-service environment.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com

If Lean Is So Beautiful, When Are You Going to Get Around to Implementing It?
Most everyone agrees that lean is beneficial in manufacturing. After all, you don't need to carry all that weight around, so why do it? But achieving results with lean manufacturing requires perseverance and dedication, says Gino Addiego, Novellus Systems' executive vice president of operations. "It's like losing weight," he explains. "Everybody talks about it. Everybody tries. Everybody knows it's possible. But not everyone makes it happen."
Source: EDN, http://www.edn.com

'Competitive Essence' Is What Makes One in 10 Companies Stand Out from the Pack
Most high performing enterprises share common characteristics and behaviors that predispose them to success. In fact, those characteristics and behaviors translate across industries, as well as across the globe, according to a group of CEOs gathered for a recent roundtable sponsored in part by Accenture.
After a three-year study of data from hundreds of companies, the consulting firm Accenture dubbed this predisposition "competitive essence," a quality exhibited by the one company out of 10 that outperforms its competitors for a decade or more. "Competitive essence has three components: market focus and positioning, distinctive capabilities, and performance anatomy," says Vernon Ellis, international chairman of Accenture.
Source: CRM Daily, http://www.crm-daily.com

China's IT Outsourcing Market Has Yet to Reach Maturity of India's, But It's Working on It
Unlike India's large and thriving outsourcing industry, China's is still immature and fragmented, with few companies attaining high-level international certifications. Moreover, most of the IT outsourcing that happens in China today serves that country's domestic market, such as the financial services sector.
Still, U.S. companies are finding a few providers that combine U.S.- based management, marketing and support teams with China-based developers.
Source: Computerworld, http://computerworld.com

BPO Outsourcing Firm Says It's Found Perfect Spot for Call Center Operations: Guatemala
So many companies are piling on the offshoring bandwagon that it's becoming a bit like the dot-com phenomenon. It's hard to do the fresh thing anymore. Well, 24/7 Customer, a business process outsourcing specialist, has managed it. In its quest to locate a new BPO call center in the same time zone as the United States, but not in a crowd, 24/7 has chosen Guatemala. The company, with headquarters in Silicon Valley but most of its 7,000 employees in India, scoped out other more commonly chosen places, too--like Costa Rica. But Guatemala fit the bill. "We wanted to be in a market where we were the first. You want an edge. It gives you a change to build your reputation and brand before you have competition," says P.V. Kannan, 24/7's CEO.
Source: Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com

AMR: ERP Market to Grow Across the Board, But Especially Among Large Companies
The increase in enterprise resource planning-related investment is very broad based, with spending increases planned across all sizes of companies and a variety of vertical industries. As usual, the strongest growth will come from companies with more than 10,000 employees. We anticipate their 2007 budgets to grow 12.3 percent, with one-third of these respondents expecting to spend $10m or more on ERP-related activities next year.
Source: AMR Research, http://amrresearch.com

Outside Integrators, Airfreight Industry Doesn't Seem to Be Flocking to RFID Use
Despite reservations across the industry about the use of radio frequency identification technology in air cargo, several of the express operators are forging ahead with the new technology for tracking. Already, TNT proudly announced last December it had completed a pilot phase and was ready to integrate RFID equipment into its existing systems for shipment tracking.
Outside the integrator camp there is decidedly less enthusiasm among airfreight technology experts for RFID. "There is a lot of talk about RFID, but it's not yet proven technology," says Christopher Shawdon, vice president and partner of Logistics Solutions at Unisys. Traxon, the conduit for electronic data flow between some 3,000 forwarders and about 90 airlines, is not anticipating any impact from RFID on its architecture in terms of message standards or file sizes for the time being.
Source: Air Cargo World, http://aircargoworld.com

Is Your ERP System, Model and Operation Strategy Manacled to the Past?
ERP software was built on the premise that companies would tailor or configure the solution before they installed it--not after. Like custom-developed code, once these solutions were installed, few expected them to get reworked, reconfigured and reinstalled during the product's useful life. These old systems were developed by IT professionals who frequently changed companies; documentation was lost, and the replacement workforce had no skills in the coding of old software.
Is it any wonder that companies would defer or avoid major software repairs or reconfigurations whenever possible? The cost of these efforts was huge relative to the benefits derived from the new configuration or functionality. The organizational trauma was worse. And if cost and trauma weren't enough, the risk that planned changes might backfire into new and unknown tech problems meant the real possibility of career suicide for operational/IT executives.
Transformational change, therefore, might be popular in business books and board rooms, but it is met with snickers if not downright guffaws by those in the technology know when it comes to ERP solutions. This is not a change management problem. It's a product design problem--one born of software developed for yesterday's static business environments.
The bottom line? When it comes to invoking new business processes and strategies, businesses are carrying on "in denial," as psychologists would say, and without the infrastructure they need in today's environment. This means they remain wedded to past methods and practices, blindly enter bad deals, miss business opportunities, offer substandard service to customers and under-perform against Wall Street and investor expectations.
Source: CIO, http://www.cio.com

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