Infosys’ blog on industry solutions, trends, business process transformation and global implementation in Oracle.

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February 24, 2009

Is Lean Manufacturing the answer to your operational woes -II

Previous post - Is LEAN Manufacturing the answer to your operational woes?

A straight forward answer to whether 'Lean manufacturing is the answer to operational efficiency woes' is not feasible, but researchers have acknowledged that along with agility, leanness in operations and manufacturing is important. Most of the ERP and Supply Chain products provide ways and means to inculcate these processes into the e-business architecture.

The most widely used techniques are Kanban system and Just-in-time replenishments. These can easily be inculcated in ERP suites and affect the manufacturing bottom-line significantly. The others are more for process and setup improvements and are generally used by consultants during BPR and process improvements initiatives.

The future direction of products which will make business more efficient from a Lean perspective are the more advanced and integrated Kanban system and the more advanced Just-in-time system. The Kanban system will need to have tighter integration with MRP/planning system so that the future demand predictions (forecasts and firm demands) will help recalculate Kanban bin and buckets sizes. The current breed of ERP products don’t have any Kanban scheduling system which should have been present.

The Just-in-time concept is supported by Postponement theory. This is very much inculcated in the latest supply chain products and ERP but it has a weakness in the scheduling aspect. Sometimes the postponement leads to too much delay due to the lack of last minute scheduling problem. This is a gap which needs to be taken care of.

There are numerous other ways to achieve greater leanness and agility to be more competitive and more efficient.

I encourage fellow bloggers to share some of the tools and techniques they have used.

Posted by Arnab Banerjee at 6:40 AM | | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 23, 2009

Is Online Sales the hope for low In-store sales?

Continued from post http://www.infosysblogs.com/oracle/2008/12/is_this_the_right_time_to_go_a.html

In this tough economic environment one definite trend is emerging, more and more consumers are buying online, finding wider availability, better pricing and ease of service. Let us evaluate some key trends in online sales.

As more consumers face difficult issues at home, balancing their own personal budgets, there is a distinct trend emergeing in consumer spending

-> Ease - With gas prices fluctuating, more people are choosing to shop from home, be it TV Shopping or Online shopping. It is also faster and less energy spending than shopping in a mall or a physical store. Also lot of Retailers are now offering some versions of Buy Online and Pick up at Store, which combines the ease of online sale with the comfort of pick up at a nearby store. Oracle Order management offers a variety of order types and shipping options that can provide such functionalities.

-> Wider range of Products - With an online catalog, Retailers can offer the entire range of products to the consumers, there is no phyisical limitation that a store poses, also key concepts such as upselling and crossselling can be employed with greater efficiency. The bought stock can be directly shipped to the consumer, or shipped to a nearby location.

-> Faster Access - With the online sales channel, products can be offered to the consumers as soon as they are manufactured/conceptualised in the supplier network. This is a very important aspect in merchandising Fashion, Technology and other Fad products where time to market is of essence.

-> Better Pricing - By cutting down on the merchandising costs, a better price can be offered to the consumers. Also with the variety of payment options online, innovating discounts, coupons and other deals can be provided.

These are some of the key themes that are continuing to drive consumers to buy online! Even in these difficult times, online buying offers consumers a better bang for the buck.

What have been other themes that you have seen in the online sales space?

Posted by Venu Kotamraju at 7:50 PM | | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Is LEAN Manufacturing the answer to your operational woes?

In today's economic turmoil, the manufacturing units are under constant pressure to look for innovative methods to provide value for money to their customers. In such a scenario, it becomes imperative for the enterprise to manufacture and sell products which would actually add profits to the business, not just revenues.
The secret to the above is - having a wide product variety, better quality, minimum manufacturing time and flexible systems in meeting demands without additional administrative and financial burden. The challenge to be addressed here is this conflicting requirement: if you have a wide product variety with strict quality and economical output, you cannot be flexible.

Lean is the term which is synonymous with reduction of waste in any kind of process, ever since its introduction by the Toyota production system and then the publication of the book, “The machine that changed the world” by Womack in 1990. Lean stands for waste reduction in any value adding process. The pillars of Lean manufacturing are Kanban System, Just-in-time concept, Value Stream Mapping, Poka-Yoke, 5-S, Single piece flow, etc. All of these reduce excesses in some way or the other.

Is Lean the answer or do we need something else too?

Posted by Arnab Banerjee at 9:57 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Customers – Lifeblood of an Enterprise!

All of us are customers in one way or the other in our everyday life. How satisfied are we with the service, products that are sold to us? Do we even know how vital are we to an enterprise for their business growth, sales, profits etc.? How do the enterprises look at the customer data when it comes to business? Do they have enough information about all of their customers? Read through the blog to know more about how the Customer data is maintained in a central Hub.
Customers are vital to both analytical and transactional operations of an enterprise. Every enterprise will have ‘n’ number of customers doing business with them and it keeps growing every year. The moment a customer enters into a business with an organization, the customer information has to be stored as it is vital to the business and it’s the breadwinner for any enterprise.
How are these enterprises ensuring that they have all the information about their customers? If so, is the information that is stored in their databases - sufficient, relevant, consolidated, and duplicate free, rich in quality? The answer can be ‘Yes’,’ No’ or ‘May be’. This is because the customer data in today’s enterprises are maintained in disparate applications across geographies. Also, ‘n’ number of customers in business is not even closer to maintaining high quality customer information in the system.
So far, using the conventional approaches, the enterprises have been able to solve this problem to a smaller extent like integrating transactional systems, making use of analytical applications that will help the business in decision-making process etc., but these approaches has to led to poor customer service, less sales opportunities in various markets and also the customer data thus stored is not clean, duplicate free, relevant and consistent across the enterprises. More importantly, it does not provide a single view of customer data to the external world.

The solution to this could be the Oracle’s –Customer Data Hub which would provide the enterprises with a centralized, single, global view of customers that is consistent, duplicate free, and is of high quality. With the central hub in place, the enterprises can continuously synchronize with the external systems. This way the customer data is more accurate, up-to-date, and highly reliable which helps the business to provide better customer service, generate more sales which in turn leads to more revenue, better analytical decisions for better operations.

Watch out this space for more in the future!

Posted by Aruna Srikanth at 6:16 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Single Instance or Multiple Instances?

For a global company, choosing between a single instance and multiple instances is a strategic decision which can augment the way the company does business.

 

While it may seem easy to say that single instance is the right decision, there are merits in multiple instances and a company should think through the merits and demerits before arriving at a decision.

 

Proponents of single instance have argued that having a single instance leads to lesser maintenance and less troublesome upgrades as we can minimize the complexities of the development and test environments. Also, data flow between multiple instances is never a challenge.

 

The concept of multiple instances came from 80s when due to server load issues, companies had to resort to separate instances. Changing the architecture is always a painful job once you have added complexities to your instances, hence companies continue with the old architecture. But there are companies which actually maintain multiple instances to take advantage of tax benefits in Europe or US of maintaining data of a particular geography in separate servers. And of course there are instances of classic risk mitigation where companies have global processes to be supported in one instance while local processes (localization needs) go into another instance to minimize the risk to the business (owing to localization patches).

 

Therefore what seems to be an easy decision in favor of a single instance is not that easy!!!

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 2:00 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 20, 2009

Appliance Data warehouses: Is this where we are headed?

“In computing, a data warehouse appliance consists of an integrated set of servers, storage, operating system(s), DBMS and software specifically pre-installed and pre-optimized for data warehousing (DW).” – Wikipedia.

For the datawarehouse fraternity Appliance Datawarehouse vendors are basically the Teradatas and the Netezzas of the world who primarily load their proprietary RDBMS software on massive parallel processing (MPP) servers in order to get the necessary scale and the speed


Without going into the details of the technological superiority of an Appliance Data warehousing (which I guess is a given) I would want to discuss on whether it makes business sense in adopting this as a technology imperative for your BI/data warehousing needs. As I see it, the USPs of an Appliance Datawarehouse is in aiding your loading speed and increasing your computing speed by use of its special storage algorithms.

Now today if your DWH is on a traditional RDBMS (non-Appliance based) and are looking at moving into an Appliance based system, one of your business drivers would typically be an increase in your data volumes. While I agree that increasing data volume is something every business has to cope with but I am of the opinion that the future of BI does not lie in processing large volumes of data but processing data on a more real time basis and on propagation of the data to the right audience in the enterprise. Here I am not taking into consideration the data that you may need to store due to the regulatory compulsions, where the loading speed may not be a critical factor. 

 
I  would suggest an analysis be done on the overall BI strategy that your organization has adopted in conjunction with the above paradigm and then make a decision on adopting an Appliance Datawarehouse. Adopting an Appliance DWH would be a life changing decision for organizations of any size and would be difficult to come out of given the magnitude of investments that go behind setting up the whole framework. Hence the strategic imperatives need to be very clear. The next key factor to be considered would be the speed of computing that is requited and here what matters is how quickly would you want to carry out your analytics? How is your data based on which you carry out your analysis stored physically? In my experience I have seen speed to be always a bit on the perception of the end user and needs some degree of perception management. However here as well I would see a lot of our traditional alternatives in improving speed like partitioning, purging and also looking at Column based databases to give that speed. My approach to handle this would as well be to explore a good physical database design as well as a robust logical design to exploit the inherent speed of the underlying RDBMS and then look at going the Appliance route if it fails to meet the desired speed.

 In a nutshell I believe that the BI world is not headed towards speed, scale or volumes but more towards an approach which enables the appropriate user community to have current and real time data. At the same time it could still be justified to adopt an Appliance based DWH based on the specific business imperatives in your enterprise.

Posted by Somnath Mukherjee at 11:11 AM | | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 17, 2009

Speed to Market - Using historical data

The other aspect of successful design is effective usage of historical data. Recall the fact that only 30% of new products launched succeed. Effort that would have gone into the other 70% of the failed product will prove useful in the new initiative.
From the historic data, we may avoid the mistakes made in the past and also we may reuse the design data that fits into the new design without wasting time in redesigning. For example you would have designed a component for an old project & that project may be discarded due to some other issue – now there is a new project for which you may want to use the same component. PIM/PLM tools help is tracking the old design data & thus save time in redesigning a component that is available already.
After designing perfectly, there are tools available to validate its manufacturability. Virtual prototyping tools and Digital Manufacturing tools helps in getting the perfect product in one go. We will discuss the topics of Virtual Prototyping and Digital Manufacturing later.
 
 

Posted by Krithivasan S at 10:21 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 16, 2009

Detail Design phase - Speed to Market Strategy

Continuing  the series of  previous posts on Speed to market started at:
 
 
Next comes the detail design. In this era of globalization, even design workspace has gone global. The design, analysis and generating codes for manufacturing are happening in different places. At times even the designs of different components happen in different places. There is a need to integrate designs done at different locations to complete the design of the product. In some cases, to cut costs the detail design is outsourced. The design engineers with CAD tools will be sitting in one location and the client may review the design on a weekly basis. There is no need for CAD licenses in Client end. They will be able to work in design engineers’ workspace from remote location or they may do all review markups offline and send it to design engineers. PLM systems have embedded tools that helps in opening any CAD file using a browser and do all markups which can be imported by the Design engineer and do necessary modifications. Design collaboration tools help in integrating detail design happening in different places, working from remote places on virtual design space without CAD license and also incorporating analysis results to correct the detailed design. All these help in completing the detailed design faster.
 
 
 

Posted by Krithivasan S at 10:47 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 13, 2009

Speed-to-Market - Get it Right for your Business

The first step in launching a new product is designing one. With available tools, once product design is frozen, manufacturing and launching  can be managed effectively. The time taken to freeze the design is highly unpredictable. From my previous post, we will discuss on collaborative design and effectively using the historical data.
The starting point is having a concept design. For this inputs from Marketing, Customers, Service, vendors, Manufacturing, Quality and other related departments needs to be collated – this forms the basis of bringing out a concept design. Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools come handy in collating information from different sources and get the concept design approved by all departments that provided the inputs. For instance, customers of a particular car would have preferred a reverse sensor and marketing would have provided input that other cars in the same segment has the sensor. In concept design we may propose a simple cost effective electronic sensor or have a high-end rear view camera with an internal screen. Both will address the problem, but the Marketing personnel would know what competitors offer in the same segment. We need to take right decision based on feedback from Marketing and also need to validate the decision with other departments connected before actually incorporating the feature in the car. There could be number of features like this and all needs to be validated and requires approval from many departments. The entire concept phase can be automated using PIM/PLM tools. So before starting the design we have buy-in from all concerned departments. If we get this wrong and some problem comes at later stage it will delay the speed to market and in worst case -the product fails.
 
We will discuss about detail design in my next post. 
 

Posted by Krithivasan S at 10:23 AM | | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 12, 2009

Pull Production: Have you achieved global maxima?

In one of my earlier blogs, I had mentioned the pitfalls of using a ‘Pull Production’ in case of a remanufactured product where there is a combination of new and salvaged percentage of components. Even with a new product manufacturing and pull production, you may not have optimized your global supply chain.

Typically when we talk about a pull production, we see it from a firm’s viewpoint and hence the firm is able to make substantial improvements in terms of holding lesser inventory. But somewhere in the supply chain, one of the partners is actually bearing the brunt of holding excess inventory. So in this case what we have achieved is local maxima and not global maxima.

 

This leads to the argument that as a company why should you care to achieve global maxima when you have made substantial savings by achieving local maxima. If as a company, you think that you can bully your channel partners to do so, you can still continue with this practice. But in the long term this may backfire as we move more and more towards a collaborative workspace.

 

Let us accept the fact that with an ever changing business scenario, speed is the key and it is very difficult for a company to singlehandedly respond to market changes on a sustainable basis. What is required here is a collaborative environment where the partners can manage the lesser critical portions of the supply chain.

 

If we look at maximizing the global optima, we need to look at the supply chain from an end to end perspective with the role played by each partner. And there needs to be an incentive for the partner to take risk and store excess inventory to avoid hiccups in the chain. What this boils down to is to compensate the partner for this risk. After all the bankers must have told you that more the risk you take the more you gain.

 

Read more - http://infosysblogs.com/oracle/2009/01/is_pull_production_the_final_w.html

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 3:17 AM | | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

February 6, 2009

Is my CAD vendor the natural choice for PLM?

 As a head of Product Engineering team, you finally convinced the management for a PLM tool for your organization. The next big question will be which tool should you implement? All CAD vendors have PLM tools & few ERP vendors also offer PLM as a module. 

You got to know about PLM either from CAD vendor or ERP vendor. Most SMEs without big ERP footprints, get to know about the advantages of PLM from their CAD vendor & the vendor obviously pushes his product saying that since your CAD is ours, implementing our PLM will help in having seamless management of your design data – sounds logical right? Not exactly…contrary to perception among SMEs that PLM is mainly to manage product design data, PLM’s gambit is more, PLM focuses on managing product through its various stages of maturity and help companies to maximize returns from their product portfolio. This means PLM should effectively interact with various departments like manufacturing, marketing, service & even with vendors. Most of the PLM vendors manage all design data within their PLM environment – they have plug-ins to integrate to all major CAx (CAD/CAM/CAE) tools. So decision on choosing a PLM vendor is not based ONLY on your CAD platform. Though major CAD vendors provide good PLM tools, your decision should be built on the tool that has a best-fit to your organizational needs. Following are the brief guidelines for choosing a PLM Vendor: 
 
Expertise in PLM domain
Exposure and number of success stories in your industry
Capacity & Flexibility to adopt best practices in Industry
User friendly interface.
Ability to integrate with your legacy systems – mainly with CAD & ERP
Vendor’s focus & strategic vision to meet challenges that face your industry.
Ability to handle various compliances
Ability of the tool’s capability in managing new product introduction, change management & Bills of Material management effectively.
Vendor’s licensing policy and ability to give ‘View and Mark-up’ only access to any authorized using a browser.
Role-based security & access control.

Of the above, all vendors will have comparable features & capabilities in most of the aspects & key to select the best fit for you lies in the vendor’s exposure to your industry & number of success stories in your industry. This will help you to narrow down your choice to a greater extent & final decision may depend on the vendor who could fit-in most of your organization specific requirements.

Posted by Krithivasan S at 6:36 AM | | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

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