Infosys-Oracle Blog

These organizations aim at becoming "An Enterprise of Tomorrow" by using specialized supplier skills in the manufacturing process to help lower packaging and manufacturing costs and increase production quality. What they also aim at is using supplier capacity to increase the overall production capacity. They envision enhancing their stature of "World Class Organization" by reaping the dividends of a successful Contract Manufacturing Organisation (CMO) relationship with its vendors.

There are many benefits that are associated with a successful CMO engagement. Some of these benefits could be:

• Reduced Investments in capital assets
• Shift from fixed to variable cost model
• Buy in specialized knowledge and skills
• Improved asset utilization
• Greater degree of freedom to focus on core competencies
• Spread risk and reduce costs
• Faster time and access to market

Nevertheless, theses CMO engagements also come bundled with many a challenges, some of which could be:

• Critical dependence on supplier/vendor
• Increased financial commitments- Expense and Capital
• Lack of shared visions and goals
• Problems associated with supplier evaluation
• Cultural difference between Own Organization and CMO

The success or failure of an organization's CMO engagement could be well assessed by measuring certain key KPI factors like:

1. % lowering of manufacturing costs
2. % lowering of packaging costs
3. % improvement in process and product quality
4. An overall % increase in overall production capacity

All said and done there as certain critical pieces of the puzzle that need to be put in place for a CMO engagement to be successful. These critical jig-saw pieces are those related with:

• Strategic Fit
• Cultural Fit
• Technological Fit
• Organizational Fit

World class organizations are learning and teaching organizations. They engage in a continuous endeavor of learning and teaching each day and that is how Best Practices evolve for the Industry to follow.

A Successful CMO engagement is the outcome of establishing a Centroid of Triangle, the angular points of which are balanced by

1. Strategic Fulcrum (Long Term Vision)
2. Tactical Fulcrum (Short Term Mission)
3. Operational/Executional Fulcrum (Implementation Methodology)

Another best practice that the industry has benchmarked is the standardization of business and system processes for each contract manufacturer, a retail organization deals with. A SPOC at the retail organization is always a preferred choice to make the multi-vendor CMO engagement successful. Once the magic triangle is laid out, the fruits of a CMO engagement are there to reap.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Karan Chadha, Associate Consultant, Infosys

In Part 1 of this blog, I had talked about the immense potential that Social Media data holds for getting transformed into business insights. In Part 2 I moved on to discuss Social Media Intelligence (SMI) tools and the key value adds that they provide to Organizations. I will now move on to the piece that is the most relevant for us; the piece about integrating SMI tools with conventional reporting tools like OBIEE and establishing an integrated reporting environment; an environment which leverages insights from structured enterprise data as well as fluid social data.

Let me touch upon two facets of what is now broadly known as Social BI:

• Transforming generic insights offered by SMI tools into actionable customer specific insights
• Richer customer insights by leveraging social data in conjunction with traditional data

Transforming generic insights offered by SMI tools into actionable customer specific ones

Insights offered by SMI tools are often generic in nature.  A typical insight from an SMI tool will be like, '60% of people have a positive sentiment towards the brand and 40% have a neutral/negative one'.  However, there is no way to figure out which customer holds a positive sentiment and which one holds a negative one. Neither is there a way to figure out if a sentiment actually belongs to our customer or it is just spurious one. Therefore, such insights are useful but incomplete.

Integration with the Data Warehouse can completed this half told story of an SMI tool. Assuming that an Organization has mapped its customers against their Social Media IDs, they will be able to track down each social conversation at a customer level. This will offer two major benefits:

• Determining Patterns across Sentiments
  The ability to track down conversations at a customer level will be useful in determining patterns across conversations. For instance, an Organization might figure out that a large proportion of customers having a positive sentiment are old-time customers (say > 4 years) and a large proportion of customers holding a negative sentiment are newly acquired customers. This insight will send a clear message for an Organization to step up their service quality for newly acquired customers. If such a disparity in sentiments is found across geographic regions, it will send a message to probably have a relook at the customer service teams in negative sentiment regions. So, a generic insight gets transformed into a powerful actionable insight.
• Prioritizing addressing of Grievances
  Social Media is a noisy space and the number of relevant conversations can be overwhelming. However, the priority that an Organization would like to attaches to each conversation may be different. A negative sentiment expressed by a decade old high-value customer may be viewed and acted upon different from a similar sentiment expressed by a newly acquired customer. Integrating SMI tools with the data warehouse can help Organizations put different customers into different priority buckets based on factors like years of association, customer life time value and social activeness score thus streamlining the way they manage and prioritize a huge pile of social conversations.

Richer customer insights by leveraging social data in conjunction with traditional data

Typical customer databases will include traditional fields like name, e-mail & address. This information can be enhanced by adding social information to it. Social attributes, fetched from the social media profiles of customers, can give an authentic reflection of the softer aspects of a customer. This can be precious information from the point of view of understanding the psychographic profile of customers.

If Amazon can benefit from this data by knowing the books that it should target a customer with (say based on the books that a customer has listed on his social profiles), Nike can base the development of its new series of shoes around these insights (say based on discussions where customers are talking about enjoying their jogs on dew laden grass and thus requiring suitable shoes).

Essentially, insights leveraging social attributes in conjunction with traditional data have the potential to help organizations prepare better product development and targeting strategies.

I will delve further into these aspects in Part 4 of the blog.

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Sowjanya Achar, Associate Consultant, Infosys

Increasing financial crimes and money laundering activities across all sectors of the economy has necessitated government of every country to step up the vigil and make appropriate amendments to the law to curb such hideous acts and the grave consequences that occur on account of such crimes. Money laundering is a process through which illegal money is injected into the financial system in a systematic manner by disguising its true illegal origin and the usage of such funds for organized crimes such as terrorist financing, drug trafficking etc. It is in the purview of the regulators and financial institutions like banks to curb money laundering and so Anti-Money Laundering measures are at centre stage to curb financial crimes across the world.

Oracle Mantas Alert and Case Management solution is one such risk management application that supports monitoring, investigation and detection of financial crimes and fraud among huge volume of transactions, across various branches in different locations through sophisticated behavior pattern recognition and is widely being used by banks all over the world.

Oracle Mantas Alert and Case Management solution is now integrated with OFSAA 7.2 to provide a common platform to the clients along with other offerings of OFSAA.The mantas next generation UI is being integrated with OFSAA 7.2 infrastructure and is being developed using reveleus forms framework. Oracle Mantas Case management solution is designed to operate as a standalone platform while still fully integrated with Oracle Mantas Alert Management solution. Depending upon the client requirement it can be pre-integrated with Oracle Mantas Alert Management or with third party Alert Management application thus providing more flexibility from the client requirement stand point.

Mantas next generation UI has enhanced features that will support the user during the course of analysis and investigation of alerts and cases. It provides snapshot information on the home page by including a notifications section that provides an intimation of the action items that the application user has to act upon, interactive dash boards which provides a graphical representation of alert and case statistics based on various criteria and also provides a list of priority items to be acted upon by showing priority alert and cases information. From the perspective of an analyst in the bank it provides a one stop overview of the action items that have crossed due date and the ones nearing due date as well as get clear statistics by viewing the dash boards thus assisting in prioritization and planning the course of action accordingly. An additional feature of security administration UI has been introduced through which a user will be provided with an interface to add and remove system users and also assign and modify security attributes from the front end. This provides flexibility to add more users and change the security attributes like access to a particular business domain, jurisdiction, and branch depending on the banks requirement. Mantas next generation UI provides the user with advanced search capabilities in the form of queues search which filters information available based on certain pre-defined criteria set. For example an analyst  may want to view information assigned to him but a supervisor may want view information escalated to him for further review .The navigation menus and the UI look and feel have been improvised to make it more flexible in terms of usage. A user will be able to undertake actions through the various action categories available to him in the form of action buttons that are defined for each user group and thereby can undertake multiple actions at a time and is not restricted to a single actions page. Thus the newly introduced features enable an analyst in a bank to get a bird's eye view of critical information to support the course of investigation.

Thus banking on the flexibility of OFSAA infrastructure Oracle AML Solution is looking at providing a common platform to the clients for the various solutions it offers thus broadening opportunities and scope in the long run.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Here are 6 Best Practices that should be followed while taking up a BI modernization initiative:

1. Have the business case ready: In most cases, a modernization initiative is mandated and driven by IT organization rather than business. It is always advisable to ensure that such an initiative is made relevant to the business as well. Such initiatives should always be linked to a set of problems that business users are facing with the current systems while trying to get meaningful insights.
2. Assess, Rationalize and Prioritize: A BI modernization initiative should always be preceded by an assessment phase. Objective of such a phase should be to go through the inventory of reports/ dashboards/ cubes and rationalize them. This activity will include combination, decommissioning (existing reports/ cubes) and ideation (of new reports/ cubes). The final set of reports/ cubes should also be ranked on the basis of priority (with inputs from business users), complexity and similarity.
3. Say no to Big Bang: BI modernization initiatives should never be deployed in a big bang mode. Instead, such initiatives should be deployed in phases/ waves/ laps. In fact, even before the migration activity is undertaken, a pilot should be undertaken which comprises of a set of use cases which can potentially cover the complete range/ variety of reports/ cubes. A successful pilot phase will instill confidence in both business and IT community and any potential issues regarding architecture, visualization etc. can be clarified and closed.
4. Parallel Run: Business users will have confidence in the new system if the information delivered with the new system ties back to the older one. Thus, it is always advisable to have an extended parallel run where both the BI systems (old vs. new) are active.
5. Don't forget the human touch: One of the biggest challenge encountered in a BI modernization initiative is business user adoption. Typically, business users are so used to the functionalities available in an older BI tool/ technology that they insist on replicating the same functionality in the new BI system which can potentially lead to product customizations (and hence higher TCO and greater risk). Thus, change management and user adoption should be given due importance right from the project initiation.
6. Governance = f {business, IT): Lastly, governance structure for such initiatives should ensure continual business representation. This step will ensure business buy-in and help mitigate issues mentioned in the above points.

I would be interested to hear your feedback on these best practices as well as any additional challenges that you/ your team has faced during such BI modernization initiatives.

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Ever since the birth of the IT revolution Business Rules have been a part and parcel of the applications. There usage has mainly been a part of the applications and changing the business rules meant changing the application which involved huge impact in terms of time and money. With this challenge came the thought of separating the Business Rules from the application in such a way that the change in business rule has no impact on the underlying application. This brought in more agility to the applications and reduced the maintenance cost of applications. This has benefited the insurance, health care, financial and government sectors the most as these sectors have applications whose defining business policies are subject to frequent change.

Business Rules are used to implement the business policies. They are written as simple if <condition> then <action> implementation. Rules analyze facts against the conditions and perform the corresponding actions. The rules engine is defined as the entity that executes these rules. Once the rule engine is provided with the set of rules, it can process the facts and perform the derivative actions. Oracle Business Rules (OBR) in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is one such product which can help in making the business analyst more independent and also help the applications to be more flexible.  The Oracle Business Rules is an integral part of the Service Component Architecture and hence can be used in tandem with any SOA Component.

A business process typically accepts an XML as input invokes some services and produces an output which is again an XML. Typically a business process orchestrates the different services that are to be invoked and can itself be exposed as a service. The Business Rules in OBR can be exposed as a service called the decision service. This is used to access the modeled rules by any SOA component. The business rules provide following benefits to the business process:

1.       Agility:  Using the Oracle Business Rules, it is easier to modify the business process. The process is less time consuming and more rapid.

2.       Reduced Cost: Changing the business rules using OBR is much easier than modifying the complete application and hence reduces cost of maintenance.

3.       Transparency: Since the business rules are now available on the SOA Composer they can be easily viewed by the directors, auditors, business analyst or anyone who is allowed to access them.

4.       Lower deployment times: Business Rules configured in once instance can be directly migrated to production with no or very little effort. This is a huge benefit for applications where the change cycle is very short.

5.       Reduced business process complexity: Since the business logic has been moved to the business rules, the overall complexity of the business process is reduced.

Posted by Kuldeep Singh Dhillon at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Oracle Manufacturing enables us to include supplier-sourced components and resources in the manufacturing processes. This helps realize a number of potential business benefits that could include:

1. Using specialized supplier skills in the manufacturing process to help lower engineering and manufacturing costs and increase production quality
2. Using supplier capacity to increase the overall production capacity

From a configuration standpoint, one can define outside processing items that represent supplier-sourced items, resources, and services that you include in the build process. These items can be non-stockable items which represent the actual supplier contribution in the assembly build process or we can define the assembly itself as an outside processing item. The outside processing item is the item on the requisition or purchase order and the item we receive in the purchase order receipts. One should also define outside resources and associate them with these outside processing items. The outside resources are included on the routings for scheduling and costing purposes. A job or repetitive schedule in Work in Process is charged for outside processing through these outside resources.

Standard Oracle's OSP is a good fit to accomplish the Contract manufacturing scenarios for most industries and Retail, CPG and Logistics is no exception to the rule. Standard Modules like Oracle Inventory, Oracle Purchasing, and Oracle Work in Process and be appropriately configured to achieve the objectives. The closed loop system can provide for the following:

• Define outside processing resource requirements for discrete job and repetitive schedule routings
• Automatically generate purchase requisitions by moving assembly items to the Queue intraoperation step of an operation that has outside processing resources associated with it
• Receive assembly items back from outside processing suppliers and automatically charge your outside processing resource costs
• Control and track progress at outside processing operations

Standard functionality can be tweaked and customizations made, to meet specific business requirements. As each organization strives to become world class, contract manufacturing is set to rule the world. And as we have always said IT follows the business, there is an ever increasing scope of improvement for system capabilities. Best practices in contract manufacturing would involve identifying the appropriate strategic, tactical and operational agenda and implementing them. System design and implementation would fall under the purview of operational agenda. We will continue our discussions in forthcoming blogs on each aspect of these best practices.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Organizations onset on this journey by gauging and developing a clear understanding of the capacity and capability requirements of manufacturing for their likely future portfolio, looking out a time window horizon into the future. This is what would eventually provide the enterprise an adequate time to think through and evaluate what to invest in developing internally and what to outsource. And when it comes to outsourcing contract manufacturing is the buzzword. As discussed earlier, Contract Manufacturing can be defined as the outsourcing of a requirement to manufacture a particular product or component to a third party. Contract manufacturing enables companies to reduce the level of investment in their own capabilities to manufacture, while retaining a product produced to a high quality, at a reasonable price, and delivered to a flexible schedule.

The most common reason why an organizations choses to outsource is the Cost Saving that would be realized at the end of the mission. There are three main drivers for this cost differential, which can be regarded as the underlying reasons for outsourcing. These are stated as follows:

1. Access to capacity
2. Access to technology
3. Access to markets

Unlike any business opportunity there is a cost associated with outsourcing or contract manufacturing. There are two broad classifications of this cost.

• Direct Cost
• Indirect Cost

The direct costs of contract manufacturing are fairly comprehensible. These are:

1. Conversion cost
2. Cost of materials
3. Cost of maintaining the contract relationship.

But the direct costs are only the tip of the iceberg. The depth of the iceberg can be gauged by the extent of the indirect cost which could be broadly classified into the following:

• Uncertainty Cost
• Risk

Uncertainty costs are those that are built into the supply chain like the one associated with maintaining appropriate inventory levels. There is an additional working capital tied up in the supply chain due to the fear of supply interruptions, and caused by lack of visibility and lack of systems integration. Then there are the risks which are inherent to the entire market or entire market segment. These are also known as the systemic risk. There is also an element of reputational cost associated with choosing an incorrect contract manufacturer that compromises on quality.

So what is the ABC of Contract Manufacturing? Access to capacity/technology/market provides the Benefits of Cost. If Markowitz Portfolio Theory is applied to the ABC of Contract Manufacturing, world class organizations can better gauge how enormous the Cost Iceberg really is?

Posted by Amit Sinha at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

What is perhaps the number one complaint about introduction of JD Edwards ERP or a new functionality in JD Edwards, in an Enterprise?
No one knows how to use it!!

According to one study, effective User Adoption seems to be the absolute best predictor of enterprise software success. More often than not, Enterprises have a lack of focus on faster User Adoption that helps to sustain Oracle -JD Edwards implementations and upgrades throughout its life-cycle. Let's talk about ways of achieving a faster user adoption based upon efficient usage of Oracle's User Productivity Kit (UPK) in an Enterprise.

What is UPK?
For the uninitiated, UPK is a tool provided by Oracle for rapidly developing and delivering on-demand training. It captures the developer's interactions/transactions with system and records them in various formats. From one single recording exercise UPK can output manuals, guides, cards and presentations and video recordings.

How to increase JDE User Adoption?
In implementing JD Edwards ERP we fundamentally change the way a business User or group does their job.  Consequently, the business process and culture change associated with the ERP is much more significant than the implementation of the ERP itself. Below are a few things you can do to increase user adoption of JD Edwards Applications, utilizing UPK:
1. Generate interest and change perception
2. Develop basic theory
3. Bring applicability
4. Bringing it ALIVE

1. Generate interest and change perception
The JD Edwards business users may tend to have little interest in JD Edwards product features and associated benefits. To have their attention and change their perception, a "Real-to-life" scenario needs to be show-cased.
How UPK helps? Conducting sessions with the end users and show-casing, with the help of UPK pre-built content (in visual formats), how JD Edwards Procure-To-Pay process works and how it could help Procurement department / group become more effective and efficient.

2. Develop basic theory
Once the user's perception is changed there will be a need to communicate the basic theory of the new JD Edwards product / functionality. The end-user would need to understand a few basic concepts about the new product / functionality in order to have a reasonable discussion about how it could be applied to their work.
How UPK helps? With the help of UPK content understanding the basic steps of an Order-To-Cash cycle. This knowledge will be essential to understand how JD Edwards could be applied within the enterprise for Order management and tracking.

3. Bring applicability
Now the focus shifts from explaining the basic theory to bringing the applicability of JD Edwards to life. During this stage, the applicability of JD Edwards is explored within the context of a particular business group or team.
How UPK helps? A session could be set up with a business group to explore how they currently keep other people up-to-date with what they're working on, combined with an ideation session about how JD Edwards could enable them to do so in a different way, and the associated benefits. UPK can capture all the steps in a business process. It records every keystroke, every click of the mouse, each menu option chosen and each button pressed. The UPK content then can be updated whenever there is a change in business process or functionality and shared with the larger group.

4. Bringing it ALIVE
Finally it is about making the new JD Edwards ERP real and relevant to people and groups. The previous three stages have discussed what could be, and this stage is where it has to actually happen.
How UPK helps? Develop specific UPK content and provide online or softcopy of step-by-step user guides with screen shots to help users the first few times they use the new JD Edwards applications.
JD Edwards training can be conducted, leveraging UPK content, prior to using JD Edwards application / new functionality.

Having said this there may be a few more interesting ways of utilizing UPK. Please feel free to share your views.

Posted by Shriranjan Gharpure at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

As the Global Retailers grow in size and expand across geographies with more complex logistics function, they rely more on outsourcing 3rd Party Logistics Service providers (3PLs) to manage their supply chain and warehouse operations for better inventory management, operational and cost efficiency.  Also this helps the retailers to focus their energy more on their core competencies and developing their product capabilities and increasing their market penetration.

Based on the geographical spread, product types, number of stores/distribution centers and the availability of 3PLs, Retailers have to work with multiple 3PL service providers to manage their entire supply chain. Managing seamless and tight IT integrations with multiple 3PL providers is a big challenge for any retailer today and the absence of an integrated IT infrastructure tops the list of concerns that retailers voice about 3PLs.

Even though both retailers and 3PLs have conflicting perspectives on several issues, one commonly agreed upon area of concern is Insufficient IT capabilities. One industry research shows that 43% of customers and 31% 3PLs agree that this is one critical improvement area and also Industry research has consistently indicated that a gap exists over the expectations that some retailers have for their 3PL's IT capabilities and the satisfaction level with those capabilities.

Both parties desire an IT system that is responsive, delivers valued information in real time. However, the degree of investment required to create and maintain such a system often stands as a barrier toward attaining such a goal. Another challenge is that smaller third-party logistics companies are slow to adopt effective software due to the significant up-front investment required for many systems. Also many retailers lack the KPIs reporting and visibility required to run adaptive supply chains while 3PLs argue that retailers could improve in their ability to communicate critically-needed data in a complete and timely manner.

The most common integration entities (interfaces) between the retailers and 3PLs are Item Master, Expected Receipt, Receipt Confirmation, Pick Release, Ship Confirmation, Inventory Adjustments and Inventory Snapshot. Many 3PLs and Retailers share a mutual and growing expectation to develop IT systems that provide real-time interfacing between their IT systems. Such integration balances not only current inventory, but can be used for demand/supply planning and help the retailers in scheduling future shipments more accurately. This results in creating greater efficiencies and reducing costs. 

Here are some of the proven best practices that can help retailers to bridge this gap and help them in building a simple, flexible, responsive IT integration with 3PLs.

1. Standardize:  When Retailers are working with multiple 3PLs with different IT capabilities and systems, it is very critical for retailers to standardize the fulfillment center models/ processes, business and functional requirements, integration specific scenarios, Interface/ Transaction details, Support management process, Exception/Error Processing, Reporting requirements, Data transport methodology and Lot numbering/attributes standards. This helps in setting clear expectations about day to day warehouse operations to all 3PLs and also helps in quickly on-boarding new 3PLs.

2. Communicate and Train: The standardized functional and technical requirements documents mentioned above act as the primary source of information for 3PLs. In addition, it is very critical to bring all the 3PL teams for a summit to walk them through the processes, standards and requirements with day-to-day scenarios in the warehouse operations. Also it is very critical to train both 3PL operations team and customer business team together which helps to establish a common understanding on processes and systems.

3. Build Tools for Support:  When the supply chain structure is complex with 8-10 Regional distribution centers and 30-40 local distribution centers catering to 3000-4000 stores, it becomes very critical to make sure on daily basis that all the transactions flows across 3PL WMS systems and Retailer ERP systems successfully. This needs robust monitoring and support system for transactions failures and also good interface error correction mechanism to correct and reprocess the daily transactions.  If the transaction failures are not addressed in an efficient and quicker way, the Inventory discrepancies between 3PL system and Retailer's ERP system can harm the upstream ordering and planning systems.

4. Identify what to Report: The mutually agreed and understood daily reporting mechanism for operations metrics and KPIs out of 3PL and Retailer IT systems is very critical to run the business operations smoothly. For example, the daily inventory discrepancy report helps business in getting the right inventory picture and also resolving the root cause of the discrepancy. The other useful reports are Daily allocation/order failure report, Shipment failures report, Inventory adjustments report and Physical Inventory /Cycle count report, Receipt failures report etc.  The reporting on KPIs like Inventory accuracy, Inventory turns, Supplier compliance, Shipping accuracy, order turn-around time helps retailers in optimizing the distribution network and processes.

5. Assign clear Ownership:  Since multiple teams like 3PL operations, 3PL IT support, Customer distribution operations, Customer IT support, Planners, CSRs, Store managers, Cost accounting are involved in running the daily retail business operations in distribution centers, It creates lot of confusion in communication and ownership of IT systems related tasks. So the tasks and ownership for the 3PL operations team, Retailer's business team and IT support team have to be clearly identified and the right communication channel needs to be established for efficiently running the daily operations.

Posted by Vijaya Suresh Prabu at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

As emphasized in the previous blog, today's social media aware customer wants to directly interact with the companies bypassing any middle level/agent layers. One of the ways organizations can achieve this is by using social media concept of communities. The massive amounts of data that would start flowing from these communities can be used to address customer grievances or suggestions directly without the intervention of the agents, where a lot of information may be lost in transition.

Making the customer a critical piece of the puzzle would encourage customer advocacy of the brand. Customer advocacy is one of the key outcomes of the social media. One customer clicking "LIKE" on a product/community can trip more users "like the customer" to do the same, increasing the visibility of the product. Also, the same concept of reputation can be applied to Insurance carriers. Lot of research is being done on developing analytical social models and algorithms that can be used to rate companies/brands based on the positive, negative or neutral comments made by the customers on social media. Insurance companies can leverage from the lowering ratings of the competitors by targeting the customers that are not satisfied with their current insurance carrier.

Insurance product vendors can also come up with products or plug-in that can be integrated with their claims management systems. Using this plug-in information can be gathered about the claimant using social media channels. Of course, doing such kind of checks/surveillance would have to be handled at the right places like legal, insurance regulations etc. The companies can also leverage the concept on Social Rep (Social Reputation) as an input parameter to policy underwriting of the customer.

Insurance company can give an option to the insured to voluntarily join certain communities that might guide the customer on benefits of health lifestyle (for life insurance), good etiquettes of driving, links to agencies that can do initial property verifications etc. Customers can join these initiatives and improve their rep scores that would help in lowering the premium amount. Obviously, this kind of strategy would come with its own set of problems and challenges like; differentiating the genuine customers from the ones that misrepresented the online social data, analyzing and tracking customers' online social presence, encouraging the customers to voluntarily share their social profiles etc.

As and when Social CRM concept finds more takers in the insurance sector, more novel and innovative techniques would come up leveraging the social media. Insurance being completely a risk management business can definitely increase its predictability by efficiently using the massive information that is floating all over the social media channels.

Posted by Rohit Kaushal at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

There are certain attributes of a supply chain based on which the supply chain practices can be designated as Green Supply Chain. This blog is a result of the analysis of green supply chain initiatives of various companies. The blog describes the various innovative steps and business processes which are helping companies to have more aware and environmental friendly operations amd processes, making it more sustainable. These practices and steps indicates the traits of a supply chain being green and environmental friendly.

These supply chain operations indicates an environmentally aware demand-supply chain and a conscious effort toward building a green sustainable practice to make earth a better place to live. The following list describes the supply chain practices:

• Organization following a Green Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model
  The flow of environment information into Supply chain: The extent of flow of environmental information into the supply chain proves to be a powerful information and is a big differentiator for environmental conscious supply chains.
• The plan for product disposal: Companies having plans of product from Cradle to Grave or Cradle to Cradle are definitely having a lot greener supply chains compared to those who are not having.
• An advanced reverse logistics and reverse supply chain is an important trait of green supply chain.
• Supply chain environmental compliance and auditing programs tailors a green supply chain.
• Eco-labeling of products is a new emerging trend which traits a aware and green supply chain.
• Companies doing the Landfill status calculation and trying to reduce the same based on their waste generation suggests a greener orientation to supply chain.
• Solvent, waste recovery and waste recycling methodology in the manufacturing practices is an indication of green manufacturing.
• Companies have adopted Green Purchasing philosophy and is a good indicator of green supply chain.
• Carbon footprint measurement in business processes is an indication of green processes.
• Reduced Emission or zero emission in manufacturing is an indication of green manufacturing.
• Adoption of environmental conscious (green) technologies in supply chain and last but not the least, following a lean strategy where a value added steps includes environmental values as well.

Its not necessary that a green supply chain is restricted to these many attributes, There can be many more as well. These are just an indicator. And at the same time it is not necessary that any environmentally aware company needs to follow all the practices highlighted. It can be following any one of them only. The awareness and conciousness is important, means and practices will evolve.

Posted by Arnab Banerjee at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 9 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In my earlier blogs I have explained the data model to define the linear assets as part of the linear asset management solution. Any network will have both linear assets and non linear assets. It is important to build the relationship between the linear asset network and non linear assets.

 Every segment of linear asset of a network can have one or more non linear assets and in the same way every non linear asset can be share by more than one linear asset segments or networks. Such examples are train station (Junction) in the railway network, substations in case of electrical transmission lines, pump houses or storage tanks in water or gas pipe lines. In all these examples, the station is at a fixed location and will be shared by more than one asset network. It is important to build this relationship so that all assets of a region or location can effectively be planned for maintenance and apportion the costs over the networks of the assets.
In the previous blog we have see the various attributes that are required to define the linear assets. In the similar way non linear assets too requires a set of attributes to be defined to build the one to many (One non linear asset shared my many linear asset network) and many to one (many non linear assets can be associated with one linear asset network).
Let us refer to our own network picture with some non linear assets this time.
 
In this example, we have T1 to T5 are the terminals that are referred as Non linear assets. These terminals are either owned by one segment (in turn by a network) or shared by multiple segments of multiple segments. As part of the maintenance, of a network it is better to plan the maintenance of these terminals and associated assets. Sometimes as part of the maintenance of the location or region it is better to plan and carry the maintenance of all linear and non linear assets of that location.
In this blog we will list all the critical attributes that are required to define the non linear assets so that they can be integrated to linear asset networks.

Department
Shared Asset: Yes/No
Hosts multiple asset networks (Hub): Yes/No
Cost Sharing: Yes/No
Longitude of the asset:
Latitude of the asset:

The important consideration of the solution is to associate the non linear assets to a project and a task. It is much easy to recognise the costs and transfer the costs to the shared networks (linear assets). 
This relationship will help us to consolidate the maintenance work and effective notification to the related assets.
We will see the linear assets maintenance algorithm in the next blog.

Posted by Murali Krishna Somisetty at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Contract manufacturing capabilities could very well include activities that comprise blending, sifting, spraying and turnkey processing. The success of this very vital supply chain link depends not only has the know-how but also the technology to manufacture the best solutions. Wherever contract manufacturing and packaging production lines are modular, the retail players can reap rich dividends by exploring the wealth of contract manufacturing. This helps the manufactures meet virtually any specification for contract manufacturing and contract packaging. Contract manufacturing goes hand in hand with contract packaging capabilities. Contract packaging capabilities could very well include activities that comprise vertical and horizontal form, fill and seal, labeling, multiwall bagging, poly bagging cartoning and labeling.

As we have always stated that IT follows business, therefore the success of any contract manufacturing engagement also depends on the capability of both the primary Retail/CPG player as well as the contract manufacturer. The sophistication of IT landscape at both ends will drive the richness of such engagements and the inculcation of industry best practices. In my upcoming blogs I will deliberate with you, on the different models in contract manufacturing, system capabilities to meet business imperatives and many other aspects of this enticing and intriguing aspect of retail and CPG industry.
If implemented with a lot of thought to align the business needs to system capacities and capabilities, Contract Manufacturing could very well be a Contract to Kill - To kill the competition, as each Retail/CPG player focuses on its core competencies. This a giant leap in their journey to becoming a world class player.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 5:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Kunal Girishrao Hedau, Senior Associate Consultant, Infosys

It has been for a while now that the Insurance Companies have identified the "Online channel" as one of the dominant lead generation channel as a measure of impacting overall sales. The dominance factor however has not been realized to the level that it should be.

One of such recent study examining consumer shopping and purchase behavior is the "J.D. Power and Associates U.S. Insurance Shopping Study" and it reveals some interesting facts of the consumer online insurance behavior:

• More than half (54 percent) of insurance shoppers report getting their quote online
• Increase in the rate of switching companies among the online insurance shoppers because of the aggressive marketing initiatives undertaken by the Insurers.

The study also finally concluded with the fact that "Online Insurance Quote Applications initiate a majority of policy sales".

While the above study clearly gives us an impression about the recognition and importance of the Online channel, it also goes to imply of the huge business opportunities, if such leads of the online insurance shoppers are followed immediately or in short, importance of closing in on the transition time required from Policy Quote generation to policy issuance.

Noticing this trend, the insurers have realized the importance of making the "Online Sales Portal" available to the consumers.

The Online Sales Portal comprises of an integration of disparate systems to facilitate end to end New Business process flow. The web portal initially captures the customer data to generate a valid quote (electronic as well as print) and then depending upon the customer acceptance, the subsequent process of the Online Insurance Purchase is continued. The customer further enters the required data and proceeds to make payments electronically. The above customer data is then pushed into the policy admin system and a Policy Number and Client Number is returned to the customer along with the printed policy document and payment receipts. Hence the end to end business process comprises of integration of web portal with the Underwriting and Rating Engine, Policy Admin System, Electronic Payment System and a Document Generation System.

The result of the above process for the Insurers is a sale of an online insurance policy by Optimizing End-to-End business process, reducing the turnaround time, delivering effective customer communication in a paperless and cost efficient manner.

On the other hand the consumers also benefit from the Online Sales Portal as it facilitates them with the Product Comparision feature, multiple payment options and reduced documentation or paperless work, comprehensive decision making, time saving and most importantly reduced cost of insurance by avoiding the commissions paid to agents, e-signing their policies, choosing paperless billing as well as the waiver of premium allocation charges incase of some unit linked policies.

Keeping in view the above benefits, it has become notable and decisive for the Insurers to have an End to End solution for addressing Online Insurance channel leveraging the "Best of Breed Products/Systems" to testify a "Win-Win" situation for both the insurers and consumers.

Kindly share your thoughts in case of execution of any such solution offering or implementation experiences.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )