During tough economic times, even the mightiest of them fall and especially in oil and gas industry we have seen that happening when crude plummeted to $32 after hitting a record of $147 a barrel at a point of time
Continue reading "When the going gets tough, the smooth gets going!" »
Knowledge process outsourcing(KPO) may be defined as outsourcing of high added value process where the achievement of objectives is dependent on the skills, domain knowledge and experience of the people carrying out the activity. It is being claimed that KPO is one step extension of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) which is outsourcing of low value added services to a partner company.
Is it possible for a Hi-Tech company to outsource high value added and critical processes like Design, manufacture of critical components, etc. to global outsourced partners to achieve business benefits? Let's look at what are pre requisites for this and the pros and cons of this and evaluate.
In recent times Hi-Tech companies have increasingly looking to outsource substantial portion of their manufacturing to vendors in developing nations like India, China, ec. to uncover substantial reduction in costs. This outsourcing helps the companies to improve competitiveness and profitability and to some extent even helps in making the Hi-Tech companies operations viable in the marketplace.
Continue reading "Innovation through Outsourcing in HiTech Companies..Is it Achievable?" »
Continue reading "IFRS Adoption- To Wait & Watch Or To Start" »
Continue reading "Consolidate, Cleanse, Complete Customer Data -Four steps away!" »
Are you looking for a tool that ensures maximum convergence of the best-of-breed Oracle applications deployed at your enterprise?
Let’s discuss how Oracle Process Integration Packs (PIPs) not only offer out-of-the-box process integration solutions to composite industry processes, but also cut deployment times significantly.
In today’s competitive environment the unit prices for electricity and gas is driven heavily by the competition between energy companies.However, to ensure that the customer receives a fair price and to avoid monopoly, it is quite common to have this price overseen by regulation. Though there are many pricing models available in different countries, by and large the pricing models in regulated scenarios are either revenue based pricing or rate based pricing. This blog briefly touches upon the pricing models and the components of prices. Pl. note that the examples in this blog focuses on UK energy market.
Continue reading "Regulated Energy and Utility Market Challenges – Pricing" »
Continue reading "Unleashing MEA's Potential in Telecom Services" »
The peanut butter and peanut paste recall have been considered the largest product recall in history. Nine people have been died & thousands have reported sick due to consumption of PCA products. Questions are being raised about the food safety regulations & quality issue in Supply chain. Is it the system Failure or Greed of few individuals? Is it only the PCA whom to blame? What about the downstream Manufacturer who were using PCA products as their Raw Material? Also, are our Quality regulations sufficient? But the most important question that most Food companies should be asking themselves is this, what to do to avoid the repetition of same in future?
Continue reading "Failure of Peanut Corp. of America, what should we learn??" »
“Earth Hour” observed on Saturday 28th Mar, 2009 from 8:30 to 9:30 PM across the world. While this is equivalent to switching off China's emissions for less then six short seconds, it shows our concern for climate change. It also means, Companies have to comply with stricter regulations in coming future.
Continue reading "Going "Lean with Green" through Enterprise Solutions" »
Continue reading "Speed-to-Market - Get it Right for your Business" »
Continue reading "Is my CAD vendor the natural choice for PLM?" »
Peoplesoft like any other ERP implementation involves huge and concerted effort and intricate planning from Project initiation to Go Live. Implementation in Less time translates to Less Cost for the customer. This assumes more significance in these times of recession where customers are seeking for more value for money and quick returns on investment.
Continue reading "How Quick can Oracle’s PeopleSoft be Implemented" »
The Directive on WEEE (Wastage of Electrical and Electronics Equipment) in EU notes that the content of hazardous components in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) is a major concern during the waste management phase and recycling of WEEE is not undertaken to a sufficient extent. The WEEE directive places the responsibility of end of life (EOL) disposal responsibility of the products on the manufacturers either individually or by joining a collective scheme. This implies that the cost of disposal of the product and the harmful substances that it contains squarely lies on the manufacturer. The EU Commission has set new targets for recovery and reuse/recycling by 31-Dec-2008 for all EU countries.
Today’s global environment has placed increased pressure on Hi-Tech manufacturers to become more competitive and profitable. Global outsourcing activities have increased in importance and have increasingly emerged as a key strategic tool in achieving cost reduction, quality and delivery improvement, cycle time reduction, and improved responsiveness to customer, competitive, and financial market demands. It is estimated that a well planned and executed global outsourcing strategy can result in a cost savings differential of 15 to 25 percent when compared to manufacturing inhouse.
Using external suppliers to design, manufacture, ship and service products or components - has been a growing trend in recent years as Hi-Tech manufacturers have sought, among other things, to divest themselves of production capacity (and the inherent risks associated with owning capital equipment), lower their labor costs and maintain greater flexibility in the face of ever-shrinking product lifecycles.
Continue reading "Importance of Outsourcing to provide flexibility to Hi-Tech Manufacturers" »
To remain competitive in today's environment, manufacturing companies are looking at boosting their supply chain performance. One of the key levers for improving supply chain is 'cost reduction' at various stages of the entire chain.
Continue reading "Using Operational Levers To Boost Supply Chain Performance" »
In continuation with the entry here
Standardised project management process
Utilities have a trend of growing through acquiring other companies and hence the project management processes are likely to vary within their business. For e.g., an organisation that took over a contracting company that specialises in executing rechargeable jobs is likely to have its processes and systems for managing rechargeable jobs different form the rest of the business - unless there is a conscious effort to homogenize the processes. The project centric solution design addresses this by mapping the processes to the job classification available out of the box in Oracle ie., direct and indirect jobs Also project management templates can be defined to ensure that the projects are defined in a specific way that is aligned with other projects in the organisation. This substantially reduces the time required by the engineers and/or planners to create projects in Oracle. In some cases (Large capital projects), the project are likely to be created in best of breed project management software like Primavera or MS Projects etc.,. The out of the box interface available in Oracle eBusiness suite can be used to reduce the need to duplicate effort in entering project data into Oracle. With this, the process, the resource assignment and budgeting are the only processes that need to be done in Oracle eBusiness suite, whilst the other core project management processes are managed in the actual Project management suite.
Continue reading "Providing visibility to your large projects through a Project centric solution" »
Last week I was at Oracle partner briefing on technology stack. It was quite interesting and informative. The discussion was around BEA acquisition and integrating the existing Fusion product with BEA.
With the current slowdown being accelerated by the financial turmoil, companies are increasingly looking at avenues to cut costs yet maintain profitability against all odds. This is a tricky situation given the fact that any decision leads to a bullwhip effect owing to the integrated nature of today’s supply chain. One of the time tested techniques to achieve this is through Reverse Auctions which is quite prevalent in the High Tech industry.
Continue reading "High Tech Industry’s Sourcing Value Proposition: Reverse Auction" »
ERP implementations are a special breed of projects. They are often characterized by aggressive timelines, high budgets and involvement of diverse teams. This emphasizes the need to have a reliable tool to measure the performance of ERP implementations throughout the execution phases.
Continue reading "Earned Value Management for ERP Implementations" »
There is often a dilemma in the customer’s mind,whether to go for Localization or do a Customization. Here are some of the pros and cons of these two options:
Localization comes pre-built with the product and does not need to be developed. While it can be assumed to have already been tested, effort needs to be estimated for the further rounds of testing.
This is beacuse,Localizations are add-on features which might not have been time-tested to the extent the base application features are.Also,Regional requirements change, all the implications of which might not have been addressed in the Localization in a timely manner. There can always be a lead time between a new requirement and its solution through Localization.
Continue reading "Localization vis-a-vis Customization: Which way to go?" »
If we look at the world's 2 leading large ERP packaged suites, they are huge applications that offer tremendous flexibility to handle just about all possible kinds of manufacturing systems and business processes spread across all kinds of industries. Can these ERP systems be readily adapted by small & medium-sized companies and how do large ERPs really differ from those that are used by the SMB segment?
Continue reading "ERP Systems for Small & Mid-Sized Companies" »
In the first part of the blog we looked at the rise of packaged BI http://infosysblogs.com/oracle/2008/08/age_of_packaged_bi_and_analyti.html
In this blog we analyze when and how should organizations evaluate packaged BI
Organizations today, are under pressure to improve efficiency and margins. Analytics has become an indispensible part of their existence. Large organizations face a challenge owing to constraints of increasing visibility across value chain in terms of analytics, BI in multiple silos, and heterogeneous systems from the legacy era.
Continue reading "Age of packaged BI and analytics – Should you embark on this journey? Part 2" »
When there is a need to bring about large scale HRIT portfolio transformation (post merger, for example) it is important to use this opportunity to maximize the business value , while minimizing the TCO and risk of transition.
Infosys has a comprehensive framework, approach and accelerators to look at this transformation scenario in a global delivery model
Continue reading "Large scale HRIT Portfolio Transformation" »
Organizations who want to strengthen their ability to attract and retain employees at all levels to meet the needs of Organic and Inorganic Growth, need to have an Integrated approach to Talent Management. This would not only offer sustainable competitive advantage, but also operational benefits like reduced time to productivity, developing targeted capabilities, and Talent mobility across the organization. Integrated Talent Management is a lot more than yet another HR process. It is a mindset that goes beyond the rhetoric towards a holistic and integrated approach. Based on our experience, we’ve identified three critical elements to achieve Integrated Talent Management: Strategy Integration, Process Integration, and Technology Integration.
Last week when I was in Kansas City presenting a paper at the 2008 APICS International Conference, I had an interesting observation. There was a tremendous emphasis on Sustainability. We talk about Lean Supply Chain but companies were one step ahead discussing Green Supply Chain. Initially I had dismissed it as another fad but I was amazed at the commitment more so in the High Tech Domain.
"Business case? What business case? This is a "strategic" investment"....ever heard that one?
Can any executive team pull that off in today's economy? Something tells me that those days are O-V-E-R.
"That which gets measured gets done"....so here's the secret: build a Value Story, define the core metrics, and measure, track, and transform using the Oracle OBIEE solution.
That's a mouthful. Let's talk about it live at Oracle OpenWorld. Ask for me at the Infy booth.
See you in SF -
Chris
You only need to open one consulting proposal to see the classic (trite?) framework of "people/process/technology" being touted as the exhaustive framework that should drive your transformation. It's that easy (yeah right). Is it a coincidence that those 3 words correspond to the stock-in-trade consulting presentation package (.ppt)?....thats for another post.
Where is Value? Where is Capability? What about Accountability? Exactly how does this all happen without a well-aligned roadmap?
Our IMPACTtm frameworkhas been developed to address these areas. It also speaks to integrating the EXTENDED enterprise (where to work), new capabilities (what to work on) and managing the overall tranformation (how to do it).
Reach out to our Infosys team at Oracle Open World and ask for me - I will be happy to give you a personal guided tour to a whole new way of transforming your business in an Oracle-enabled environment.
Till next time,
Chris
Forecasting has been rated as one of the top supply chain issues in the globalized world. Organizations are striving to predict customer demand as accurately as possible. Accurate forecasting kick-starts demand and supply chain planning. A large number of products-geography-customer combinations require system enabled forecasting capabilities. A holistic forecasting system brings in Statistical Rigour and Modeling, Dashboards and Simulation capabilities and automatically tunes its models to suit changing business requirements. Sharing here excerpts from one of our working paper – the criteria in choosing the holistic forecasting system.
1. Ability to Model Demand:
Ability of a forecasting system to generate forecast at the most granular level across Time, Geography, Product and Customer dimensions, with the highest accuracy. This will also decide how effectively the system has been able to model the business requirements.
2. Statistical Rigour:
Forecasting systems need to have exhaustive library of statistical models - starting from simplest to most complex. This can help in choosing the best forecasting model which truly represents demand, yet manages model complexity. For example, there are cases where a simple “Moving Average" model may be adequate, whereas there might be cases that demand more sophisticated models (such as “ARIMA"). Moreover, there might be occasions where a combined model is chosen with a weighted average of different models. As a result, the system should not only provide the means through which different models may be easily applied but also facilitate the collaboration between these models for a true representation of demand.
3. Accuracy and Forecast Generation Time:
The preliminary requirement of any forecasting system to generate accurate forecast may not be enough. For example, an organization requiring daily forecasts for the planning purpose may not be able to use the forecasting system if it takes 10 hours to generate forecasts, regardless of its accuracy. Timely availability of forecast is as important as the accuracy it provides.
4. Interpretability:
Statistical error measures (e.g. MAPE, MSE) are popular yet widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. Quite often, end-users are not equipped to interpret the forecasting accuracy through such error measures. Forecasting system should enable business users with dashboard capabilities that communicate such measures in visually interpretable mediums.
5. Accommodate external issues:
Selecting the best forecasting model may not be enough. In majority of the cases, accuracy could benefit from the consideration of external components. These components could entail information such as the dates of forthcoming national holidays and the occurrence of exceptional events such as marketing campaigns. Hence an automated system should be able to understand such components and should be able to seamlessly combine them with basic forecasting techniques.
6. Automatic self-tuning:
An automated collaboration of the various components generates an additional consideration. When various models are combined, collaborative operation and self tuning becomes a major issue. The challenge arises from the relationships among the models. Although manual operation is a solution, it is associated with two major problems. Firstly, efficiency is reduced due to the required time and secondly, selection of models may be compromised in order to choose simpler alternatives. Hence an automated process for self-tuning would increase the flexibility and efficiency of the system.
Excerpt from the working paper – Shah M., Owusu G., Shoban B., Balkundi N., “Improving Forecasting Accuracy of Traditional Demand Planning System” (2008)
Continue reading "Six questions to analyze if your company is ready for SOA" »
Proliferating customer touch points has increased complexities in understanding the customer relationship. Increased globalization of businesses and its customers / consumers has put stress on ensuring apt customer experience. Businesses are facing new customer acquistion very difficult, specially in matured markets - turning their focus to sustain existing customer base and increase potential.
Continue reading "How to make more money with customer information" »
Where is my Order????? When will it get shipped???? Another delay, yet again!!!! These are some of the very common and frequently asked questions by the Customers.
The challenging business needs, difficult to hold enough inventory, increase in cost of manufacturing and more so frequent re-org’s have made manufacturers to re-think about their business strategy. The business drivers are changing and increasing at a fast pace and Enterprises using ERP’s expect the product vendors to be more than up to speed to offer capabilities in the standard product and also provide an Integration strategy to offer seamless out-of-box integrations.These capabilities are targeted towards Increase in Agent Productivity, Significant reduction in cycle time, Automating Business flows, Orchestrating Business flows spread across disparate applications and Enabling Shared service operations etc.
Oracle has a taken a step forward to meet the above objectives and much more than that. The latest release of Oracle EBS (eBusiness Suite), which is popularly known as R12, is a significant step to meet the complex and demanding business objectives. The features like Multi Org Access Control (MOAC) allow agents to access data spread across Operating units from a single responsibility. The enhancements done as part of EBS R12 in Order Management, Advanced Pricing, iStore help in increase of Agent productivity and shorten the Order cycles.
Come and join the journey if you wanna know on how to expedite and streamline your prolonged Order cycles…….
This session will elucidate how Oracle R12 features can be leveraged to enable shared service operations with features like MOAC. It will elaborate the New R12 features in the areas of Order Management, Advance Pricing and iStore with suitable examples. The session will explain on how the new features like Price book will join the core stream and make it more transparent to the customers. This session will also talk about how the new R12 features and Fusion middleware product BPEL came together and delivered a composite Application model for a big Hi-Tech giant.
Oracle's latest version of its E-Business Suite (EBS) is a significant release. Current users need to determine if and when this upgrade will be appropriate, if they have not already done so. New users of Oracle applications need to ensure that Release 12 is the appropriate release to implement. – Gartner
The journey begins in the biggest Oracle Technology symposium – Oracle Open World, 21st-25th Sep 2008……
Session ID: S300276
Session Title: Shorten Your Order Cycles with New Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Features: Wanna Know How?
Track: Oracle E-Business Suite
Continue reading "Thinking of Acquisition? Keep ERP as one of the decision parameters" »
Historians used two approaches to apply the past to the future: reasoning by analogy and projection of trends. The 1970’s saw the emergence of ERP systems in the form of Inventory Control Packages and Manufacturing Resources Planning (MRP II). Then came the integration of Finance, which was followed by the integration of various functional areas like Customer relationship, HR etc.
The evolution of Business Intelligence traces a trajectory similar to this. From a time of specialized tools and long multi-year customized solutions, we are seeing a convergence of enterprise applications, Data warehouse tools and analytic solutions. This is reinforced even further by the takeover and consolidation of BI vendors leaving few large players with capabilities across the value chain.
‘No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.’ ~H.E. Luccock
Continue reading "Age of packaged BI and analytics – Should you embark on this journey? Part1" »
Today, ERP is used more to drive business improvements & operational efficiencies and hence, any delays or budget over-runs could impact the business. However, most independent surveys and studies indicate that about 55 percent of ERP Implementation projects incur budget overruns. According to Standish Group, a research firm, the average IT project runs over budget by about 43 percent. Among the litany of reasons quoted (such as excessive focus on technology at the expense of business processes, communication shortfalls, project management and operational issues) estimation & bad planning rank high in the list.
Continue reading "Improving Package Implementations Estimates using Package Points" »
Continue reading "Thinking of R12? Go for an Enhanced Upgrade" »
If there is one thing which we can call as the livewire of the High Tech Sector is Labels. The entire high tech industry moves on labels. In Standard ERP Packages there are certain limitations in terms of volume of labels, performance and quality of bar code labels. As a result, typically companies have looked at other middleware options as a plug and play with the ERP Packages. Latest offerings from the ERP vendors seem to address this problem removing the need for middleware.
Continue reading "High Tech Sector’s Label Printing Needs: Are we there?" »
Continue reading "What is the Right Product Structure for the High Tech Sector?" »
We have always known a Middleware as a software program that integrates two or more disparate applications. Anyone having first encounters with Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) will tend to reckon it as a collection of middleware products. The fact is it is not just a middleware; it is much more than that.
Continue reading "Fusion Middleware – Not Just a Middleware" »
R12 is a milestone in Journey to Fusion
Oracle’s E-Business Suite Release 12 is Oracle’s latest version of their business applications with an upgrade path to Oracle Fusion Application. The technology stack is upgraded to Fusion Middleware, the backbone of Fusion Applications.
Continue reading "Upgrading to Oracle R12? Keep Fusion in mind" »
An economic downturn affects everyone, some more than others. The overall effect tends to lower consumer confidence and this has a direct impact on consumer spending. Or does it?
Continue reading "Retailing in a Down Economy, any different from a Boom?" »
Now we have established that Retailers are a special breed of organizations (see here) and their financials definitely deserve a special look. I think this difference in their operations has tremendous impact on their choice of applications. Some of the common notions of Oracle Applications such as Procure to Pay do not work for retailers.
Continue reading "Retail Financials or Financials for Retailers- Part Deux?" »
Continue reading "Having Confusion around Fusion!!!!!!!!!!!" »
The last month and a half has been exciting! The ardent cricket fan in me has been treated to some rapid fire cricket through the Indian Premier League 20:20 extravaganza. Round about the same time, my project team also started rapid application development using SCRUM, a methodology I would call the 20:20 version of the waterfall model of software development. Interestingly, the word SCRUM also has its origins from the sport of rugby where a “scrum” is a group of people responsible for picking up the ball and moving it forward.
Continue reading "SCRUM Methodology: Does the Twenty-Twenty Version of the Waterfall Model Work?" »
Continue reading "Retail Financials or Financials for Retailers?" »
Corporations today are spending significant amount of time and money in deploying state of the art ERP software like Oracle, SAP etc. IT management in these big corporations is more concerned to get the software deployed and then they consider their job is done. To say the truth the job is not even half done in most cases. The fail to recognize an important parameter - the ability of the system to perform as per "expectations" after the system has been deployed.
