Supply Chain Management

This one is from my experience in implementation of  Baroda-Ahmedabad-KalolGas pipeline (BAKPL); a Gujarat state government project for transporting natural gas. Before the final commissioning of the gas pipeline, there are certain prerequisites like the entire pipeline should be free of impurities and reactive gasses. Also the welded pipe joints should be tested for internal cracks or weld burrs. Pigging, a well-known process for flushing out the pipeline of impurities is carried out by passing a probe called "Pig" through the length of the identified pipeline section. With equipment's like sensors and odometers attached, the modern Pigs are capable of pinpointing the exact location along with the details of the fault. These fault details can then be communicated to appropriate teams for the correction. However in this case, the identification of the location will happen through absolute length or via a GPS coordinates, the limitation of which we witnessed in the earlier part of the blog.   Now let us look at the IBM Maximo application capabilities which support the Dynamic Segmentation concept thereby helping to effectively manage a scenario like this.

Continue reading "Linear Asset Management and Dynamic Segmentation- Part II" »

Posted by Rejeesh Gopalan at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Traditional Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems always treated assets as point assets. Plant equipment, Fleets, IT assets you name it, they are all point assets and have self-sufficient programs available within most of the EAM packages to take care of their maintenance requirements. So what's the fuss about linear assets then?

Continue reading "Linear Asset Management and Dynamic Segmentation- Part I" »

Posted by Rejeesh Gopalan at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

 

I am back again in Vegas for IBM Pulse 2013. Last year, I covered the event live with daily blogs, but this time my whole schedule was so packed that I hardly had any time to write. Hence summarizing the whole event in one blog.

Continue reading "Infosys Team at IBM Pulse 2013" »

Posted by Praveen Kumar Agrawal at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In today's world, its very common for airline, hotel and other industries to dynamically vary their pricing on the basis of several factors. For example, a hotel might charge couple of hundred rupees more if the booking is for a weekend. Similarly, the private airlines very easily fluctuate their prices on the basis of dynamic demands or on the basis of vacation seasons. The variability can be as high as 100% for some cases. Also coupled with online booking sites, the whole idea is to create a consumer surplus that would ensure maximum profits for the industry. Consumer surplus is defined as the difference between what the consumer is willing to pay against what the consumer actually pays. However, the prime question is whether dynamic pricing is really beneficial for the industry or not.

Continue reading "Dynamic Pricing : Is it really worthy" »

Posted by Atin Bhola at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

  One of the biggest challenges for an enterprise today is to constantly upgrade and optimize their IT infrastructure to cope up with the fast growing technology and never ending business demands. As the IT consumers have to transform their heavily customized old school enterprise applications to a standard technology platform, the Enterprise application developers and the Companies are having a stand of between customized application and a configurable solution.

Continue reading "Is Customization a Boon or Bane?" »

Posted by Arun Prasath Muniyappan at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my capacity as a consultant and having worked in multiple implementations, I have always thought about processes that could have reduced the cost, time and rework and hence would have brought about a high degree of customer satisfaction. Today, companies in the west have identified IT as an enabler of their business processes. However, after the recent economic recession, companies have started to realize the importance of curtailing costs of IT implementations through reduction of project implementation timelines, rework effort and fitness to requirements. Today, companies realize that their SME's cannot exactly articulate the complete set of requirements to the IT vendor at the beginning of the project. Moreover, since the SME's are experts in their areas of expertise only (eg: SME's for inventory, purchasing, shipping, financials etc..), they find it difficult to integrate the requirements and present a holistic picture to the IT vendor. This generally results in high costs of change in terms of both time and effort. This limitation can primarily be attributed to the fact that the end users and the SME's get to see the end to end solution in the implemented system at the very end stages of the project. Calling for a change in functional requirements in any of the modules at this stage have ripple effects in the entire end to end configuration and hence involves more costs.

Continue reading "Is Agile methodology a good solution for ERP implementations" »

Posted by Atin Bhola at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has been a growing momentum across multiple industries to move from a "one-size-fits-all" approach to a portfolio of different supply chain strategies. Companies segment Supply Chains using different attributes across multiple dimensions of product [product volume or demand variability], customer [Customer/Channel value] to design multiple efficient or responsive Supply Chains. Mr. Thomas further recommends in his blog approaching Supply Chain segmentation as an end-to-end strategy that encompasses business processes starting all the way from the Customers over to Suppliers. This also includes Demand Management process, which will be the focus of my discussion in this blog. The Demand Planning Organization which is responsible to sense, plan, manage and communicate demand needs to factor in the different Supply chain strategies that are to be employed for different segments.
Most advanced planning systems provide a suite of statistical forecast models and different parameters for the Forecaster to further fine-tune the models and in addition they also contain Best-Fit models that perform multiple iterations to choose the forecast model and its parameters that provide the lowest Forecast Error specified. There is however no easy way for the forecaster to assign these models to different segments that is available out-of-the-box. As a result, the Forecaster ends up reviewing the forecast models for every part every forecast cycle and then changes the assignment, given a change in the strategy for a particular segment.

Continue reading "Adding intelligence in the Forecasting process to support Supply Chain Segmentation" »

Posted by Sandeep Deolekar at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Predictive analytics uses several techniques to analyze past events to make predictions about future. One of the areas where this technology can be applied is forecasting in supply chain management. The biggest challenge that companies today face is accurate demand forecasting. This can be determined to a certain extent if technology and analysis can help determine customer's usage, spending and behavior. For example, predictive technology can help determine the number of customers that would come to a coffee store based on the current temperature. This can be arrived at through data collected in the past where similar temperatures were recorded. Based on this analysis the number of staff can also be increased/decreased .  Apart from plain predictive models, predictive technology can be used to prepare decision models to take logical decisions based on a number of factors involving many variables. For example, in the case above, the other factors/variables that can contribute to the computing the number of customers arriving at the store could be the day of the week (weekday or weekend), the time (morning, afternoon, evening), current brand value of the products sold, type of customers etc.

Continue reading "Use of Predictive Analytics in Supply Chain" »

Posted by Atin Bhola at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Guest Post by

Sajit Kumar C.N., Principal Consultant, Infosys and

Ganesh Subramanian, Lead Consultant, Infosys

Enterprise-centric Asset Management is a new model evolved from the rapid and radical change that businesses have undergone. This radical innovation in business is brought about by globalization and may be profoundly displacing many of the well-accepted models that businesses used to follow. 

In such a scenario, the world is rapidly adopting collaboration across value chain as a competitive differentiator. The same holds true for after-sales asset management, which is the last and perhaps the most decoupled "link" in the value chain in asset-intensive industries like industrial tool manufacturing. Organizations can no longer afford to sustain with inward-looking Enterprise Asset Management only ...

Read more on our article in Spend Matters, a global content community dedicated to examining a range of procurement and supply chain issues.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is generally recommended that you plan critical products and components in SAP APO [or an APS system] and non-critical products and components in SAP ECC [or the respective OLTP system]. The critical products have some typical characteristics that can be used as guidelines to identify them: long replenishment lead times, usage in multiple Upper Level parts and A-Class products [based on ABC Classification that I had discussed in my earlier blog]. The non-critical parts are planned in ECC with the assumption that the planning for these parts does not need advanced algorithms and the parts can be procured easily and quickly on a need basis.

However this consideration misses one critical aspect - the Supply Planning Organization Structure. The above recommendation works generally well where we have planners that are dedicated to plan just these non-critical components. However, we have seen in multiple clients that the Planners are responsible for planning the entire Product Family across all the levels of the BOM for both the critical and non-critical parts. The planning done for non-critical parts in ECC requires the planners to access not only multiple transactions, but also multiple systems and then execute on the system proposals. Also, with increasingly shorter lifecycles for the components, it is getting increasingly important in the High-Tech industry to plan the components considering substitutes, before placing a buy signal to the Suppliers. We have seen that due to these reasons, the planners prefer to have both the critical and the non-critical parts being planned in APO and the proposals presented to them in a consistent manner for them to make decisions.

Continue reading "ROP using APO CTM" »

Posted by Sandeep Deolekar at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)