Supply Chain Management

Growing data analysis need of business users was evident when a super user expressed the desire to generate an operational report which will not only help him to know how many units of a certain product did a business unit sell in a retail store in Irving, Texas but would also state how much revenue did that product generate during the last four months broken down by individual months, in the south west territory by individual stores, broken down by promotions and demographics, compared to estimates (previous forecast) and compared to the sales of a previous version of a similar product.

The above user request clearly validated that today's decision managers must be able to analyze data along any number of business dimensions, at any level of aggregation, with the capability of viewing results in a variety of ways. They must have the ability to drill down and roll up along the hierarchies of multiple business dimensions.

 

Memory-centric data management and OLAP (online analytical processing) technologies and tools are the answer. With the cost of memory dropping and speed increasing, the in-memory computing and analytics platform is an efficient way which has helped users carry out complex analysis on enterprise wide data by consolidating, and editing enormous volumes of data across different operational and financial measures.

Memory-centric technologies permits real-time and multidimensional OLAP analysis, with much more speed and computational flexibility as opposed to disk-centric technologies, whose performance is more like "come back after lunch".

The concepts of hyper-cubes and multidimensional domain structure (MDS) presents a special method for representing a data model with more than three conventional business dimensions i.e. product, time and geography. The MDS also is the technological back bone for memory-centric solutions offered in the market place today such as SAP's BI Accelerator/Net Weaver & IBM's Memory-Centric OLAP Platform: COGNOS/TM1-Applix.

These technologies has not only helped users expedite the process of analyzing the voluminous data across product lines, geography, time, demographics, promotions and other business metrics such as direct sales, profit margin, cost of goods sold but also has helped them make key business decisions such as to change their build and buy plans, modify financial and unit forecast and re-position a product inventory to achieve a sell through in another market segment in another part of the world by quickly making an intra-company transfer.

Running multiple cascading what-if simulations, carrying out scenario planning, customer analytics, profitability analysis in a sequence of analysis session using OLAP cubes has helped users accurately and timely gauge the performance of the key metrics of the business and make tactical and strategic decisions, thereby improving visibility across the value chain of a global organization.

 

Posted by Rajiv Mehrotra at 1:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CIOs and maintenance managers, while selecting application software to take care of their work and asset management processes, often face the questions of significance of best of breed EAM packages as against ERP packages. Many of our clients ask for our help in enabling them to take right decision. Like any other typical product comparison, there are no binary answers to questions being asked in this debate. There is no clear winner in this debate. In fact, I am of the opinion that asset intensive organizations should not get into this debate and should look for ERP+EAM instead of ERP Vs EAM. Recently, "Supply Chain Matters" invited me to share my views on this subject. For further insight, please refer to http://www.theferrarigroup.com/supply-chain-matters/2011/03/17/supply-chain-matters-guest-commentary-i-have-an-erp-system-do-i-really-need-a-best-of-breed-eam-package-as-well/

Posted by Praveen Kumar Agrawal at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SAP insider event is one of the most awaited and sought-after annual event in the SAP consulting community. The event specifically focuses on broad areas of Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Life-cycle management and Procurement. Taking this opportunity, as part of the Infosys SAP and SCM family,am planning to present some interesting and thought-provoking experiences that we went through as we implemented  Available-to-Promise(ATP) engine at a leading global FMCG major.

 

One area   most Organizations can greatly benefit while implementing an ATP solution, is to take into account downstream logistical considerations. Shipment-Lotsizing and Sailing Schedule are two logistical concepts that can be embedded into the ATP engine in a manner that Order touches are reduced to the minimum and the process of order fulfillment is made fairly automated.

Shipment Lot-sizing is all about making sure all the key parameters in orders that are quantity-centric are lotsized in a unit of measure understood by the Shipment Planning organization. This includes Order quantity, Confirmed quantity and Delivery quantity. The latter two can be lot-sized using simple set of coding.In the same vein, the concept of Route Scheduling or Sailing-Scheduling helps consolidate transportation plans based on geographical location of destination. The business rules for Sailing Schedule can be modeled in gATP in a manner that there is very less manual intervention required in subsequent processes.
Overall, preparing the data in gATP for downstream application such as Logistics takes the Supply Chain efficiency to a new level and that is what we will discuss in SAP insider. So watch out for the session on 15th April at Paris at 12:00 noon local time on the topic "A Best Practice Approach to Improve the Order-to-Ship Process Using GATP Functionality in SAP APO". For detials on my session click - http://www.scm2011.com/session.cfm?id=1174&u=europe&s

Posted by K. Srinivas at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous post, I outlined how warehouses must evolve to drive revenues. Let us consider a new dimension in this post on how warehousing concepts are spilling beyond distribution centers in today's buy-online-pick-anywhere-deliver-anywhere world.

When online operations began a few years ago, retailers set them up as independent business entities. This made good business sense at that time since there was not much clarity on how the online strategy must evolve. It also minimized the downside to existing store strategies and allowed the definition of the way forward for online selling and fulfillment.

As the first step, retailers established the 'dot com' warehouse to exclusively cater to online sales. Operating independently from existing DCs, these dot com warehouses consolidated online orders, received goods and shipped to customer homes. When customers requested in-store pickup of items in some instances and home deliveries for others, the dot com warehouse evolved to ship to both the home and store. When complexity turned up a notch (in retail grocery for example) with customers placing orders with 30-40 lines and expecting same day deliveries, retailers had no choice but to fulfill from regular stores and/or dark stores (and in such specific cases, ignore the DC completely).

While the fulfillment strategy for online orders has evolved to include a blend of regional DCs, central DCs and local stores, it is pertinent to ask whether the underlying mechanisms of fulfillment have changed. Not much, it turns out. After all, once items are received and stocked in shelves, the store (just like a DC) must assimilate orders, pick items and perform deliveries. Assuming a very conservative 100 online orders per day (with 40 lines per order), it must plan for the efficient picking of 4000 lines. It must plan for the picking activity to occur during times when customer footfalls are less so that the work schedules of store associates are optimized.

If you think all this means running through warehousing activities in stores such as creating locations, running waves, planning batch picks, assigning personnel, executing picks, scanning items, entering quantities, creating cartons, staging totes and performing check-out tasks.... you guessed it right. That is what it takes.

Of course, one solution does not fit all. And not all of it is available out of the box in today's WMS solutions. But it is definitely worthwhile to extend warehousing strategies and WMS-lite concepts for addressing unique challenges in today's stores. And in my next blog, we will see what this would mean to the warehouse management solutions of tomorrow.

Posted by Arun Kumar at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Post by

Bob Ferrari is the Executive Editor of the Supply Chain Matters Blog, and a periodic guest blogger on the Infosys Supply Chain Management blog.

Efficient asset management has become a far more critical need for asset-intensive businesses and service providers. The cumulative impact to U.S. and other international railroads during the recent global recession, along with changing customer service models are keen reminders to how important enterprise asset management (EAM) process management capabilities have become.

Within the U.S., the impacts of the sudden downturn in supply chain shipping activity had a rather dramatic impact on railroad assets.  As an example, industry shipments of railcars declined by 64% in 2009.  According to the Association of American Railroads, 2009 was the worst year for freight rail traffic, reaching its lowest levels since 1988.  In that same year, 28 percent of rail fleets were parked in storage, and one estimate noted that there were $43 billion in idle assets representing both leased and owned locomotives and railcars.  As an observer of global supply chain activities, I vividly recall reading news articles indicating that railroads were challenged to find all sorts of storage locations for these idle assets.  The BNSF railroad alone had rail cars that sat idle for up to three years on unused track stretching more than 30 miles in some places.  Similar reports came from other U.S. and European railroads as well.  It seemed like every available rail spur was utilized as a storage location, a virtual real estate warehouse, as it were. As observers, we speculated on how railroads were able to track and account for all of these scattered idle assets. 

Now that global economies have begun economic recovery, these same assets are being re-activated for service.  An important consideration however is the re-deployment plans and current condition of these assets.  Has subsequent damage occurred, and if so, what repairs are needed?  Have scheduled maintenance procedures lapsed or are overdue?  Have leases changed hands or have customer leased assets been reallocated?

In a past Infosys SCM posting,it was observed that EAM, traditionally viewed as an internal or regulatory function of an organization,has now become more customer service oriented with the advent of the service economy.The objective of EAM has always been to increase asset availability, but the evolving post recessionary economy adds new dimensions of procurement, service and repair efficiencies.  Assets, either physical, facility, or IT related, need to classified, tracked and prioritized as to utilization, maintenance, service requirements, probability of failure and customer service requirements. EAM has the potential to be the early warning system for managing asset and overall operational efficiency.  Integration with operational and other business systems increases efficiency and reduces lead times for scheduling. Expensive and highly utilized assets such as locomotives need special attention. Equipment warranty and claims tracking insure that organizations avoid lost opportunities, while the advent of new mobile and GPS technologies add new capabilities for real-time tracking.

Another important consideration is that capabilities included in EAM are often sensitive to specific industry needs, more so than certain other process capabilities.  While we commented on recent developments in the railroad industry, other asset-intensive industries such as utilities, energy services, retail, transportation, process or discrete manufacturing will each have their own unique EAM requirements.  Industry knowledge and experience has special meaning for EAM.

The recent incidents of scaling-down and scaling-up of fleet assets is an indication of the 'new normal' of business volatility.  Customers demand reliability flexibility and up-time, and assets must be managed to yield maximum efficiency. Effective asset management positively contributes to both customer and business responsiveness and bottom line results.

Posted by Bob Ferrari at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Just before boarding the flight to US for IBM Pulse, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters had a media interview with me. While the primary objective was to discuss about the EAM sector and what we plan to showcase at Pulse, conversation invariably moved over to a broader supply chain fabric.

Last year, for those who remember, as part of my SCM predictions for 2010, I had stressed on the need for convergence and integration across supply chain. For me, this was achieved through

• Integrating disparate functions (forecasting with procurement, transportation with warehousing and work management with inventory)
• Near real-time visibility across the supply chain (ideally - if not, at least cutting across business functions), via an alert and event management framework

This year, with SCM being in greater focus as a more visible partner in organizational strategy, my view was on how supply chain can be the driver for

• growth (revenue impact)
• cost (profit impact) and
• differentiation (competitve strategy impact)

These are sometimes achieved through specific business functions, for eg: indirect procurement program focus on cost management while anything on the sell-side whether its enhanced B2B commerce features or store inventory visibility would drive revenues. How would you use supply chain to differentiate your organization vis-a-vis the competition - at the customer-side, supplier-side and partner-side?

More on my interview with Bob here: http://www.theferrarigroup.com/supply-chain-matters/2011/03/02/smarter-asset-management-interview-with-gopi-krishnan-of-infosys-technologies-part-two/

Posted by Gopi Krishnan at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The highlight of Day-2 of course was our joint session with Arizona Public Services which was part of a Post Implementation Panel: Improving Operational Performance. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)'s Donnie Martin went first and then for 30 minutes, Ruchi Mitter from APS, Uma Shankar Padhy from our client services team and Venkat Aduri from the implementation team got to speak on the APS SOAR (not "SORE" as Ruchi reminded everyone) journey which stands for Standardize,Optimize,Automate and Review. I felt our session was a lot more content rich, going beyond program level aspects like change management, incident management and SDLC to more EAM/Maximo/Utility-level specifics.

There were a slew of meetings with IBM senior executive cutting across geographies, industry verticals and business functions. For me, the three areas of alliance focus for building a great EAM practice would be sales, marketing and competency.

• On the competency side of things, we have made significant strides  thanks to a very helpful alliance partnership, the next level of evolution there would be to get the various internal IPs built over years including tools, accelerators and methodologies certified and vetted under the Tivoli umbrella.
• Marketing needs to continue to spread the message and for that, Pulse is as big a platform as one can get. Our several collaterals this time created on diverse aspects from EAM implementation to maturity model to after-sales service have given more momentum there.
• On the sales-front, it will always be about shared interests on the field. That's the message that I have been driving, in terms of focusing on key verticals of common focus and bringing in some cadence to the relationship.

Am I giving away all my practice strategy secrets? Not really, I do believe it all boils down to strategy execution once the thinking hats have been taken off.

Day-2 evening was spent with another set of client folks watching the much celebrated David Copperfield's show, who along with most of his ilk, have been thoroughly (and unfortunately) demystified thanks to the internet. So while the magic didn't always surprise, there is no question that he's a wonderful showman. More than anything else, magic is also about practice (sharpening your saw) and great team work (synchronicity) which is required to create the perfect illusion and the wow factor. This specific logistics client we had dinner with is trying to pull off something truly unique - think communication centers (facilities) with monitoring computers (ITSM), think locomotives (physical assets) with onboard computers (ITSM) and then think, IT servers (ITSM) and data centers (facilities). What smart planet envisaged, they're slowly crafting it all into reality.

I also took the time to walk around the various stalls and booths. Barring another major competitor, we had over a dozen tiny boutique shops focusing on Maximo implementations. It reaffirmed my thinking that we're on the right track here with our Maximo team. There is a strong case for a global SI to be the partner of choice for Maximo implementations worldwide, we need to be that go-to partner. An interesting booth was that of Ariba where they were offering Ariba marketplace for procurement transactions from Maximo, around spares purchase or other material indents going beyond the enterprise, with support also in the invoice & settlement (payment processing) area. There were several mobility providers as well, with iphone extensions naturally being the rage.

The most amazing aspect about being at Pulse (and for me Tivoli brand is all about Maximo!) was getting a feel of the sheer diversity of product usage. Its not about the same finance module in ERP being implemented across industries and geos. For EAM, each client is constructing his or her own totally unique story via a very tailored deployment of the product. We met non-profit medical research companies looking at facilities management & calibration to railroad companies planning out their convergence story to oil & gas companies deploying it for their far flung assets to clients providing maintenance as a service trying to figure out how to track their crews and mobile assets. No two EAM usages are truly alike. In that respect, it celebrates the diversity of assets for each of its customers, down to the individual user looking at his set of assets.

All in all, there is tremendous value to be at Pulse, so we'll surely be back next year. We have had expo theater session, a stump speech (so to speak) during oil & gas group focus meeting, co-session with the customer, one-to-one meetings with senior IBM executives, strong booth presence etc., so in the next year, we would need to up the game further.

Next up would be IBM Impact where the Sterling Commerce acquisition is going to be showcased under the umbrella for the first time, happening in less that 5 weeks from now. Infy will be there and in all likelihood, on an even bigger stage.

 

Posted by Gopi Krishnan at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After reaching Las Vegas late evening on 27-Feb with further delays in hotel check-in and long walks across multiple hotel lobbies in Las Vegas, it was time to start fresh on Day-1 (28-Feb) while fighting massive jet lag - we had multiple meetings scheduled apart from a speaking session for me at the Expo Theatre.

The keynote came from Dean Kamen, entrepreneur and inventor, who outlined the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) initiative, a program to get students interested in engineering, science and technology from high school days. His sincere and genuine presentation (quite a bit like Randy Pausch's famous Last Lecture) drew a series of resouding applauses.

The track kick-offs were next, with Maximo reserving a pride-of-place opening in the Grand Garden Arena of the MGM, a far cry from its "also-there" positioning in a few years back during the first Pulse event post acquisition. As Bill Sawyer said, its a measure of Maximo's importance to IBM driven through its passionate customers that got it here. 300 submissions for white papers didn't hurt either.

Bill Cheng had a round table with Maximo program leads from three distinct set of geos/verticals/user groups - Abu Dhabi Water & Electric Authority, Amtrack and Cummins who shared their experiences around change management, user buy-in, customizations, living with ERP vs EAM question side-by-side and a host of other areas. It also helped that all three have been Maximo users for over a decade.

Later Bill Sawyer called the three awardees on stage for the Maximo innovation awards - Abu Dhabi Water & Electric Authority came up trumps again, along with GM for their pioneering innovative use of integrating PLM with EAM for Chevy Colt. The last winner was another interesting Maximo customer, the City of Corpus Christi in Texas with its game plan of being a smart city with EAM cutting across all city services from public works to water & waste water to road construction to real estate. As one of the users mentioned, "every single thing we have in our city is an asset and need to be managed, maintained and leveraged thus".

I had my speaking session at the expo theater at 2.30PM, where we had an audience of 30 folks who came in to listen to our suggestions for Maximo implementation for Energy & Utility companies. My key message was that there are multiple ways in which organization can kick off their Maximo initiatives

• start in a geo and expand further to other geos, departments or divisions
• start with work management and expand to procurement, inventory management etc or
• start with physical assets and then expand to IT assets and facilities

Regardless of the starting point, there are three aspects to keep in mind when it comes to planning the road map:

1. INTEGRATION with ERP& instrumentation to extend EAM flows
2. CONSOLIDATION of multiple instances and versions
3. CONVERGENCE across asset classes - physical, IT, facilities and mobile

Offline at Pulse, we have two very fruitful meetings as well, one with the worldwide sales head of Tivoli where we talked about partnerships at the "front-end" and the other with a VP for business development & alliances on leveraging our solutions & accelerators on a broader stage (the "back-end" competency part). We had dinner with one of our clients where we discussed among other things the age-old question of what comes first - fit-gap or requirements gathering. We wound up the evening watching a wonderful Cirque de Soleil performance at the Wynn with another set of client folks.

Day-two would be about more meetings and our much awaited joint presentation with Arizona Public Services. More on that later.

Posted by Gopi Krishnan at 9:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)