Electronic Cash News

For global companies, transportation costs are souring to the extent that shipping costs are fundamentally changing the value-added proposition of off-shore outsourcing. For companies with high freight costs (steel, cars, and so on), these companies can now be extremely more competitive manufacturing locally than overseas.

E-Sourcing Forum’s posting, Reverse Globalization, provides a good overview on how transportation costs are creating a fundamental change in how global companies do business. Cost examples include:

“…the cost of shipping a 40ft Container from the Far East to the Eastern Seaboard of the US, has almost tripled since 2000 ($3,000 to $8,000). This will double again once the price of a barrel of Oil reaches $200.

Furthermore, at Today’s oil prices, every 10% increase in a trip distance, translates into a 4.5% increase in transport costs.”

Construction and project-centric businesses have to manage their supply chains more to minimize overall project failure than just to reduce costs. Project-centric businesses use their supply chains to manage risks. Supply chain costs are secondary than the risk of inadequate resources or meeting critical project deadlines and deliverables. Project-centric businesses must look at the total project cost instead of supply chain costs in isolation. To that end, project-centric businesses are using supply chain systems to provide better visibility, less risk, lower total costs, and strengthen supplier relationships.

SupplyChainBrain has a great article, Lifting the Burden of Project-Centric Supply Chains. This article talks about the five drivers of project-centric businesses: risk, cost, cash flow, time, resources. Additionally, enterprise systems are now increasingly being used by project-centric businesses for visibility and control, strengthening supplier communications, managing risk, and even managing return on investment (ROI).

Not sure if it is the downturn in the economy or just a Perfect Storm, but companies are in great need of supply chain talent. Our current economic climate is increasing the need for companies to drive significant costs out of a company’s supply network, continue to cut-order ship time, optimize supplier / outsouring relationships, assure business continuity of changing supply sources, and manage / gain visibility of globally dispersed operations. This is what supply chain professionals do best.

See SupplyChainer posting, Lucas Group Reports Substantial Hiring Growth in Supply Chain Logistics.

Most companies desire to have automated information exchange with their suppliers. This is especially true in the area of paying supplier invoices. Besides saving on administrative labor, companies also have opportunities to take advantage of supplier discounts and proactively manage working capital. There are four stages to Accounts Payable (AP) automation: manual, tactical, collaborative, and working capital.

Manual Solution: centralized, manually process and approve invoices

Tactical Solution: OCR, document and approval workflow, online reporting

Collaborative Solution: Outsource, automated matching, online dispute / resolution

Working Capital Solution: 100% electronic invoice (EDI / information exchange), supplier self-service, integrated purchase-to-pay processing

See SDCExec.com article, Emerging Payment and Discount Paradigms in the Supply Chain for more information

A 2008 survey from Deloitte LLP and National Venture Capital Association shows that U.S. still maintains top ranking in technology innovation. Specific technology sectors include semiconductors, software, bio-pharmaceuticals, medical devices and clean technology. The 2008 Global Venture Capital Survey included opinions from almost 400 venture capitalists.

Read more from Pittsburgh Business Journal’s news item, U.S. still leads world in technology innovation

Aberdeen Group in their Annual State of the Market Report announced the top 100 technology vendors for 2008. This year business intelligence and analytics software vendors are the top growth area beating out mobility technology vendors last year. The top vendors were chosen from survey respondents that identified the top three technology companies that had the most influence on their business performance over the course of the past year. The top 100 most influential technology vendors include:

1. Microsoft—— 35. i2—– 69. Xerox
2. Oracle—– 36. EDS—– 70. Front Range
3. SAP—– 37. QAD—– 71. Internec
4. IBM—– 38. Ariba—– 72. Manugistics
5. Cisco—– 39. CA—– 73. Palm
6. Hewlett Packard—– 40. Epicor—– 74. Unisys
7. Dell—– 41. Juniper—– 75. Yahoo!
8. Salesforce.com—– 42. Sprint/Nextel—– 76. 3com
9. EMC—– 43. Tata Consulting—– 77. ABB
10. Sun Microsystems—– 44. ADP—– 78. CANON
11. Google—– 45. Fujitsu—– 79. Capgemini
12. RIM (Blackberry)—– 46. Intuit—– 80. Informatica
13. Siemens—– 47. Manhattan Associates—– 81. Interwoven
14. Adobe—– 48. Novell—– 82. McKesson
15. AT&T—– 49. Red Prairie—– 83. Mincom
16. Apple—– 50. SunGard—– 84. Mitel
17. Sage—– 51. Telstra—– 85. Netsuite
18. Infor—– 52. BMC—– 86. Omniture
19. Nortel—– 53. BT—– 87. Progress
20. Avaya—– 54. CSC—– 88. Rackspace
21. Red Hat—– 55. Skype—– 89. SPSS
22. Motorola—– 56. Infosys—– 90. Syntel
23. Verizon Wireless—– 57. NetApp—– 91. Teradata
24. Dassault—– 58. Symantec—– 92. T-Mobile
25. Accenture—– 59. Huawei—– 93. Toshiba
26. Sony Ericsson—– 60. IFS—– 94. Websense
27. Alcatel - Lucent—– 61. Microstrategy—– 95. Servigistics
28. AutoDesk—– 62. Aruba—– 96. Genesys
29. Intel—– 63. CDW—– 97. Logility
30. SAS—– 64. Concur—– 98. Kronos
31. Citrix—– 65. Exact—– 99. Rockwell Automation
32. Nokia—– 66. Hitachi—– 100. Checkpoint Systems

See CNNMoney.com posting, Aberdeen Group Announces Top 100 Most Influential Technology Vendors for 2008 for more details.

With talks of recession corporations naturally focus more on cost-cutting opportunities. Many companies will just make across-the-board cuts in General and Administrative (G&A) costs, but the big opportunities are in looking at corporate business processes. This is especially true in the areas of supply chain and technology. Reducing costs through use of best practices, standardization, elimination, or simplification offers companies more opportunities than blanket cost cuts. Having a lean G&A is good, but having superior, cost-effective business processes are better.

In reading The Hackett Group’s research article, G&A Spending Cuts Offset 21%-41% of the Anticipated Decline in Pre-Tax Profit During Recession, they talk about global corporations that “lift and shift” business processes to reduce costs. In their examples, they basically talked about outsourcing organizations overseas such as call centers or consolidating data centers. These are good example of optimizing business processes versus just taking an organization approach of dictating across-the-board cost cuts.

I continue to see automation technology as the best enabler for reducing costs in corporations that focus on continue process improvements. For corporations focused more on organizational structure than processes, technology just becomes another cost center.

Also, see Sourcing Innovation’s posting, Hackett Hacks Away at Recession Declines.

What is the difference between a software designer, software engineer, programmer and software developer? The short answer for figuring out a software development job title is to read the associated job description. Companies can provide a wide variety of job descriptions for the same software development job title. Some companies are very definitive in determining job titles versus other companies may use job titles loosely. I would think that a well-defined software development job title would be aligned with the software development life cycle (SDLC). For example:

- architect / designer - would be involved with requirements and specs.

- programmer - large company - coding; small company - does all development

- engineer - broad term, but follows well-established SDLC processes and standards (i.e. not an “artist” or one-man show)

- developer - broad term, but person can do coding

Links: Software Engineering WiKi Page, Software Development Wiki Page

There are many software products that are so full of features that the features get in the way of the customer having a consistent, positive experience. I know this is true with many anti-virus programs as well as many graphic software and project manager software packages. Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis Curve provides a graphic illustration of features versus experience. On a bell-shaped curve the customer’s experience at first is that they want more features, but at some point in the product life cycle the features get in the way of the experience. See Shmula posting On Customer Obsession for more on product experience versus product features.

Avery Dennison, the label maker, has a great RFID 101 video that provides an extensive overview of what is RFID and how RFID technology can be used to track items, boxes, and pallets. Avery is a natural fit to be a leader in passive RFID tags. Most passive RFID tags are now being embedded in labels for good reason - costs, efficiency, quality control. Avery who has the experience of making bar code labels that can withstand any environment is demonstrating they have the knowledge to produce cheap, quality RFID tags.

Avery Dennison’s RFID 101 video covers all the basics and challenges of passive RFID tags. This includes how they are made, how readers work, how RFID labels are created, how they are applied, facility installation challenges, and how RFID technology can be used. Also, good discussion on RF frequency standards and the Electronic Product Code (EPC). See Avery Dennison’s RFID 101 video for more information (Note: you have to sign in to view video). Also, Modern Materials Handling has a lot of good links on RFID technology.