QuickREAD

January 3, 2007

Be a Change Detective, and Save Your Enterprise
Your success depends on your ability to detect emerging patterns of change clearly and precisely. You have to look at the business very broadly and from the outside in and have the tenacity and imagination to fill in the gaps until the foggy picture becomes clearer and more complete. This know-how is how you get ahead of the curve and on the offensive instead of constantly putting out fires.
Source: CIO Insight, http://www.cioinsight.com

Chinese Manufacturers Say, 'Go East'--to Eastern Europe
The grain fields around the Czech town of Nymburk are fallow at this time of year. But by next summer a new kind of harvest will be added to the wheat and barley. Chinese electronics manufacturer Sichuan Changhong is building a $30m factory in Nymburk that will turn out 1 million flat-screen televisions a year when it swings into full production. "Getting Changhong into Nymburk is a big success for us," says Ladislav Kutik, mayor of the town of 15,000 an hour east of Prague.
Kutik and his fellow Czechs are experiencing one of the stranger paradoxes of globalization. China's rise has created plenty of headaches for Central Europe: Competition from the mainland has devastated the region's low tech, low-margin industries such as textiles and shoemaking. But like Changhong, growing numbers of companies are starting to manufacture in Central Europe as an alternative to production in China. While Japanese electronics manufacturers have been making their goods in the region for a decade or more, their counterparts based in China and Taiwan now are both opening new plants and expanding older ones there to get closer to Europe's wealthy consumers.
Source: Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com

With RFID, Canadian National Says, No More Missing Chassis
We've all had the exasperating experience: a small object, perhaps a pen or eyeglasses we were using moments ago vanishes into thin air the instant it's laid down on the desk.
The folk at Canadian National Railway Co. know the story. In their case, however, the missing object is often a hulking chassis, a wheeled frame hauling a 20- or 40-foot steel intermodal container with over 24,000kg of cargo.
It was happening at CN's intermodal terminal in Brampton, Ontario until the railway company deployed ruggedized radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on some 2,000 chassis to track their whereabouts.
The Brampton yard, which is CN's largest intermodal terminal, is the first Canadian rail facility to experiment with and reap RFID's benefits.
Source: CRM Daily, http://www.crm-daily.com

Control Who Gets 'Inside' with Identity, Access Management Software
Managing the identity of people who have access to critical business data has long been a key component of effective information security strategies. But it's taken on greater urgency with the push to mitigate corporate risk by restricting access to applications and information.
Identity and access management tools verify the identity of people--including employees, business partners and customers--and control the applications and information those people can access.
A major benefit of the technology: It's helping companies comply with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires public companies to back up financial statements with proof of the procedures and controls in place.
Source: Baseline, http://www.baselinemag.com

Church's Recipe for IT Success: Outsource Even More to Indian Company
Fast-food chain Church's Chicken is planning to outsource more IT functions to Sonata Software Ltd. in Bangalore, India, including application development and IT consulting.
The decision is a result of cost savings that the company has already received from Sonata, says Harsha Agadi, president and CEO of Church's Chicken, an Atlanta-based chain owned by private equity fund Arcapita Inc.
Church's Chicken moved its IT infrastructure management about a year ago from IBM to Sonata, a mid-sized outsourcing company. The deal was worth $5m over five years.
The company has saved about 40 percent of its IT infrastructure management costs by offshoring to Sonata, Agadi said in an interview last week.
The savings that Sonata is generating has freed up cash for Church's Chicken to open 20 new restaurants that will generate about $20m of sales annually, according to Agadi.
Source: Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com

Three Things You MUST Know About RFID: Scanners, Radios, Warehouses
Anyone trying to master RFID will need to examine its three key components: scanners, radios, and warehouses. The reason for putting scanning expertise first is because the transition from barcodes to radio tags is a relatively easy transition. Think of each item as tagged with its own radio code rather than a physical one printed on a label. Any successful RFID deployment also needs to take into account potential radio issues and how wireless networks are deployed across the enterprise. Finally, warehousing and inventory experience are needed to collect the scanned information and integrate into any existing supply chain applications. "Essentially, what ERP did to the enterprise, RFID will do to the supply chain. It's all about centralization, visibility and automation," says Marlo Brooke, senior partner at Avatar Partners, an Irvine, Calif.-based systems integrator.
It also helps to understand the types of goods being tagged. Take the two situations where large appliances such as dishwashers and cases of disposable razors are being tagged. If you lose track of one or two cases of the latter product, it isn't as much of a big deal as if lose a couple of appliances. Ultimately, the IT shops that will succeed at RFID will be able to handle the massive data dumps and route this data to the right places within their applications infrastructure, and be able to act on this information as part of their decision support systems, too.
Source: Information Week, http://www.informationweek.com

Most U.S. Multinationals Handled Their Crises Fairly Well, Survey Finds
The bad news is that nearly half of U.S. multinational corporations in a recent survey faced major crisis situations in the past years. The good news is that almost three-quarters of those were pleased with their companies' resilience and performance in dealing with those crises. A quarter said the response was "outstanding."
Looking ahead, two-thirds of the companies surveyed are at least moderately concerned about their preparedness for a crisis in the next three years. That percentage jumps to 73 percent among companies that already have faced a crisis in recent times.
Source: Industry Week, http://www.industryweek.com

Business Transformation (Hardly a New Concept) Really Began to Take Hold in 2006
Chief among the important business and technology trends, which began germinating in prior years, that started to blossom in 2006 was the often disruptive idea of business transformation.
Last year, business transformation--with its underlying notion of dramatic change to spur growth--became mainstream in industry discourse, a sign that the years ahead will see tangible manifestations of this strategy as manufacturers pick up the pace of reinvesting in plants and equipment. The results of a CEO survey by IBM in March underscored that business transformation was starting to take hold in the industry.
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com

How Are Business Process Outsourcing Deals Changing Today?
"Today a BPO deal looks more like a merger and acquisition transaction than an outsourcing deal," says Steve Stubitz, head of Hewlett-Packard's BPO for the Americas. "They work best when there are synergies in capabilities between the buyer and the outsourcer. It's like working with a partner to do things they don't want to do or aren't good at.
"In addition, today it's much more important that the two organizations are in sync. Today's BPO deals demand a higher degree of cultural affinity because it is impossible to predict what will happen over the seven-year term of a deal."
Source: Outsourcing Journal, http://www.outsourcing-journal.com

Market for Customer Analytics Software May Exceed $400M by 2010
The global customer analytics software market was worth $296m in 2005, and is expected to grow to a value of $419m by 2010, representing an impressive compound annual growth rate of 7.2 percent for the 2005 to 2010 period. Across this timeframe, North America will be the largest contributor to the global market, while the Caribbean and Latin American region is expected to experience the strongest growth over the period, at a CAGR of 20.6 percent.
Source: CBR Online, http://www.cbronline.com

Goal of CRM Software? To Help Sales Reps Help Themselves
Automating the sales process is one of the most important functions of a CRM system. In fact, much of today's CRM software has its origins back in the mid-'80s and early '90s, not as "customer relationship management" software, but instead as "sales automation" software.
Although much has changed over the past 2 decades, the goal of sales automation software remains the same: make it easy to help sales reps help themselves, and their customers, to increase sales. CRM software is designed to accomplish this goal in two ways: by automating redundant parts of the sales process, which saves time, and by putting all the necessary information right at the fingertips of the sales team.
Part of the challenge for a sales manager is getting new reps up to speed so they can get the maximum benefit out of their company's CRM system. There are still many salespeople who have never used CRM software. And, even if someone has used CRM before, the implementation is usually quite different from one company to the next.
Of course, after new reps have been trained on the basics of using a CRM system, it's time to help them hit the ground running with proven methods to increase sales.
Source: BPM Today, http://www.bpm-today.com

Portal Expands Functionalities to Match Army's Appetite for Information Sharing
Army Knowledge Online, the Army's one portal, is expanding and increasing functionalities to match the Army's growing appetite for collaboration and information sharing. Expanding from 97,000 users in October 2000 to its present day strength of over 1.8 million account holders, AKO provides premier classified and unclassified enterprise functions, tools, and services to the warfighter, institutional, and greater Army community.
Source: Line 56, http://www.line56.com

Smart Foreign Execs Won't Object to 'Harmonious' Society in China
In Beijing these days, it's common to hear the phrase "Building a Harmonious Society" being uttered by CFOs in both public and private. This newly minted Communist phrase is being taken seriously in a way that recent party lines never were.
That's because the phrase is not just a slogan, but also a milestone: the government has, in effect, conceded that China's headlong rush to capitalism has created a social gap between rich and poor. It's a slogan with teeth -- new laws will be enacted to support an ambitious social agenda to narrow the divide.
The laws not only aim to strengthen the rights of workers and property owners, but also to introduce fair practices into China's anything-goes market. A bankruptcy law will bolster the rights of creditors over workers. Much-debated legal protections for owners of private property, a first in modern China, are likely to be approved. Taxes for foreign-invested enterprises will also increase, to nearly 30 percent from a previous "holiday" bracket of 15 percent.
Not surprisingly, some foreign executives have reacted negatively to this legislation. Many view legal protections as added costs in a market that is already growing more costly. A prescient few have tempered their resistance, however, thereby gaining a competitive advantage.
Source: CFO, http://www.cfo.com

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2007 Supply Chain Management Resource Guide & Executive Yearbook
The annual complete source of industry suppliers of solutions, systems and services, industry conferences, exhibitions, seminars and executive education programs.
And some of the most respected SCM research organizations and analysts take a look at the past year's developments and suggest what to look for in 2007.

In the January 2007 issue of Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies magazine.