Data Centers, Green IT: Where does the power go? October 31, 2007
Posted by mukundmohan in News.Tags: data center, Green IT, IT, Technology
comments closed
Quick Hit:
CIO magazine has a good article on green data center and their benefits.
Seventy percent of electricity in a data center powers equipment other than IT gear, according to APC, a vendor of backup products and service in West Kingston, R.I.
If you’re considering how a green data center may save you money, check out APC’s estimates of power usage in a typical 1 megawatt data center:
- Air-cooled chillers: 33 percent
- Uninterruptible power supplies: 18 percent
- Computer room air conditioners: 9 percent
- Power distribution units: 5 percent
- Humidifiers: 3 percent
- Switches: 1 percent
- Lighting: 1 percent
image credit: Goneeshopping.com
Global Supply Chain Visibility October 31, 2007
Posted by mukundmohan in News.Tags: Aberdeen, Gartner, Industry reports, supply chain, Supply Chain Visibility
comments closed
If you’ve visited the Inovis blog a few times, you’ve likely run across a reference and/or link to Aberdeen Group research documents. We keep up with our homework and current events. We also think it’s important, and relevant, to share our evolving knowledge base, even if that means just pointing you in the right direction for information.
For us, the publications and insights of Aberdeen, and Gartner Group and quite a few other media and research vendors, are important to remain competitive within our industry. It’s evolving at an incredible pace. If we had to boil it down, we’d go with Business Community Management, EDI VAN, B2B Gateway, Process Automation and Managed File Transfer. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Aberdeen Group published a report in September titled A View from Above: Global Supply Chain Visibility in a World Gone Flat. If you haven’t yet read the report, we highly recommend it. It offers extremely compelling research into the benefits of managing your global supply chain through automation. It’s essential reading for any manager involved in justifying proposed technology upgrades in their supply chain sector.
The report offers hard research into Best-in-Class Performance indicators vs. the Industry Average and Laggards (those slow to adopt technology). The scales are tipped heavily in favor of the Best-in-Class adopters of supply chain management technology.
The benefits are significant, including:
-
Improved Supply Chain Visibility
-
Improved Delivery Performance
-
Improved Data Quality
-
Improved Supply Chain Agility
All of the above improvements have shown significant positive impact to the bottom line. They are critical components to remaining a viable enterprise, and contributing to ongoing success in any industry.
Why is it more difficult to hire good Supply Chain talent? October 30, 2007
Posted by mukundmohan in News.Tags: eSourcing forum, Hiring, Michael Lamoureux, Sourcing Innovation, Supply Chain Talent, Talent Management
comments closed
Michael G. Lamoureux of Sourcing Innovation and eSourcing forum talks about Talent Retention in Supply Chain.
Given my temperament to tout the talent gap that is now increasing daily, I was happy to see the recent article from the European Leaders Network that stated People Do Matter Most, Really. The article, which referenced a recently completed research study, revealed, again to my content, that the best performing CPOs are concentrating their efforts on their people, capabilities, mindsets, and aspirations.
Every company says “People do matter” but this is one of those times, when McKinsey and Supply Management Institute have quantified it.
The study from McKinsey & Company and the Supply Management Institute found that high performing firms had high performing purchasing departments and that what matters is the people in the purchasing department, how talented they are, how motivated they are, and how they interact with the wider organization. They found that purchasing departments that excel in these aspects of their activities achieve savings two and a half times higher than those that don’t. Furthermore, their positive influence branches out beyond the historical territory of PSM to include areas such as revenue, innovation opportunity generation, and the leadership of commercial change in the company. In more detail, high performing firms demonstrated annual purchasing savings of 3.5%, a 1.4% annual reduction in COGS, and an average EBITDA of 17.7%. Compare this to low performing firms that only achieved a savings of 0.6%, a 0.5% increase in COGS, an an average EBITDA margin of only 12.7%.
Got me thinking about why is it more difficult to hire SCM talent than any other resource:
1. Balance the delicate line between “vendor” supporting and “company” supporting. Most SC professionals walk that tight rope daily. An immense amount of patience is needed to make sure you have the interests of the partners (suppliers, etc) and those of the company. Getting that rare individual who manages both effectively is extremely difficult.
2. Keen eye for detail with a strong strategic focus. Changing regulations, sourcing rules, country outsourcing requirements, – what does not change in Supply chain daily? Keeping on top of it is a headache for most. Yet, most SC professionals cannot be only mired in details. A strong focus on the strategy of managing the company’s critical assets is key. Not too many people in the talent poll can do both with aplomb.
What do yo think? What makes your job more challenging to recruit for?
Cross Industry Integration… October 30, 2007
Posted by Jonathan Gatrell in Business Community Management, Industry Publications.Tags: Data Interchange, EDI, Global trade, Healthcare enrollments, SDO, Transportation Management, VICS
comments closed
More and more companies continue to be challenged to automate new parts of thier businesses communities, which may ultimately require automating with members of different industries with new requirements and a diverse set of transaction requirements previously not understood.
Two key industry organizations, VICS and ASCX12, are delivering new standards support, best practice models and global support requirements for cross-industry interactions and automation.
ASC X12 continues to evolve their organization to deliver meaningful integration for all industries where effectively the transaction becomes the industry bridge. This approach to delivering a cross industry set of transactions helps support better visibility and more effective business community management through use of standards based transactions, whether it’s automating Global Trade, integrating with carriers, Healthcare enrollments or just the traditional Order-to-Cash lifecylce deployed in most organizations.
Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions‘ (VICS) is working to deliver a new comprehensive implementation model for Collaborative Transportation Management, which leverage core X12 transactions, defines the sequence of transaction and the owners of each transaction from a sender/receiver perspective.
As community leaders, standards groups and technology partners work to deliver increased capabilities for cross-industry and global interactions the input from users is a very important part of the process to ensure success. Below is an overview of the new high level X12 presentation which helps understand the work, the value and the impact of a given standards development organization.
With ongoing improvements to existing document content, investment in new transactional models and industry expertise groups such as VICS and X12 will continue to drive improvments for global connectivity and process integration.
The transactions aren’t only about buyer and seller or carrier and customer – they are building blocks for multi-industry interoperability, which is becomming an increasingly important requirement for global business communities.
