The Inovis Blog

The L.A. Roadshow was a blockbuster hit, and Philadelphia looks promising. As we look towards the Philly show and figure out how to make this event enriching to all that attend, we must first look back at what made the L.A. event so successful. Perhaps if I had to pick what I was most impressed by, it would be the creative uses our attendees found for this function.

The peer interaction that occurred during the course of the Roadshow was one of the most pleasant and unexpected results that we encountered. It was great to see customers who trade with each other meet for the first time. As conversations were initiated throughout the room, many people were pleasantly surprised to realize they were talking to one of their suppliers or to their hub. As conversations deepened at every table, attendees shared their personal experiences with each other and were able to make recommendations based on their knowledge of what has worked for them and what hasn’t.

In addition to learning from each other, some attendees took the Roadshow as an opportunity to study Inovis solutions and see if these offerings were a right fit for their company. Other customers were just curious to see how certain solutions work and what they look like.

I’m excited to see what happens in Philadelphia and encourage everyone in the area to attend. Take the opportunity to meet your partners, hear from Inovis employees, and tell us whatever’s on your mind.

Learn more about the Philadelphia show >>

Inovis continues to expand our efforts on delivering strategic partnerships to help transform your business communities.   A recent announcement of our partnership with Small World Labs is one such partnership which will help drive global collaboration, knowledge sharing and improved business community management for our customers and their business partners.  Michael Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of Small World Labs has contributed a guest post to help better understand the value of social networks below. 

There continues to be a great deal of excitement around social networks.  MySpace currently has 275 million members and Facebook claims more than 70 million.  Those are big number numbers that no one can deny.  Is this just hype?  How does this affect your business?   Can your business leverage a social network?

 

The interesting thing about social networking is that the value is in the network, not the technology.  The knowledge, expertise and personal interactions drive the benefit – one user at a time. 

 

Businesses and organizations have started using existing social networks for a myrid of purposes – knowledge sharing, marketing and providing access inside and outside of the business for key constituents.    Marketing was perhaps the first key area seen using social networking.   In 2006, Burger King ran a successful, well known advertising campaign featuring a MySpace profile for “The King.” Over 140,000 people added The King as a friend  and represented a great use case on how public social network participation can drive revenue, loyalty and awareness.  The downside is public networks have limited to no restrictions how the network is managed and focused.

 

As time goes on, you’ll see more and more organizations incorporate “community” into their overall strategy.  Those that do will begin to actively reap the benefits that their community members provide through collaboration.  Those that don’t move first will likely see a competitive necessity to react as their competitors start to take advantage of this arena.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about this topic you can check out a specific blog post on social networking for businesses or the general Small World Labs blog

Thanks for the post MW!

If you are like me, with kids and are looking for a Nintendo Wii this Christmas, good luck. They’re all sold out. Why? Wired has a good piece on it.

It’s not that the company isn’t trying. It’s bumped up production from about 1 million to 1.8 million a month, says Nintendo Senior Vice President George Harrison, with roughly a third of them earmarked for North America. Last week was Nintendo’s best since the Wii’s launch, with 350,000 sold in the United States alone. In comparison, Microsoft sold about that many Xbox 360s last month. It’s a remarkable triumph for a console focused on the kind of simple games skeptics originally wrote off as “thumb candy for dummies.”

 

 

So why dont they make more you ask? Most of our retail customers know this already.

The shortage stems from this unprecedented demand, and from the fact that Nintendo had to make its final production decisions for the holidays early this year, Harrison says. The company planned on being able to stockpile Wiis through the summer, when demand for videogames typically slackens.

1. Since most manufacturing is no longer in the US, on average retailers need about 3+ months to get the product manufactured, shipped across from the far east then on trucks to the distribution into the store.

“Typically, we’d have begun stockpiling console hardware back in August” for the holiday season, Harrison says. “But this year, we were selling all the Wii we could get, and we got all the way through the summer with basically no inventory in our warehouse.”

2.  Unable to forecast demand. It is a fickle and demand driven world and its more difficult to predict which products will be the “hits” versus “duds”.

3.  Just in time manufacturing has introduced a lot more risk in the supply chain. There’s inefficiencies still in most supply chains regardless of how well companies have progressed over the years. Which is the most exciting part of being in this business. We have provide so much in terms of Supply Chain ROI and savings over the last few decades and there’s still a lot more to go.

What about your company? When did you complete all your “forecasting” for the holiday year?

Hi guys,

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