The Inovis Blog

Every Christmas, Santa miraculously delivers billions of presents to boys and girls in every region of the world. What’s even more impressive is that he always gives the right presents to the intended recipients. Just how does he do it? Well, while I can’t explain how he travels the world so quickly—or, at least not in this blog post—I can reveal Santa’s little secret. Santa uses RFID and data synchronization to ensure that he obtains the correct items, and distributes them to the right places.

What is data synchronization? According to rfidupdate.com, “data synchronization is the practice of having product data be identical—synchronized—across all trading partners’ systems.” This is important for Santa. He has a lot of trading partners, and a lot of toys to pick and choose from. Without data synchronization, Santa might see that Candy Cane’s Tasty Treats, Co. sells candy canes at 75 cents a pop, while Cheap Carl’s Candy Canes are 25 cents each. Without data synchronization, Santa might purchase from Cheap Carl only to find that his are made with cheap ingredients and they taste like black jelly beans. Yuck! Candy Cane’s goods, on the other hand, are made with love, her freshest ingredients, and taste exactly as a candy cane should. Thanks to data synchronization, Santa knows exactly what he’s getting and will know important details of every product he gets from a trading partner. The information won’t get lost in translation, either. Data synchronization ensures that the data will be consistent whether your partner’s using XML or EDI.

Santa’s second biggest secret is his use of RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification). Technovelgy.com describes RFID as “small electronic devices that consist of a small chip and an antenna. The chip typically is capable of carrying 2,000 bytes of data or less.
The RFID device serves the same purpose as a bar code or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card or ATM card; it provides a unique identifier for that object. And, just as a bar code or magnetic strip must be scanned to get the information, the RFID device must be scanned to retrieve the identifying information.”

Santa’s elves scan each gift and sort presents into piles according to the household they will be delivered to. Next, the elves bag each pile and label them. Santa’s even trickier than you think. He has placed an RFID chip on every chimney—or front door for those without chimneys—and scans each residence once his sleigh has landed. After Santa has successfully delivered every present, he checks off his list and tracks his presents to assure that each present is warm and cozy under the correct Christmas tree.

Most of Christmas is purely magic, but even Santa needs a little help from technology to make life easier and more accurate!

So I was browsing various sites and found an interesting write up from network world on the retirement of a mainframe which is a common trend we are seeing as many companies are moving to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for the next generation of high performance computing regardless of the legacy hardware platform.  Below is an excerpt:

Some users have gone to great lengths to dispose of their mainframes but few have gone this far. On November 21, 2007, the University of Manitoba said goodbye to its beloved mainframe computer by holding a New Orleans-style jazz funeral for its 47-year-old IBM 650, Betelgeuse…

I know have have participated in numerous platform refreshes and other critical projects which ultimately resulted in the new MESH platform and each milestone was met with excitement and new opportunity through Inovis and for our customers who help drive improvements to our solutions, so I can clearly appreciate the pomp and circumstance of retiring a 47 year old mainframe.    

With the ever increasing requirements to move towards real-time, rapid/agile development and improved service levels the retirement of legacy platforms for many of our customers is a daily event and hopefully seen with similar excitement and opportunity such projects provide.     What projects have you recently completed in your infrastructure to jazz up your trading community?

I was going through my normal routine of checking out Oddly Enough News a few days back, and the headline that caught my eye was “Parking chief fired for illegal parking.” Recently in Rome, the city’s Traffic and Parking Chief lost his job after he was caught parking in a disabled parking spot using a permit that belonged to an eighty six year old woman. This guy was clearly not living within the rules he was enforcing.

Here’s the bottom line. When you’re trying to be in a leadership position, and you’re trying to drive the behavior of others, you’ve got to live (at the bare minimum) by the rules you’ve lain down, and ideally live a step above them.

This is also true within the supply chain. When you’re a hub and are trying to roll out and drive the adoption of electronic commerce standards within your suppliers, you had better be clean. You need to make sure that you are managing, maintaining, and driving the highest quality and consistency of data that you possibly can if you expect your suppliers to do the same.

If you’re going to hold your suppliers to strict standards, implement chargebacks, and other penalties for late or incorrect data; you’d better make sure that you have your own act together. Don’t be the Parking Chief parking illegally and trying to force others to follow a set of rules that you yourself are not following with your own data, timeliness, and accuracy.