Chemical Industry Blog

A Pause for the Blog

MSDNArchive — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:36:56 GMT

Hi everyone,

I’m posting this to let you know that I took on a new challenge at Microsoft and that means this blog will “pause” until my replacement in chemical and process manufacturing is brought on board.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 3rd year for the blog. Judging by the number of readers, it is accomplishing my goal of driving awareness of Microsoft’s commitment to the chemical and process manufacturing industry and sharing great stories of how our customers are using information technology to advance their business.

I appreciate all the connections and relationships this blog has created. Most of you don’t comment directly on the blog, but you’re private emails through the comment form are just as appreciated and just as useful for making connections.

I wish everyone continued success in the future.

-Brian

Microsoft Acquires Process Manufacturing Solution

MSDNArchive — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:49:10 GMT

I’m excited to write that yesterday we announced the acquisition of four industry solutions including a process manufacturing solution for Dynamics AX from Fullscope, Inc.

These acquisitions signify our continued commitment to driving innovation for our process manufacturing customers and partners and is consistent with our industry strategy to build a foundation of industry functionality into the Microsoft Dynamics product line.

Most of our process manufacturing Dynamics AX customers are mid-sized companies or subsidiaries/divisions of large, global companies. Having this common industry functionality delivered as part of Dynamics AX helps increase predictability and expedite the rate of innovation for our customers.

Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX adds key capabilities including:

Control of continuous or near-continuous manufacturing processes involving flexible formulas and recipes
Quality management
Integrated tracking of raw materials, by-products and co-products, and finished goods
Multi-dimensional end product and inventory control

Click here for more information on the acquisition and for more information on Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX.

-Brian

Medway Plastics Case Study – Online COllaboration

MSDNArchive — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:48:34 GMT

We posted a new video case study of Medway Plastics’ use of Microsoft Office Live Meeting to help increase productivity and drive down costs for both collaborative product development and customer service.

Medway Plastics, a family-owned business, is a custom injection molding and tooling company based in Long Beach, CA.

The video describes their move to Microsoft Online Services, including the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite and Live Meeting.

It’s a 2 minute video focused on their use of Live Meeting. I love to see technology applied to save money and provide a better customer experience.

Thank you to Medway Plastics for sharing your story.

-Brian

Coca-Cola Enterprises Moves to Cloud Computing with Microsoft Online Services

MSDNArchive — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:29:42 GMT

Cloud computing, in particular the move of email and other business productivity services out of your data center and into the cloud has a rising interest in the chemical industry.

I’d like to share this new case study featuring Coca-Cola Enterprises, the world’s largest marketer, producer and distributor of Coca-Cola products.

While certainly not a chemical company, the challenges they faced will be familiar to this community – rationalizing a complex IT vendor landscape, driving IT costs down, and delivering a unified collaborative workspace and corporate intranet across their 72,000 employees.

We also produced an associated video which can be played from the case study page with interviews of several CCE execs.

Thank you to Coca-Cola Enterprises for sharing your story.

Also, if you are interested in checking out our Business Productivity Online Services offering, the best place to start is here.

-Brian Willson

Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration Using SharePoint 2007

MSDNArchive — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:42:45 GMT

Guest blogging today is Dave Lassiter. Dave is our Solutions Director for Manufacturing & Resources and is responsible for solutions that we take to multiple vertical markets inside of the Manufacturing & Resources sector. One of those solutions is Supply Chain Visibility & Collaboration.

-Brian

~~~~~

Microsoft and AMR Research recently presented a webinar on how organizations can harness the value of their supply chain data towards improved performance using visibility and collaboration. If you would like to learn more about the latest industry trends in supply chain visibility and collaboration and the Microsoft/Infosys offering, please click the link above and watch the replay.

This current economy is certainly challenging all of us to do more with less. As supply chain professionals, how often in the last year have you heard, “Cut costs, downsize your workforce, reduce procurement costs, and scale back inventory and do it all without impacting revenues or customer service”? Sound familiar?

We hear from our customers again and again that they need to quickly improve their supply chain performance. However, customers with large ERP and legacy system investments have difficulty responding to critical business initiatives in a timely and cost-effective manner. These projects can take 9 to 12 months and cost over a million dollars. No supply chain executive or CIO who values his or her job would dare take this traditional mega-IT project to the CEO for approval in this market.

Without this “Big IT’ project option, line of business executives and IT executives scramble to find niche solutions to get them what they think they need quickly and at a perceived low cost. However, these niche solutions further complicate the customer’s already complex and expensive information technology infrastructure.

Now, “legions” of highly compensated consultants are often required to manipulate these systems for a “business transformation” project that will cost millions of dollars and take years to implement. So what are these executives to do? Another problem many executives face is their supply chain team works around their existing legacy systems using Microsoft Excel and other Microsoft Office tools to run their supply chain. People within their organization are struggling to easily find and manage the data they need to make efficient decisions around how to run their business.

Microsoft has built products and solutions that are easy to use, quick to deploy, simple to maintain, and leverage existing investments. For example, one of our fastest growing enterprise products to date is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. SharePoint provides a proven, low cost, intuitive, easy to use collaboration and Web 2.0 desktop work place for employees. Many companies own these capabilities and are beginning to leverage this investment for role-based dashboards for performance management and streamlined, simplified, lean business processes.

Having such a platform in place can be particularly useful when a customer needs to quickly deploy a new business process to improve performance, to achieve cost savings, or meet revenue growth goals.

So, what does this platform have to do with helping our supply chain executive and CIO out of their “do more with less” dilemma? Let me tell you about a customer I personally worked with to help get a solution like this in place:

One customer with over $1 Billion spend annually on direct materials had buyers who spent a large portion of their day searching across 24 separate screens in their standard ERP solution for the information they needed to process a routine purchase order for direct materials. This included looking at supplier, material, quality, and other records in the ERP system. One of the top 3 business initiatives of this customer was to reduce raw material costs. The customer was also under pressure to significantly reduce their overall IT budget. The customer had both ERP and Microsoft capabilities to improve their business processes. The customer needed a "low-cost", quick time-to-value solution which allowed their buyers to more quickly process purchase orders and have the “real-time” visibility needed to reduce purchase price variance. The Vice President Supply Chain had hard dollar cost savings targets that were going to be very difficult to meet without a simplified business process and KPI's to track performance improvement. A Six Sigma team identified what the "role-based" dashboard needed to look like to implement a lean business process. The customer selected Microsoft SharePoint versus typical options other customer might use like: (1) a custom ERP development effort; (2) purchase and roll out of the SRM ERP module; or (3) purchase of a SRM module from another vendor. The customer now has a project underway to deploy a "Buyer Workbench" using the Microsoft platform with a 12 week implementation plan for a production roll out seamlessly integrated with their ERP system of record. The customer already owned the Microsoft licenses so the only costs for this project were the time of the internal project team and the supporting Microsoft Global System Integrator partner services. This customer has also selected Microsoft's for their enterprise Business Intelligence solution on top of ERP and other legacy systems. They are now able to role these capabilities out to their employees across various functional areas providing a simple, intuitive role-based dashboard for their role in the organization.

One of Microsoft’s key Global Alliance partners, Infosys, has created a role-based performance management workbench offerings (Supply Chain Visibility) that can easily connect to a customer’s legacy systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to enable “real-time” exception based Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Infosys has created these role-based desktops for various functional roles in an organization such as Procurement, Manufacturing, Materials Management, and Service Management. Infosys was selected to provide the "Buyer Workbench" mentioned in the paragraph above. Infosys has developed an offering which allows customers to get a "fast start" on a project to support their key business initiatives in streamlining work processes and improving "real-time" exception based performance management. This includes a data model, best practice KPI’s, templates, reports, and dashboards.

I am seeing a large pick up in these kind of “quick hit” projects with our customers. The biggest challenge Microsoft faces right now is helping customers become more aware of how they can leverage these capabilities that they typically already "own." I talked to a Chief Information Officer at the recent AMR Supply Chain Executive Conference; he was considering looking at an ERP solution for pricing analytics and procurement. These were two key business initiatives at his Company. He was not aware Microsoft partners like Infosys had solutions in the same space. He was very pleased to find out there were Microsoft based solutions available since they run a tight ship and can’t afford multi-million ERP based software and large business transformation type services projects.

If you are considering a supply chain visibility project, you should consider Microsoft and our partner Infosys who can most likely give you a compelling proposal at a significantly reduced cost and time to value. Your users will be happier using the Microsoft office experience to do their job!

Webcast Question Follow-Up: Scalability of Dynamics CRM

MSDNArchive — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:34:41 GMT

I just received all the questions that were on the webcast. I’ll go through those over the next several days. One that indirectly came up, was the scalability of Dynamics CRM.

The day after the webcast, we released the following information on Dynamics CRM scalability. Working with Intel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 scaled to more than 50,000 users concurrently over a high-volume workload.

You can read about the details here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jun09/06-03IntelMSBenchmarkPR.mspx

-Brian

Replay of ChemWeek Dynamics CRM Webcast Featuring Arch CHemicals

MSDNArchive — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:07:01 GMT

For those who couldn’t attend the live webcast, the replay is available on the ChemWeek site at http://www.chemweek.com/crm.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

-Brian

ChemWeek Sales Productivity Webcast on Dynamics CRM

MSDNArchive — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:30:24 GMT

Thank you to everyone who joined today’s webcast highlighting Arch Chemical’s experience deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help the drive sales productivity.

We weren’t able to get to all the questions, so I am working on getting a hold of them and answering any that are broadly relevant on the blog in a future post.

Once ChemWeek posts the recording, I’ll post a link here for those who wanted to join, but couldn’t.

We published a formal case study with Arch Chemicals, which you can find here.

-Brian

Tackling the Sales Productivity Challenge

MSDNArchive — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:38:18 GMT

I was invited by ChemWeek to contribute a blog entry for the upcoming webcast on June 2nd @ 10:00am Eastern, highlighting Arch Chemicals use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to drive sales productivity.

You can find the blog post here (subscription may be required). The blog post explains our point-of-view on how technology can be used to drive sales productivity. Here’s a hint, it’s about more than just CRM.

I’ll create a follow-up post after the webcast to summarize for those who wanted to attend, but couldn’t. I’ll also point you to the formal case study we just completed with Arch Chemicals.

I hope you can join the webcast. You will hear a great story from Arch Chemicals. You can sign up here.

-Brian

Enabling the Agile Supply Chain

MSDNArchive — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:26:00 GMT

Join AMR Research, Microsoft and Infosys for a June 9th webcast about supply chain visibility & collaboration. See the invitation below. You can register at http://video.webcasts.com/events/amrr001/30790.

Enable the Agile Supply Chain

Unlock Value with Actionable Insights and Collaborative Execution

A joint webcast co-hosted by AMR Research, Microsoft and Infosys Technologies.

The current global economic turmoil has substantially increased the risk inherent in today’s supply chains, requiring immediate changes in how enterprises manage them in order to reduce risk, increase performance, minimize cost and respond with agility to changing market conditions. AMR Research analysts Noha Tohamy and Fenella Sirkisoon summarized the nature of these required changes in an Alert Article entitled, “Managing the Biggest Supply Chain Risk of All: Constant Change” (December 3, 2008):

“The only successful approach to managing supply chains is to assume constant change and embed the ability to shift focus, reshape supply chain strategies, and rebalance resources on a more frequent basis. To do that, companies must embark on the following mitigation strategies:

· Rebalancing geographic manufacturing and sourcing portfolios

· Managing the supplier base and collaborating with trading partners

· Building better supply chain visibility.”

Join AMR Research, Microsoft and Infosys as we discuss strategies for supply chain cost reduction and risk mitigation, and learn about the Infosys/Microsoft Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration Workbench solutions that:

· Reduce supply chain cost and enhance agility and performance through actionable intelligence and collaborative initiatives.

· Build on your existing system and infrastructure investments.

· Accelerate implementation with lower upfront costs and lower total cost of ownership.

· Speed user adoption and increase productivity through the use of familiar Microsoft Office tools & interfaces.

Here is what some customers are accomplishing with this solution:

· A major digital imaging company gained a 360-degree view of the service supply chain with the “service performance workbench” implemented in under 4 months, improving product quality and customer satisfaction, and enabled the company to scale the platform for other service initiatives.

· A leading online services company is managing hardware and related assets for deploying datacenters with the “procurement workbench”, on track to reducing CapEx cost by $30 million, labor cost per PO by 75%, and inventory cost per device by 10%.

· An industrial products company is expecting substantial incremental revenue in its fiscal year through various cost and margin analysis, and 40% productivity improvement by redistributing employee time from data collection, preparation to more value added functions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY & COLLABORATION SOLUTION: www.nextgenerationsupplychains.com

Date/Time:

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

8:30a–9:30a Pacific Time

Register At:

http://video.webcasts.com/events/amrr001/30790

Agenda:

Cost Reduction and Risk Mitigation Strategies for Today’s Supply Chains
Noha Tohamy,
Vice President, AMR Research

Unlocking Value with Actionable Insights and Collaborative Execution

David Lassiter,
Director – Manufacturing Solutions, Microsoft Corp.

Krishnan Parasuraman,
Principal Architect,
Infosys Technologies

Review AMR Research Alert Article: “Supply Chain Visibility: Infosys' Microsoft-Based System Proves Its Value” Dec 11, 2008

Jane Barrett, Noha Tohamy

www.infosys.com/supply-chain/supply-chain-visibility-report.pdf

JOIN US FOR THIS WEBCAST AND LEARN WHAT YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH!