Discrete Manufacturing Industry

Microsoft is BIG in Big Data

Jean-Claude F. Monney — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:58:01 GMT

Microsoft is BIG in Big Data

Last week I chaired our High Tech Executive Customer Advisory Board (CAB) made of a dozen of CIOs of the High Tech ecosystem and the focus was Big Data. The conversation was lead by one of our Big Data expert Shoshanna Budzianowski that triggered a lot of interested amongst the CAB members.

What if we could find insights of early detection of industry trends that would influence the timing of capital investments such as semiconductor factories? What if we could harness Supply Chain industry trends? What if we could extract best practice knowledge by mining the vast amount of support, design or manufacturing operation data? Are companies about to realize they are sitting on an gold mine of structured AND unstructured data?

What is Big Data?

There is a set of broad industry trends which are each putting pressure on traditional data management and business intelligence platforms and tools. These include:

Increasing Data Volumes: The annual growth of WW information volume is 59% and continues to rise. This explosion of new data driven by a full range of traditional and non-traditional sources like sensors, devices, bots and crawlers. According to an IDC report, the volume of digital records is forecasted to hit 1.2M Zetabytes (10²¹ bytes) this year – and predicted to grow 44x over the next decade

Increasing Data & Analysis Complexity: The real growth in data mentioned earlier is coming from unstructured data and the myth that 80% of unstructured data has no value has been debunked by examples like the success of search engine providers and e-retailers who unlocked the value of click-stream data. The requirement to store, analyze and mine structured and unstructured data together is becoming the new norm

Changing Economics, and Emerging Technologies: Cloud computing and commodity hardware have radically reduced the acquisition cost of computational and storage capacity and is fundamentally changing the economics of data processing. commodity hardware is being complimented by new distributed parallel processing frameworks like Hadoop, which when combined with a rich ecosystem of tools provides a platform for tackling massive data processing tasks.

The buzzword “Big Data” captures in a nutshell the trends, technologies and promise for businesses to generate real insights from Petabytes of structured and unstructured data. Simply put it’s about the 3Vs; Volume, Velocity and Variety of data.

What problems are customers trying to solve?

Organizations have always produced data that is unstructured and high-volume e.g. medical images, Web logs, RFID, sensor, locality, etc. Historically customers threw away most of the data they could collect to avoid data deluge. Spurred by plummeting storage and computation costs, coupled with the value resident in this data, customers are demanding new business insight from every bit of data they have access to in a cost effective and scalable way. Examples include

Understanding user behavior and interactions online
Identifying trends and popular topics in social media sentiment analytics
Optimizing and targeting advertising campaigns
Discovering medical epidemiological trends (e.g. identifying the next flu outbreak)
Identifying financial fraud within public sector transactions

What is Microsoft’s experience with addressing these challenges?

Microsoft has been doing “Big Data” long before it became a mega-trend and brings over a decade of Big Data expertise to the market. Microsoft is in-fact one of the largest users of “Big Data” technologies. E.g. we use it at Bing to deliver you the best search results (over 100 PBs of data), we use it at Microsoft Advertising for Ad targeting (14 billion ads per month), we use it at XBOX Kinect for machine learning for facial and bodily gestures to tune Kinect’s response to you, we use it for Exchange Hosted Services for Spam detection (2-4 billion emails per day) and the list goes on.

What is Microsoft’s approach to Big Data?

Our approach focuses in four key areas:

First, our goal is to make Hadoop accessible to a much broader class of IT professionals, & developers. By making Hadoop available on Windows, we will simplify acquisition, deployment and configuration, reducing the time it takes to get up and running on a Hadoop cluster. In addition, we will provide integration with .NET and with other commonly used languages like Javascript, making Hadoop accessible to millions of developers who previously did not have a way to easily access these big data services.

Second, our goal is to make Hadoop enterprise ready. This means enabling data movement between Hadoop and SQL Server and delivering a distribution of Hadoop that can integrate with existing IT infrastructure on windows i.e. Systems Center, Active Directory etc. and provide enterprise capabilities like security, predictable performance with the option to deploy Hadoop in Hybrid IT scenarios on premises and in the cloud.

Third, we want to facilitate access to the world’s data through the combination of internal and external data and services. The Windows Azure Marketplace offers a Data Market service that provides with wide variety of data including demographic, environment, financial, retail and sports. Microsoft is pioneering other services such as Microsoft Codename "Social Analytics" that enables customers to improve profitability by integrating social media data with business applications. See new concepts/ideas on the SQL Labs website.

Fourth, our goal is to enable insights into ‘Big Data’ to all users wherever they are. By focusing on providing integration with our industry leading BI Platform including SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services and SharePoint as well as enabling accessibility through award winning Self Service BI tools like PowerPivot for Excel and Power View on any device, we will make insights into Big Data also available to a broader class of end users as given in the illustration below.

For more information on Microsoft and Big Data, please use the resource link below:

Microsoft Business Intelligence site

Microsoft’s Big Data Roadmap & Approach

Big Data for Everyone: Using Microsoft’s Familiar BI Tools with Hadoop

Have a BIG fantastic day!

JC’s Head in the Cloud

Jean-Claude F. Monney — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:15:10 GMT

It was 3:05pm; I was driving from Austin to Dallas to meet a customer and stopped at a gas station in Temple to get some cold beverages.

As I was paying at the counter my phone received a calendar alert. I looked at it, and it was my car manufacturer’s global diagnostic system informing me that my car needed an urgent service and that a service appointment was already made for me at a Waco dealer at 3:30pm. The calendar entry showed that the repair time would be 30 minutes. I accepted the calendar invite since Waco was just a dozen miles away. The systems also warned me that it would put my 5pm meeting in Dallas in jeopardy as I was going to enter rush hour traffic, and it proposed to send a meeting update to the meeting participants informing them of the potential delay. I confirmed the change and proceeded to go get my car serviced as recommended.

How did all this happen?

While I was buying my cold drinks, my car health check monitor connected with the gas station Wi-Fi network and synced with my car manufacturer’s cloud-based diagnostic service. Prior to the availability of such technology, I would have had to experience a problem or see an alert on my dashboard before becoming aware of the issue. I would then have had to arrange for my car to be serviced, or worse, would have had brake failure and sat on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck or been stuck in a ditch somewhere.

Today, with cloud-based global diagnostic systems running on Windows Azure, the car can transmit the hundreds of parameters captured by its army of sensors active in my car. In this particular case, the cloud diagnostic service was able to identify a potential major fault in my brake system by doing an analysis comparing my vehicle’s current brake performance with data from more than 45,000 of the same model car in use in the US. Back in the day, your dealer would use a very expensive diagnostic system to identify the problem, and none of the data would be available for compiling a database of brake performance characteristics across all vehicles on the road.

How did it know about Waco? The Cloud system got information on my current position and destination from my in-car GPS system. Since my mechanical problem was a priority-one issue, the diagnostic application identified the closest dealer in the area, and using the dealer cloud service scheduler, booked a service appointment at my expected time of arrival after having ensured the required parts were in stock.

This imaginary but possible scenario highlights one of the biggest potential areas for the Cloud - services innovation. Companies can now use secure and reliable continuous cloud services such as Microsoft Windows Azure to develop innovative service scenarios that would delight their customers.

Initial cloud service opportunities will be most compelling for high value assets such as cars, planes, trucks, boats, energy, ecology, etc. as well as for people and pets that are invaluable assets and for the growing cloud-based services for appliances, home, security, etc.

By leveraging the Windows Azure platform, enterprises have a tremendous opportunity to accelerate innovation. Find out more at Microsoft Windows AZURE.

In the Cloud, the big can be small and the small can be big…

It's the Cloud innovation power!

The Value of Social Computing in Product Development

Mimi S — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:34:12 GMT

Contributed by Guest Blogger, Paul Manikas.

The use of Social Computing in the consumer space continues to show explosive growth. Facebook has now exceeded 700 million users. 110 million Tweets are sent per day on Twitter. There are 200 million views per day of YouTube via mobile. We are seeing a similar growth pattern emerge in business as organizations integrate social computing into the enterprise. Dell, one of the leaders in leveraging social media “is weaving social media into the fabric of the company,” according to Adam Brown, Dell’s Executive Director of Social Media (read Dell’s story here).

Companies who have deployed social computing are seeing measureable benefits from deeper customer relationships, improved operational effectiveness and higher employee satisfaction. A recent study by McKinsey called “The Rise of the Networked Enterprise: Web 2.0 Finds Its Payday” looked at the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on how organizations collaborate internally and externally. They found that fully networked enterprises are more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share and have higher operating margins than companies who use Web 2.0 in more limited ways. The survey results showed that of organizations deploying Web 2.0:

77% are seeing faster access to knowledge
60% are reducing communication costs
52% are seeing faster access to internal experts
41% are seeing increased employee satisfaction

Social computing is succeeding in business because it serves two critical needs. First, it meets human needs - to be heard, recognized, rewarded, connected, and part of a community. Second, it addresses business needs – to get more done with less, become more agile, and create break-through innovations. By using social computing to create networks across customers, partners, suppliers and employees, you build new ties and facilitate collaboration which boosts efficiency, working relationships, and overall performance. Social computing is becoming a mainstream movement because it makes business processes work better while satisfying basic human needs.

The value of social computing in Product Development (i.e., Social Product Development) is considerable as you gain benefits along the full product life cycle. At the front end, social computing enables open innovation by bringing together the wisdom of the crowd to collect and vet ideas for new products. During the product design, develop and launch phases, social computing enables project team members to come together to share ideas and work on problems. It uncovers knowledge and expertise that is buried in an organization. Social computing helps product developers to find experts, and it records ad-hoc communications for future discovery. After a product is released, social computing enables companies to listen to customers and respond to questions/complaints in real-time. Dell is redirecting this customer feedback across the company so everyone hears what is being said.

Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) recently released Windchill SocialLink, a social computing solution targeted for product development. SocialLink enables product developers to locate experts across the organization, facilitate and document ad-hoc collaboration, provide real-time project status updates, and self-organize into communities of practice to share ideas and tackle challenging problems. SocialLink is embedded in PTC’s Windchill applications making it part of their engineering workflows. To learn more visit www.ptc.com/products/windchill/sociallink.

Social Product Development provides a new form of collaboration and a new way of working. Consider an engineer who is designing a new part and runs into a problem. Instead of trying to figure it out on his own, he uses SocialLink to pose a question to one of his communities. He launches a collaborative workspace and describes the problem while displaying a 3D image of the part. By working together in this virtual space with fellow engineers across the world, he quickly gets an answer (and reduces his stress). When you consider the number of times that this happens over the course of a project, the additive benefits of making decisions in minutes instead of hours or days is huge in terms of time to market.

The growth of social computing in business will continue to accelerate as fewer executives look at social collaboration as a distraction and instead recognize it as a competitive weapon. To ensure a successful deployment start by tackling a fairly specific problem that engages users. In the case of Social Product Development, these problems can range from being able to find experts more quickly to coming up with new ideas for products to reducing the number of design iterations. When you consider the competitive advantages that can be gained along with the opportunity to boost employee morale, it’s time to move beyond questioning the value of Social Product Development and to start receiving the value.

Microsoft at COFES: Old Friends, New Ideas, and A Hint of the Future

Mimi S — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 23:13:00 GMT

Written by Craig Rode.

I just returned from COFES, (Congress Of the Future of Engineering Software). It’s held in Phoenix, which is not a bad place to visit when one lives in the Seattle area where it’s been raining for what seems like months.

COFES is a great opportunity to meet luminaries of the CAD/PLM space. I encountered old friends, new ideas, and even a couple of customers from back in my CAE sales days.

I had the opportunity to host a pair of technical sessions with the help of my colleague Todd Needham, who works in Microsoft’s High Performance Computing group. These informal meetings, really conversations on a large scale, confirmed two things for me. One, there is still an awful lot of confusion about what cloud computing is. Second, despite the confusion, there is a lot of interest. People sense something big is happening and they don’t want to miss it. And they want to know how it can impact their areas of interest, in this case PLM.

We discussed technology and business models. It’s obvious that some people still think of cloud as “just like the datacenter, but somewhere else.”

If you think back to the initial use of computers, they automated existing manual tasks, like bookkeeping or accounting. Nobody back then was able to imagine solid modeling or Finite Element Analysis. Similarly, the Internet, at first was perceived as a convenient way of moving and sharing files. Nobody in 1995 envisioned eBay, YouTube, or Facebook. So it’s pretty risky to predict what new business models will emerge from cloud computing with respect to PLM.

If you look at some trends, you might be able to glean some hint of the future. Engineering is increasingly done in countries, like China and India, where low cost is an issue. Software piracy is a serious issue (Software hosted in the cloud is more difficult to pirate.) Devices running apps are becoming increasingly important ways of creating and accessing information.

I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if the next disruptive business model in PLM is CAD authoring and data consumption in the cloud.

In fact, I’d be surprised if it weren’t.

Tribal Knowledge, ‘Hidden’ Information and Social Networking

Mimi S — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 22:29:00 GMT

Written by Craig Rode.

I was listening to the radio the other night on my way home from the office, and heard a story about manufacturing. It concerned a local large manufacturer, and its concern about engineers. Apparently, it anticipates having ten thousand engineers retire in the next ten years, and is very concerned about the availability of replacements.

Leaving aside the difficulty of finding that many engineers, I see a real onboarding challenge here. Much of what engineers (or most knowledge workers) do and how they do it is not really captured in structured processes or systems. There’s a lot of folklore, or tribal knowledge, in how things are done. When manufacturing companies bring in new knowledge workers, how do they find this ‘hidden’ information? Companies that do not have a strategy for dealing with unstructured data have a real challenge in front of them.

If your company is growing, and it looks like finally manufacturing companies are beginning to hire again, it’s worth examining the tools and processes that are used. Are they the kinds of tools that new college graduates are used to using? Can information be easily found? Is your IT department up to the challenge of the consumerization of IT, where people will insist on using their own laptops, tablets, and mobile devices? How about social networking as a mechanism for finding information for the new workers?

As we bring younger new workers into our companies, we have to start thinking about our how our IT infrastructure can accommodate them.

// CR

JT Open Conference Experience - New Themes Emerging

Mindy Tunick — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:36:00 GMT

Written by: Craig Rode

I just returned from Orlando where I was attending the JT Open conference. What an interesting couple of days! JT, of course, is the open format for display of 3D data in a lightweight fashion. It lends itself to collaboration by vastly reducing CAD model size, and allows combining of CAD models from different systems in a true “multi-CAD” environment. More information on JT Open here:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/open/jtopen/index.shtml

Excellent presentations were given by a variety of companies, including Boeing, GM, Ford, and Caterpillar. Several themes emerged, including how most companies of any size (with the notable exception of GM) have multiple CAD authoring tools, and JT enables combining the models from these different systems into one ‘meta’ model. Another was the importance of JT to working with the supply chain, since the days of requiring all suppliers to use the same CAD system as the OEM seem to be largely over.

Microsoft presented twice. My colleague Simon Floyd showed how JT is currently integrated with Microsoft Office, and discussed some future potential developments to drive the integration further. I was asked to discuss cloud computing and how JT, combined with Azure, can enable IP protection in the supply chain. IP protection is a key concern for companies in High Tech and Electronics. Companies need to share certain of their data with their suppliers, but want to control what they can and cannot see, especially as the supply chain grows more dynamic and distributed. I was able to show a prototype “proof of concept” that addressed this issue.

If you haven’t been using JT in your company I encourage you to look into it. It’s a great tool for sharing engineering information.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the relevance to High Tech and Electronics

Mindy Tunick — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:49:00 GMT

Written by: Craig Rode

In my last entry "Cloud computing: What’s the story?", I tried to differentiate between different types of ‘clouds’. With the definition behind us, I want to try and describe some of the characteristics of a PaaS cloud, such as Microsoft’s Azure, and how they might be applicable to high tech.

The five major capabilities offered by PaaS and the potential uses in high tech include:

Scale web access- the ability to increase or decrease web roles depending on demand. Companies who engage in e commerce would find this useful for sudden increases in traffic, caused by either seasonal shopping patterns or new exciting products.

Scale computing- the ability to increase computing power on demand. Potential uses here could include solving massive FEA problems such as fluid dynamics in near real time, thus shortening their time to market and improving their products.

Multi-tenancy- Multiple views of a single application or set of data, filtered based on credentials. This could include having an engineering model in the cloud, and sharing it through the supply chain, but only giving certain views or subsets of information to members of the supply chain. In fact, Microsoft and Siemens PLM showed a prototype of this at Siemens PLM world in Dallas in June.

Communication- The ability to rapidly set up (and take down) secure communications between and among companies without having to build separate rigid systems. We’d expect this to be useful in high tech because the supply chain is so dynamic.

Near infinite storage- There are lots of uses here, including the tons of PLM data that are associated with high tech products. Other applications could include digital supply chain content, wherein movies, music, games, etc., are all delivered through the cloud.

It will be very interesting to watch over the next year or two, how these capabilities are picked up and leveraged by high tech companies. Let me know if you think of more.

Craig Rode

Cloud computing: What’s the story?

HighTechandElectronics — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:01:55 GMT

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen as much discussion as I have recently about this new paradigm, cloud computing. A couple of years ago the concept was floating on the horizon, but today you can’t really have a conversation about technology without its mention.

A few months back I gave a speech at the EDIFICE meeting in Munich on how Microsoft is viewing cloud computing and what it might mean for businesses. I learned then that confusion reigns: people’s concepts about it are very, shall we say, ‘cloudy’.

Maybe a few observations can shed some light.

Cloud computing and its applications to the high tech industry are still in their infancy. While the technology shows promise in some areas, it is true that new technologies are uncanny in their ability to defy early predictions. After you first understood what the internet was, would you have guessed that it would spawn YouTube or hundreds of other sites? Who knows what the cloud will bring?

Which brings me to the next point: I don’t much care for the term ‘cloud computing.’ It’s imprecise. Putting the several distinct technologies involved into one bucket obscures three important distinctions:

Software as a Service (SAAS) has been around for some time now. Any application that resides in the internet, and that you have very little control over except as a consumer, falls into this category. Think of Microsoft Hotmail or Salesforce.com.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is different. IaaS is the hosting of virtual machines in a datacenter to run your applications. The host provides the hardware and the virtualized instance, the customer the balance. It’s been great because companies don’t have to buy hardware or provision the IT. IaaS allows IT to become an operating expense, not a capital expense.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an operating system model with its code written specifically for its platform. PaaS makes new things possible, things that couldn’t be done in the IaaS model.

And sadly, even though I’ve broken the current cloud environment into three distinct categories, it’s really a bit messier. The point though is that it’s important to clarify which cloud model you’re talking about. Remember your science lessons? There’s stratus, cumulus and cirrus clouds. Think about how different and mixed they can be. The same is true here.

So why is there all this discussion around the cloud now? There’s real convergence of business need with new technology trends. On the business side, high tech companies are working with increasingly distributed value networks and dynamic supply chains. They’re selling into fragmented markets and pushing for ever lower costs. On the technology side, advances in virtualization, security, and architecture (SOA) make the new model possible. The application of technology to business need makes this space worth watching (and the fodder for future blogs)!

– Craig Rode

Changing Markets Require New Tools and Techniques for Effective and Secure Collaboration

HighTechandElectronics — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:22:00 GMT

With the economy continuing to show signs of improvement, manufacturers are turning their attention to strategies for capitalizing on new business opportunities.

In the high-tech sector, improving collaboration across the value network will be a key strategy for boosting sales—and improving profits—going forward.

Morris Chang, chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) said as much during his keynote at the company’s recent technology conference in San Jose. A summary of Chang’s talk was published on EE Times.com.

“Business is very good now,” Chang said. “The near-term outlook is healthy. The mid-term outlook is moderate.” In numerical terms, Chang expects the overall market for integrated circuits to reach $276 billion in 2010. That would represent a 22 percent increase over 2009.

Chang expects growth to slow to 7 percent 2011, before hitting even more modest levels—just over 4 percent—through 2014.

These lower numbers—or more precisely the reasons behind them—are why Chang is urging high-tech companies to do a better job at chain collaboration.

Chang believes Moore’s Law—the theory ascribed to Intel Co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip doubles every two years—is starting to slow. And that, among other things, is causing research and development costs to escalate.

The end result: it’s becoming increasingly difficult to develop new breakout products. That puts even more pressure on companies to get products to market faster and to ensure that products don’t have design flaws or production-related defects that could hurt sales. This fuels the need for better collaboration.

“We need to collaborate even before the design starts,” Chang said in his speech. “I believe we can be far more collaborative.”

Industry analysts at Manufacturing Insights, an IDC Company, believe new methods of collaboration are essential to success of all manufacturers—including those in the high-tech sector—in this changing marketplace. They also believe unified communications technology provides the ideal platform to enable effective collaboration across the value network.

Manufacturing Insights details its thoughts on this subject in a report titled, Unified Communications in Manufacturing: Accelerating Decisions While Lowering Costs.

The report’s co-authors, Bob Parker and Benjamin Friedman, say manufacturers now operate in a “do more with less faster” environment that puts a strain on engineering organizations and highlights the need to include external personnel in the process.

“No longer are we operating supply chains over even supply networks,” the analysts write. “They are value networks . . . that must include upstream suppliers and downstream distribution partners and ensure that products are delivered to the right place, at the right time, and for the right price.”

For that to happen consistently, the analysts say, “Collaboration must be done securely. It also must include the ability to federate directories with those at key suppliers, allowing communication to span the respective organizational structures and provide assurance for appropriate identity, authentication, and authorization of users.”

The report highlights a case study from BenQ. BenQ has termed the extension of its corporate communication platform as "federations." These federations allow BenQ suppliers and partners to be included in the company's communication environment, allowing for expedient communication with entities beyond the IT reach of BenQ.

In short, the analysts are saying value networks make it easier for companies to share their internal expertise across departments within the enterprise while also tapping into the external expertise of suppliers, partners, and engineering service firms. They also are saying unified communications technology delivers the tools to enable this new level of collaboration in a cost-effective, secure, and auditable way.

-Sanjay Ravi

Digital Marketing Starts with Planning

HighTechandElectronics — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:13:00 GMT

Guest blog from Paul Manikas, Industry Market Development Manager, High Tech & Electronics Industry group

The marketing landscape has undergone a major transformation. Broad usage of the internet and socal media has created a shift in customer buying power and behavior. Businesses no longer control the conversations with their customers. Instead, customers and prospects engage with organizations on their own terms. Conversations over social media are replacing surveys and focus groups as the primary means of capturing customer intent. Buyers don't trust corporate advertising messages and are more inclined to trust recommendations from friends, peers and other customers. A brand is no longer what you say it is, it's what they say it is. Social media has emerged as a powerful and necessary marketing channel for gaining and retaining customers.

As the number of people who participate in social media sites continues to explode, it becomes increasingly important for marketing organizations to leverage this channel. By definition Digital Marketing is marketing that uses interactive connections between seekers and providers enabled by digital/social media. Digital Marketing best practices generally include the process steps of Listen, Engage, Attract, Monetize, and Measure, but this view is incomplete. Digital Marketing also requires other elements to generate the desired results, specifically Planning, Management and Optimization. I've proposed the following model to illustrate the Digital Marketing process.

In this blog I'll cover the Planning step.

The addition of digital media has complicated the planning and budgeting process because now marketers have more channels to consider. Developing an integrated marketing plan that optimizes spend across many marketing channels is quite challenging. It is particularly difficult for companies that consist of multiple business units with disparate processes. Each group often has its own approach for planning and going to market, which makes it hard to share best practices and create a consolidated view.

Marketing organizations face common challenges related to planning:

Limited visibility into the status of marketing projects
Incomplete visibility into budgets and marketing spend
Lack of a central location for creative files
Lack of a centralized project plan and marketing calendar to coordinate activities

To address these challenges, marketing organizations can take advantage of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, an end-to-end collaborative project and portfolio environment. The EPM Solution helps a marketing organization gain visibility, insight, and control across all work, enhancing decision-making, maximizing resource utilization, and measuring and helping to increase operational efficiency.

Sony Electronics has implemented a planning solution called Marketing Resource Management (MRM) based on Microsoft EPM. The web-based tool offers a single point of entry for fiscal year budget line items; an auto calendar capability of proposed market activity; a report of planned spend for fiscal year buckets; and an online view of proposals. Senior leadership has a cross-category, consolidated view of activity. An auto calendar report enables users to be aware of what's coming and adjust plans as needed. Sony can now better manage resources and minimize duplication of marketing materials. These operational efficiencies are expected to eliminate 2.5% of marketing spend across all divisions. When fully operational, MRM will also allow Sony to conduct accurate financial reporting, which will enable users to look at the ROI of specific marketing activities and reallocate funds and resources to higher performing campaigns and channels.

To learn more about Microsoft's Digital Marketing solutions, check out our full-spectrum web platform which enables businesses to build rich-branded websites that help reach, engage and empower your customers and partners with the best publishing, monetization & collaboration tools.

Management Innovation Will Fuel 21st Century Success

HighTechandElectronics — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:25:00 GMT

Guest blog from Paul Manikas, Industry Market Development Manager, High Tech & Electronics Industry group

Gary Hamel, best-selling author on business management, was the keynote speaker at the recent Microsoft Global High Tech Summit. The subject of Gary’s talk was The Future of Management, also the title of his latest book. Hamel’s main premise is that the challenges facing business in the 21^st century require an innovation in management. Most businesses follow a management philosophy that was developed during the Industrial era, a period of history when improving operational efficiency and standardizing work processes were the priorities. While a command-and-control management approach brings standardization and discipline, it also squanders creativity and initiative. A survey 86,000 employees from 16 countries by Towers Perrin showed that less than 20% of employees are truly engaged in their work. Employees are frustrated by their lack of control and unwillingness of management to listen. The way we manage our resources (i.e., people) actually makes them less resourceful, and hence constrains progress.

The challenges of the 21^st century are markedly different than what faced business when the current management practices were established. Change is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Competition is intensifying (especially from low-cost countries). Barriers to entry are much lower. Differentiation between products is diminishing. Customer expectations and bargaining power are increasing. These 21^st century challenges have exposed the limitations of current management practices which are primarily focused on fixing inefficiency.

To thrive in the 21^st century, companies need to become strategically adaptable while remaining operationally efficient. This will require an innovation in management. In his book, Hamel defines innovation in management as “anything that substantially alters the way in which work of management is carried out, or substantially modifies customary organizational forms, and by so doing, advances organizational roles.” While companies focus on product innovation or business model innovation to secure a competitive advantage, these forms of innovation do not provide long-term advantages. It’s become too easy to copy them. Callaway Bug Bertha irons and Walmart’s discount retailing model are examples of innovations that were copied.

By comparison, management innovations often lead to “significant shifts in competitive position” and provide sustainable advantages. Management innovations challenge dogmas that are deeply engrained, hard to see and harder to change. They often span multiple management processes so they are difficult for others to replicate. Or they are part of an ongoing program of innovations that compounds over time, and hence competitors struggle to catch up. Examples include Whirlpool’s commitment to innovation and GE’s executive development system.

The goal is to create a sense of purpose so that your workers bring their best to work every day compared to treating them as commodities. Since change is the only constant, success depends on building an adaptable organization that is capable of continuous self-renewal as opposed to waiting for a crisis to make changes. In an era of hyper-competition, low barriers to entry, web-empowered customers, and shrinking product life cycles, innovation needs to be everyone’s job versus something you relegate to R&D. Examples of successful companies that exhibit these principles include Whole Foods, WL Gore, Ubisoft and Rite-Solutions.

It’s certainly easier to put these new principles in place when you are starting with a clean sheet of paper, and quite challenging when business has been operational for a long time and management has a stake in the status quo. GE, P&G and Whirlpool have shown that even established companies can reengineer their “management DNA”. The future holds promise for companies that have the courage to question existing practices, embrace these new principles and reinvent management for the 21^st century. These times represent a tremendous opportunity for those companies willing to take on the challenge of management innovation. We invite you to talk to us about how Microsoft’s Innovation Process Management solution enables everyone in your organization to participate in innovation.

New Year Requires Focus on Current Industry Trends, New Approaches to Corporate Performance

HighTechandElectronics — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:48:00 GMT

In the after math of CES a few weeks ago, where the numbers of attendees and exhibitors increased from last year as a result of the global economic upturn, I think it’s important to go on record in this blog to highlight some of the key macro forces that will continue to impact 2010 and beyond, per some comments I made a few months ago in Electronics World magazine.

There’s no question that the global high tech and electronics (HT&E) industry has matured from 1970-85 era, when vertically integrated delivered complete product lines themselves. But since the then the industry changed, outsourcing many functions to create new cost efficiencies and speed in product development. And consumers have gained the upper hand in identifying the products they want through Web 2.0 communities.

Trend #1 – The power shift to consumers has resulted from active consumers leveraging Web 2.0 capabilities to influence the success of products. HT&E companies need to take advantage of digital marketing solutions that manage local content in different countries in one place and bring harmony to e-advertising campaigns, and proactive monitoring and response to customer needs/ feedback.

Trend #2 – Computing, entertainment and communications are going digital and converging to create exciting new products, services and business opportunities. Combining these produces can manage the customer experience throughout the lifecycle of the product and drive new and recurring higher margin revenue opportunities. It is no longer about an innovative technology product, but about the total consumer experience it delivers with content and services.

Trend #3 – Emerging economies are exerting new influence on HT&E companies, as their consumers gain affluence and require refinements to the ‘one size fits all’ mentality that previously defined product development and marketing. HT&E companies are challenged to create ‘profitable proximity’ by developing capabilities to observe and serve the unique local needs.

Trend #4 – Rising demand for products correlates to rising commodity and transportation prices. Consumers and politicians around the world are interested in ensuring sustainability and provide a unique opportunity for HT&E companies to innovate.

Trend #5 – Wide ranging differences exist among all countries for regulations governing environmental, healthcare and competitive issues. Large scale manufacturers need systems that create transparency for compliance with all those regulations and then go one step further by incorporating them in their everyday business practices.

Trend #6 – An influx of Gen-X and Millennial generation workers and the exit of Baby Boomers from the work-a-day world create new opportunities for companies to introduce high productivity IT solutions. Solutions need to be easy and familiar to use and integrated across the enterprise.

Please read more about these trends and their likely impacts on HT&E companies in the Electronics World article. It’s my hope you will find it quite interesting as we move forward into 2010. – Sanjay Ravi

Global Compliance Activities Require New Approach to Forming Corporate Technology DNA

HighTechandElectronics — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:58:00 GMT

A recent conversation with Prime Magazine spurred my thinking about the incredible complexity of regulations which High Tech & Electronics companies must comply with during their production of market leading products. Every new regulation – no matter whether they are financial (Sarbanes-Oxley), environmental (WEEE/RoHS), based on individual privacy (HIPAA), or security (ITAR)—impacts manufacturers.

And let us not forget that these companies operate globally, adding yet one more layer of complexity to their compliance operations. Companies which sell globally need to ensure that they understand and abide by the regulations for each country or region in which they do business. Furthermore, the complex supply chains which often span the globe mean that the responsibility for compliance is shared among many partners, both inside and outside the company.

Imagine a product being sold in Germany. This product is designed jointly in the US and Japan, and assembled in Taiwan from components manufactured in China and Vietnam. The product(s) thus sold would have to abide by the environmental standards WEEE and RoHS. And the manufacturer would be on the hook for compliance by its supply chain to these standards. On top of that, if any of the design could conceivably be used for a military application, the control of access of some of the engineering information would be impacted by the US ITAR regulations.

The challenges occur because many businesses weren’t originally set up to operate globally. Many enterprises contain separate (sometimes disparate) systems in each of their business units. We call these ‘silos’ of information. Collecting information from each silo can be torturous, if not impossible sometimes. Further, most members of a global supply chain possess very little in the way of formalized systems at all, making the required tracking of such information to be a nightmare.

There are so many regulations at so many different levels that only through automation can compliance be assured. Manufacturers that deploy the right technologies can greatly reduce their exposure to violations of regulations and the financial consequences thereof. Further, they can greatly reduce the cost of compliance by automating the collection of information needed to measure compliance.

Among Microsoft’s solutions for compliance are Rights Management Services (RMS) to control document access, SharePoint for a controls and compliance workspace, SQL which provides a secure and reliable platform for securing data.

We at Microsoft regard regulatory compliance as a journey and our approach adopts both the softer aspect as well as technological aspect. We focus on enabling our clients through our vision of building a holistic risk management and compliance culture, environment and infrastructure.

Here’s a link for more information on Microsoft and compliance, and the Prime Magazine article I referred to at the beginning can be found in this issue. – Craig Rode | Industry Technology Strategist, High Tech & Electronics - World Wide | Microsoft Corporation

Consumer Electronics Supply Chain Academy Panel to Explain Web 2.0 Best Practices for Global Supply Chain Management

HighTechandElectronics — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:32:00 GMT

As the pace of global economic upturn increases, so too will the challenges to the smooth operations of the global supply chain resume.

Remember that in 2007, we were beginning to see severe strains in material availability and manufacturing capacity across the High Tech & Electronics value chain.

Now that recovery is imminent, how can companies employ Web 2.0 technologies to create a more efficient supply chain?

Later this week, I will take part in a panel discussion on “Supply Chain Best Practices in Consumer Electronics and Other Industries” with industry leaders from Capgemini, Monster Cable Products, GXS, Sony Electronics, and Teradata. The panel occurs at 2:15 p.m. on Friday, January 8. Our panel will discuss the benefits of clear information flows amongst B2B partners using new Web 2.0 tools. They’ll also discuss ways to share information with more timely and accurate data exchange, data synchronization and master data management, in order to minimize supply chain inefficiencies and make better informed retail inventory management decisions. Program and registration information is available here.

I hope to see you there! – Sanjay Ravi

HT&E Companies Shifting Focus to Innovation, Customer Centricity

HighTechandElectronics — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:43:00 GMT

We’re closing out the year seeing encouraging signs of growth around the world. As evidence we need only look at semiconductor manufacturing, traditionally an early indicator of future demand for HT&E products. The SICAS Semi Industry report has shown a big increase in capacity utilization to 86.5% in the third quarter, up from 55.6% in the first quarter. This is a great indicator of increased pricing pressures, growth, and profitability for the sector, and glad tidings for 2010.

As such, our recent discussions with high level tech executives in Redmond indicates that HT&E organizations now are very focused on making the most of the potential upturn and moving from their 2008 cost reduction efforts to an increased focus on innovation and orienting their companies to the needs and proclivities of its customers (which we call customer centricity). Indeed, upon learning about this shift, we discussed this transition in great depth at the recent Microsoft Asia High Tech Summit in Tokyo, where a number of our High Tech and Electronics customers shared their current priorities and also presented their successes working with Microsoft and our partners in the HT&E vertical.

IDC Manufacturing Insights' recent white paper highlight how companies should organize to create a coordinated approach to gaining and retaining customers. The paper, “Optimizing Channel Coordination in High-Tech and Electronics Manufacturing,” describes how HT&E companies can endeavor to gain market share and increase profitability by

· targeting product innovation to serve narrow market niches

· reaching out and appealing to customers in China, India, South America and Eastern Europe (see previous blogs on this topic here and here)

· connecting key services to product platforms, (e.g., Xbox and Xbox Live) and,

· retaining customers through strong business relationships and high customer satisfaction.

IDC offers specific analysis and guidance on how HT&E companies can accomplish greater coordination and effectiveness in their various sales channels and customer maintenance operations. I highly recommend becoming more familiar with the complex topic of global coordination, as discussed by IDC. It could make for a very merry 2010! – Sanjay Ravi

Developing Next Generation SMS for Emerging Economies

HighTechandElectronics — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:00:00 GMT

We’ve been writing in previous blogs about the mistake that High Tech and Electronics (HT&E) companies would make if they fail to market to people in emerging economies. And we’ve written about how technology applications can overcome the difficulty of marketing to those audiences.

A story in the Wall Street Journal in October echoes these themes, discussing how Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard are “aggressively expanding their sales networks in China’s countryside, where over half of China’s population resides and broadband access is increasing.”

The story, “PC Makers Cultivate Buyers in Rural China,” notes that:

Though difficult to penetrate, China’s countryside is “probably still the world’s most promising market” in terms of the number of people “who’ve never owned a PC before, who would to like to own a PC and who have that capability,” says David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based marketing strategy firm.

So, the market in China and other places is huge and represents a green field of opportunity, possibly as many as four billion people worldwide. How can HT&E endeavor to capture this market?

We suggest that focusing on sales effectiveness will drive HT&E companies in the right direction. Sales effectiveness in our view comes about through enabling some tried and true operational processes through information technology:

o A unified collaborative workspace and corporate intranet that provides employees with an effective way to collaborate and form work teams, increase productivity and enable better information flows

o Integrated programs in a familiar environment that increase effectiveness among remote teams

o A secure working environment that prevents malevolence and intellectual property loss

We’ll talk more about improving these operational processes in future blogs. – Han Tiong Law

Marketing to Emerging Markets with Next Generation SMS Technologies

HighTechandElectronics — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:16:00 GMT

High Tech & Electronics who are keeping their eye on the ball of their underlying business should pay attention to a Wall Street Journal story that appeared in early July.

The story, “Why Companies See Bright Prospects in Rural India,” describes how international newspaper headlines focus inordinately on what happens in the corporate world, both in good times and bad. There’s a sort of near-sightedness that occurs around Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, while the more dynamic activity in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities is worthy of note:

In the villages and towns, it has been a very different picture. “The rural market is insulated from the global meltdown,” says Harish Bijoor, CEO of brand and business strategy consultants Harish Bjoor Consults. “The rural part of our economy has been untouched by credit cards and mortgages as known in the West.”

"The slowdown experienced by India on account of the IT (information technology), real estate, financial services and automobile sectors was an urban phenomenon," says Ajay Gupta, founder and CEO of ruralnaukri.com, which focuses on jobs in the rural sector. "However, the negative impact of all this on urban India has been more than offset by encouraging performance in rural areas. The rural economy has provided a cushion. Overall sentiment in the country was different from other parts of the world where each household had at least one person with a pink slip."

The point here is that many HT&E companies are looking to the developing countries to grow their market share, but the question is whether they are looking in the right place. Existing sales, marketing and service management (SMS) technologies might focus the HT&E companies on the homogenous and dense population centers of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, but not enable them to reach the Tier 3, 4 and 5 cities. Those cities diverse cultural attributes and scattered geographic locations make that difficult. That’s a mistake, and the Wall Street Journal piece explains why.

Indeed, HT&E companies need to look a the new capabilities of high performance sales networks that operate over the Cloud in order to harness next generation SMS and reach the full breadth of emerging economies. Next generation SMS using the Cloud will provide the HT&E enterprise with the scalable capabilities to reach the emerging markets, to be able to sell through tens of thousands of small networked partners that can reach emerging market customers. – Han Tiong Law

New Business Models, They Just Keep Coming in the High Tech & Electronics Industry

HighTechandElectronics — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Perhaps this story caught your eye: earlier this month Anthony Zuiker, the creator of “CSI:Crime Scene Investigation,” a U.S. television show, announced that he will be releasing what he’s calling a “digi-novel.” This novel will combine three different media: a book, a movie, and a website. According to Zuiker, “The future of business in terms of entertainment will have to be the convergence of different mediums.”

Not so coincidentally, we are hearing increasingly from our High Tech and Electronics customers that they continue to seek out new business models. Changing consumer preferences and competitive pressures are driving our customers to move from their traditional ‘build and sell’ model to one where devices are combined with services to deliver a richer, more engaging experience.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to forecast what combination of products and services will become popular (and therefore profitable) and which will fail. I read recently that several years ago the telecommunications industry was gearing up for what they thought would be a multi-billion dollar market in broadcasting to mobile devices. The actual market size today is far smaller than forecast and likely millions of dollars were wasted by investing in this area.

So the question is, “How does a High Tech and Electronics company survive and even thrive in such an environment?”

Certainly, staying close to its customers is important. Web 2.0 capabilities provided by companies like Microsoft are gaining popularity because they can help predict rapid changes in consumer tastes, and therefore product success. Tying this information back to engineering/product development teams is critical too, as is tight integration with suppliers, in case things in the forecast change rapidly and new plans need to be made.

While collaboration among sales, marketing, manufacturing, product design, and supply chain teams has always been a desired end-state, the degree to which things are changing in the High Tech world converts such an objective from a “nice to have” to a “necessary to survive” status. And having the ability to extract the most meaningful KPIs from all these various operational groups and present them to executive management in a dashboard can change the decision making framework from “too little too late” to right on time.

Microsoft sees its customers increasingly using applications from its partners based on SharePoint and Unified Communications to provide just such collaboration. Even though companies are more dispersed than ever, they also face a business environment in which real time collaboration is an absolute requirement for survival, not to mention winning market share. - Craig Rode | Industry Technology Strategist, High Tech & Electronics - World Wide |

Next Generation SMS Makes Sense for Emerging Economies

HighTechandElectronics — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:35:00 GMT

Few people noticed an announcement in February that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will help fund projects that enable poor mobile phone users to transfer money using handsets.

What was interesting about the announcement was that while many people in the Third World (and also many poor people in the developed countries) don’t have banking accounts, they do have need to participate in the financial system, whether that’s to pay their utility and phone bill or put gas in their vehicle and buy groceries. In addition to not having a lot of money to store away, the poor tend not to trust financial institutions with their money, preferring cash or other real assets as stores of wealth.

Regardless, the Gates Foundation announcement indicates that there is awareness that people in emerging economies do value their mobile phones and companies can use those phones to engage in short message service (SMS) programs that reach previously inaccessible markets.

In fact High Tech & Electronic (HT&E) companies have an opportunity to take an innovative approach to reaching people in emerging markets with another type of SMS -- sales, marketing, and service management -- technology. We like to refer to SMS as the latter (sales, marketing and service management) and not short message services. The acronyms are confusing and we’ll do our best to make them clear when we blog about them.

Emerging countries offer high growth environments, characterized by strong economic foundations, large populations and high levels of urbanization. Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) make up 2.7 billion people and have a combined GDP of $3 trillion, with $230 billion in information and communications technology (ICT) spend. These countries have secured their position as bases of broad-based growth because of their advanced ICT markets, established IT infrastructure, high info-density, heightened government ICT support and IP protection.

As such, High Tech & Electronic (HT&E) enterprises need new capabilities in next generation sales, marketing and service management technologies to reach emerging economies, in Tier 1 & 2 cities as well as Tier 3-5 and other cities in BRIC countries. These capabilities include a mega contact center, a sales network, marketing for the masses, services and support network, customer and partner relationship management, networked customer logistics as well as next generation B2B and order management.

The companies who are sensitive to these possibilities will be the next leaders when the global economic upturn occurs. – Han Tiong Law, Market Development Director, Asia Pacific High Tech & Electronics Industry

Microsoft Offers Approach to Regulatory Compliance for High Tech & Electronics Companies

HighTechandElectronics — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:28:49 GMT

Worldwide, national policymakers are requiring companies to clean up their environmental footprints and otherwise comply with a range of regulations around health and safety. High tech and electronics industry companies in turn are evaluating how technology initiatives can address these governmental concerns.

Microsoft IT Showcase has recently published Microsoft IT Streamlines Regulatory Compliance, which discusses how Microsoft IT uses a holistic approach to address the ever-increasing complexity of regulatory compliance. This continually evolving system combines different regulatory frameworks into a single overarching process, and uses standardized tools to test similar controls. By combining tools and using a clearly defined role-based accountability model, Microsoft IT streamlines business processes, reduces duplication of effort, and makes business units more operationally efficient. Read the Technical Case Study here and be sure to come back to us with any questions on how this might work with your HT&E company.

Research & Development Continues to Be Seen as Key to Emerging as Leader

HighTechandElectronics — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:52:18 GMT

Maintaining research and development spending during economic downturns seems to be a key theme of various press and research reports out in recent weeks but to us maintaining or reducing such investments isn’t really the question.

The better question is how to improve the quality and impact of R&D spending through collaborative processes that identify and formulate innovation of new products or improve innovative workflows.

Take for example the Wall Street Journal story “R&D Spending Holds Steady in Slump”

Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S. companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier, even as their revenue fell 7.7%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis….

Overall spending by the 28 companies nudged down 0.7% in the quarter. Among those keeping up R&D funding is Microsoft Corp., which spent 21% more in the fourth quarter over the year-earlier period…. Intel Corp., which posted a 90% drop in fourth-quarter net income, plans to spend $5.4 billion on R&D this year, down slightly from last year, plus $7 billion in the next two years to modernize its plants. 3M Co., maker of Scotch tape, Post-it notes and other products, has laid off 4,700 workers in the past 15 months and will cut capital expenditure 30% this year, but it expects R&D spending to stay flat or increase slightly.

"We are looking at really protecting R&D," says Lisa Su, chief technology officer of Freescale Semiconductor Inc. The chip maker's fourth-quarter revenue fell almost 40%, but R&D spending fell only 6%. "That's what's going to drive growth coming out of the downturn."

BusinessWeek magazine offers a great video on R&D, where some reporters performed a screen of companies that invested in R&D during the last recession and found their stock performance benefited greatly in the following upturn. Bizweek reporter Tara Kalwarksi deserves kudos for their research.

And finally, in the February McKinsey Quarterly, authors Christie Barrett, Christopher Musso and Asutosh Padhii wrote a story, “Upgrading R&D in a downturn” where they emphasize improving the quality of R&D spending:

Companies should take a more strategic approach to cutting R&D costs, by using today’s difficult economic environment as an opportunity to upgrade the R&D organization’s focus, practices, and management. That path helps companies not only to cut their costs but also to raise productivity and speed up time to market—while positioning themselves for even greater success in the future.

Microsoft is very focused on R&D improvements, especially in the area of innovation management. High tech and electronics (HT&E) companies compete in the fastest-moving industry in the world, where customer tastes change overnight, new technologies emerge unexpectedly, and competition can appear out of nowhere. HT&E companies rely on innovation for their survival. While high tech companies may place a high priority on being innovative, most feel that their results don't measure up.

Microsoft has focused on delivering a software framework that maximizes R&D expenditures. The framework helps companies unleash the power of the collaboration within the organization, so that no matter where employees are located, they can have that proverbial “OneTeam” approach to adding value.

The framework helps high tech and electronic companies measure ideas against corporate strategic drivers and then communicates those drivers throughout the enterprise so that collaborating employees know what they are and can contribute accordingly.

For instance, scorecards let employees see how their company is performing against its preset innovation goals, which ideas are contributing to innovation and which areas need attention. The framework also allows companies to gather ideas from every level of the organization so that ideas can be viewed, prioritized, evaluated and promoted, if appropriate. The framework allows changes in conditions, corporate priorities or customer preferences to be taken into account instantly so that priorities can be identified.

As a high tech manufacturer of the Xbox® 360, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices business group employs some 7,000 employees for the development, production, and marketing of the video system, other entertainment and learning products and hardware devices. To customize and streamline workflow on development and production of nearly 13 million consoles, each with more than 1,000 parts, Microsoft’s E&D group developed an Office Business Application on the 2007 Microsoft Office system to connect 140 business activities in a custom workflow solution that provided improved data access, tracking and analysis. The benefits were more accurate, timely business reports; improved views of data and workflow; seamless integration between user interface and required tasks, data, and applications; better-informed business decisions; flexible solution to meet evolving requirements; and improved developer productivity. The complete case study is located here.

There’s so much more on improving R&D and innovation that we’ll be revisiting this topic in future blogs. – Sanjay Ravi

“Help! I urgently need to improve my supply chain performance and I have no money!”

HighTechandElectronics — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:48:00 GMT

Guest blog from Dave Lassiter, Director of Manufacturing Industry Solutions for Microsoft.

The 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 fashion. 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 often are required to manipulate these systems for a “business transformation” project that will now cost millions of dollars and take years to implement. So what are they to do?

Microsoft has built products and solutions that are easy to use, quick to deploy, simple to maintain, leveraging existing investments. For example, one of our fastest growing enterprise products is SharePoint. SharePoint provides a proven, low cost, intuitive, easy to use collaboration and Web 2.0 desktop work place for employees. Most companies already own many or all of these capabilities and are beginning to leverage this desktop for deploying "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. The great part about this platform is that most companies already own many or all of its elements and are beginning to leverage this Microsoft platform for deploying "role-based" dashboards for performance management and streamlined, simplified, lean, “real-time” business processes.

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 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 Information Technology budget. The customer had both ERP and Microsoft capabilities to take advantage of 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 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 since they run a tight ship and can’t afford multi-million ERP based software and services projects.

On June 9^th, Infosys, Microsoft and AMR Research will present a Webinar to discuss how organizations can harness the value of their supply chain data towards improved performance using visibility and collaboration. This session will be recorded, and I will be providing a link to the recording shortly after the webcast. – Dave Lassiter, Microsoft

High Tech &Electronics Companies’ Need Increasing for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

HighTechandElectronics — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Hello, I’m Craig Rode and I’m the Industry Technology Strategist for the Microsoft World Wide High Tech and Electronics group. In this role, I help bring together technology and partners which provide solutions for our customers in High Tech. I’ve been involved in High Tech for over 30 years, in a variety of roles spanning development, product management, marketing, and sales. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008 I was the VP of North American Sales Operations for CoCreate, (now acquired by PTC), a supplier of PLM tools to leading high tech manufacturers.

Years ago High Tech and Electronics (HT&E) companies began offshoring their manufacturing work to lower cost parts of the world to leverage lower labor costs. In some cases, they contracted with other companies to make their products or components. In others, they opened up facilities themselves. In both cases, the cost savings HT&E companies realized were tremendous despite the fact that they had to add IT and technical infrastructure costs to manage the projects. Today though, a similar move of the engineering task offshore is not going as smoothly and needs new solutions.

Sending the engineering function offshore makes a lot of sense. Design engineers really need to understand the manufacturing impacts of the design decisions that they make. Getting feedback from the shop floor is critical to the design engineer who needs to create products which can be manufactured at the lowest possible cost. And, for a lot of companies, enabling local engineering means that they can design products with local markets in mind. That’s key to attaining competitive advantages and market share in emerging markets. Finally, engineering can be less expensive in emerging markets.

Today, it is very common to find companies based in the US, EMEA, and Japan whose engineering resources are distributed worldwide. The problem? As engineering becomes decentralized and more dispersed, it becomes harder to manage, and collaboration becomes more difficult. The money saved because of lower labor rates may be lost if it is spent by flying personnel to and fro for project status review meetings.

Further, the distribution of intellectual property (IP) outside the walls of the engineering department creates new issues. HT&E companies’ survival depends on ensuring that their current and future product designs remain secure. This becomes increasing difficult to manage as engineering is more widely distributed. In addition, much of the information contained in US companies’ engineering databases are regulated by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which states that access to certain types of product design information must be controlled to prevent citizens of certain countries from accessing it.

In fact, one company I worked with had its entire engineering system shut down by its own internal IT auditors until it could get those controls in place. Luckily, we were able to get them in compliance within a couple of working days.

When I was selling product lifecycle management solutions, one of my customers was a large California-based equipment maker that has engineering teams working together on their complex high tech products. These teams are located across the world with presence in Canada, US, EMEA, and Asia. Engineers from these teams work together on the same engineering models. This company relies heavily on CoCreate Model Manager from Microsoft partner PTC to coordinate their activities and manage the information to deliver high quality products in the shortest amount of time possible.

Microsoft’s collaboration-enabling solutions, like Microsoft Office Sharepoint® Server and Unified Communications can and have been applied in situations like this. Moreover, there is huge potential for cloud computing (Azure) because some of the countries where this work is being performed (like China, Vietnam, Malaysia) don’t have the IT infrastructure or the internet “pipes” to have real-time collaboration that requires fast, continuous connection. Total cost of ownership, Microsoft familiarity and ease of use, have made these effective solutions for companies that have offshored their engineering processes.

Microsoft Responds to Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration Challenges of Manufacturers

HighTechandElectronics — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:28:00 GMT

In our last blog we noted that several high tech and electronics (HTE) company executives attending the Global Economic forum said they are placing a premium on gaining greater visibility into what is going with suppliers, customers and worldwide operations. The executives’ pain points varied by company, industry and geo

graphy, but all in all they validated the findings of a KRC Research-conducted survey that Microsoft and Infosys published in January.

Among the key findings:

50 percent of business decision-makers, such as chief information officers or vice presidents of operations, reported increasing complexity in their supply chains.
65 percent reported experiencing a supply chain disruption, and said it took hours or longer from the time of the disruption to when supply chain systems reported the incident.
29 percent of high-tech manufacturers produce more than 50 percent of their manufacturing output through third parties or contract manufacturers, a trend that has increased over the past 2-3 years.
Nearly a third of those surveyed reported their supply chain professionals spend 25 percent of their time finding and re-working supply chain data to get it to the required level of granularity and format. For a high-tech manufacturer with 50 employees focused on managing the supply chain, this percentage of time per worker equates to $1.3 million annually in lost productivity, based on the average salary of a manufacturing manager ($105,581), according to IndustryWeek.

We could go on about the survey results but you get the picture. A press release is posted here and the full survey findings are here. We’ll come back to these results in detail in future blogs.

High tech supply chain management is a highly complex endeavor, where you have to deal with managing a constantly changing, and highly uncertain global business environment, where rapid decision making is critical for long-term success.. We recently published a case study about Samsung Electronics efforts to strengthen its ability to manage its global supply chain, particularly for the purpose of preparing for the uncertainties in the high tech business environment and drive Samsung’s competitiveness.

Samsung worked with Microsoft to create an action-oriented role-based productivity solution that enables simulation and on-demand changes of business management plans leveraging cube write-back capabilities, and empower people to make these adjustments by using a user interface that is “employee-familiar”. Samsung Electronics deployed a Role-Based Productivity solution from Microsoft built on SQL Server®, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.

The company expects its forecast accuracy for product demands to improve some 20%, which is significant when event a 1% increase in demand forecast accuracy can lead to substantial cost reduction in raw materials, logistics and production tasks. The company is expecting a 1000% ROI with enhanced demand forecast accuracy.

For those high tech and electronics companies with other supply chain challenges, our solutions are built upon core Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server ,Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server. We’ll be talking more about how these solutions provide Supply Chain visibility and collaboration in future blogs as well.

For a more thorough discussion of Microsoft in Supply Chain Management, see the HTE supply chain solution page on our Website and also a specific solution brief. Again, we’ll discuss these in more detail in future blogs.

-Sanjay Ravi

Global Electronics Forum Provides Insights on Emerging from Worldwide Recession

HighTechandElectronics — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:10:00 GMT

In early March, we attended the annual Global Electronics forum and came away with a number of great insights into how top-tier high tech and electronics (HTE) companies are looking to survive this recession and then thrive in the next upturn, when it comes.

Just to give you a sampling of who was there and what they talked about, Dell’s Paul Prince, the CTO for enterprise systems, led a presentation on “Coupling Hardware and Silicone Design for More Powerful software Enablement,” and Johan Van de Ven, a senior vice president for Philips Consumer Lifestyle, led a panel on the “Thoughts on Next Steps in the Ongoing Digital Revolution of Consumer Electronics” There are too many other great presentations to cover here – just know they were all excellent.

As we heard these presentations as well as feedback from the panel discussion about the Global Electronics Industry – with executives from austriamicrosystems, Celestica, Dell, Fairchild, IBM, Philips and McLaren Electronic Systems – some clear themes about our current worldwide economic environment came to the fore.

First, worldwide high tech and electronics companies are viewing today’s markets as uncertain and unpredictable and this is causing tremendous difficulties for all organizations to plan and forecast. In this environment, companies are placing a premium on gaining the ability to have greater visibility of what is going on, whether that’s with their customers, suppliers or worldwide operations. They want to reduce the dysfunction that’s produced by silos within their operations and in interactions with outsiders. Anything that can reduce the latency of decisions is of high value to the organization grappling with the rapid fire pace of change now occurring.

Secondly, reducing costs across the operational value chain is a high priority activity at all HTE companies. Consumer demand for the entire range of digital/electronic products continues to be softening or declining at a rapid pace, leading to price erosions and thinner margins. Any operational improvements that reduce costs help counter these trends.

Thirdly, the time to work toward gaining market share with new or improved products is now. Most of the companies continue to maintain their investments on Innovation, as well as drive increased levels of customer intimacy, especially in these tough times. Companies that can take market share through well placed product offerings, and differentiated customer service, stand to gain the most when the upturn occurs.

A recently released McKinsey research confirms that insight: “About half of the companies that entered these downturns as leaders—the top 20 percent—ended up as laggards when the economy regained momentum.” Interestingly, the laggards were companies that cut employees and other SG&A expenses. And leaders in the upturn tended to be those that engaged in high levels of acquisition, according to McKinsey.

Clearly, McKinsey’s findings offer real imperatives to do what it takes to make continued investments in the growth of your HTE company and work to identify future trends. Whether that’s improved management or new technology adaptations, there’s room for improvements and investments for the next up cycle.

We are going to focus future blog entries on our views of how companies can make implement recession-beating practices and work toward emerging as a leader once the downturn recedes.

-Sanjay Ravi