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Top 3 Survival Tips for Manufacturing
1. Have visibility into what is selling
2. Streamline your product offering based on sales
3. Customize your supply chain to your product offering and demand signal (Read as “educate the supply chain of the product based on sales”)
A manufacturing operation that is disconnected from sales is bound to have high inventory and poor capital utilization – both being extremely detrimental to profitability. continue reading »
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How Fat is Your Supply Chain?
An overwhelming number of products today fit into one of these two categories: configurable products or products with a fixed bill of materials (BOM). Configurable products are also called Dynamic Configurations. Fixed bill of material products are also called Static Configurations (typically for off the shelf products like pencils, shampoo, etc).
Companies offer configurable products to allow customers the luxury of mixing and matching feature choices in order to customize the products they want to buy. continue reading »
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Why am I typing my Connections Again and Again ……
Do I have to do this all over again?
Didn’t I do it right the first time?
Do I have to do this all over again?
How many times do I have to enter the connections…?
Didn’t I? Didn’t I? continue reading »
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LivingSocial and Amazon – Connecting Social Commerce and Retail
Social commerce should connect with e-commerce and retail. We all know that. But here is a great example of how it’s done. Amazon has invested in LivingSocial. For those of you know who have not heard about LivingSocial, it’s like Groupon… they just make less noise. LivingSocial offer deals per day in multiple cities for restaurants, bars, spas, comedy clubs, sporting events, theaters, classes….etc. continue reading »
Pattern Based Strategy: A New Trend That Will Impact CFOs
When the Financial Times starts writing about a topic, you know it’s going main stream. The article in FT.com mentions Gartner’s major trends that will dramatically alter IT and drive economic change over the next ten years.
The first three trends are – cloud computing, context aware computing and social networks. These three trends are “pure” technology trends that have already been the subject of much discussion and debate continue reading »
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‘Search’ is ineffective for highly perishable content
Reposting a great blog article from blog.gabacus.com
Highly perishable content changes fast, really fast, … just as the term ‘highly perishable’ suggests. Search is based on a Q&A session, where the dialogue beings with the user having to state what they are looking for, with a few key words. This process can take time. It is a trial and error sort of dialogue… can also be quite frustrating….as most folks will tell you about their experience with Google. continue reading »
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Forrester Says “Text Analytics is Key Trend to Watch”
Analytics, as I understand it, reveals intelligence from information. I use the term information because Gartner educated me that data means it is structured. Having worked with data as long as I have, not only is it not structured, it is a MESS!
The rush over the last few years has been that every BI/reporting tool has claimed to be analytics. The input to these tools is usually numbers. continue reading »
Monetizing Social Media and Tweets!
Twitter has just introduced a new version of its Web site for businesses, which opens the door to any advertiser who wants to appear on Twitter. Previously, Twitter had limited the number of advertisers and said it had a line out the door. Sounds like ‘Adwords’ ??
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, said in September that Twitter would offer self-serve advertising to small businesses next year. The new site does not yet do that, but has an online form that advertisers can use to contact Twitter. Twitter is also offering advertisers a dashboard that tracks things like how many people have seen or mentioned a business’s posts — a major step toward solving Twitter’s analytics riddle.
This ties into some key concepts.
Relevance is going to become key for Twitter. Twitter knows that one of its greatest strengths, the largely unfiltered fire-hose of information the service spurts out at around 95 million tweets per day, is also its greatest weakness. Specifically, how does a user filter out the important information (the signal) from the noise on Twitter? Tackling that problem will be a big part of the company’s future direction, said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
“One of the challenges for us going forward is relevance,” said Stone, who was being interviewed on CNN’s show “Reliable Sources” on Sunday morning by host Howard Kurtz.
On another item – The click through rate on Twitter dwarfs that of Facebook!
“Yet Twitter has become the most effective tool for click-throughs. Twitter yielded a whopping average of 19.04 clicks, whereas Facebook only produced 2.87 clicks.”
Many big-name advertisers, like Coca-Cola and HBO, have flocked to Twitter’s new advertising model and its 175 million registered users, but other advertisers say they are waiting to see whether and how Twitter advertising works.
Investors are looking for monetization – that means higher relevance !
Early detection, Immediate Response!
Companies are sitting on large volumes of data that is growing everyday. Every company makes this statement sometime during our first meeting: “We have a lot of data. We know there is a lot of value in it, but we cannot get to it. We are hoping that the analytics will deliver the intelligence to us to that we can act on it.”
The key words are – “Deliver the intelligence to us, so that we can act on it!”
The volume of information has become so large that traditional methods like querying and data mining are fun exercises for geeks. Business users neither have the time, nor the inclination! Over and above that, they do not know what to look for. “I do not know what questions to ask!” explained one of the business users. “If there is intelligence in the data, give it to me”.
Pattern Based Analytics delivers on this business need. The key value points for pattern based analytics is –
- Analytics for structured or unstructured information
- Delivers highly prevalent patterns from information
- Eliminates the need for data modeling, that pre-supposes the queries
- Early detection, Immediate Response !
The need for these key elements is more dire than every before. As the amount of information continues to grow, companies need fast and sustainable methods to convert it to intelligence. Traditional methods like data mining and BI-querying are outdated.
One cannot expect business users to query their way to insight on petabytes of data!
This is why Gartner has names “Pattern Based Strategy” as one of the key pillars for the coming decade! Quoting Gartner:
“The environment after the recession means business leaders must be more proactive in seeking patterns from conventional and unconventional sources that can positively or negatively impact strategy or operations, and set up a consistent and repeatable response by adjusting business patterns.”
This applies to ALL piles of information.
The world wide web is the biggest pile of information, and the fastest growing. In this world, Google requires users to search for intelligence. Twitter alone dumps over 95 million tweets a day! How can a user search for insight? What to search on???
Pattern based Analytics converts information into insight.
The time is NOW!
Google Less Relevant As Perishable Media Explodes
The amount of information created is unprecedented. Seems like there more words created in month that stars in the sky!
- Google Ranking irrelevant for Perishable and Social media
A few years ago we thought that the bloggers were creating volumes. But the days of blogging seem to be far behind us. Enter micro blogging, and social media. Every thought and sound bite is captured and transmitted through some electronic medium.
In this context Google’s information organization and ranking seem ancient. Google’s ranking was copied from indexing used for scholarly texts and research articles. The indexing in this context is very relevant because scholarly articles that are highly referenced are valuable, and point to the origin of the research ideas. This method of weighting, ranking and referencing published research has been used for centuries by universities and research centers. This method is highly relevant in the context of scholarly text as the articles are persistent and the ideas have a long shelf life.
Enter social media and micro blogging – the 140-character tweets, the comments on all the social media sites, deal/coupons from Groupon, Scoutmob. Social Living….
>Just had a Peppermint Mocha @Starbucks
>My BF dumped me. Single again! Updated FB status!
>OMG what is she wearing!
>50% coupon for Pillsbury cookies
All highly perishable content. The shelf like of this content is anything from 5 minutes to a few days or weeks in case of deals.
Google’s ranking algorithm based on scholarly text and cross-indexing is completely irrelevant in this context. The twitter streams are neither scholarly nor persistent. I can assure you that my son’s face book comments are not worth cross-referencing!
The exciting change is that content is moving faster than ever before. It is becoming more important to know what is happening now, locally and with a concise way.