Louis Columbus, Cincom

Chris Mohney has another excellent post on ValleyWag about achieving blog nirvana, and even provides one of the coolest Venn diagrams I have seen in quite a while. Chris also provided a great link to a Venn diagram explaining the differences between Sweden and Norway.

Both are worth a quick look for a laugh too.

Louis Columbus, Cincom

Manufacturing Insights is an IDC company that specializes in the use of information technology to improve manufacturing processes including Lean/Six Sigma, RFID, Warranty, and establishing operations in China.  Bob Parker, VP Research for Manufacturing Insights, presented a scorecard of how the groups’ predictions fared in 2007 and provided the 2008 predictions.  Here is a summary of the 2007 scorecard and 2008 predictions:

1. A Major Theme for IT in 2007 – Faster, Better Decisions (Hit)
2. Intelligent decision models for supply chain management continue to make progress (Hit)
3.  Re-thinking Demand Management – Consumption Channels Replace Distribution Channels (Delayed)
4. The Next Generation of PLM Emerges (Hit)
5. RFID – Payoff Awaits the Patient (Delayed)
6. China continues to overheat (Hit)
7. Analytics will lead the way to Warranty and Quality Improvements (Miss)
8. SCOR, Lean, Six Sigma Convergence Takes Off (Delayed)
9. Companies will Begin to Create Fulfillment Execution Systems (Delayed)
10. Manufacturers will Resist ERP Upgrades (Hit)

The results of the scorecard show a fundamental truth about predictions: they resist being neatly organized into twelve month boundaries. The use of intelligent decision models for supply chain management has gained greater momentum than many industry experts had predicted for example and continues to rapid growth for example.  Predictions don’t capture momentum well, yet the Manufacturing Insights team did well.

1. Large Manufacturing Firms Will Move Toward a Globally Integrated Business Model

1. IT Organizations Will Accelerate Spending on Collaborative Decision Environments and Incubate Multi-Enterprise Business Networks

1. Globally Integrated Business Models Will Dictate That Supply Chain Organizations Reinforce the Fundamentals

1. IT Spending in the Supply Chain Area Will Focus on Fulfillment Execution

1. Product Life-Cycle Management Will become an Enterprise Strategy

1. Product Management Software Investments Will be Geared to Integrating Processes, Not Automating Tasks

1. For RFID, Forget Technology; Vendors Must Demonstrate Business Value Now

1. For Environmental Compliance and Corporate Responsibility Your Suppliers’ Problems Become Your Problems

1. Manufacturing Firms Will Tackle the Challenges of Aging/Emerging Workforces with Investment in Organic Knowledge Management

1. M2M Technology Will Emerge as a Key Enabler to Enhanced Service Delivery

·        Product customization will be handled through mass customization increasingly as manufacturers are looking to define modular processes for modular products and markets.

·        Goal-oriented social networking will emerge as these many forms of collaboration are capitalized on to accomplish results within and between departments, divisions and organizations.

·        The growth of PLM is in many respects comparable to CRM, in that both are primarily business strategies first, application areas second.  Bob Parker made the point that at the heart of CRM is a business strategy that over time has been supported and augmented through applications’ increasing agility to contribute to business strategies.

·        Sustainability is all about cost containment and reduction for many manufacturers Manufacturing Insights speaks with regularly; rarely if there do manufacturers anticipate top-line revenue growth as a result of sustainability initiatives according to the discussion on the call.

·        M2M will experience double digit growth thanks to aggressive adoption and a growing convergence of IT and engineering

Links:

Post-event registration

And the press release:

Manufacturing Insights predicts Large Manufacturing Firms to Move Toward a Globally Integrated Business Model

Louis Columbus, Cincom

Cindy Jutras of Aberdeen Group recently completed a study of ERP adoption and usage by SMEs, and the main points are summarized here.  In case you haven’t been introduced to Cindy before, she is an exceptionally stronger researcher and knows the ERP market very well, and has written a book on ERP performance called ERP Optimization. 

Here are the key findings from her report:

·        In SMEs with revenues under $50M the ERP system replacement cycles are just under eight years, indicating rapidly changing business models and customer requirements in smaller companies. 

·        One of the most surprising findings is that manufacturing-based SMEs are 27% less likely to have implemented an ERP system that expect can growth with them.  In other words, one out of every four manufacturing SMEs expect their business models to change to such a significant extent that they will require another ERP systems within eight years or less.

·        Use of event management functionality in ERP and supply chain systems including support for exception management leads on average to a 47% increase in schedule compliance.  Best-in-class SMEs are 16 times more likely to use event management functionality according to the report.

·        SMEs attaining best practices are 240% more likely to use embedded workflow management than their peers.

·        Best-in-class SMEs are 60% more likely to centralize selected functions using shared services – resulting in twice the reduction in administrative costs – while overall they are also twice as likely not to be running seriously outdated ERP versions.

Download the report here : ERP in SMB: Exploring Growth Strategies

Article link: Good manufacturing SMEs take their ERP systems very seriously, says Aberdeen

Ever since reading The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker and seen the Toyota Production Systems (TPS) implications not only on supply chains, enterprise compliance and quality management (ECQM) strategies, and the ability to Toyota to eventually turn their supply chains into learning organizations  I’ve wanted to make it come alive for my students in international business and global competition courses. 

I found an excellent document at the MIT Library online titled Creating and Managing a High Performance Knowledge-Sharing Network: The Toyota Case by Jeffrey Dyer, and Kentaro Nobeoka.  It’s written to an academic audience yet the nuggets of insights are worth wading through this document.

What is most significant from the study is how pervasive and patient the efforts are on the part of Toyota to create a highly collaborative knowledge-sharing network of suppliers, at times taking years to make sure the processes inside suppliers are aligned to the quality management standards of their own production processes.

The best lesson learned of all from the study: that suppliers trade knowledge when a highly collaborative framework is used to foster information exchange, and transaction velocity becomes secondary to knowledge gained and shared. 

The price of not having an enterprise compliance and quality management (ECQM) strategy in place is seen in an announcement today that hundreds of Hong Kong-owned toy factories in China may be forced to close after huge global recalls hit the industry, the Hong Kong Toys Council reported today.

Quite a high price to pay for not having an quality management strategy in place.

Link from Industry Week: Chinese Toy Factories under Threat

Healthcare providers across the country are now being targeted for healthcare fraud investigations. Many of those providers are clueless. They don’t even know why they’re being investigated.

Are Your Actions Causing You to Become a Target for a Healthcare Fraud Investigation?

Do you engage in one or more of the following:

• Accept what the insurance carrier offers, without question
• Work with 3rd- party liability carriers and accept what your patients give you once they receive settlement, and accept your patient’s account of settlement negotiations
• Allow your patients to retain an attorney to handle 3rd-party liability claims, and you accept the attorney’s offer of settlement without question
• Work consistently with a limited number of external providers (physicians, surgeons, neurologists)
• Fail to read the Explanations of Benefits (“EOBs”) in which the insurance carrier identifies the reasons for denial.
• Consider peer reviewers’ reports as nuisances and as costs of doing business with insurance carriers.
• Not bother to read, or don’t receive, Controverting Affidavits in which both reasons for denial are reported and aberrant practices are alleged.
• Fail to respond to Controverting Affidavits in which reasons for denial are reported.
• Fail to respond to Controverting Affidavits in which aberrant practices (unbundling of services, medically unnecessary services, medically unnecessary referrals) are alleged, because you either consider such allegations harmless or you have neither the time nor ability to provide a response challenging such allegations.

If the answer is yes, then you need to consider a healthcare compliance program!

While you can rationalize to yourself that these issues are just the cost of doing business, a nuisance and can be ignored, the consequences can be disastrous.

How to Save Your Practice, License, and Freedom If You Have Become the Target of a Healthcare Fraud Investigation?

I've spent decades in practice, and worked closely with insurance carriers, defense attorneys, personal injury attorneys, law enforcement, and others, I understand your fears and concerns. More importantly, I know how to help you gain the knowledge you need to identify the insurance carriers’ weaknesses and practice in an ethical manner.

I have seen the exodus of hordes of providers due the insurance industry’s stranglehold on the healthcare industry, and I have taught many providers to fight back. When investigators come knocking on your office-door, will you be prepared?

Here’s how you can prepare yourself now:

• Develop a healthcare compliance program. Do not make the mistake of believing that a sham compliance program will suffice. You are better off having no compliance program than merely using one for window-dressing. The false sense-of-security often proves disastrous!

• Create an audit-response program that effectively addresses deficiencies, both noted and alleged.
• Establish a policy for refunds of monies paid in error, when such errors are noted during internal audits.
• Develop an effective auditing process, assessing medical necessity and billing issues.
• Meet with SIU agents who may have “flagged” your files to identify specific areas of concern.
• Develop a Hotline to address issues of concern coming from employees, patients, insurance adjusters, etc.
• Attempt to enter into a Corporate Integrity Agreement between the targeted-provider and investigators.
• Retain a compliance team knowledgeable in healthcare law. Do not trust your fate to an attorney inexperienced in this arena. Rest assured, the insurance carriers will not!

What Are Your Next Steps?

Invest in a reputable health care compliance program now. Properly implemented and managed, a Healthcare Compliance Program could make the difference between losing your practice, losing millions of dollars, losing your freedom, and being in a position to proudly announce to healthcare fraud investigators, "Come on in. I would be proud to show you our program."

Sham programs create more problems for you than you even want to contemplate. When you become the target of a health care fraud investigation, you do not want to be forced to justify why an unqualified compliance "guru" is helping you in this process.

About the Author:

Chiropractor and attorney, Dr. Tom Rhudy teaches thousands of healthcare providers and administrators how to keep their practice watertight when it comes to healthcare compliance rules, laws and regulations. Now you can get his FREE 106-page SPECIAL HEALTHCARE COMPLIANCE GUIDE created to minimize healthcare fraud and abuse at http://www.complianceinformationnetwork.com/

Late last year Microsoft released a 182 page document they call a white paper – it’s more like a book, and it’s worth a look if you are interested to see evidence of just how closely SAP and Microsoft are working together on their shared interoperability plans.   This is the most impressive white paper/book to date on the interoperability of SAP NetWeaver Portal and Microsoft SharePoint Technologies I’ve seen that is available for no charge over the Web.  Quite comprehensive, and worth a look to just see how closely these companies are working together on their respective SOA platforms and technologies.   Just to let you know, I am not an employee, consultant or blogger for either Microsoft or SAP, I just appreciate how much work must have gone into this document. Link: Interoperability between SAP NetWeaver Portal and Microsoft SharePoint Technologies  

Product quality is the signature every manufacturer leaves in the market, so making enterprise-wide compliance and quality management (ECQM) strategies, and with them, manufacturing audits a priority, is essential. Quality, not price, needs to be the leading competitive strength of any company in 2008.

Periodic manufacturing audits define the level of consistency of production processes to their original design; uncover opportunities for greater process efficiencies based on an evaluation of how effective the processes are in meeting customer requirements; and as a result often create the catalyst for corrective action to bring processes back in line with your company’s internal goals.  Audits are the foundation of positive change. 

Besides having an auditor trained in both auditing techniques in addition to being familiar with the processes and procedures being audited, companies attaining best practices in auditing also have well-defined scales, or levels of metrics, to measure process-by-process performance and use them to both recognize exceptional performance in addition to defining action plans where improvement is needed. 

Many manufacturers actually use audit results to reward departments and work teams that are exceptionally strong at attaining production, quality and service goals. 

Today Google honors the 25^th birthday of the protocol that serves as the foundation for the Internet: TCP/IP.  ZDNet has an excellent definition of the protocol here.

I’ve taught courses on how the Internet has tended to flatten the OSI Model, using the graphic to explain how systems integrate with one another, which is a great teaching tool for the fundamentals of networking.

The interesting twist on Google giving TCP/IP the front logo for its birthday is how enterprising bloggers have been able to catapult themselves to the top of the search rankings.  Check out this story here.

Apparently the ingenious bloggers also have a great sense of humor too: in their post they credit Al Gore with inventing the Internet in 1994 to prevent global warming. 

Back in the day when I was an analyst at AMR Research I met Bob Thompson over a dinner in Redwood City and have been following his insights and writings on CRM since then.  You may have heard of him from his former site CRMGuru.com, which in April, 2007 was renamed CustomerThink.com.

You can find his top 10 CRM stories for 2007 here.

Take some time and read these over if you are even remotely interested in CRM or customer-facing strategies.  What’s refreshing about the summary is it is written for the users of CRM systems, not just for the vendor community or CRM software developers and is honest it its assessments of the industry.

I’m not one for making long laundry lists of resolutions, yet at the beginning of every year I do think it is a good idea to stop and ask if your passions are driving your life and your career or not.  Personally I could always lose more weight, become more efficient – all lifelong battles for me, all the ads getting blasted to us consumers in January just make me realize that changing on the outside is fruitless for me, the real change has to come inside first to make the changes on the outside stick.

A new year is really all about redemption and a chance to begin again. Instead of getting pulled into being envious of friends or neighbors with much more important-sounding titles than mine or more vehicles sitting in their driveways, or more homes tucked away in far-away places, I think about what constitutes a successful year, and it just comes down to one thing:

That’s it, that’s what I think really matters in any new year.  Living with a passion for what you’ve chosen to do is so much more important, because no amount of money can buy you that. 

Feeding your passions is critical, and that’s where learning and reading comes in.  Fuel your passion for your work this year by resolving to get through at least three books on what interests you; if you have kids this is also called being a great example.  Feed and fuel your passions by learning more about it; don’t just acquiesce and let the year go by. 

Have a happy and prosperous 2008!

Bruce Temkin of Forrester, on his blog Customer Experience Matters lists the top twenty most-read pieces of research he authored in 2007 with Experienced-Based Differentiation (EBD) dominating the top twenty titles listed.

In the same blog entry Mr. Temkin also shares his research agenda for 2008 which includes planned research that breaks out one of my favorite subjects, Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs as part of Experienced-Based Differentiation (EBD).  Back in July Bruce wrote a good post titled Are you listening to the voice of your customer? Which includes a Forrester graphic that defines the five levels defined through research. .    

What is really going to be interesting is reviewing the results from the research into the business impact of the customer experience.  While Cincom is not a client of Forrester Research I am hoping Mr. Temkin shares some lessons learned on his blog when the research is complete. In writing the agenda, Mr. Temkin explains he will look to determine how customer experience is connected with customer loyalty. It would be great if the research leads to a monetizing of how the dominant factors that influence customer experience ultimately impact profitability. 

Temkin’s blog is a good read and worth tracking, consider adding it to your RSS Reader as well.

Instead of just jotting down the top trends that have a high probability of success and therefore are safe as predictions, I thought it would be interesting to first look at what the best bloggers have to say and see what the implications are for manufacturing, then go out on a limb and make some predictions.

Here’s the content of the article, thanks for any feedback or comments.

Transforming Manufacturing using Voice of the Customer Strategies

Competing for customers has never been more challenging, intensely focused, or costly for manufacturers globally.  Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product line extensions to marginally increase a given products’ market size and potential sales, manufacturers must get back to what made many of them successful to begin with, and that is concentrating on knowing the unmet needs of customers and responding to them with innovative products and solutions better than any competitor globally.  

Aggressively getting Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiatives and programs off the ground quickly to drive both ongoing quality programs and getting their product development cycles fine-tuned to customers’ unmet needs delivers long term competitive advantages.  Any lasting competitive strength needs to be built on processes that deliver exceptional value to customers with products that meet their unmet needs and exceed their expectations.

While the catalyst that launched many manufacturers were innovative products and services that in many cases created entire markets, the predominant mindset today seems to be following cost reduction as a strategy to the exclusion of creating new markets.  As the authors of the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne show in their research, the ability of manufacturers to re-assess the unmet needs of their customers and create entirely new products and solutions that match customers’ changing preferences is critical. When companies follow this approach to redefining markets for their products and services they create entirely new market segments, which the authors have called blue oceans.  A market that is considered being a blue ocean is one where demand is created, not fought over, and illustrates opportunity for growth and profitability versus margin- and price cutting to gain market share.  Conversely red oceans are those markets marked by high levels of price cutting and margin taking in the hopes of driving demand up quickly to compensate for declining sales.  Price isn’t the problem in red oceans; relevance is.  Finding blue oceans starts however with an aggressive VoC plan and continues with a shift in the culture of manufacturers to act on the customer intelligence gained.

There are excellent lessons learned from the book Blue Ocean Strategy that apply to manufacturers.  Here are several of them:

• Incumbent manufacturers most often create blue oceans from their core businesses. Chrysler’s redefining the family vehicle market with the development of the minivan, IBM’s humble beginnings as the company CTR for tabulation machines, IBM’s creation of the server market with the launch of the System/360, Compaq’s defining the blue ocean of low-end, fully configured servers with the launch of its ProSignia line, Proctor & Gamble’s redefining of floor cleaning products with the Swiffer are all examples of how blue oceans have been defined by incumbent manufacturers.  In entertainment, AMC’s definition of the blue ocean strategies of first the cinema multiplex and later, the megaplex, in addition to the redefining of circus entertainment by Cirque du Soleil, which is thoroughly discussed in the book and article by Kim and Mauborgne, also illustrate how manufacturers can create blue oceans for themselves based on their core strengths.

• Blue oceans can’t be bought purely through technology innovation. Consider the fact that the majority of blue oceans that manufacturers are benefiting from today are based on existing technology, and it’s clear that just spending heavily on R&D to create entirely new markets doesn’t work.  Instead there needs to be deliberate customer listening strategies including aggressive VoC programs to fully understand the needs of customers and re-align existing product and process strengths to meet them.  The technology behind the Apple iPod series of personal MP3 players was well-known; it was the development of the iTunes store, strong demand for personal music that could be quickly saved to a personal MP3 player and used anytime, anywhere that revolutionized this specific market.  For manufacturers the message is clear; the blue oceans are out there and it takes a concentrated effort to find them through VoC programs and staying close to how customers want to solve their unmet needs.

• Defining blue oceans as traditional industries and markets don’t work; yet capturing and acting strategically on customers’ changing unmet needs do.   Kim and Mauborgne contend that blue oceans defy existing approaches to defining them and as a result require entirely new product strategies, marketing messages, and approaches to meeting unmet customers’ needs.  Manufacturers who strip away the traditional approaches to business development and new venture creation have a better chance of uncovering the higher growth and uncontested blue oceans that may exist in their customer bases.  Customers’ approaches to buying, using, and recommending your products change dramatically over time; finding out about how these changes occur is critical to finding blue ocean markets.

• Blue ocean strategies transform value/cost trade-offs and force manufacturers to align activities in the pursuit of differentiation and low cost at the same time.  For incumbent manufacturers, this is the aspect of cost reduction that makes the greatest potential impact on competing in new markets.  The ability to trim cost isn’t then used as turned a red ocean even more red with losses; it’s about creating such a high level of differentiation in products and delivering such high value that low cost becomes one more competitive differentiator.  It isn’t the single greatest differentiator, yet a contributing factor in underscoring exceptional value to customers in the fulfillment of their unmet needs.   

For manufacturers the implications of pursuing blue oceans are clear.  First, the world is now the playing field, not any state, province or region they are located in.  Globalization has leveled the playing field and is bringing competitors to manufacturers’ doorsteps, yet also providing opportunities to capture customers globally with greater efficiency than ever before as well.

Manufacturers must find the intersection of their core strengths through the use of aggressive VoC programs find the blue oceans their organizations can compete strongly in.  There are a series of qualitative approaches manufacturers rely on to gain insights from their customers, and while these are all valuable as part of a broader VoC program, the culture of any manufacturer must also change to capitalize on the lessons learned. 

No one can afford the luxury of being arrogant and ethnocentric in such a rapidly and highly competitive, changing world; if anything VoC programs must force manufacturers out of their comfort zones before market forces do and force change that is planned versus by accident.  Here are the key approaches manufacturers are taking to gain qualitative feedback in their VoC programs:

Advisory Councils – One of the most effective approaches to gaining insights from customers, there has been wide variation in results achieved using councils to gain insights into new markets and unmet needs of customers.  The cardinal sin so many manufacturers commit here however is either thinking they already know what their customers’ future plans are, or worse, viewing this as a negative experience just because customers will complaint about problems they may have had for years.  There is no room for such arrogance in such a rapidly changing global economy.  Fail to listen to your customers’ complaints and someone else will; and gain their business in the process.  If there was ever a time to throw off the “we know already”: mentality that tends to pervade old-school manufacturers this is now the time, because it is time to fight for your customers like never before.  Besides that, they have insights into where entirely new blue ocean markets are.

The best-run advisory councils first recruit from the standpoint of exclusivity and the need to gain insights into the direction customers are going.  They are hardly sales events; they are more often events where C-level executives gather to share peer-level insights into what is working and what isn’t when it comes to solving major strategic challenges.  Symantec’s use of advisory councils at the CEO level with their customers has netted them remarkably strong results as their customers have shared their long-term security strategies and plans, challenges, and sought advice from the senior security experts at the software company.  The result: over two years the platform product strategy direction of Symantec was perfectly aligned with their customers’ needs.

Blogs - If there is one lesson learned taken away from this article, get out to Google, get an RSS Reader set up and start tracking bloggers who are in your industry.  There is an exponential growth of content being generated by bloggers and many of them are hinting at the next blue oceans in key markets.  In addition many manufacturers have set up blogs and even defined blogging policies for their employees.  Using blogs as a means of connecting with customers needs to be down with transparency, honesty and directness.  No sugar-coating problems, not dodging customer complaints, but ownership and sincerity are critical in the blogosphere.  Start tracking what bloggers are saying about your company, the industry, and what is going on in related areas as well, as this is a great way to stay on the pulse of what one form of exponentially growing voices of customers is saying. 

Focus Groups – This is a commonly used qualitative strategy for completing research, yet it can also be used as a VoC program as well; and needs to be considered as part of any new product development effort.  The use of focus groups has been criticized, yet it is one more avenue by which manufacturers are attempting to find the blue oceans accessible o them.     

Mining unstructured content from sales and post-sales feedback including customer complaints – Well-intentioned at the time they are nearly always ignored when the results come back from customers, sales feedback forms and post-sale customer satisfaction bounce-back cards often up in stack after stack of moving boxes in the marketing directors’ closet or under their desk.  Because the data is unstructured and difficult to interpret, it gets ignored for years.  There is good news for manufacturing company’s marketing directors feeling too guilty to throw these boxes out yet seeing a Herculean task of coding them.  Companies including Attensity, Cymfony, Island Data and others have software that can interpret unstructured data and create linguistic models based on the results.  This is incredibly powerful for finding blue oceans.  Consider getting to know how these tools work to gain greater insight into how to find blue oceans globally.

Win/Loss Analysis needs to grow up – The days of simply relying on sounds bites of why business was won or lost have got to end for any manufacturer who wants to compete more effectively on a global basis.  If you’re a manufacturer are you’re not doing a thorough analysis of why the major deals didn’t get won then it’s time now to start paying more attention to this area of a VoC program.  Kill sound bites and don’t allow them to be part of how sales efforts get evaluated; finding out the specific reasons why a given deal was lost is critical if a manufacturer is going to compete globally with greater strength.  Too many companies get lulled to sleep with sound bites while their competitors have found entirely new markets – their blue oceans have arrived – and sound bites hide that from a competing manufacturer.  Don’t be asleep on this area of where weaknesses are slowly eroding competitive strength.  Likewise finding out why a customer chose your products and solutions nearly always points to greater clarification of the unique value proposition manufacturers rely on for positioning and identity.  

Finding blue oceans is the path to profitability and growth for manufacturers, regardless where they are located.  For American manufacturers, their core strengths began by uniquely attacking customers’ unmet needs and aligning their product strategies accordingly.  It’s time for this nation’s manufacturer to wake up and realize that it doesn’t need to just be about cost reductions and product line extensions – in the vernacular of Kim and Mauborgne – red ocean strategies.  Instead, embracing the challenge of finding blue oceans through concerted VoC programs needs to be a strategic priority – and further than that – a passion to change and become a stronger global competitor in the process. 

Cincom Systems

lcolumbus@cincom.com

 It’s intriguing to consider how Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs can assist in the development of entirely new markets, or as W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne describe them, blue oceans.  In working through an article on the topic, which is attached, I’ve tried to capture the use of VoC techniques to find new markets.  Your comments on the article are welcomed.  Thank you and have a Happy New Year.

Cincom Socrates Configuration Management Software Achieves "Powered by SAP NetWeaver " Status

Cincom Systems announced Cincom Socrates version 8.2 achieved "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" status from SAP AG, www.sap.com, Walldorf, Germany.
 

Cincom Debuts New AppExchange Software

Cincom introduced new configuration management software for AppExchange, a Web-based marketplace for business applications designed for the Force.com, a platform from Salesforce.com Inc., www.salesforce.com, San Francisco, Calif.
 

Cincom Experts Outline Best Practices in Enterprise Compliance

Lee Blandford and Ken Leamer, enterprise compliance and quality management practice members at worldwide software provider Cincom Systems, were featured speakers at the American Society of Quality's Audit Division Conference in Atlanta, Georgia on October 12, 2007.

Cincom Manufacturing Software Expert to Present in Beijing, China

Chris Astall, Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions program director, presented at the "2007 Excellence in Manufacturing Summit" in Beijing, China on October 25, 2007.
 

Five Ideas to Ignite IT Success in Your Front Office In a 50-minute recorded webinar released by Cincom, "Five Ideas that Will Ignite Success Regarding IT in Your Front Office" (www.cincom.com/ITFrontOffice), Cincom Systems; AMR Research; and Soeren Brogaard Jensen, vice president, Enterprise Application Software at American Power Conversion, discuss the findings of the industry's first survey of best practices in IT effectiveness for build-to-order products.

Top ten reasons to automate manufacturing compliance: Cincom Systems

The goal of this white paper by Cincom Systems is to provide a rationale for ten good reasons to automate manufacturing compliance.

The Latest Server Trend Isn’t So New

I  can remember back in the early ‘90s when my company moved off of DOS to Microsoft Windows. Not too long after my conversion, I happened to get into a discussion with a graphic artist. I was going on and on about the benefits of Windows and how much easier it was to learn new applications with the intuitive graphical interface. My artist friend started laughing at me.

“We’ve had that for years,” he said. “The mouse, the graphics, the intuitive program design.”

I suddenly felt like I did the time I wore my leisure suit into an urban-cowboy bar. I thought I was cool, but I was really just a bit late.

Today’s ongoing discussions regarding the “new” virtualization technology now available in the world of servers is also a bit late.

Don’t get me wrong; I think virtualization technology is a good thing. It’s just that the mainframe world has been utilizing this type of technology for decades.

Long before UNIX wandered out of the ivy-covered towers of academia, we had VM or Virtual Machine. Long before the sun rose in the west, we had LPARs or Logical Partitions. Before there was Dual Core, there were quadra-processors or hardware-based, four-way processors.

Ever hear of MVS? That’s a TLA for Multiple Virtual System.

Why did these things evolve? How were they utilized?

Virtually (sorry, couldn’t resist) all of the same reasons we hear about today – efficient utilization of resources and security – justified the application of these strategies in the mainframe world years ago.

Fewer servers, less people 

Okay, I know the price of hardware will continue to come down; but the demand for resources and capacity will continue to climb. This has been true ever since Mr. Moore gave us his law. Also, just because something is cheaper today than it was several months ago, is not by itself a justification to buy more of that something.

As the server architecture moves in a centralizing direction, the affects of decentralized control over hardware growth become more and more apparent. One of the most often-heard criticisms of this architecture is the huge amount of unused capacity it creates.

When hardware of this type becomes a departmental asset rather than a corporate resource, you are going to create a wasteful culture. A department might have one or two or three applications, all of which run on separate servers each of which can handle two or three times the workload that these apps might require.

When you multiply this over an enterprise, you’re talking about hardware expenses running maybe two or three times higher than they would in a centralized environment.

The Human Element

All of those systems require human maintenance. If your enterprise is spread out over a large geographical area, you will probably need to hire redundant personnel to maintain your decentralized systems.

Virtualization can mitigate that to some degree and when combined with centralization, your excess capacity will likely diminish to something more reasonable like 10 percent to 20 percent.

This is accomplished by buying fewer, yet larger machines, and creating multiple virtual environments to accommodate the diverse applications needed throughout the enterprise.

The same is true for the human aspect as well. Fewer humans are required to maintain fewer boxes, and centralizing them will encourage the maximum utilization of each person even further.

Further, the ability to maintain separate test and production environments is far easier and cheaper with virtual capabilities than with dedicated, single-server-per-application strategies.

System Security and Disaster Recovery

For several years now, Microsoft Windows has featured a capability called Volume Shadow Services (VSS). Combining this with Virtual Server (VS) will provide users with another “back to the future” capability that has existed in the mainframe arena for quite sometime.

Mainframe devotees have long enjoyed a robust ability to mirror a production facility either physically or virtually, remotely or locally as a ready-made failover system. These are able to kick in with no loss of data or transaction history. This is disaster recovery at its best.

VS and VSS can’t exactly do this, but a reasonable alternative for some implementations is offered through the ability to take a freeze-frame image of a system multiple times in a day. When the production system fails, the user can select the most recent image available and get things back online with a minimal loss of data.

Don’t be confused, this is not system mirroring in the mainframe sense, but it does provide a useful level of protection for some implementations.

Nothing Wrong with Modernizing

Several years ago there was a great single-panel cartoon that appeared in one of the trade rags. It featured the large, wall-sized mainframe computer replete with dials and flashing lights. There were two bald-headed, white-coated guys in the frame. One held a clipboard, intently making notes, while the other rode a Vespa-sized motor scooter in circles. The scooter was attached to the mainframe by a long, thick cord. The caption said something like “Joe takes notes as Larry tests out his new invention, the mainframe mouse.”

Okay, it wasn’t that funny after all. But, the point was well made.  We have lots of once-good ideas waiting to be picked up and brought forward into the world of today. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that there is much knowledge that is transferable and there is nothing wrong with modernizing what is old instead of re-inventing what already exists.

END --  Lou Washington is the Master of MIPS at software and services provider Cincom Systems. In his spare time, he’s also a Senior Business Manager. He can be reached at lwashington@cincom.com. Nearly one-third of Cincom’s customers still use its products running in the mainframe environment.

 Cincom Systems' (www.cincom.com) Sales Configurator version 8.1 (www.cincom.com/q2o) has received a "Positive" rating in Gartner's " MarketScope for Sales Configuration, 3Q07" report by Gene Alvarez, for 2007.

Cincom's Sales Configurator™ captures the product, services, and business knowledge needed for guided selling, complex product and sales configuration, and proposal management. It enables complex manufacturers to capture and deliver critical application, product, pricing, and process knowledge to the point of sale -- ensuring the optimal fit between the manufacturers' product offering and customers' needs.

Cincom was one of 11 vendors and 13 products evaluated in the report. Gartner considers companies receiving a "Positive" rating to "demonstrate strength in specific areas, but execution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance" and recommends that existing customers "continue planned investments" while potential customers "consider the vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations."

"We thrive on complexity," said Jim Wilson, Program Director, Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions. "Manufacturers are looking for innovative selling systems that can keep pace with increasingly complex products and services. Our commitment over the past year to support enterprise platforms such as SAP, Microsoft, and Salesforce has been well received. We believe Gartner's "Positive" rating confirms Cincom's position as the industry leader in meeting the complex selling needs of build-to-order manufacturers."

A

The MarketScope is copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The MarketScope is an evaluation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the MarketScope, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest rating. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Cincom, the Quadrant Logo, and Cincom's Sales Configurator are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cincom Systems, Inc.

All other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

© 2007 Cincom Systems, Inc. ll Rights Reserved

Win an Apple iPod Nano in Cincom-sponsored survey on quality and compliance

 Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions is sponsoring a new research survey to determine the state of quality and compliance strategies. One survey respondent will be chosen at random to receive an Apple iPod Nano.

Does Your Organization Rely on Quality as a Differentiator?

Is quality and compliance a competitive differentiator for manufacturers and services companies today?  Recent industry news and research shows that it is a more effective differentiator than price or cost.

While many companies have pursued low-cost manufacturing strategies earlier, many are now looking to balance cost reduction with a renewed commitment to quality and compliance.

Is your company implementing this strategy?

Win an Apple iPod nano

Participate in the Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions survey and answer questions regarding your company's commitment to quality − click here.

The survey results will be published in Cincom’s Expert Access, and one response will be chosen at random to receive an Apple iPod Nano.

For more in-depth information on Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions, visit http://del.icio.us/cincompr.

Contact:
Louis Columbus
Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice
Cincom Systems, Inc.
lcolumbus@cincom.com
    

Cincom Named One Of The Top 100 Global IT Providers For Manufacturing

Manufacturing Business Technology (MBT) magazine named Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions as one of 2007's Top 100 global providers of IT and enterprise applications for the manufacturing and supply-chain markets. Read more.

Engineers Spend more than Half their Time on Low-Value Activity

More than 50 percent of engineers at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers spend their time on activities that add no real value to the customer. This is according to a research report recently released by Cincom. Read more.

Study Highlights Impact of Mass Customization and Build-to-Order Practices

Best Practices: Mass Customization and Built-to-Order Manufacturing, discusses findings on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices. 

"Engineering is uniquely positioned to optimize the fit between a customer's needs and manufacturing," said Jim Wilson, Cincom program director and author of the report. "Unfortunately, much of the time spent is low-value activity." Read more.

Engineers Waste a Lot of Time on the Job

Cincom Systems published a report on Thursday announcing that in its latest research it found that over half of all engineers who work at build-to-order or engineer-to-order companies that make products on a mass scale spend a great deal of their time on low-value activities.

The report comes at a time when many Americans are deeply concerned by the exiting of manufacturing jobs and the closing of manufacturing facilities across the United States.

The biggest reason that the manufacturing sector of the American economy is shrinking is the fact that we are currently transitioning from an industrial economy into a service economy. American companies are finding it less expensive and more efficient to outsource the raw manufacturing of goods to other nations, while positions designing new products, engaging in technological R&D, managing the supply chain, and distributing or marketing goods are actually on the rise in the United States. Read more.

Coping With Compliance

How to Turn Legislative Pain Into Profitable Gain

Louis Columbus, senior compliance and quality management analyst at Cincom, will be a featured speaker at the Software Business 2007 Conference on October 2-3 at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. The annual conference focuses on current strategic business, financial and technology issues and growth opportunities facing top executives of software companies.

Cost of Non-Compliance for Manufacturers Staggers

The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering.

The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars.

In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory compliance costs. Read more. Read more.

Australia

Top ten reasons to automate manufacturing compliance: Manufacturing Companies dominating their chosen markets use Compliance Standards as their competitive strategy.

Are the quality initiatives you've set being implemented throughout your organization? Read more.

Focus on the Software Industry, Emerging Opportunities, Partnerships and Alliances

Conversations? 

When customers' needs drive an organization's quality management agenda, then the organization's departments, strategies, and initiatives work in sync for success. Harnessing the often complex, at times conflicting, and frequently changing customer requirements is essential for quality management processes and systems to move toward profitable goals. Aligning only with internal performance measurements can lead to shortsighted -- and short-term -- results. Many organizations need to reengineer how the voice of the customer (VOC) influences their objectives and the direction of their quality management, but this requires more than a semiannual vist.  READ MORE - FROM QUALITYDIGEST MAGAZINE

Manufacturing Business Technology (MBT) magazine named Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions as one of 2007's Top 100 global providers of IT and enterprise applications for the manufacturing and supply-chain markets.

The 2007 Global Top 100 list was based upon five key criteria:

--  Computing infrastructure
--  Product innovation
--  Plant operations
--  Enterprise and supply chain
--  Business performance
    

Cincom was cited for its enterprise management, configuration and quote, and lean solutions for complex manufacturing processes, including Socrates®, a rules-based system for automating complex product and process configuration.

Other companies on the 2007 Global Top 100 include IBM, Dell, Google, Fujitsu, Intel, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Saleforce.com, and Hewlett-Packard, among others.

The MBT editorial staff called the 2007 Global Top 100 list "a snapshot of the most progressive and compelling areas within manufacturing IT markets."

About MBT

MBT is a trade publication that focuses on the information needs of executives across IT, operations, and corporate functions within the manufacturing industry. For more information, visit www.mbtmag.com.

About Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions for complex manufacturers deliver lean solutions to drive operational excellence. By identifying and automating complex manufacturers' most critical business processes, Cincom enables them to streamline quote-to-order processes, ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements and achieve comprehensive enterprise management with fact-based performance management.

For the latest Cincom Manufacturing white papers, click here.

Cincom Systems Senior Compliance and Quality Management Analyst, Louis Columbus, will be a featured speaker at the Software Business 2007 Conference on October 2-3 at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California. The annual conference focuses on current strategic business, financial and technology issues and growth opportunities facing top executives of software companies. Louis Columbus, published author and former research analyst with AMR Research, will cover the latest and best practices to turn regulatory compliance into a competitive advantage. Legislative Pain Regulatory compliance is fundamentally reordering the landscape of entire industries. Companies that do not conform to the standards being set by regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, shareholders and themselves at risk. Turning Pain into Gain Louis Columbus' presentation, "Turning Compliance into a Competitive Weapon: Best Practices to Turn Legislative Pain into Profitable Gain," will reveal how compliance initiatives that started out as a cost of doing business have resulted in revolutionizing all aspects of selling, manufacturing and service strategies – and increased bottom-line profits. Gain into Good Business "Turning Compliance into a Competitive Weapon: Best Practices to Turn Legislative Pain into Profitable Gain," will show how regulatory compliance cannot only re-define business, it can be good business The Software Business 2007 Conference serves owners, chief executives, presidents, vice presidents and division or department directors of leading and fast-growing software companies located throughout North America who are conducting business domestically and worldwide. SAP, Socialtext, Cincom Systems, Progress Software, Brainshark, LucidEra, Metastorm, Formotus, Parlano, SolidWorks, Softrax and International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute, along with many other companies will attend the software industry's leading executive and manager training event. For more information about the Software Business 2007 Conference, click here For more information about Cincom’s Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice, click here.

Question: “I’m in manufacturing – complex products. We’re struggling with some new regulatory compliance requirements. I understand it’s a cost of doing business but it’s killing us. Can any of your experts point us to some research that might help alleviate some of our pain?”

Answer: “Yes, and there’s actually some good news about compliance — it can be good for business.” Louis Columbus, leader of Cincom's Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management practice.  The Good News for Manufacturers about Compliance — Compliance Can Be Good Business? Regulatory compliance is fundamentally reordering the landscape of entire industries and none more so than manufacturing in the United States. Risky Business Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, shareholders and themselves at risk. Staggering Costs The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering: The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars1. In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory-compliance costs2. Tarnished Reputations Non-compliance can cost millions of dollars in lost market share and inventory write-downs and present significant challenges in turning around a tarnished reputation. In addition, there is the broader and more costly expense of re-architecting supply chains and products for compliance. The Good News? Compliance initiatives that started out as a cost of doing business have resulted in revolutionizing all aspects of selling, manufacturing and service strategies, and they have increased bottom-line profits. Compliance Can Be Good Business Compliance can not only re-define your business, it can be good business. Steps to Combat the High Cost of Non-Compliance? Focus – on the intersection of business process management and the need for greater visibility into supply chain, manufacturing processes and distribution channels. Establish - a company-wide quality and compliance-management strategy that synchronizes processes with supply chain, purchasing, sourcing, manufacturing and fulfillment. Utilize – technology that offers real-or-near real-time process control and visibility into key performance indicators. Implement – a single integrated solution. This cost-effectively reduces the risk of non-compliance. Audit – business processes to meet compliance objectives. Additional resources: For a copy of the white paper, “Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance,” click here. For a copy of the white paper, “The High Cost of Non-Compliance for Manufacturers,” click here. Louis Columbus, is the leader of Cincom's Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management practice and a former senior analyst with AMR Research. Louis has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free. Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University and University of California, Irvine. Cincom Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) technology is a technology platform to help manufacturers cope with compliance issues and transform their businesses in the process. Cincom ECQM provides a suite of software solutions to resolve issues quickly and prevent recurrence, helping to ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements. Louis has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free. Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University and University of California, Irvine. For the latest Compliance & Quality management white papers by Louis Columbus, click here. Louis can be reached at lcolumbus@cincom.com. 1. Manufacts: The Escalating Cost of Doing Business in the U.S. – National Association of Manufacturers, May 2007 2. The Escalating Cost Crisis in Manufacturing – National Association of Manufacturers, September 2006

Helps maintain high standards, meet regulatory requirements, and improve quality Cincom Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) has released a new "Calibration Management Solution Overview" for manufacturers. Calibration Management: Helps manufacturers meet regulatory compliance and reduce non-conformance Increases productivity Reduces cost Improves quality by reducing data-entry time and human error Improves decision-making with fast, factual business-analysis and trending tools Highlights of what Calibration Management offers complex manufacturers include: Regulatory requirements and validation Equipment and measurement devices Inventory management Online procedures and worksheets Intelligent scheduling Online data entry and reporting Additional Resources For a copy of the Cincom "Calibration Solution Overview," click here (pdf). For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here. For a copy of the white paper, "The High Costs of Non-Compliance for Manufacturers," click here. B Contact: Louis Columbus Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice Cincom Systems, Inc. lcolumbus@cincom.com <IMG ALT="" BORDER="0" NAME="DCSIMG" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" src="http://webtrendssdcs.cincom.com/dcsd93dv6yxwqsgkqxqfabvr1_6x4j/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&amp;WT.js=No">

Can Regulatory compliance be good business? Regulatory compliance is fundamentally reordering the landscape of entire industries and none more so than manufacturing in the United States. Risky Business Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, shareholders and themselves at risk. Staggering Costs The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering: The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars1. In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory-compliance costs2. Tarnished Reputations Non-compliance can cost millions of dollars in lost market share and inventory write-downs and present significant challenges in turning around a tarnished reputation. In addition, there is the broader and more costly expense of re-architecting supply chains and products for compliance. The Good News? Compliance initiatives that started out as a cost of doing business have resulted in revolutionizing all aspects of selling, manufacturing and service strategies, and they have increased bottom-line profits. Compliance Can Be Good Business Compliance cannot only re-define business, it can be good business. How? Focus – on the intersection of business process management and the need for greater visibility into supply chain, manufacturing processes and distribution channels. Establish – a company-wide quality and compliance-management strategy that synchronizes processes with supply chain, purchasing, sourcing, manufacturing and fulfillment. Utilize – technology that offers real or near real-time process control and visibility into key performance indicators. Implement – a single integrated solution. This cost-effectively reduces the risk of non-compliance. Audit – business processes to meet compliance objectives. Additional resources: For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here. For a copy of the white paper, "The High Cost of Non-Compliance for Manufacturers," click here. For more information contact: Louis Columbus Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice Cincom Systems, Inc. lcolumbus@cincom.com

More than 50 percent of engineers at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers spend their time on activities that add no real value to the customer.

“Best Practices: Mass Customization and Build-to-Order Manufacturing” discusses the findings of the industry's first report − from an engineering perspective − on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices.

“Engineering is uniquely positioned to optimize the fit between a customer’s needs and manufacturing,” writes Jim Wilson, Cincom Program Director and author of the report. “Unfortunately, much of the time spent is low-value activity.”

While engineers spend most of their time (32 percent) creating new product drawings for customers, the week is often consumed by numerous administrative tasks. Such low-customer-value activities include:

• creating bills of material (14 percent),
• change orders (13 percent),
• product selection and configuration (10 percent),
• manufacturing changes in line (5 percent),
• cost estimates (4 percent),
• pricing orders (4 percent) and post-order revisions (4 percent).

Sales support activities such as general sales consultation and post-sales support of installation only consume five percent of engineers’ time.

"Engineering management would benefit from reducing the amount of low-value tactical support activity but increasing engineering's influence on sales processes and solutions that are proposed to customers," states Cincom's Jim Wilson.

Cincom Systems targeted the survey at senior engineering managers at 900 manufacturers of complex industrial, electrical and transportation equipment and systems between January and February 2007.

For a copy of the report, please visit www.cincom.com/EngReport.

Audit Management Reduces Risk, Cost, Improves Quality The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering. The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars(1). In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory compliance costs(2). Risky Business Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards set by the regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, their shareholders, and themselves at risk. Combating the High Cost of Non-Compliance Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has released a new Audit Management Solution Overview as part of its Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) platform to help manufacturers battle the high cost of non-compliance. Cincom ECQM provides an integrated suite of software applications to resolve issues quickly and prevent recurrence, helping to ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements. Highlights of what Audit Management offers complex manufacturers include the ability to: Reduce the Risk of Non-compliance Audit Library: Benchmark performance against industry and regulatory criteria Custom/Hybrid Checklists: Ensure that your company meets corporate governance and internal requirements Inherit Policies: Enforce standards by enabling sites to inherit corporate policies and workflows Improve Audit Efficiency and Reduce Cost Audit Programs: Reduce schedule conflicts and ensure that audits are done correctly and on time Audit Response: Immediately trigger corrective actions to resolve issues rapidly Attach Evidence: Quickly corroborate findings by storing evidence with audit results in a central location Improve Quality Levels Share Results: Promote continuous improvement by sharing audit results across sites Create Action: Plans Quickly roll out action plans to initiate immediate improvement Track Corrective Actions: Track the status of action plans to ensure that they are carried out effectively For a copy of the "Audit Management Solution Overview," click here (pdf). For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here. For more information contact: Louis Columbus Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice Cincom Systems, Inc. lcolumbus@cincom.com

<IMG ALT="" BORDER="0" NAME="DCSIMG" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1" src="http://webtrendssdcs.cincom.com/dcsd93dv6yxwqsgkqxqfabvr1_6x4j/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&amp;WT.js=No">

How Can Complex Manufacturers Identify and Eliminate?

The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering.

• The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars¹.
• In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory compliance costs².

Risky Business
Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by the regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, their shareholders, and themselves at risk.

Combating the High Cost of Non-Compliance
Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has released a new Non-Conformance/Corrective Action (NC/CA) Solution Overview as part of its Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) platform to help manufacturers battle the high cost of non-compliance.

Cincom ECQM provides an integrated suite of software applications to resolve issues quickly and prevent recurrence, helping to ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements.

Highlights of what Non-Conformance/Corrective Action (NC/CA) Management can offer to complex manufacturers include:

Shortened Time-to-Resolution

• Identify the occurrence of non-conformances or any other quality issue.
• Collaborate with responsible parties on tasks and investigations to quickly resolve issues.
• Communicate rapidly and clearly with suppliers about dispositions affecting them.
• Swiftly locate non-conformance/corrective-action records and related information through a wide range of search options.

Assurance of Non-Conformance and Corrective Action (NC/CA) Effectiveness

• Eliminate problems at their source and prevent recurrence.
• Set up verification reviews to ensure that a non-conformance or corrective action truly has been effective.
• Establish thresholds that will identify when an adverse trend is developing through failure-mode monitoring capabilities.

Integration with Core Systems
By integrating with other core business systems, Cincom NC/CA eliminates islands of information to ensure that changes are implemented quickly and consistently across your business.

For a copy of "Non-Conformance/Corrective Action (NC/CA) Management," click here (pdf).

For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here.

Contact:
Louis Columbus
Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice
Cincom Systems, Inc.
lcolumbus@cincom.com

James Robertson, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager, is the host of the weekly show "Industry Misinterpretations". To get notification, subscribe to this feed, and have your podcatcher pick up the enclosures. Have feedback? Send it here! We have all of the recent podcasts listed below, for your convenience:

Find the 2006 Podcast Archives

Visit the Podcast Page for the 2006 Cincom Smalltalk Users Conference!

• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 42: Import/Export
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 41: Getting Answers
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 40: Tools Talk
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 39: Emulate This
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 38: Going All Meta
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 37: Smalltalk at Penn State
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 36: Less is More
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 35:The Road to Cairo
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 34: Cincom Smalltalk Roadmap (From StS 2007)
• Show Notes
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 33: Smalltalk Solutions Show
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 32: Smalltalk Myths
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 31: Smalltalk Memory
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 30: STIC and StS 2007 with James, Michael, David, and Bob Nemec
  
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 29: Feedback and Futures
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 28: Twittering
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 27: ObjectStudio 8 with James Robertson, Andreas Hiltner, Mark Grinnell, and Arden Thomas
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 26: GLORP with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and guest Alan Knight.
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 25: Smalltalk Checks with James Robertson, David Buck, and guest Joerg Beekman.
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 24: Threading with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and David Buck
• Show Notes
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 23: Retrospective Coherence with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, and Joseph Pelrine.
• Show Notes
  
• Introducing Cincom Synchrony (Call Center Software) with James Robertson and Randy Saunders. I interviewed Randy, who's the marketing manager for the Cincom Synchrony product.
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 22: Liberty Basic with James Robertson and Michael Lucas-Smith. We interviewed Carl Gundel.
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 21: What do you use? with James Robertson, David Buck, and Michael Lucas-Smith (February 4, 2007)
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 20: Coding Mistakes with James Robertson, David Buck, and Michael Lucas-Smith (January 28, 2007)
• Show Notes
  
• Aggregating the Commentary with James Robertson - a "Product Management View" interview (January 20, 2007)
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 18: Strongtalk with David Griswold with James Robertson, Michael Lucas-Smith, Dave Buck, Bryce Kampjes, and David Griswold (january 14, 2007)
• Show Notes
  
• Industry Misinterpretations Episode 17: What's that Feature? with James Robertson and David Buck (January 7, 2007)
  
• Show Notes

You can follow this link to see all the podcast posts in your browser, or use this url to subscribe to the podcast specific news feed

Helps Manage Regulatory Compliance and Enforce Corporate Standards

--  The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162
    billion dollars(1).
--  In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in
    regulatory compliance costs(2).
    

--  Role-based document securities, password authentication
--  Complete audit trail
--  Automated validation process
--  Compliance with requirements for electronic signature, electronic
    records and software validation
    

--  Moves beyond traditional document management by enforcing employee and
    manager responsibility. When new documents and SOPs are issued, employees
    must electronically sign-off to acknowledge that they have read the new
    information.
    

--  With document review schedules, review workflows and change -- a
    notification capability, Cincom Document Lifecycle Management ensures the
    most accurate, up-to-date information is available, on-demand.
    

More than 50 percent of engineers at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers spend their time on activities that add no real value to the customer. This is according to a research report recently released by software maker Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com).

"Best Practices: Mass Customization and Build-to-Order Manufacturing" discusses the findings of the industry's first report – from an engineering perspective – on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices.

"Engineering is uniquely positioned to optimize the fit between a customer’s needs and manufacturing," writes Jim Wilson, Cincom Program Director and author of the report. "Unfortunately, much of the time spent is low-value activity."

While engineers spend most of their time (32 percent) creating new product drawings for customers, the week is often consumed by numerous administrative tasks. Such low-customer value activities include creating bills of materials (14 percent), change orders (13 percent), product selection and configuration (10 percent), manufacturing changes in line (5 percent), cost estimates (4 percent), pricing orders (4 percent) and post-order revisions (4 percent).

Sales support activities such as general sales consultation and post-sales support of installation only consume five percent of engineers' time.

"Engineering is uniquely positioned to optimize the fit between a customer’s needs and manufacturing," continues Wilson. "As such, engineering management would benefit from reducing the amount of low-value tactical support activity but increasing engineering’s influence on sales processes and solutions that are proposed to customers."

Cincom Systems targeted the survey at senior engineering managers at 900 manufacturers of complex industrial, electrical, and transportation equipment and systems between January and February 2007.

For a copy of the report, please visit www.cincom.com/EngReport and click on the resources link.

About Cincom Systems

Cincom delivers and supports innovative software and services to simplify complex business processes. For nearly 40 years, Cincom has enabled thousands of clients worldwide to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk, and achieve rapid ROI.

Cincom serves clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Ericsson, Penn State University, Milacron, Siemens and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.

Media Contacts:

Donna Hedge Burns
Cincom Systems, Inc.
513-612-2305
dburns@cincom.com

by Lou Washington, Cincom Systems

Demand-Driven Manufacturing

This morning when I left for work, I took a long last look at the sweet gum tree that towers over our front yard.  This tree has been a source of gentle conflict between my wife Barbara and me for a couple of years.

We both purchased new automobiles back in late 2003 and having an older home; the garage will only house a single car.  That meant that my car would be left outside, exposed to the elements.  When I drove a junker, I really didn’t care about the sun, rain, ice, birds and tree sap. When I pulled my new PT Cruiser into the driveway, I found that I had a bit of a change of heart.  All of these things suddenly began to matter.

Lou versus the Tree

My cruiser is more than just transportation. It has turned into something of a hobby.  I show the car occasionally, so the finish is more than just my personal vanity projected onto the car.  Show judges typically don’t care for blemished paint jobs. 

I protected the car from the sun by using a special UV impregnable wax.  I lived with the rain and ice, allowing both to just melt away rather than chipping or scraping them off. The birds I’ve discouraged using several rubber snakes.  That left that towering sweet gum tree as my primary adversary in the never ending battle to protect my beloved PT from this relentless assault of nature. 

If you are not familiar with sweet gum trees, let me tell you, they are not like normal trees.  Normal trees shed their leaves once a year and that’s about it.  They are neutral in their feelings toward cars.  They have a sort of live and let live attitude about the whole thing. 

Haters

Sweet gum trees, on the other hand, hate cars, despise cars and detest cars. They make it their business to do everything in their power to destroy any car that is unfortunate enough to park under their innocent looking branches.

There is really no safe season to park a car near a sweet gum tree.  The assault is unending and continuous throughout the year.  They employ a diabolical array for strategies to destroy the unlucky car parked near by. 

First there are the little stringy seed things that float down and creep into crevices in the body work.  These dry out and explode, leaving junk that is almost impossible to clean up.  When the stringy things run out, the tree will rain down the stickiest, nastiest sap in the world.  This makes the finish of the car look like someone attempted to shine it with sandpaper and Mrs. Butterworth’s Pancake Syrup 

But wait, there’s more.  We have the recurring fall ritual of hiding the car beneath a mountain of leaves.  The dead leaves will also find their way into almost any crevice or opening in the body work of the car.  Lift the hood in late fall and you will find enough leaves to stuff a mattress with.  Left under the hood, these will decompose during the winter turning into a gooey, stinking and decaying mass. 

Finally, when all other weapons are exhausted the sweet gum tree rolls out the most dangerous and insidious of its weapons, the spiky ball.  These little “maces” drop onto people, pets and cars with out regard to dress, time of day or the finish of an automobile.  They lodge in windshield wipers, door jams and numerous places under the hood.  They dry out, become hard and at that point they are quite capable of scratching the finish of a car right down to the sheet metal.

So, this morning I bid farewell to the sweet gum tree.  The public works people in our fair city have decided that the streets in our neighborhood need to be precisely two feet wider than they are now.  This means my nemesis has finally been defeated.  The tree removal crew was setting up as I pulled out of the drive way this morning and headed to work. 

That is why on this morning I was amazed by the fact that I actually felt some sorrow at the prospect of returning home that evening to a treeless front yard.  I debated with myself on the way to work about the whole issue of pushing down trees to make way for roads, shopping centers, parking lots, high schools and other human oriented facilities.

I started to become suspicious that I had somehow turned into a green during the night. Perhaps Woodsy Owl snuck into my room during the night and shot me up with chlorophyll or something.  I pinched myself to be sure I was indeed awake.  I checked my wallet to see if somehow I had unconsciously joined some environmental group, you know, the Society for the Return of the Earth to the Dinosaur or some such thing.  

That got me thinking about the whole issue of green, the environment and stewardship of our natural resources.            

Green is a movement that is not likely to go away any time soon.  Yet, for some reason there is still a tendency to link green with several unflattering image clichés.  You might conjure up an image of someone living in a tree for several months in an effort to protect it from being cut down by developers or perhaps you visualize a bunch of Che Guevara look-a-likes liberating down-trodden chickens from an oppressive hatchery or storming a Colonel Saunders.

Regardless of your personal view of green issues and the whole environmental movement, one must acknowledge that these issues do resonate with the public more and more. That means they impact the image that your particular business projects to that same public.

Green is increasing in relevancy with each increase in the price of gasoline and with each newscast about global warming, hydrocarbon emissions and mercury levels in salmon.

So the question might be asked at some point, is lean green? 

Do lean manufacturing strategies work with green manufacturing practices or are they diametrically opposed to one another?

Unlike many things I have researched, this one didn’t take much time to figure out.

Lean is Green

Almost every definition of lean manufacturing includes somewhere high on the list of defining characteristics, the concept of waste reduction.  Lean, by its very nature, seeks to and does reduce waste throughout the manufacturing process.  Waste is a natural by product of almost any production process.  Thus, waste reduction is a by product of almost any effective lean implementation.

Waste means everything that is either not used or that which is a manufacturing process by-product meaning smoke, steam, gas, water, strange odors etc.   The great thing about this is that if you are working a demand model with your supply chain, then your savings take on even more monumental dimensions by telegraphing the savings all the way through the supply chain.

Unnecessary widgets are not manufactured, meaning unnecessary parts won’t be fabricated and unnecessary supplies won’t be required.  . 

So needless to say, the impact is significant to your own enterprise.  Cumulatively, the impact is enormous.

All of the associated transportation waste, emissions and infrastructure wear and tear will not be needed.  Trucks won’t burn fuel since they won’t be delivering stuff that has not been ordered.  Pollutants won’t enter the atmosphere since the product not produced will not require the processes creating the waste product.  Savings will be realized on processes related to hazmat handling.  Less hazardous material means less potential for accidents, less training required for handling hazardous substances and less overhead devoted to moving, storing, using and disposing of the nasty stuff.

Again, all of these savings are transmitted throughout the organization and all along the supply chain feeding that organization.

The best part about this is that it just happens as a byproduct of implementing lean. You don’t have to form a bunch of teams, you don’t have to lobby your congressman, and you don’t have to hire or fire hundreds of people or raise prices on your end product. 

There is no requirement to contract with a book selling Lean is Green expert consultant or attend expensive seminars sponsored by the Green Guru or the Master of Lean.  There are no black belts, specialized vocabulary, secret handshakes or special societies to join. 

Waste is eliminated because of your lean implementation not because you set out to eliminate waste.

In effect, you are getting a two-fer.  You get all of the benefits of lean manufacturing in terms of reduced inventory expense, increased or more consistent quality in your output, happier customers and all the rest, plus, you are not polluting. 

When you get done, you will feel like I did on the way in this morning.  Suddenly being green is Okay!  Green positively affects the bottom line, Green makes life better for everyone that works for you and buys products from you. 

See-yah at the Earth Day rally!

About Lou Washington, AKA Mainframe Master of MIPS and ...

I started my career in information management from the somewhat misunderstood field of Records Management. Following four years of working for the University of Missouri System's Office of Records Management, I joined Tab Products Co. in 1980. Shortly thereafter, I became interested in the software business, PCs and how those systems would shape the enterprise of the future. We were transferred to Tab's then corporate HQ in Palo Alto, CA. I was the first Product Manager for Tab's Tracker systems software products that utilized a PC-based bar-coding system to track the movements  everything from files to capital assets. I believe it was the earliest example of workflow automation available on the market. I was also peripherally involved in Tab's Laser Optics division, which brought to market one of the earliest business systems employing CD-ROM and WORM technology as an information storage media.

In 1990, I returned to Cincinnati and joined Cincom Systems where I began to learn about and work with mainframe-oriented products and systems. In those days, there was a real "split" between the mainframe forces and the desktop proponents. I always found this to be amusing since both had so many positive things to offer an enterprise. I could never understand why anyone would offer one at the exclusion of the other.

My present role at Cincom involves a number of things including product security, pricing, finance, packaging and industry research.

My wife, Barbara, and I reside in Park Hills, KY. I am a member of Blessed Sacrament Church, and I am active in a local car club, Cincinnati Cruisers. We are a group of PT Cruiser owners who enjoy tricking out our cruisers and driving around annoying people who have to drive boring cars. I am the Webmaster for the Cruisers and I invite everyone to visit http://www.cincyptcruisers.com and check out our awesome rides!

CINCINNATI, Ohio – June 26, 2007 – The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering.

• The total regulatory burden on manufacturers is estimated at $162 billion dollars¹.
• In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory compliance costs².

Risky Business

Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by the regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, their shareholders, and themselves at risk.

Combating the High Cost of Non-Compliance

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has released a new Non-Conformance/ Corrective Action (NC/CA) Solution Overview as part of its Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) platform to help manufacturers battle the high cost of non-compliance.

Cincom ECQM provides an integrated suite of software applications to resolve issues quickly and prevent recurrence, helping to ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements.

Highlights of what Non-Conformance/Corrective Action (NC/CA) Management can offer to complex manufacturers include:

Shortened Time-to-Resolution

• Identify the occurrence of non-conformances or any other quality issue.
• Collaborate with responsible parties on tasks and investigations to quickly resolve issues.
• Communicate rapidly and clearly with suppliers about dispositions affecting them.
• Swiftly locate non-conformance/corrective-action records and related information through a wide range of search options.

Assurance of Non-Conformance and Corrective Action (NC/CA) Effectiveness

• Eliminate problems at their source and prevent recurrence.
• Set up verification reviews to ensure that a non-conformance or corrective action truly has been effective.
• Establish thresholds that will identify when an adverse trend is developing through failure-mode monitoring capabilities.

Integration with Core Systems

By integrating with other core business systems, Cincom NC/CA eliminates islands of information to ensure that changes are implemented quickly and consistently across your business.

For a copy of "Non-Conformance/Corrective Action (NC/CA) Management," click here (pdf).

For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here.

For more info contact -
Louis Columbus
Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice
Cincom Systems, Inc.
lcolumbus@cincom.com

Helps manage regulatory compliance and enforce corporate standards

The cost of non-compliance in the manufacturing industry is staggering. In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory-compliance costs. Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by the regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, their shareholders, and themselves at risk.

Combating the High Cost of Non-Compliance

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has released a new Document Lifecycle Management Solution Overview as part of its Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management (ECQM) platform to help manufacturers battle the high cost of non-compliance.

Cincom ECQM provides an integrated suite of software applications to resolve compliance and quality problems quickly and prevent recurrence. This helps ensure compliance with industry and regulatory requirements.

Highlights of what Document Lifecycle Management can offer to complex manufacturers include:

Regulatory Requirements and Validation

• Role-based document securities and password authentication
• Complete audit trail
• Automated validation process
• Helps facilitate compliance with requirements for electronic signature, electronic records, and software validation

Enforce SOP Training

• Moves beyond traditional document management by enforcing employee and manager responsibility. When new documents and SOPs are issued, employees must electronically sign off to acknowledge that they have read the new information.

Change Management

• With document review schedules, review workflows, and change-notification capabilities, Cincom Document Lifecycle Management ensures that most accurate, up-to-date information is available, on-demand.

For a copy of the "Cincom Document Lifecycle Management Solution Overview," click here (pdf).

For a copy of the white paper, "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," click here.

For more in-depth industry research on ECQM, click here.

Louis Columbus
Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice
Cincom Systems, Inc.
513.612.2300
lcolumbus@cincom.com

Complexity Not the Problem 

 Most engineers at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers believe that product complexity is not the primary barrier to customization. They cite lack of knowledge of options by the customer (67 percent) and the field (44 percent) as the primary barrier to product customization efforts.

This is according to a research report released June 11, 2007, by software maker Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com).

“Best Practices: Mass Customization and Build-to-Order Manufacturing” discusses the findings of the industry's first report − from an engineering perspective − on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices.

“The implication is that the knowledge required to sell customized products is not being effectively transferred to the field and customer. This is not surprising given the lack of strategic investment in front-office processes and systems,” writes Jim Wilson, Cincom Program Director and author of the report.

According to this survey, the primary barrier to customization is the effective transfer of knowledge from the back office to the front office. Of the surveyed respondents, 43 percent indicated that inadequate systems are also a barrier to customization.

Internal Expert Knowledge at Risk
Intellectual capital related to products is primarily in the heads of a few experts (64 percent). Twenty-six percent see the loss of intellectual capital through retirement or turnover as a key risk to their build-to-order strategy. Even more concerning is the fact that 35 percent of respondents report that there is no method in place for sharing knowledge throughout the company.

Cincom Systems targeted the survey at senior engineering managers at 900 manufacturers of complex industrial, electrical, and transportation equipment and systems between January and February 2007.

For more information on the report results contact Jim Wilson by email at jwilson@cincom.com or telephone 513-612-2657. 

For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com. 

New White Paper

Cincom recently named one of the "Most Influential Manufacturing Technology Providers," has released a new white paper - "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance," that examines compliance effects, strategies and tactics for top performers in the manufacturing industry.

Bad News -Staggering Costs
The cost of non-conformance in the manufacturing industry is staggering. In the U.S. alone, manufacturers pay $11,388 per employee in regulatory compliance costs¹.

Increased Risks
Manufacturers that do not conform to the standards being set by the regulatory bodies are increasingly placing their organizations, their shareholders and themselves at risk.

Good News – An Unexpected Discovery
Companies that take on compliance efforts are discovering that newly implemented selling, manufacturing, and service processes provide a competitive advantage. For these manufacturers, compliance initiatives that started out as “cost of doing business” exercises have resulted in a revolution of all aspects of their selling, manufacturing, and service strategies. Add to that, unexpected increases in bottom—line profits and it turns out … compliance can be good for business.

The "Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance" reveals why compliance and quality standards don't have to impede to success but rather can become a competitive advantage. In fact, compliance automation initiatives are found to be essential for any manufacturer that desires to meet and exceed customers’ expectations daily.

The white paper is published by Cincom's Enterprise Compliance & Quality Management Practice, and written by former Senior AMR Research Analyst, Louis Columbus.

For a copy of the white paper, click here – Top Ten Reasons to Automate Manufacturing Compliance.

To contact the author: 

Louis Columbus
Enterprise Compliance and Quality Management Practice
Cincom Systems, Inc.
lcolumbus@cincom.com


 

Executive Summary

Study the top-performing companies across all manufacturing industries and a plain and simple truth emerges: the ability to produce consistently high-quality products, regardless of forces impacting demand, suppliers, pricing, or channels, is the key to accomplishing revenue and profit goals.

Manufacturing companies dominating their chosen markets have as their core strength the ability to deliver exceptionally high levels of quality in their products on a consistent basis.

Compliance is the competitive strategy of making sure every product produced every day will exceed customer expectations and, as a result, drive up sales and profits. Compliance is the fulfillment of the commitment every manufacturer makes to every customer regarding their products’ benefits and value. Compliance strategies are the means through which those commitments are kept to customers, and that clear truth pervades the highest-performing companies in all manufacturing industries today.

When considering why you should join the top manufacturing companies that are automating compliance, realize that each product produced and sold creates a moment of truth for every customer you have. Making certain that your products (and more importantly, the processes used to produce them) can consistently deliver the highest-quality experience for your customers is what compliance is all about. Compliance to quality standards in your products is the ultimate competitive weapon because it is critical if the manufacturer’s goal is to successfully exceed its customers’ expectations daily. Compliance is essential for any manufacturer that wishes to go beyond survival and thrive in an increasingly competitive and turbulent global arena.

The top ten reasons manufacturers need to consider automating their compliance initiatives and strategies are provided in the following sections, and all have as their foundation the use of quality as a long-term competitive differentiator. Complying with customers’ expectations is much more difficult and takes much more focus than regulatory compliance, yet both together are acting as catalysts to companies that choose to capitalize on change rather than avoid it.

Reason 1: Improve Product Conformance at the Process Level

Let’s face it, when products aren’t regularly conforming to quality assurance or customer standards, it costs the entire company lost time in firefighting toward a workaround solution and possibly reduced customer satisfaction. Instead of resorting to the quick fix that can drain revenue, manufacturers that have turned compliance into a competitive weapon take these steps:

First, they evaluate and, in many cases, re-define the supply chains, production processes, and quality assurance standards to alleviate bottlenecks in the production areas.

Second, entirely new approaches to measuring quality and compliance are often initiated to augment procedures already utilized, and parameters are rigorously scrutinized. These steps give the manufacturing teams insight into which processes are under-performing and the circumstances responsible for these defective processes.

Third, enterprise-compliance and quality-management software is used to selectively automate those areas where manufacturers can get the best return from this IT investment.

Fourth, benchmarking and performance analysis is completed. Corrective and preventative action at this point is no longer a firefighting exercise, but one that can be handled through exception reporting and fine-tuning the process itself. The result is that when non-conformance is reduced, customer satisfaction increases and service costs drop.

Reason 2: Create a Culture of Quality in your Supply Chains

Many manufacturers marvel at the Toyota Production System (TPS) and envision it as insular, contained within the Toyota manufacturing plants with Six-Sigma measures of production quality and efficiency. The foundation of this world-class production system is actually based on a very high level of supply chain quality standards that Toyota suppliers need to consistently meet in order to continue shipping products to the auto manufacturer. Suppliers have said that participating in the TPS forces a culture change first in their companies, then a re-alignment of processes to better share knowledge in the Toyota Supplier Network.

Compliance to the Toyota Production System (TPS) standards forces suppliers to create a culture of quality. The same is true for any manufacturer that initiates and maintains a supplier compliance strategy that relies on a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) that indicate when any given supplier’s quality or delivery performance is trending up, staying constant, or trending downward. Creating corrective-action strategies with suppliers based on mutually agree-to metrics produces the motivation needed for change to happen. The bottom line is that automating supplier conformance strategies, including the use of alerts, self-service portals, and content management systems, is part of providing suppliers with the assistance they need and turning compliance into a competitive weapon.

Reason 3: Synchronize Inspections and Audit Data to Supplier Rating

When manufacturers rely only on manual processes to complete inspections and audits, it is rare that these results are correlated back to supplier rating results. Maintaining the information in a centralized database, minimizing the possibility of error, and automating calculations could in fact signal exceptional gains in the performance of suppliers to quality standards. The opportunity for a manufacturer to further increase the performance of suppliers to quality, delivery, and performance standards is lost because the supplier rating information is not adequately calculated and communicated to the supplier.

For manufacturers that choose to automate their manufacturing compliance strategies using an ECQM-based approach, the potential exists for motivating each supplier to continually higher quality levels with a correspondingly higher level of goals set for follow-on supplier ratings.

The bottom line is that through first defining the processes that interlink inspection and audit to supplier rating, manufacturers can encourage each supplier to implement specific improvement strategies and rapidly see the results in new shipments.

Reason 4: Develop a Comprehensive Corrective and Preventative Action Strategy

Error detection and prevention is a hot-button issue today, and compiling accurate records of Correct Action is crucial for maintaining a good quality system and preventing the reoccurrence of defects. It is important to have a closed-loop mechanism for initiating, implementing, and verifying the effectiveness of changes resulting from the non-conformance process.

Some problems may only need simple resolution that may be closed in an exception or non-conformance record, whereas other types of problems may require the exception to be attached to an issue or action plan to complete the investigation. This is why it is important to have a system that is customizable to your specific needs and for the requirements of your industry.

Early awareness of potential problems prevents escalation, and it saves corporate dollars and possible litigation. Additionally, integrating corrective action with other aspects of a quality system maximizes the use of all information in the decision process.

Reason 5: Create and Post Audit Benchmarks on Supplier Portals

One of the best strategies for creating and sustaining competitiveness between suppliers regarding quality is to post their relative performance on portals and internal websites where all suppliers can see who is excelling, who is staying at a constant quality level, and who is falling in terms of quality. Manufacturers that do this actively include Dell, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Toyota, and many others. Microsoft does this on its supplier portal called Microsoft Market, and internally this visibility into supplier performance is called “rank and spank” strategy for ensuring high levels of supplier quality.

Since the analytics required for quickly producing these rank and spank supplier reports originally come out of Microsoft Excel requiring an inordinate amount of time to manually generate, manufacturers are turning to ECQM suites of applications to automate the reporting process. Typically, however, manufacturers keep these analytics to themselves, missing out on the opportunity to motivate suppliers to higher performance through competition. Audit Benchmark performance needs to be visible often so it becomes part of both manufacturers’ and suppliers’ cultures. What gets measured gets done. The bottom line is that manufacturers need to look at automating compliance and integrating analytics tools so that these reports can be quickly generated, published, and used for fostering higher levels of product quality from suppliers through competition.

Reason 6: Create a Compliance System of Record

When manual processes dominate the quality management process workflows of a manufacturer, it is common to find disconnected or totally isolated systems that contain only a small proportion of the total quality management strategic performance of the company. Manufacturers that rely extensively on manual workflows have only an anemic, fragmentary compliance system of record. The majority of the fragmented data records are in Microsoft Access, Excel, or Word, or in any number of other mostly PC-based database systems.

For any manufacturer to realize the benefits of pursuing quality management strategies, there needs to be greater integration across the many fragmentary databases, data sets, historical performance data, supplier audit results, non-conformance history, and corrective-action reports. Once these are organized into a single compliance system of record, the manufacturer is able to effectively define and execute quality management strategies. One example of this involves the historical analysis of suppliers and the effectiveness of supplier management. Having a compliance system of record would show just what aspects of supplier management led to increased quality levels, which didn’t, and what the trends are in suppliers and their ability to meet quality levels.

The bottom line is that the successful manufacturer must have a system of record that can be used to measure progress. The compliance system of record is critical for setting benchmarks for supplier, production, and process performance.

Reason 7: Ensure Engineering Change Notice (ECN) and Drawing Compliance

The more complex the manufacturing environment, the greater the impact of ECNs and drawing modifications across engineering, design, purchasing, production, and quality management departments for a successful company. Many manufacturers have had their ECN processes in place for decades, and while they operate efficiently and have well over half a dozen colored sheets with specific routing workflows designed before Visio was ever visualized, the sheer volume and complexity of changes required is dramatically increasing. Design engineers working on the in-cockpit electronics for the Airbus A380 recently remarked that at nearly three inches thick, the ECNs for the A380 are now thicker than a large metro telephone book. Admittedly the A380 is one of the most complex aircraft ever produced, and the in-cockpit systems rely on over two dozen integration points across dozens of onboard systems. This example, however, underscores why even the most well-worn paths of ECN process workflows in manufacturers are increasingly overburdened with ECN volume and complexity, the likes of which they have never seen before.

The effectiveness of your business is dependent on your ability to enforce standard operating procedures, share knowledge, and document control process. There is no easy way to properly control changes in products, processes, and master records, etc. Change Control is a complex process. Failure to have an adequate Change Control system can cause equally complex results. Inadequate Change Control can expose a company to product-liability action resulting in product recalls, internal confusion, and violations of product, process, and equipment regulations.

The bottom line is that the managing of Change Control through a more effective approach to classifying, analyzing, and responding to ECNs electronically is critical to stay competitive. Manufacturers that have grown through acquisition face the daunting task of reconciling their ECN process from two or more systems, factories, and process sets. However, by automating compliance, the ability to automate ECN workflows, including the allowance of multiple and often parallel signatures, can save hundreds of hours a year and ensure higher levels of product compliance.

Reason 8: Use Compliance as a Catalyst for Process Improvement

Creating and executing a compliance strategy has to do with redefining supplier qualification, management, incoming inspection, product non-conformance, and corrective-action processes so that a consistently high level of product quality can be delivered. The impetus for process improvement is customer-driven quality standards that need to be met in order to keep sales levels up. This is certainly the case both in commercial and consumer markets, where consistently delivering to a specific level of quality can mean the difference between retaining or losing a customer. Customer loyalty has a lot more to do with product quality than any other aspect of the marketing or sales-execution mix.

The consistency or lack thereof of product quality says everything about a manufacturer: their commitment to continuous improvement and to fulfilling the customers’ expectations and delighting them. Process improvement is critical for the ability to stay aligned with customers’ expectations of performance in order to deliver them.

The bottom line is that those highest-performing manufacturers are using quality initiatives as the catalyst to make their production more centered on customers’ expectations first, whether those expectations are in the form of an ECN, a contract, or a purchase order.

Reason 9: Transform Compliance Wins into Competitive Differentiators

Consider the GE culture and its transformational effect in the Six Sigma concept or the Toyota Production System and its heavy reliance on compliance performance measurements, and the reasons for automating compliance become clear.

Once a manufacturer has chosen to automate compliance processes, one of the strategic objectives to consider is how to position quality leadership as a competitive differentiator. For many organizations, this is the culmination of a quality management strategy that begins with business-process re-definition and progresses to supplier ratings and corrective and preventative actions, and then throughout the managing of product and process quality on a consistently high basis.

The bottom line is that instead of just relying on price, promotional activities, or channel strategies, consider turning your compliance strategies into a competitive advantage by underscoring product and service quality performance. Only by taking a more integrated view of quality management strategies can this happen.

Reason 10: Manage Government Regulations So They Don’t Manage You

Quit looking at regulations for compliance as an impediment to getting your company’s strategies together and think instead of how compliance to these regulations can become a competitive advantage. Responding to the intent of the regulation is critical and also leaves latitude to structure your own customer-centered compliance strategy, giving you competitive strength in the long run.

Making regulatory compliance work for your company starts with a clear definition of how you can make your product-quality and product-compliance strategies more aligned with customers’ needs and less inwardly centric and focused only on clearing the next regulatory hurdle. Being more customer-driven from a compliance standpoint puts regulatory compliance in its proper perspective, and this is another reason why many manufacturers choose to automate their compliance strategies.

The bottom line is that responding to regulatory compliance requirements needs to be done within the context of market- and customer-driven quality initiatives. Don’t comply for the sake of complying; comply to find a unique competitive advantage on which you can capitalize.

Louis Columbus, is a member of the Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions Team and a former senior analyst with AMR Research. He has worked with enterprise clients on defining solutions to their channel management, order management and service lifecycle management strategies. Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University and University of California, Irvine. He is the author of fifteen books on technology and two books on analyst relations. His book, Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies, can be downloaded for free.

About Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions

Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions for complex manufacturers delivers lean solutions to drive operational excellence. By identifying and automating complex manufacturers' most critical business processes, Cincom enables them to streamline quote-to-order processes, integrate product and process development, and achieve comprehensive enterprise management and fact-based performance management. Cincom leads the industry with over three decades of experience, providing deep domain expertise for rapid and continuous return on investment.

LEAN AND RUSTY JOIN THE EXPERT ACCESS BOARD AS CONTRIBUTORS

We are happy to introduce a new series for our Expert Access readers this month.

This series will explore the concept of lean manufacturing. I hope you find a lot of value in the series. Don’t hesitate to contribute your own thoughts and feelings about the various issues we address.

Two New Experts

To help me understand what exactly “lean” entails, I have asked two of our pre-eminent experts on manufacturing to weigh in during each article and contribute their own views such as they are.

I am pleased to introduce to you Lean and Rusty.

These guys seem to disagree about a lot of issues relating to manufacturing, particularly when it comes to making changes around the old shop floor and elsewhere in the enterprise.

As a prelude, I can tell you that Lean was thrilled about this opportunity, but Rusty was kind of grumpy about having to make a couple of changes in his calendar to accommodate this series. I hope you enjoy their participation in our forum here in EA.

Drum Roll Please …

Check out the article below titled Lean Manufacturing and You.

I hope you’ll find it interesting and informative.

Lou Washington, Cincom Systems

Lean Manufacturing and You

Includes Self-evaluation Form Based on Information From the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cincom Systems, recently named one of the "Most Influential Manufacturing Technology Providers," has published its latest research white paper "Best Practices In Aerospace Lean Manufacturing: The Migration to a Lean Enterprise."

Tackling the task of transformation

The white paper reveals how aerospace manufacturers are tackling the task of transforming lean manufacturing lessons into lean aerospace business strategies. These strategies include the necessary steps to institute lasting change at the process level.

Where are you?

Best Practices In Aerospace Lean Manufacturing: The Migration to a Lean Enterprise also provides a self-rating test and maturity model that specifically shows how companies measure up against others in aerospace manufacturing.
Lean aerospace – how to get there

The white paper also includes key recommendations on how aerospace manufacturers can successfully transform their operations to a lean manufacturing model. These recommendations are based on the collective insights gained from research cited by MIT’s Lean Aerospace Initiative and a variation of AMR Research’s Demand Driven Supply Chain Maturity Model.

For a copy of the white paper, click here - Best Practices In Aerospace Lean Manufacturing: The Migration to a Lean Enterprise

For information on Cincom Aerospace and Defense, click here.

An updated Cincom white paper on the high costs of non-compliance for manufacturers is now available - click here

Document Lifecycle Management can help you create, manage and share critical documents and best practices throughout the entire enterprise. Used effectively it addresses some critical compliance issues;

Enforces  SOP Training
Moves beyond traditional document management by enforcing employee and manager responsibility. When new documents and SOPs are issued, employees must electronically sign-off to acknowledge that they have read the new information.

Accelerates Document Review Cycles
Quickly put documents to use in your organization.

Helps Manage Change
With document review schedules, review workflows and change—notification capabilities, Document Lifecycle Management ensures that the most accurate, up-to-date information is available on demand.

Enhances Productivity
Eliminate silos of disconnected information to create a collaborative environment where knowledge can be shared easily.

How do the engineering departments at build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturing companies respond to the increasing requests for customized products?

In a recorded webinar released today by Cincom Systems, "The Engineer's Perspective: On Customization and Build-to-Order Practices" (www.mycincom.com/engineeringwebinar), Cincom Systems; Design News Magazine; Manufacturing Business Technology Magazine; and Joseph Colannino, R&D Director at John Zink Company, discuss the findings of the industry's first report from an engineering perspective on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices.

According to the report, only 67 percent of build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers knew how much it cost to produce customized products, and 73 percent didn't know the cost of engineering change orders.
Details of the survey findings will illuminate current practices among complex manufacturers and highlight implications for:

    * Business processes
    * Product rationalization
    * Engineering's role in transformation

Most engineers are seeing requests for customized products increase year after year. And it's clear that increase is having an adverse impact on time available for product design changes, new product development, and innovation. In this environment, it is vital to create a process that is accurate yet quick to meet the customer's needs. Cincom's Quote-to-Order solutions help complex manufacturers dramatically streamline the quote-to-order and build-to-order process by automating complex, expert-dependent processes including: sales, pricing, quoting, design validation, and product configuration.

To listen to "The Engineer's Perspective: On Customization and Build-to-Order Practices," please visit www.cincom.com/engineeringwebinar

To learn more about Cincom's Quote-to-Order solutions, please visit www.cincom.com/Q2O.

Cincom Hosts 2007 Customer Summit

CINCINNATI, Ohio — April 4, 2007 — Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions (CMBS) will host a Customer Summit on May 15-17, 2007 at Cincom Systems' world headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Agenda
Cincom customers will have a chance to learn best practices and accelerate operational excellence through an exchange of information and interaction with Cincom application experts. Sessions will provide both technical and functional focus, ranging from introductory to advanced, while centering on CONTROL™, Cincom's Enterprise Management solution.

Registration
Registration for this event is required and limited to the first 75 customers. For more information, please visit www.mycincom.com/conference.

Best Implementation Track Record in the Industry
Cincom has over three decades of experience and focuses on having the best implementation success track record in the manufacturing software industry, to deliver rapid and continuous return on investment.

About Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions
Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions for complex manufacturers specializes in lean manufacturing solutions to drive operational excellence. By identifying and automating complex manufacturers' most critical business processes, Cincom enables them to streamline quote-to-order processes, integrate product and process development, and achieve comprehensive enterprise management and fact-based performance management.

For more in-depth information on Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions, click http://del.icio.us/cincompr.

About Cincom Systems
Cincom delivers and supports innovative software and services to simplify complex business processes. For nearly 40 years, Cincom has enabled thousands of clients worldwide to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk, and achieve rapid ROI.

For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com.

Media Contacts:

Kimber Shockey
Cincom Systems, Inc.
513-612-2302
kshockey@cincom.com

Like most engineers, you saw requests for customized products increase again this year. And it's clear that increase is having an adverse impact on time available for product design changes, new product development, and innovation.

How are other build-to-order and engineer-to-order manufacturers coping? How do other engineering departments respond to increasing levels of requests for customized products?

Join us as Cincom, Design News, Manufacturing Business Technology and Joseph Colannino, Director R&D at John Zink Company, discuss the findings of the industry's first report from an engineering perspective on the state of mass customization and build-to-order practices.

Details of the survey findings discussed during this MBT Webinar will cast an illuminating light on current practices among complex manufacturers, and highlight implications for:

    * Business processes
    * Product rationalization
    * Engineering's role in transformation
    * Technology and system support

REGISTER FOR THIS WEBCAST TODAY

Cincom Quote-to-Order Solutions streamline business processes by automating quotes, pricing and product configurations as well as fulfillment. Thus they help attract, sell, and service customers across both indirect and direct channels.

For more in-depth information on Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions click http://del.icio.us/cincompr

CINCINNATI, Ohio — March 29, 2007 — Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions has been recognized by START-IT magazine, a leading publication serving the industrial sector, by being named to the START-IT Top 125 list. "This year's START-IT 125 listings provide a snapshot of the companies with the greatest impact on its direction," says John Buell, editor-in-chief of START-IT magazine 125. "These are the most influential manufacturing technology providers." Meeting the Criteria Companies on the START-IT 125 must meet certain criteria in order to qualify for a place in this annual listing, such as: Being a technology-driven organization A focus on manufacturing Educating directors, managers, vice presidents, and chief executives Serving the SMB market and larger Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions for complex manufacturers specializes in lean manufacturing solutions to drive operational excellence. By identifying and automating complex manufacturers' most critical business processes, Cincom enables them to streamline quote-to-order processes, integrate product and process development, and achieve comprehensive enterprise management and fact-based performance management. Experienced Focus Cincom has over three decades of experience and focuses on having the best implementation success track record in the manufacturing software industry, to deliver rapid and continuous return on investment. For more in-depth information on Cincom Manufacturing Business Solutions click http://del.icio.us/cincompr   About START-IT magazine START-IT magazine (www.START-ITmag.com) helps manufacturers take full advantage of the power of partnerships by emphasizing the importance of IT partnerships and how these partners are working together to reach their goals through the use of technology. Emphasizing the power of partnerships, START-IT is read by decision-makers across all manufacturing segments as a primary source of business strategies to best take advantage of today's technologies. About Cincom Systems Cincom delivers and supports innovative software and services to simplify complex business processes. For nearly 40 years, Cincom has enabled thousands of clients worldwide to increase revenue, control cost, minimize risk, and achieve rapid ROI. Cincom serves clients on six continents including Boeing, Federal Express, Ericsson, Milacron, Siemens, Rockwell Automation, and Trane. For more information about Cincom's products and services, contact Cincom at 1-800-2CINCOM (USA only), send an e-mail to info@cincom.com, or visit the company's website at www.cincom.com. Media Contacts: Steve Kayser Corporate Public Relations Cincom Systems, Inc. 513-612-2348

Attending Pilgrim Software’s User Conference this week, on the shores of the emerald-green and blue Gulf of Mexico at the Don Cesar Hotel (a classic pink lady of a hotel build in the 1920s) I just can’t get over the ironies, the paradoxes of what compliance, in my mind, has represented and what is going on here.  In my mind, compliance, the use of audits, and all that goes with tracking non-conformance conjures up images of stern and sober folk who revel in sameness and predictability.  They want the world, I thought, predictable and pure in cause and effect.  I was prepared for many, many acronym drive-bys.  None came. 

Paradox of paradoxes, this user conference made compliance sexy tonight at a major blow-out of a Pirate Party that looked more a toga party.  And the presentations weren’t bad either during the day.  Linking how to measure compliance through dashboards – the ability to show in real-time how compliance is making a difference with customers – was analytical sexiness as well. 

The bottom line of all this was that compliance’s new face is all about taking customers’ requirements and expectations to the heart of what Quality Management and Quality Control Departments do.  The best paradox of all was the impatience many quality management professionals have with being even more aligned to their customers’ measurements and not their own. 

Question: We’ve worked incredibly hard on bettering our customer experience – making sure we have the right product available at the right time and at the right price. We want our customers to “trust” that we’ll deliver – quickly. Are there any studies or metrics that discuss “trust” as a valuable differentiator? Answered by: Louis Columbus, Cincom Systems. “Yes. And when you say ‘trust’ ... think speed. And think right now.” Trust Is Speed Trust is turning into speed of purchasing this holiday season. And while any e-commerce manager could pile up their weight in metrics and key performance indicators, it’s irrelevant unless the last 12 months have been spent attuning all channel strategies to the unmet needs and wants of customers. Coordinating multiple channels to have the same pricing, availability, product selection and messaging is very difficult, yet this holiday season will be the first one where companies with these multi-channel strategies in place win big relative to online-only counterparts. Here are the reasons why: Payback Time It’s payback time for retailers that have cultivated customer loyalty by working hard to have the right products in stock at the right time, at the right price. Apparel and footwear have consistently been those areas of retailing that generate the highest levels of loyalty, and it all hinges on having the right product, at the right price, at the right location for the customer. Over years of purchasing experiences, customers trust retailers to deliver from their websites what they have in the stores – and this segment of customers I think will lead the significant uptick in online sales this holiday season. I’ve seen friends who have rarely shopped online go to Target.com or Nordstrom.com and order children’s clothing because they didn’t want to hassle with the holiday shopping lines. These are people who have never shopped online before. It’s also interesting to note that several shopping studies have shown how the most elusive shopping segment of all, 25 to 34-year olds perceive colors versus an aging baby boomer who does it quite differently. Again the trust issue of apparel purchased online unites these very different segments: colors can be trusted once seen in a store, yet they can’t be verified online. Synchronization on Steroids Multi-channel selling requires supply-chain synchronization and visibility on steroids. Getting the right products at the right price to the stores is what supply-chain synchronization is all about. It’s not enough in a multi-channel world to simply have a supply chain system that can manage inbound shipments and scheduling – multi-channel retailing requires visibility, forecasting support, orders of magnitude and more synchronization across multiple distribution centers, whether they are located across the country or across the world. Don’t Get Played Pricing gets played when multi-channel selling strategies aren’t in place. Consumers and companies purchasing through multiple channels both know that when a company’s pricing systems aren’t consistent between channels, extreme price deals can be had. Expedia’s relationships with airlines at times bears this out, as the certain European airlines have at times put in the wrong pricing for the online partners and given away $15 tickets from Detroit to Berlin for example. Having a single system of record for all pricing across all channels and synchronizing on that when revised costing cycles occur is critical. This is why multi-channel retailers aren’t going to get played on price, yet will emerge from this holiday season with sable gross-margin performance for the period. Virtual Equalizers Product range is the equalizer. By far the most critical driver for online retailing traffic is product range, and the multi-channel efforts of Costco.com and WalMart.com bare this out. There are items on both websites that aren’t available in their stores, and this is a deliberate strategy to show they can scale to the level of online-only retailers’ product breadth. Virtual catalogs are tough to compete against, and in this season’s holiday shopping electronics, photography equipment and other products differentiated on price will be the bulk of spending with online retailers – in fact, it’s clear this is happening already. Service-Oriented Attitude Multi-channel retailers that have been fortunate enough to create loyalty with customers are finding that the perception of service also applies to their online selling as well. This “halo effect” of service applies to Nordstrom’s a premium department store headquartered in the Pacific Northwest with stores located throughout the Western U.S. Their loyalty with shoe customers is so strong they have a shoe configurator on their site that gets much of their traffic. That’s trust — ordering a configure-to-order shoe. The trust factor is alive and well because Nordstrom’s service halo effect reaches online.

CRM in Manufacturing Doesn’t Need to Be Perfect
A few flaws are OK if deployed early
by Jim Hessin – Supply Demand Chain Executive

Customer Churn

Changing and challenging businesses processes in 2007

2007 starts with the recognition that the battle to hold onto existing customers will be more intense than ever. Battling customer churn in entirely new ways will reshape entire industries. What's being redefined is how companies' stay connected with customers, and at its essence, staying relevant to those served.

The coming year is going to reorder entire industries due to customer churn. With this reordering will be an entirely new set of selling dynamics, as existing ones prove marginally successful into 2007.

Bungling the Bundle of “3”

The old "bundle three" rule for higher customer retention will no longer be as strong as they once were in keeping customers from churning either.

While the severity of churn will vary by industry, the fact that many companies have no idea what their true churn rate is, and how to fight it, is already turning into an area of opportunity for software vendors.

Keeping Up

The growth of business intelligence and analytics in financial services and telecommunications through 2006 is partially driven by the need to slow churn down — and this will accelerate into 2007.

Churn's pain is going to be SaaS's gain — as there isn't going to be enough time to deploy traditional enterprise applications.

Services industries already contend with churn as part of their business models, yet telecommunications is going to see the fundamental aspects of churn strategies change as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) becomes one of the top projects on which companies choose to spend in 2007.

Changing Your Customers

The challenge for many companies with CRM systems already in place is how to respond to churn when it happens, without resorting to plummeting pricing or product bundles that appear very attractive to customers yet don't make long-term financial sense.

Many CRM systems aren't agile enough to create strategies on the fly for responding to customer defection; they are built with the implicit assumption customers will always be there.

There are literally dozens of metrics to measure the upward progression of prospects to customers through pipeline analysis and customer lifetime value once they start buying, yet many old-school CRM systems do not take into account customer churn.

This inflexibility of legacy CRM systems fails to support business strategies aimed at fighting to retain customers first.

The revolution that will happen in 2007 as it relates to CRM is the further integration of analytics, sales force analytics and customer data management, all applicable to selling, service and marketing strategy development. This translates into a much more agile CRM platform than ever before.

Making sense of 2007 starts with the recognition that the battle to hold onto existing customers will be more intense than ever, and that battling churn in entirely new ways will reshape entire industries. What's being redefined is how companies stay connected with customers, and at its essence, staying relevant to those served.

Louis Columbus has more than 18 years of experience in the IT industry, specializing in market and industry analysis, sales, product management and development. He’s held senior positions at Toshiba America, Lockheed-Martin, Intergraph, and immediately before joining Cincom, as senior analyst at AMR Research. Mr. Columbus is a frequent contributor to industry publications, is a columnist for CRMBuyer.com, and has published 15 books on operating systems, peripherals, and industry analysis. Mr. Columbus also teaches graduate-level international business and marketing courses at Webster-Loyola Marymount University and the University of California, Irvine.

Louis’ areas of expertise include the mass customization of discrete manufacturing processes including engineer-to-order and made-to-order, customer relationship management, marketing, analyst relations, distributed order management and global supply chain planning.

Manufacturers Compliant 91% of the Time" Indicates Significant Room for Improvement

Boston, MA – January 5, 2007 – Manufacturers and software vendors alike are more focused on compliance and traceability than ever before. However, many manufacturers are still in the beginning stages of adopting technology solutions facilitating compliance and traceability initiatives. A new benchmark report, "Compliance and Traceability in Regulated Industries," published by Aberdeen, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE-HHS), confirmed that only 8% of manufacturers surveyed have eliminated pen and paper or manual spreadsheet processes from compliance and traceability programs. Furthermore, only 24% of manufacturers surveyed have implemented technology solutions with both production process visibility and automated traceability functionality.

Matthew Littlefield, a Manufacturing Research Analyst at Aberdeen says, "In almost every case we?ve examined, technology adoption precedes improved performance of compliance and traceability initiatives. When making technology decisions for compliance and traceability initiatives, manufacturers should realize a standalone solution is very rarely sufficient. A successful compliance and traceability program often relies upon production process control and visibility from a MES (manufacturing execution system) vendor such as Rockwell or Honeywell. The program may also rely on automated traceability from an ERP vendor such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, or Oracle. Finally, audit, complaint, CAPA (corrective and preventive actions), and exception management capabilities from a QMS (quality management software) vendor such as MasterControl, IQS, or Cincom will often complete the suite."

Littlefield adds, "Manufacturers adopting a broad-based integrated approach to compliance and traceability are 65% more likely to achieve best-in-class status and are gaining a significant competitive advantage."

Littlefield offers the following recommendations for improving compliance and traceability operational performance:

• Utilize a technology solution that offers real- or near real-time process control and visibility into key performance indicators.
• Integrate the above technology with exception management and continuous improvement technology solutions.
• Automate raw material and finished product traceability and eliminate other manual processes from current compliance and traceability initiatives.

More than 340 companies participated in the study, including Pfizer, Roche, Wyeth, and The Coca-Cola Company, among others.

This study is made available to the public through the underwriting of: Cincom, IQS, MasterControl, and SAP. For a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=3702

Question: We’ve worked incredibly hard on bettering our customer experience – making sure we have the right product available at the right time and at the right price. We want our customers to “trust” that we’ll deliver – quickly. Are there any studies or metrics that discuss “trust” as a valuable differentiator?

Answered by: Louis Columbus, Cincom Systems. “Yes. And when you say ‘trust’ ... think speed. And think right now.”

Trust Is Speed

Trust is turning into speed of purchasing this holiday season. And while any e-commerce manager could pile up their weight in metrics and key performance indicators, it’s irrelevant unless the last 12 months have been spent attuning all channel strategies to the unmet needs and wants of customers. Coordinating multiple channels to have the same pricing, availability, product selection and messaging is very difficult, yet this holiday season will be the first one where companies with these multi-channel strategies in place win big relative to online-only counterparts. Here are the reasons why:

Payback Time

It’s payback time for retailers that have cultivated customer loyalty by working hard to have the right products in stock at the right time, at the right price. Apparel and footwear have consistently been those areas of retailing that generate the highest levels of loyalty, and it all hinges on having the right product, at the right price, at the right location for the customer. Over years of purchasing experiences, customers trust retailers to deliver from their websites what they have in the stores – and this segment of customers I think will lead the significant uptick in online sales this holiday season. I’ve seen friends who have rarely shopped online go to Target.com or Nordstrom.com and order children’s clothing because they didn’t want to hassle with the holiday shopping lines. These are people who have never shopped online before. It’s also interesting to note that several shopping studies have shown how the most elusive shopping segment of all, 25 to 34-year olds perceive colors versus an aging baby boomer who does it quite differently.

Again the trust issue of apparel purchased online unites these very different segments: colors can be trusted once seen in a store, yet they can’t be verified online.

Synchronization on Steroids

Multi-channel selling requires supply-chain synchronization and visibility on steroids. Getting the right products at the right price to the stores is what supply-chain synchronization is all about. It’s not enough in a multi-channel world to simply have a supply chain system that can manage inbound shipments and scheduling – multi-channel retailing requires visibility, forecasting support, orders of magnitude and more synchronization across multiple distribution centers, whether they are located across the country or across the world.

Don’t Get Played

Pricing gets played when multi-channel selling strategies aren’t in place. Consumers and companies purchasing through multiple channels both know that when a company’s pricing systems aren’t consistent between channels, extreme price deals can be had. Expedia’s relationships with airlines at times bears this out, as the certain European airlines have at times put in the wrong pricing for the online partners and given away $15 tickets from Detroit to Berlin for example. Having a single system of record for all pricing across all channels and synchronizing on that when revised costing cycles occur is critical. This is why multi-channel retailers aren’t going to get played on price, yet will emerge from this holiday season with sable gross-margin performance for the period.

Virtual Equalizers

Product range is the equalizer. By far the most critical driver for online retailing traffic is product range, and the multi-channel efforts of Costco.com and WalMart.com bare this out. There are items on both websites that aren’t available in their stores, and this is a deliberate strategy to show they can scale to the level of online-only retailers’ product breadth. Virtual catalogs are tough to compete against, and in this season’s holiday shopping electronics, photography equipment and other products differentiated on price will be the bulk of spending with online retailers – in fact, it’s clear this is happening already.

Service-Oriented Attitude

Multi-channel retailers that have been fortunate enough to create loyalty with customers are finding that the perception of service also applies to their online selling as well. This “halo effect” of service applies to Nordstrom’s a premium department store headquartered in the Pacific Northwest with stores located throughout the Western U.S. Their loyalty with shoe customers is so strong they have a shoe configurator on their site that gets much of their traffic. That’s trust — ordering a configure-to-order shoe. The trust factor is alive and well because Nordstrom’s service halo effect reaches online.

Louis Columbus, former senior analyst at AMR Research, and management at Gateway and Ingram Micro, has published 15 technology books. Currently Cincom Marketing Manager for Manufacturing Enterprise Compliance Software Products, Louis is also a weekly columnist for CRMBuyer.com and Informit.com, and gives graduate-level international business and marketing courses for Webster Loyola-Marymount University. Louis taught at University of California/Irvine, and California State University/Fullerton and onsite at Ford and Chrysler. Focus: global economic theory, international marketing strategies, global product introductions, and international expansion strategies. Louis can be contacted at Lcolumbus@cincom.com.

Transparency and speed rule

by Louis Columbus, Cincom Systems

The pace of change is quickening. To be competitive manufacturers must become transparent from the field where orders and quotes are created, through to the factories where products are manufactured through to fulfillment.

It’s Quickly Becoming Transparent

Transparency and speed now rule over mountains of metrics and analytics. During the next five years for any manufacturer to stay competitive, they will have to keep pace, even outrun changes in their customer base, in their processes, and most of all in the transparency between when an order is first placed, to its steps in fulfillment and finally in its delivery to the customer.

How to Evolve?

So how can manufacturers evolve from being inward-centric, to ensure that they don’t miss the revolution their customers want? The answer is to aggressively develop and pursue a field-to-factory vision. This is beyond buzzwords and just theoretical knowledge. It’s about turning speed and accuracy into a competitive advantage and turning change into an asset.

Speed

Speed is a competitive asset, and the visibility from when a quote is first produced to when a final product is shipped is what matters most. Harvesting demand starts with this clear view through your company’s value chain. To ignore it by being myopic or by leaving out a critical step is to leave money on the table. AMR Research has found a strong correlation between the field and its many interactions with customers on the one hand, and the ability to excel at production, manufacturing, fulfillment, and service at the other.

Always Time to Do Things Twice … But Not Right the First Time

There are numerous reasons why field-to-factory is so critical now for the manufacturing industry, such as the fact that between 70 and 80 per cent of orders from manufacturers need further work and often re-entering, compared to 20 per cent average across all industries. The complexities of capturing orders in manufacturing make adopting a field-to-factory series strategies a must-have. Add in the complexities of managing global orders and the need for delivering a clear and consistent message to customers becomes clear.

Strategies for making a field-to-factory vision come alive are briefly outlined below:

Intensify your focus on each customer interaction. Realize that in each and every interaction you have with a customer, their trust must be earned. You must intensify your focus on the fact that every critical moment of every day has to underscore the fact that your company in particular values and aligns internal systems to deliver exceptional service.

Bring solutions — not just technology — to your clients. Create systems that allow your prospects to progress at their own pace. This strategy is true for product evaluations, trials, and purchases. Also, during the trial period, build clear visibility throughout the entire value chain of your company.

Give your clients visibility into order history as well as each specific order's progress. Creating systems that benefit all clients by delivering the status of a customised order as it travels through manufacturing and fulfillment and also has the ability to quickly summarise order history by product, region, or business unit is what happens when a field-to-factory vision gets turned into reality.

Integrate all customer-facing systems in the field to ensure accuracy, reliability, and transparency. The need for providing transparency across quoting, pricing, manufacturing, and fulfillment systems – with a focus on how to best surpass customers' expectations at every interaction – is critical. This is at the heart of field-to-factory strategies and where several manufacturers are finding a sustainable competitive advantage.

Cultivating channel partners, distributors, and resellers is where the most profitable returns are being generated from field-tofactory initiatives and strategies. Go after these strategies for quicker returns on channel investments so that your company will be able to harvest demand more efficiently and with greater accuracy than competitors.

Look to the intersection of manufacturing, sales, and production to make field-to-factory strategies work. Manufacturers can reap rewards by looking to unify their sales and manufacturing responses to customers electronically and accurately using engineering's expertise. Look at the intersection of these departments, the databases and systems used, and examine ways to streamline or even replace manual processes.

Spend heavily on channel education and product knowledge versus short-term incentives. Those companies winning against competitors are using field-to-factory strategies to bring superior knowledge into their channels. Knowledge puts lasting pressure on competitors while incentives become addictive for channel partners, and they often become conditioned to only sell what has an incentive attached to it.

Aggressively manage leads and their escalation through your channels. Don't settle for just sending leads out and then waiting to see if sales happen. Work to re-engineer processes around leads to track them efficiently, then find what best practices work for your channel and organisation.

Aggressively pursue best practices in quoting and order capture. This translates into making the most of integration between your quoting and order-capture systems with pricing, supply-chain, ERP, and services systems. Making your company as competitive as possible starts with a strong focus on unifying the channel-facing systems with internal systems. Winning business against your competitors starts with the ability to capture quotes without errors, and the skill to define a realistic expectation back to a client regarding when their build-to-order product will be shipped.

Summary:

The longest-lasting benefits from field-to-factory go to those companies that demonstrate the ability to:

• Start with the goal of providing a clear workflow from the order to the production floor, alleviating all unnecessary manual steps in the process.

• Consolidate redundant order-capture systems that may serve only a single channel or are a leftover from an acquisition or merger.

• Integrate legacy systems while enabling order capture, quoting, and pricing systems to deliver the same data.

• Process orders with greater speed from order to fulfillment; achieve greater accuracy due to engineering, sales, and manufacturing being in concert with each other; and produce greater flexibility in automating responses to custom orders.

The fact is that every company is a global competitor and each has to harness speed, accuracy, and agility as competitive weapons to survive in an increasingly competitive world. In manufacturing, speed and accuracy already beat out geographic preferences thousands of times a day. In order to survive in today’s manufacturing industry the Field-to-Factory vision is critical. The ability to compete and win business, then fulfil orders accurately, reliably and profitably, distinguishes the manufacturers that grow from those that shrink or go out of business altogether.

The field-to-factory vision is defined in more detail in the white paper “Field-to-Factory – how manufacturers harvest demand” by Cincom, which can be downloaded from this page.

Louis Columbus, former senior analyst at AMR Research, and management at Gateway and Ingram Micro, has published 15 technology books. Currently Cincom Senior Marketing Manager for Manufacturing Enterprise Compliance Software Products, Louis is also a weekly columnist for CRMBuyer.com and Informit.com, and gives graduate-level international business and marketing courses for Webster Loyola-Marymount University. Louis taught at University of California/Irvine, and California State University/Fullerton and onsite at Ford and Chrysler. Focus: global economic theory, international marketing strategies, global product introductions, and international expansion strategies. Louis can be contacted at Lcolumbus@cincom.com.

So Now This Is Christmas ... What Have You Done?

Some things to consider ...

by Steve Kayser, Cincom Systems

Have you considered how precious and fleeting each moment is? How each breath is an amazing blessing extending our existence on this blue-green magical orb called earth?

An earth that travels through space at over 1,000 miles per hour and moves around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?

[ Read More ...]
 

Question: We’ve worked incredibly hard on bettering our customer experience – making sure we have the right product available at the right time and at the right price. We want our customers to “trust” that we’ll deliver – quickly. Are there any studies or metrics that discuss “trust” as a valuable differentiator? Answered by: Louis Columbus, Cincom Systems. “Yes. And when you say ‘trust’ ... think speed. And think right now.” Who is the call center host with the most?  Learn why.

Find, acquire and retain customers.

Teamwork for Success ... but a Team of Rivals? An interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin by Nettie Hartsock – Expert Access contributor   Five Strategies to Energize Growth Strategic growth wisdom for entrepreneurial leaders (video) by Lisa Nirell, Nirell & Associates   The Psychology of the Customer Experience Get in their comfort zone by John Todor, The WhetstoneEdge, LLC   Creating an Execution-Based Culture Five questions: Do you measure up? (PDF) by Bob Prosen, The Prosen Center for Business Advancement   Seven Tips for Effective Sales Performance Management Gonna make your number? ... Wrong! by Phyllis Roteman, President, The Loyalty Group

Integrate. Automate. Maximize operations for bottom-line results.

You Only Go Live Twice Y2K and the stage for craziness by Lou Washington, Cincom Systems   No Schedules. No Meetings ... You Call This Work? Smashing the tick-tock clock from Business Week   Top 10 IT Predictions from Nucleus Research The bottom line from Nucleus Research   The Best and Worst of B2B Website Design An eye-opening study by Alan Webber, Forrester Research

How do YOU work in the new workplace? Share success stories of pushing the technology envelope. Tell about the creative use of software in your organization. Enter to win a new Palm Treo 680.

Deliver business-critical information to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

How to Turn Boring Features into WiifM (What’s in it for Me) Benefits Effective copy takes effort and common sense by Denny Hatch – Business Common Sense   RSS – The Business Case Increases traffic and search engine rankings (PDF) by Rok Hrastnik - MarketingStudies.net   If It Doesn’t Sell, It Isn’t Creative – and Other Ogilvy Truisms Insightful quotes for us marketing folks by David Garfinkel – World Copywriting Newsletter   The Transformation of the Web How the information we consume is shaped by Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer – Journal of Universal Computer Science

Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide.  Nowhere to Even Stand Still.

Stepping up to the Global Competitive Challenge

by Cincom CEO Tom Nies

Competing Globally Starts with Compliance

Of all the forces impacting manufacturing today, compliance is fundamentally re-ordering the landscapes of entire industries. Lack of compliance can cost millions of dollars in lost market share and inventory write-downs for products that are not compliant, and present significant challenges in turning around a tarnished reputation. In addition, there is the broader and much more costly expense of re-architecting and redefining supply chains and products to be in compliance. READ MORE