Blue Sky

What are you embracing for your RIA's?

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:14:14 -0600

Rich Internet Applications (RIA's) seem to be at a crossroads in terms of development platforms right now. Searching through the latest Monster.com job postings will reveal that obviously Ajax is in strong demand, but what I was really looking for were Flex related jobs. How in demand is Adobe Flex and what is its future? My search reveals 645 hits on Flex in Web and Application development. Ajax yields over 2,200. I'll continue to monitor the situation to see if a trend can be realized.

I'm a Flex noob for sure, but so far what I am seeing is simply the fastest path to an aesthetic, functional application (Web or not) that I know of. I also see a platform that certainly paves the way to turning your application into an SaaS quite naturally using Flex's built in XML parsing functionality. I also welcome eliminating the challenges that come with writing a stateless application. And I don't feel all that bad moving away from things like Scriptaculous and obscure JavaScript. I suppose I am looking at application development more from an end result standpoint and not so much what I think is cool to code in or looks best on a resume.

I cannot argue with the beauty of the Flex Builder IDE, and I can't help but think that Flex offers a bridge to .Net programmers wishing to dive deeper into the Java world. But what of Java programmers who tend to shy away from any technology tied to a big commercial software company? Is there a comparison between Adobe and Microsoft, or would that really be pushing it? So how about it developers? Is Flex open enough for you? Does it give you a sense of vendor tie-in? Do you enjoy the simplicity of a drag-and-drop IDE or do you feel like you're selling your soul by using it? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Introducing Blue Sky Consulting

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:27:24 -0600

Blue Sky Technologies will soon be officially announcing the creation of a new subsidiary called Blue Sky Consulting, but I wanted to comment on it first. We are consistently tapped to perform programming and project services for companies with strapped IT budgets and schedules. In the past, our involvement in these projects was mostly unofficial, but with the birth of Blue Sky Consulting we are opening an entire sub-division dedicated to providing our programming and project expertise for any company which needs such services. Typically a company's needs would be derived from a new application that is required and which the company has been unable to procure through existing channels. Perhaps modifications to existing applications are driving the need to bring in programming resources. Blue Sky Consulting (BSC) will evaluate these projects to determine if there is a match between our core competencies and the client's requirements. BSC specializes in the following areas:

J2EE web applications, Java Applications
We specialize in applications in the following business areas:

Supply Chain
Logistics
Warehousing
Transportation
Order Procurement
Yard and Dock Applications

Projects in the following areas also match our core competencies

Human Resources
Marketing and Advertising
Accounting
Merchandising
Operations

The following technologies match our core competencies

Java
Ajax, JavaScript
O/RM, Hibernate, all SQL databases
Adobe Flex
Ruby, Groovy
Ruby on Rails
Struts
Legacy languages: Informix 4gl, COBOL, perl

BSC brings to the table the same programming team that created our flagship application Insight, as well as Janus , our Yard and Dock Management application. We also bring Sun Java Certification and Project Management Institute Certification into the value proposition.

Visit www.blueskytech.com for contact information and more information.

How Appointment Management Can Save You Money

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:58:37 -0600

Appointment Management software is not just a nice-to-have anymore. We'll be releasing a case study with specifics on the ROI soon, but in the meantime, I thought I'd list a few ways we've seen our appointment management application save customers money.

Visibility
The chart below shows a typical dock schedule as viewed in our application. By having a real-time view to what's going on with the doors, the manager can fit appointments in where it would have been too risky to even try before. The starred entries are backhauls. Before, they would have been clustered at the end of the day but with improved visibility, they can work them in as time permits. By tightening up the schedule, the customer can keep the unloaders busier during a shorter period of time. Labor can be reallocated to where its needed or staffing levels can be reduced.

Fuel Savings
The improved visibility and management allows the customer to decrease the time the truck spends in the yard. That saves a significant amount of fuel, which is obviously critical with today's gas prices.

Warehouse Efficiency
The appointment system can be tuned to schedule loads so that the doors are closer to where the product is. That keeps the dock cleaner and lowers travel time for putaway.

Labor
I've already mentioned one way appointment management saves labor costs. Because the suppliers and carriers are often scheduling their own appointments, the dock scheduler is free to perform other tasks. The dock manager spends less time dealing with the schedule and more time optimizing. As mentioned, putaway distances are shorter, which frees up forklifts for other tasks.

There are less tangible benefits such as customer and employee satisfaction and being able to now see other areas that can be improved, but the savings mentioned plus the quick implementation show a pretty strong ROI.

AMR Research Announces Top 25 Supply Chain for 2008

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:46:09 -0600

Blue Sky would like to extend our warmest congratulations to one of our top clients, and avid users of our supply chain visibility technology, Royal Ahold, for creating a world class, demand driven supply chain.

Says AMR Research: “The AMR Research Supply Chain Top 25 identifies companies that demonstrate leadership in applying demand-driven principles to their global supply chains. Our goal is to show how supply chain excellence contributes to economic value creation, and, in so doing, to raise awareness of the importance and influence of the profession.

AMR Research’s Supply Chain Top 25 includes a Peer Opinion component in its ranking methodology. This component comprises 20% of the total point score upon which the final rank is based. The other components are an AMR Research Opinion score (20%) and financial metrics (e.g., return on assets, inventory turns, and growth), which collectively account for 60% of the score.” Read on to see the list of the AMR Top 25 Supply chains for 2008

The AMR Top 25 Supply Chains for 2008 are:

1. Apple
2. Nokia
3. Dell
4. Procter & Gamble
5. IBM
6. Wal-Mart Stores
7. Toyota Motor
8. Cisco Systems
9. Samsung Electronics
10. Anheuser-Busch
11. PepsiCo
12. Tesco
13. The Coca-Cola Company
14. Best Buy
15. Nike
16. SonyEricsson
17. Walt Disney
18. Hewlett-Packard
19. Johnson & Johnson
20. Schlumberger
21. Texas Instruments
22. Lockheed Martin
23. Johnson Controls
24. Royal Ahold
25. Publix Super Markets

Visit the AMR Research site to get additional information on this annual ranking.

NEW Blue Sky Tech website

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:12:10 -0600

Welcome everyone to the newly released version of the Blue Sky Technologies website. If you typed in the address of our old URL, ... www.blueskylogistics.com, you were redirected to www.blueskytech.com. We recently underwent a name change and a rebranding of our product line necessitated by an ever increasing footprint of products that are offered. No longer are we just implementing Supply Chain Visibility Solutions, but we have also augmented with operational applications such as a Web Based Appointment Management solution. More offerings are in the works and we invite you to stay tuned to this site for further updates.

In the meantime, please let us know what you think of our new website and contact us for further information as your company moves forward with projects surrounding Visibilty, Business Intelligence, Dashboards, Metrics, Scorecarding and other operations within your Supply Chain.

New Name, New Look, Same Company

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:44:32 -0600

You might have noticed a few changes around here. After months of deliberation, we have now officially changed our company name to Blue Sky Technologies. While we still specialize in supply chain, we wanted to emphasize the technology aspect of our company. We solve supply chain problems using software. And frankly, we just got tired of fielding calls from people wanting us to transport their freight or store their inventory.

As part of the change, we've also completely redesigned our web site. We hope it's easier to use and better illustrates some of our software offerings.

Please tell us what you think either in the comments to this entry or by e-mailing us directly.

Innovative Uses of Insight #1

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:14:23 -0600

I would like to start posting here some ways people could use our Insight Visibility software in ways they may not have thought of. If you're an Insight user, perhaps you could even share some stories on how you've put Insight to work for you.

One space that I've noticed few people consider when thinking of supply chain visibility is right in the store. Why not put the system to work as a means of real-time, alert based communication between the warehouses and the stores? For instance, wouldn't it be great if a store location (or customer) knew the status of their orders every time that status changed? Perhaps it would be really helpful for the store if Insight was integrated with your on-board truck solution (like Xata or Turnpike Global) so that the store could be notified when their order was a certain distance away, so they could prep the backroom for delivery. Another good idea is to stop sending paper invoices or other documentation with the order and instead provide them as a report through Insight. You could control printing costs, save paper and reduce driver downtime at each facility doing this.

Look here for further articles in the future that may trigger some ideas of your own. In the meantime, blog entries like these are a great read and generate lots of thought!

Till next time.
Jason Perrone

Manager of Professional Services
Blue Sky Technologies
jason.perrone@blueskylogistics.com

Stop & Shop Uses Insight for Supply Chain Visibility

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:27:37 -0600

Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies magazine featured a case study about how Stop & Shop manages exceptions and has improved productivity by using our Insight supply chain visibility dashboard Stop and Shop (a subsidiary of Royal Ahold) was one of our first customers and they've really helped us enhance and fine-tune our product. They are a great company to work with and we appreciate the positive reviews from Joe Francis and Jerry Pimental.

Supply Chain Collaboration

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 10:53:35 -0600

Supply Chain Collaboration, particularly related to inventory management and collaborative planning, replenishment, and forecasting (CPFR) is a hot topic these days. On-demand applications using web services and open XML standards have the potential to make implementing a solution much simpler than in the past. Here are some links provide an overview of the concepts:

The Bull Whip Affect is a way of illustrating the increased inventory levels across the supply chain due to lack of demand information at each exchange point. This article illustrates it in more detail and has links to more information, plus you can try out the Near Beer Game which really drives the point home.

A good description of CPFR from VICS (PDF), a consortium that publishes standards for CPFR.

Another article on the VICS site discusses what the author calls the Digital Economy (PDF) or "Digiconomy". Much of it is related to supply chain collaboration.

Finally, this long paper from CAPS Research goes into a huge amount of detail on Achieving World-Class Supply Chain Collaboration. The site requires a free registration.

More on Real-Time

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:14:27 -0600

A recent article from CIO magazine talks about managing the flow of real-time data. The VC in Vacation Land also references this article in his series on real-time data. While real-time is usually thought of as a good thing, it can lead to problems if it is misused. The article cites studies that show that often managers make worse decisions when they have access to real-time information. Here are some of the reasons:

Information overload - people can only handle so much data before it usefulness deteriorates
Trust - if you get 100 alerts a day, you're going to start tuning them out (anyone who has started using Windows Vista will understand this)
Spikes - an exception condition can look like a trend when seen over a very short time horizon
Bad data - it's difficult enough to synchronize data among multiple systems, but having bad real-time data will be much more challenging to analyze and fix due to the volume.

So is having real-time data a bad thing? No, but it must be used appropriately. Some ideas:

Segment metrics into those that should or should not be viewed real-time. For example, overall demand information is probably too susceptible to spikes to warrant viewing it real-time, while tracking individual orders may benefit.
Provide real-time data to the appropriate people or roles. Generally speaking (there are exceptions), the higher up in the management structure, the less real-time the data needs to be.
Make sure alerts are displayed only when they are truly actionable. Build in tolerances that will cause an exception to be ignored if it is transient. Conversely, you may want to report the spikes in an aggregate, less real-time way in order to analyze why they are occurring.
Understand the costs of extracting real-time data in terms of the load on both the monitoring application and the back-end or legacy systems. In a perfect world, all data could be real-time and rolled up to the best time period, but the reality is that there is a performance hit so determine up front just how real-time the data needs to be and only extract it as needed.

Real-Time Visibility

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:26:37 -0600

The VC in Vacation Land writes about real-time data. While I agree with the benefits he lists, it's important not to get too caught up in the hype put out by some business intelligence vendors. Yes, real-time is good, but not in all cases. For managing operations where minutes or even seconds can make a huge difference in scheduling, congestion, or labor allocation, it's a must. We have applications that do just that. But there are many situations where less current data is just as useful and there are definite costs associated with using real-time data.

We've been implementing an Inventory Visibility application and for one of our customers, updating the data once a day is good enough. In that case real-time would require us to access many different transactional applications on the fly which could impact performance for either the users of our dashboard or the transactional processing or both. By offloading the data into a separate data store, we control the data model so we can create reports and dashboard widgets very quickly. We can add indexes or redesign tables for performance which would be impossible if we were going against the transactional systems real-time. We have the option of refreshing more often if the business need changes. If we eventually need real-time, we can modify the extraction process to run continuously (possibly with some performance tweaks), without having to change anything on the front-end. And as a bonus, we can store the data we collect indefinitely, allowing us to do historical reporting and trending.

The bottom line is that you should evaluate just how real-time the data needs to be and weigh the costs against the benefit.

Wal-Mart RFID Updates

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 11:37:36 -0600

Baseline Magazine featured a well researched story this month on Wal-Mart's RFID initiative. According to the article, initial results from Wal-Mart's RFID project are not very impressive. Inventory levels have gone up. Operating costs have gone up. And Wal-Mart remains steadfastly committed to the project.

In my personal experiences, supply chain leaders from the various companies we deal with have gone from talking about RFID as the dominant topic of conversation, to a post-conversation annotation. If your company always approached RFID with care, tact, and a deep sense that you need to do a whole lot more research before considering implementing the technology, then RFID's lack of pervasiveness is not surprising to you. Many of you have already been nibbling away at the RFID ROI proposition by implementing a supply chain visibility solution. In fact, by reaping the low hanging fruit from visibility solutions, you are pushing your ROI for RFID out that much further. Still, if you're like most supply chain experts, you also know that eventually this technology just has to succeed. It's a no-brainer on so many levels. Articles like this are great lessons-learned documents for the rest of us.

What, therefore, are the reasons behind Wal-Mart's "faltering RFID initiative". Is it the technology? Is it still too expensive? Is scan accuracy still too low? Or is the problem with Wal-Mart's implementation? Was the project timeline too aggressive? Did Wal-Mart's edict of forced compliance turn its partners off to the idea, or perhaps, caused their own projects to fail due to time and budget constraints?

I suspect that all of these are factors in these initial results. As a project manager at heart, I tend to focus on the problems in the management of this project. When building a project team, you need consensus from your stakeholders (in this case, the 600+ suppliers Wal-Mart managed to get involved). How many of these companies saw RFID as adding to their own bottom lines? I just don't think Wal-Mart did a good job at imbuing these partners with a sense that the project would be good for everyone, not just Wal-Mart. This is exacerbated by the fact that the brunt of the project costs were to be borne by the suppliers. Add to that the fact that RFID tag prices have not moved much, and the value proposition for these suppliers looks pretty dismal. Companies like Best Buy are turning more to in-store implementation of RFID now, and I suspect that's because you can take slap-and-ship into your own house, and all the benefits you reap are direct and immediate.

Another mistake Wal-Mart made was by plotting a five and ten year plan using technology which was still in the rapid evolution phase. Companies are now finding that the applications for RFID that are most readily implementable and with the fastest payback are not the same ones they thought about five years ago. How fast can a project the size of Wal-Mart's change focus?

As I finish reading the article, the primary thought I take away is that I need to stop associating the Wal-Mart project with the viability of RFID. It's fantastic that we can reference that project as a baseline, but other companies are showing that there is value in RFID in the present and it can work.

Jason Perrone

Manager of Professional Services

Blue Sky Technologies

jason.perrone@blueskylogistics.com

Recalls

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:55:11 -0600

The Freight Dawg has blogged (sorry, I just can't bring myself to use his term) about recalls and how Visibility systems are crucial in managing them. I'll add that just knowing where a few thousand cases of peanut butter are within your supply chain is not enough. You need to know lot numbers to isolate the bad product and historical information in case you need to backtrack to the origin of the problem. And you need additional visibility to keep track of what's been contained, e.g. product on hold in the warehouse, interrupted deliveries, etc. Finally, you need insight into your upstream suppliers' inventory so you can determine how to replenish your supply chain the most efficiently. With the right systems in place, you could recall and replenish almost simultaneously to minimize the disruption, not to mention the bad press.

Link: Eric Joiner's Freightdawg.com - The Logistics and Supply Chain Blog!: Recall: CIO's Loom Large in Reclaiming Damaged Product.

Supply Chain Network - Jeff Ashcroft

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:45:01 -0600

Jeff Ashcroft is a vocal consultant in the Supply Chain business and in reading his most recent newsletters and scanning his website, he is putting out some very interesting questions and challenges for leading edge companies. Although he highlights some of our own Blue Sky work in his most recent newsletter, Link: http://www.supplychainnetwork.com/, you can also find many thought provoking articles as well as the latest news in the industry. You can sign up for his electronic newsletter by clicking on this link: http://www.supplychainnetwork.com/phplist/?p=subscribe&id=1

I've had the pleasure of working with Jeff on several projects in the past including an early pilot program on RFid with a consortium of U.S. and Canadian companies, and more recently with a company wishing to seek a new level of integration between their suppliers of manufactured products and also the companies end customers. Once completed, a major step will be taken to reduce inventory in the Supply Chain and the related benefits such as storage space, out of date product and greater cash flow.

You should check out Jeff and his newsletter.

The Long Tail of Supply Chain IT Projects

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:00:41 -0600

Amazon makes the majority of its money selling books that are not popular enough to be stocked in traditional bookstores. That illustrates a concept that's been going around the internet and business world lately: the long tail of marketing. It's based on the idea that there is a demand curve that shows a large number of consumers that all want the same products, but that behind that curve is a long downward slope that represents smaller groups of consumers that have more specific needs. Historically, companies had to focus on the largest market area, but the internet has opened the door to meeting the demand of each of those smaller groups.

I think the long tail theory can be applied to IT projects, specifically in the area of supply chain collaboration. Traditional supply chain IT spending has gone to large, monolithic software packages that handle an entire functional area of the business: warehouse management, ERP, purchasing, etc. Trying new things such as using the internet to better collaborate with suppliers or customers is often met with resistance because it is assumed that any kind of change in those areas would require a drastic overhaul of the IT infrastructure. But there is a long tail of smaller opportunities that can provide immediate value while proving out concepts that can later be applied to other targeted areas and eventually the entire organization.

With the growth of on-demand applications, faster and more dynamic software development, and XML standards, a company can test the waters with smaller projects and smaller risk. For example, a company could work with a single key supplier or customer to improve inventory visibility, collaboration, and supply chain processes. With a hosted application, there is much less upfront spending which lowers a big traditional risk of trying to make these kinds of changes. With new tools and platforms available, an internal IT department, consultant, or vendor can quickly bring new applications to bear, avoiding 12-month roll-out cycles. And by using XML standards the risk of obsolescence, vendor lock-in, or never-ending consulting arrangements is mitigated. The work to write to standard APIs is done once and if the tools or developers need to change, that work is still relevant and useful.

By working in the long tail of IT initiatives a company can explore the possibilities without having to bet the farm. In the above example, the company may get tangible financial benefits from the initial project. Or, they may fail miserably but at a small cost and the lessons they learn can be applied to make the next attempt successful. Or, they may get limited benefits that grow exponentially as more suppliers and customers are brought on board. Low risk, high potential gain - what more can you ask for?

Aberdeen explores some of these ideas and goes into more detail on supply chain collaboration in Technology Strategies for Accelerating Global B2B Collaboration.