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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

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, 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As David Blanchard concisely explains in his book, Supply Chain Management Best Practices, "When you are out of stock, you're out of business." This simple, clear statement kept reverberating in my mind as Blanchard illustrated the successes and failures from real-life business scenarios in order to present various lessons and best practices for SCM.

As I read through the various scenarios Blanchard discusses, one thing that stood out above the rest was his emphasis on taking responsible action and preventing anyone along the supply chain from becoming complacent. Complacency creates delay, waste and other problems -- all of which are not only detrimental to effective supply chain management, but also to achieving a company's overall business objectives.

This Supply Chain Digest article mentions some rules to follow when designing supply chain dashboards. One thing that is not discussed in detail is how important it is to be able to drill down to lower levels of information. An executive may be able to see that service level is lower than desired, but to be able to drill down and see the primary cause makes that knowledge actionable.

If you really want to learn about effective dashboard design, I recommend you read Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few. By the way, Few's latest blog article talks about the Ambient Orb. We actually integrated the orb into our product at one point but the time lag was too great at the time to be useful. However, the first 5 new customers that buy our product and reference this blog entry will get a free Orb with one integrated alert.

An Aberdeen study just released has found that Best-in-Class firms that use Visibility Data Analytics experience a significant reduction in lead times, inventory levels, and inventory carrying costs.

For the complete article, visit http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0314952.htm.

Recently The Aberdeen Group released their latest research on Supply Chain Visibility projects within a sizable sample group of companies. Blue Sky Technologies is pleased to be a sponsor of this important research, and to know from the report that products like ours are making such a large impact on companies' bottom line. This is the second year of this type of research for Aberdeen, and the results show a significant increase in both the number of companies engaging in Visibility projects and the size of the expected ROI. Here is a sampling of reasons companies are engaging in visibility projects:

1) The need to improve on-time delivery performance (72%)

2) The need to reduce lead time and lead time variability (63%)

3) The need to improve ability to make mid-course corrections (41%)

4) Just-in-time and lean programs causing shorter delivery windows (38%)

5) The need to proactively alert customers of late shippments (38%)

To download the entire report click on the following link:

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/4303-RA-global-supply-visibility.asp

Productivity vs Productivity Plus

October 1-3 marked the dates for the 2007 Food Marketing Institute(FMI) Productivity Plus conference held in Dallas Texas. This conference, which is a working conference by nature attracts operational management as well as executive management from just about every major food retailer / wholesaler in the U.S. and as well has membership from across the world.

This years’ conference included topics ranging from hiring and retaining employees, to updates on upcoming governmental legislation, cost saving case studies, automation and several sessions on benchmarking, labor productivity, supplier collaboration and one that I presided over which was entitled; “Business Intelligence, Dashboard Technology.

It was great news to us that the room was packed with so many people wanting to investigate this technology that is now a reality, and to understand how to implement these cost saving measures into their organization. At this point, all leading companies have implemented operational systems to manage inbound, transportation, yard, warehouse management, outbound and store systems, but there is much ‘cream’ left at the top for additional cost savings. Allowing supervision and management to be “Alerted” to upcoming potential issues and averting the time waste and potential service level hiccup can add substantially to the bottom line of an organization.

Moving from a “Nice to Have” to a “Gotta Have” application and utilizing this latest technology for Dashboarding, Visibility and Business Intelligence seems to be the hot topic and is being adopted by the companies that truly pay attention to the metrics and bottom line of their organization. The “Plus” in Productivity is coming your way soon!

Blue Sky is proud to be one of the best tools available for measuring your supply chain metrics and health. Here is a brief article about the growing megatrend, and a link to the entire list of megatrends, as reported by Supply Chain Management Review.

Link: Supply Chain Performance Management: New Metric Framework from APQC « SCM Pulse.

In the never ending debate about ERP versus best-of-breed solutions, and the value of enterprise software generally, a recent article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review casts more doubt about the idea of a single enterprise system to manage the supply chain.

The problem is complexity. The greater the scope of a single dominant system, the greater the complexity of stitching the entire system together across multiple processes.

At Blue Sky, we constantly see companies compensating for supply chain fluctuations by padding inventory safety stock levels, thus adding unnecessary costs to their organization. Many companies are struggling with how to apply lean strategies, which have their roots in manufacturing, to the principles of distribution and fulfillment. While adopting pull based demand techniques is a good starting point, matching your daily demand with your actual fulfillment shipments and analyzing the delta will give a company real, grounded data in which to make significant mid-course corrections, thus enabling companies to operate using lean strategies in the distribution and fulfillment supply chain space. The following article gives some high level details.

Link: Lean: The Antidote to Cost and Variation - 9/1/2007 - Supply Chain Management Review.

From SCDigest:

Read the full article.

This article in Supply Chain Brain talks about how 3PLs are helping their clients define and deliver Perfect Orders.

Larry Lapide discusses some pitfalls of focusing too much on perfect order metrics rather than the bottom line in Supply Chain Management Review. Like all metrics, perfect order can be "gamed" by making poor decisions like the one described in the article. It's important to be able to drill down to the details so you can uncover situations like this one. Detecting the problem as close to the source as possible will go a long way towards preventing people from manipulating the results to make the metrics look good.

We're currently working on a module to our Insight application that tracks Perfect Order metrics. Contact Steve for a demo.

We've just released our latest whitepaper on how supply chain visibility solutions can help you achieve continual performance improvement. You can download a PDF and Jeff Ashcroft was also kind enough to post the Supply Chain Network website.

A Perfect Order is usually defined as one that is delivered to the right place, at the right time, with the right products in the right quantities, with the right documentation. Industry Week recently published an article that highlights the potential benefits of measuring and working to improve the perfect order rate.

We are currently looking for partners to work with us to build a perfect order monitoring application. The basic idea is that you will be able to see your overall perfect order score at a high level and then drill down into details to help you identify problem areas and determine what actions to take to improve your score. Executives might simply look at the overall score and drill down to the department or region level; department or region managers might drill deeper into functional areas; operational personnel could see all the way into the individual order lines. Ultimately, you will be able to view current orders and their risk of being less than perfect along with steps you can take to prevent imperfections.

To find out more, please contact Steve Hensley (steve.hensley@blueskylogistics.com).

A Perfect Order is usually defined as one that is delivered to the right place, at the right time, with the right products in the right quantities, with the right documentation. Industry Week recently published an article that highlights the potential benefits of measuring and working to improve the perfect order rate.

We are currently looking for partners to work with us to build a perfect order monitoring application. The basic idea is that you will be able to see your overall perfect order score at a high level and then drill down into details to help you identify problem areas and determine what actions to take to improve your score. Executives might simply look at the overall score and drill down to the department or region level; department or region managers might drill deeper into functional areas; operational personnel could see all the way into the individual order lines. Ultimately, you will be able to view current orders and their risk of being less than perfect along with steps you can take to prevent imperfections.

To find out more, please contact Steve Hensley (steve.hensley@blueskylogistics.com).

As evidenced by the new big logo on our front page, we have just been named by Inbound Logistics to their list of Top 100 IT Providers. Aside from being named to the list, we are also thrilled to see such an emphasis on visibility among supply chain executives as shown by the article that accompanies the list. More and more companies are realizing that the old adage "you can't manage what you can't measure" is even more true and relevant in today's global, highly competitive marketplace than in the past. As another example, if you look at the session handouts from the Food Management Institute's (FMI) yearly distribution/supply chain conference, you'll see that over half of the topics were related to visibility, metrics and scorecarding. Which is good news for us as we're nearing completion of a scorecarding module that will allow our customers to view key metrics for their distribution networks, with a heavy emphasis on aspects of the distribution operation that affect the bottom line such as shrink, service level, operational efficiency, and cost efficiency.

Metrics are critical to staying ahead of the competition. However, as this article discusses, you have to make sure you are measuring the right thing and then communicate the results and take actions to improve. Determining which of your metrics actually help you perform better will help you avoid unnecessary expenses and information overload.

This article talks about the difficulties in building a valuable supply chain dashboard. One of our goals is to work with our customers to define the metrics that really help them make better decisions. By embedding that knowledge into our products instead of treating each engagement as a one-off consulting gig, we hope that all of our future customers can benefit from our experience out of the box.

And this reference to the above article does a good job of highlighting a key issue that we often encounter: dashboards have to be built from the bottom up instead of the top down. First, because the top level "executive" metrics are difficult to obtain and less trustworthy if you haven't built them on a solid foundation of lower level data. Second, because the people that make the incremental changes that increase the efficiency of the supply chain do so with low level operational data, not high level strategic data. Both are important, but the low level supports, validates, and explains the high level.

Here's an article that uses an interesting analogy to drive home the value of dashboards and real-time visibility.

I apologize to all of our loyal readers for the amount of time since our last blog. It's not for lack of material - just lack of time; we've been extremely busy over the last few months. We are putting the finishing touches on our latest release of Insight right now. It will be a major step forward in terms of functionality and usability. Read on for some of the highlights as well as more information about what's been going on at Blue Sky.

Intelligent Logistics is a hot topic in the Supply Chain industry. In order to meet the changing demands in a real-time environment, adaptive supply chains will be best equipped to respond most effectively. Visibility is a key component in intelligent supply chains, and encompasses all aspects of planning and execution excellence. For a brief article on the current thoughts and trends in the logistics industry, view this article. For more information, contact Steve Hensley at 214-941-1000.

"Business activity monitoring" (BAM) is a Gartner term that defines the concept of providing real-time access to critical business performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Here at Blue Sky, we are extremely grateful that Gartner coined a term that so accurately describes our Insight application, although, to be fair, the term existed before we developed our application - it was just not yet on the famous Gartner hype cycle curve. Recently, Gartner published the results of a study designed to determine the real value of BAM. Some of the key findings were:

Latency - the most common requirement between an event and the notification of that event is less than 15 minutes Vendors - most BAM purchases were from IT vendors such as BMC and IBM/Tivoli or BPM (business process management) and BI vendors like Business Objects and Cognos Deployment - the majority of BAM projects are deployed in less than 3 months Services - the average services costs are less than the software license costs ROI - more than 80% of BAM projects have a positive ROI

Let's look at each of these findings as it relates to our Insight application.

When a company sets annual performance goals within the supply chain, how are the performance goals measured? Are the measurements taken using the most accurate data available? Is the underlying data reliable? These questions are paramount when attempting to minimize the gap between a company and its competitors. Supply chain visibility solutions coupled with the SCOR-model can help bridge the gap between supply chain processes, providing a standardized method of obtaining and reporting the information required for continuous supply chain improvement. Understanding the advantages of the SCOR-model and identifying how existing Supply Chain processes relate to the model can increase the ROI on existing Supply Chain systems and visibility investments.

If you are interested in hearing how a Supply Chain visibility strategy aligns with the SCOR-model, read our latest White Paper, Maximizing Supply Chain Visibility Solutions with SCOR®. For more about Blue Sky, send us an e-mail at info@blueskylogistics.com. Or, feel free to call Steve Hensley or Randy Marble at 214.941.1000.

Software vendors often market their applications using a wide array of buzzwords and acronyms. Even in a relatively focused area such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), there are literally dozens of terms used to describe an application without really helping a potential customer understand what it does. BI, SOA, SCEM, SCPM (not to be confused with SCpM), EDM, OBI, BAM – the list goes on and on with most terms having multiple conflicting definitions that usually correlate closely with the product that is being sold. Our Insight vision statement explains in clear terms exactly what our product does and how it can help your organization by getting the right information into the hands of the right people. It also includes descriptions of the common acronyms and buzzwords you are likely to encounter from other vendors and explains exactly where our Insight application fits.

If you are interested in moving beyond the hype of buzzwords and learning about how an application can really help you, check out part 1 of the Insight vision statement, published here in the latest About.com Logistics/Supply Chain newsletter. To get the entire document and find out more about Blue Sky, send us an e-mail at info@blueskylogistics.com. Or, you can call Steve Hensley or Randy Marble at 214.941.1000 and they’ll answer all of your questions.

The recognized value of many implemented supply chain business intelligence, (BI) applications is often poorly tracked, as there is little knowledge about how these solutions actually support different decisions and processes. When evaluating supply chain BI applications, analytics, metrics and alerts should be part of the standard supply chain BI solutions in order to increase the benefits of BI and thus prove the Return on Investment. (ROI).

Hopefully, most software implementations have a well-founded business case behind them that explains why the given solution is being put into place. When preparing such a business case, it is important to choose financial and/or operational metrics that measure the effectiveness of the chosen solution. If no such metric is used, it will be difficult to ensure a positive payback on the investment. For instance, if a supply chain visibility software solution is required, it is important to know what aspects of the supply chain need to be monitored and measured. Is the organization having issues with product throughput, perfect order fulfillment measurements, labor efficiencies, inventory turns or some other area of the supply chain?

Welcome to the official Web Log of Blue Sky Technologies. Here you will find the thoughts, ideas, opinions, and (occasional) product plugs from the leadership team of Blue Sky. We hope that you will continue to read this Blog and find it valuable and entertaining. Our goal is to develop a vibrant community of customers and partners, while also raising the visibility of our company and products. We will concentrate our posts on subjects within our area of expertise – our own software, supply chain visibility and operational business intelligence - but don't be surprised if, once in a while, we hit on other topics such as general technology, software development, or supply chain practices and trends.