Archive for November, 2008
Nothing gets software vendors more excited than new government regulations. Sarbanes-Oxley was a boon to companies like SAP and Oracle a few years ago. It allowed them to walk down the hall from the CIO’s office and talk to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the person who controls the company’s purse strings. Similarly, TMS vendors welcomed the new Hours of Service (HOS) regulations when they first went into effect in… Continue reading
Facebook in Supply Chain Management
· CommentsI walk among the Facebook generation, all these people around me
nodes in a big social network.
This was the beginning of a poem that occurred to me last night as I walked through the Northeastern University campus, where I gave a guest lecture on “Technologies that Tomorrow’s Industry Leaders Are Investing in Today” (a topic that I’ll write about in a future post). Even though I’m still relatively… Continue reading
Software-as-a-Service Gets Optimized
· CommentsThe terms “optimization” and “software-as-a-service Transportation Management System (TMS)” have not gone together historically. Most SaaS TMS vendors came into existence during the dotcom era. The problem with “legacy” TMS applications at the time was that they were great at optimization, but poor at execution. Saas TMS vendors filled this void, leveraging the Internet and Web technologies to streamline and automate shipment tendering, booking, track and trace, freight audit and… Continue reading
All Greened Out (Until The Asteroid Comes)
· CommentsOkay, it’s been a while since I’ve written about “green” supply chain management. To be honest, I’m a bit “greened out” at the moment. I feel like I did a few years ago, when RFID was all the rage. The first few months of RFID were exciting, learning about the technology and listening to executives at Walmart, Gillette (now P&G), and other early adopters talk about their ambitious plans. But… Continue reading
Too Big to Fail, or Death by a Thousand Cuts
· CommentsWalking my kids to school this morning, an image popped into my un-caffeinated mind: a 6 foot, 300 pound giant third grader, towering over his frightened classmates, with his report card in hand and crying out to his teacher, “I’m too big to fail. I’m too big to fail!”
I guess this financial crisis is starting to affect me. Freddie and Fannie were too big to fail, so was… Continue reading
