A retailer’s demand chain consists of assortment planning or category management, inventory management, and purchasing. The demand-supply chain configuration is the basic setup. The packaged consumer goods supplier makes his offering to purchasing, and the supplier allocates the product to the retail customer based on the customer’s purchase order in a distribution center. But how can a supplier get a “time profit” and replace inventory with information?

The answer is to stop relying on purchase orders: The manufacturer of packaged consumer goods needs to move VOP from purchasing to inventory management in the customer’s demand chain. But there is also more to it. To deliver all products with the same efficiency by replacing inventory with information, the supplier needs to take three basic steps:
1. Move the VOP to inventory management; move up the customer’s demand chain by replacing purchase orders. You can do this, for example, by replenishing the customer daily, based on the customer’s inventory report. The result is that the information on customer demand is equally good for all products. For all but the most high-volume products, this gives the supplier more time to react, a time profit.

2. Use the time profit to reduce the customer’s costs. For example, offer assured availability to the customer, or bill to consumption to simplify the customer’s accounts payable process. (This reduces the customer’s costs because she can verify her accounts payable against total goods issues, or sales.)

3. Use the time profit to improve your performance and maybe to increase product differentiation. For example, moving the OPP to pack to order gives more variety to lower cost for the supplier.

— Willam E. Hoover Jr.

2004 saw Lindows changing its name to Linspire on April 14, after it lost a legal battle against Microsoft.

ARPANET, the first ‘Internet’, was launched in 1969.

AT&T manufactured the first commercial modem, the Bell 103, in 1962.

Computers were sold commercially for the first time in 1951.

In 1991, Sun unveiled the Solaris 2 operating environment, fined-tuned for symmetric multiprocessing.

In 1995, SCO acquired the UNIX Systems source technology business from Novell Corporation.

In 2001, Microsoft filed a trademark suit against Lindows.com in December. It won the case in early 2004.

In August, 1995, Microsoft Windows 95 was released. It sold more than a million copies within the first four days of its launch.

The microprocessor was invented in 1971. The creation was considered a computer on a chip.

The world’s first minicomputer, Digital Equipment’s PDP-8, was introduced in 1965, and cost a phenomenal $18,000.

There are times when designs are produced and, despite their inherent mistakes, are implemented anyway. Have a look:

When making your investigations into which stock management system you want for your business, one of the deciding factors should be “how often will it change?”. In the same vein, the question “will it continue to be without ‘this’ feature or ‘that’ one forever, no matter how often I message the manufacturer?”

SIMMS 2015 Inventory Management software provides the advantage over other packages in that it is designed, amended, augmented, improved, expanded and altered on a regular basis (at least three times per year) — and always has been.

Flexibility and willingness to change is not common with other software. Most of it you buy “as is” (or ‘out of the box’ as is commonly referred). Such limitations that you find in the software may possibly be changed or improved someday, but your own protestations and requests are most often ignored. The software manufacturers have got your money now and they most often don’t care about you getting any bells or whistles beyond what they offer in their stock package.

With SIMMS 2015 (and every other version produced) enhancement requests are free and will be added to upcoming releases of the software. For free. If you, however, need a modification immediately, KCSI can tailor the software to your specific requirements with very little extra cost, thus providing you with immediate results. Visit www.simmssoftware.com or email sales@kcsi.ca for more information about how SIMMS is interested in becoming even more of an inventory solution that will grow with you and your company’s needs.

In today’s fiercely competitive business world, management should aim beyond survival at market leadership. You need all the help you
can get. While you may know the fundamental operations of your business better than we can ever hope to know, no one is better equipped to establish a cost effective inventory control solution tailored to your unique business operations better than we are.

Precise inventory control is an essential part of the operation of a successful, well-organized company and successful businesses require timely and accurate information on your receipt of goods, the movement of goods within or between locations, the sale, removal or other disposition of goods, and the precise valuation and status of goods remaining in inventory at any point in time down to the bin status, colour, size, style, lot numbers, serial numbers and expiration
dates remaining in stock. If you run out of stock, you will lose sales. If you have too much stock, the lack of cash flow will hurt you.

SIMMS Software‘s Inventory Control Maximizes your Inventory Management benefits...
SIMMS 2015 provides a complete inventory management solution for you, controlling inventory, tracking items, ensuring adequate supplies, increasing warehouse productivity, and significantly reducing paper flow. SIMMS software’s ability to input and track manufacturer’s serial numbers, generate and print internal barcodes, and track true costs and warranties sets it apart from any other inventory system.

Inventory Control Software that is easy to configure and customize…
SIMMS 2015 is easy for any user to configure and customize utilizing several user-defined fields available within the program, eliminating the need to change lines of code at installation. This translates into a reduction of implementation time, and eliminates the possibility of bugs being added inadvertently. Now there is finally the option of giving any business all the help it will ever need in terms of complete inventory control. Your business can have that affordable yet powerful inventory management program that you have always wanted.

Visit www.simmssoftware.com or email sales@kcsi.ca for more information.

Edmund Gunter of England invented the slide rule as early as 1692.

In 1958, Chester Carlson invented the Xerox machine. The integrated circuit was invented at the same time, enabling the miniaturization of electronic devices.

In 1993, Intel released the Pentium processor. It was a 60 MHz processor, incorporating 3.2 million transistors. It sold for $878 apiece.

In December 1970, Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application entitled “Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture”, the first basic patent on the microprocessor.

In the 1940s, Hungarian-American John von Neumann devised the von Neumann architecture for computers, which is the basic architecture that you see today in virtually every non-parallel-processing computer around, and ever to have been built.

In the summer of 1969, UNIX was developed. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, was born the same year.

The EDSAC ran its first program on May 6, 1949. It wasn’t the first stored-program computer, but rather, the first practical one.

The first edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual, by K. Thompson and D. Ritchie, was released in 1971.

The first von Neumann-architecture computer to be actually constructed and operated was the Manchester Markl, designed and built at Manchester University in England.

VisiCalc was developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979. Retailing for $99 apiece, VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies.

Paradigm: As in Changing paradigms, Paradigm shift, New paradigm. So what is a paradigm, why are they always changing and shifting, and is there anything we can do to stop them? Consultants, writers, salesmen, and speakers love this word, they like to use it to try to convince you that something dramatic is happening and you’re missing the boat. A Google search resulted in approximately 3 million documents containing the word Paradigm. I think that qualifies as overuse. In contrast, the phrase “inventory management” only returned 600,000 documents.

Sea change:  This one is used similarly to “changing paradigm” to indicate a significant change is occurring. Throughout the history of business, I can only think of a few things that could be considered significant change: mass production, globalization, computer technology and the internet. That’s it!  In fact, I don’t even think globalization can be considered a “changing paradigm” or “sea change” since commerce has been global for centuries. Everything else is pretty much the same.

Watershed moment: For those of you that feel the terms paradigm or sea change didn’t quite meet your needs for your next lame speech or article, try using watershed moment instead. Better yet, use all three.

Profit center. This term is increasingly replacing the term “cost center” in many companies. Why? Because some dozey managers or execs heard it in a seminar and thought that this simple name change would change the culture of their organizations. Why go through all the work of educating and managing your workforce, or evaluating and improving operations, when a simple gimmick like referring to your cost centers as profit centers is available?

Coaching: So when exactly did “training” and “supervision” become bad words? And is “coaching” really any less offensive to our overly sensitive workforce? Are we supposed to follow the examples of sports coaches and slap employees on the butt when they do something right or get in their faces and yell obscenities (no more than four inches from their face and make sure the spit is flying) when they fail to follow instructions. Sure, there have been times when I’ve had employees complaining of a back injury that I wanted to tell “walk it off, Nancy boy!” But I didn’t. Why? Because it’s not appropriate for business and I didn’t want to get fired, or should I say kicked off the team.

Leveraging: Another favorite of consultants, writers, salesmen, and speakers. They’re always telling you that you must be leveraging technology, leveraging knowledge, leveraging the internet, blah blah blah.

World-class: Ah yes, we all are struggling to be world-class. If only we knew exactly what world-class is.

Best practices:This is something all those world-class companies have, or so you are led to believe. If there truly were a way to determine best practices, I think we would be surprised to find out that they are not being used by the companies touted as world-class.

Anything E-: E-commerce, E-manufacturing, E-enterprise, E-business, E-world-class. Okay, the last one’s made up, but wouldn’t you truly be top of the heap if you were E-world-class? Granted, you would probably need to E-leverage E-best practices in order to achieve E-world-class status as we are experiencing a major E-shift in the E-paradigm.

Demand chain: Does calling a supply chain a demand chain really change anything? I’m pretty confident that most people working in supply chain management realize the purpose of the supply chain is to meet demand.

Value chain. Here we go again. From now on, I’m going to refer to the supply chain as a value chain, thus emphasizing that activities within the supply chain must be adding value to the product.

Value stream: This takes “value chain” to a whole new level of absurdity.

Income stream:  I just received a phone call from a guy that was putting together a group of businesses to generate an “income stream”. He was trying to talk me into participating in the income stream (he mentioned income stream more times than I could count). I spend a lot of time outdoors and am well aware that a stream is generally taking runoff from a variety of areas and channeling it ultimately towards a larger body of water. I suspected the same would be true of this income stream scenario, ultimately channeling some of my income into this guy’s income pool.

Software architecture is all about building systems that meet the business’s needs. However, it is easy to get caught up in the frenzy of reveling in the technical details that surround building the system.

Most software architects achieved their position through excellence in technical details. They were able to synthesize that knowledge in a manner that allowed them to complete the following tasks:

• Deliver components of a system in a timely manner

• Unwind complex technical issues

• Translate requirements into working software

• Oversee the work of others

• Mentor others on their team and on other teams

• Communicate with management, technical staff, and business representatives

• Model information

• Maintain technical “currency”

• Be aware of and understand technology trends

These capabilities, along with a glimmer of soft skills, attract the attention of management and prompt executives to begin considering an individual for an architectural position.

The challenge for the architect is being able to see the big picture: No matter how technically awesome a particular system is, if it is not able to meet the needs of the business (both functional and operational needs), the software is of no use. To minimize this risk, a shift in focus needs to occur. Specifically, the architect cannot be solely focused on the technical aspects of system construction, but rather must incorporate a solid understanding of customer value (what is the real customer problem you are helping solve?) in conjunction with business value (how does this help the company make money?) when considering the true worth of the proposed software architecture.

— Dave Hendricksen

Visit www.simmssoftware.com or email sales@kcsi.ca for more information.