Productivity Bulletin: 1/23/2015

Photo: Sean MacEntee, Flickr

The Supply Chain: 1/21/2015

sn_SupplyChainManagement_o2

  • Assessing and managing risk: Interview with IBM’s Louis R. Ferretti

    As supply chains have become more global, the complexities of managing risk across vast and varied physical and political geographies arguably have grown by orders of magnitude. That’s a lesson that IBM, one of the world’s largest technology companies, has taken to heart. Beginning in 2009, the company undertook the task of building a complex supply chain risk management tool, now deployed globally, that provides managers with a way to examine supply risk in a much more robust fashion than ever before.

    http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20150116-assessing-and-managing-risk-interview-with-ibms-louis-r-ferretti/

  • Supply chain risk has companies on edge:

    In its fourth such survey, the Allianz Risk Barometer 2015 shows “business interruption and supply chain” risks remains of most concern for 47 per cent of respondents for the third year in succession.

    http://www.fullyloaded.com.au/news/logistics/1501/supply-chain-risks-have-companies-most-on-edge-allianz/

  • Corrupt government procurement leads to $1.5 trillion mistake:

    The F-35 fighter jet was supposed to do a bit of everything, as James Fallows explains in “The Tragedy of the American Military”. Instead, the aircraft can barely do anything: it has trouble flying at night, its engines have exploded during takeoff, and early models suffered structural cracks. There’s no end in sight, either. The all-in costs of this airplane are estimated to be as much as $1.5 trillion. (That’s approximately the same price as the entire Iraq War.) In an Atlantic magazine video, Fallows explains how such a disastrous project came to be—and why it can’t be stopped.

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/pentagons-15-trillion-mistake-is-one-of.html

  • Making supply chain green:

    Workers in sustainable supply chain management must be adept at negotiating supply chain complexities and creatively applying broad business and environmental knowledge. Weaving between profit-related subjects and environmental research generated by NGOs, they innovate cross-sector solutions seamlessly. These workers represent a new breed of eco-polymath and they are in demand.

    http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/community/blogs/aj-special-delivery/greening-supply-chain-management

  • Is There a Third Option for SCM Executives Looking to Revamp their Supply Chain Management Operations?

    Improvements need to be achieved in months, not years, a reality that can only be realized through a managed services partnership in which the only measure of success is tied to the operational improvements resulting from the program. While many supply chain executives have never seriously considered managed services as an SCM option due to liability, performance or security risk concerns, this is indeed an economical, efficient and strategically viable solution that supply chain leaders should consider to deliver operational performance.

    http://blog.kinaxis.com/2015/01/is-there-a-third-option-for-scm-executives-looking-to-revamp-their-supply-chain-management-operations/

  • What if the Problem Isn’t the Rules, but the People? [This is a good article on Federal sourcing, but it applies]

    The study found that while there certainly are problems in buying and implementing the latest technology in government, “many federal leaders believe that these problems are the result of execution of the procurement process rather than regulatory requirements.” While nearly 40 percent of the more than 500 survey respondents had some influence in the procurement process, only one of them cited problems with the Federal Acquisition Regulation in written comments.

    http://www.govexec.com/federal-news/fedblog/2015/01/what-if-problem-isnt-rules-people/102792/

Supplier Report: 1/17/2015

sn_mainframe_IBM

IBM

There is ALOT Of mainframe chatter this week from IBM.

  • Softlayer’s IaaS standing up to Amazon’s AWS:

    “IBM SoftLayer does some things well and some things cheaper,” Linthicum said. “And if people say, ‘should we consider them?’ I say ‘sure. Why not?’ If you need a bare-metal cloud, you don’t want to pay for network traffic, those sorts of things, they seem to rise to the top.”

    http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240238356/IBM-SoftLayer-IaaS-stands-up-to-AWS-with-free-support-networking

  • A counter-point to an article I shared last week: Don’t tell IBM the mainframe is dead…

    It’s very likely true that companies relying on Linux, Java, and databases to support their cloud computing, analytical, and transactional workloads would experience higher levels of performance at a lower overall cost if they deployed a small number of IBM z13 systems, rather than a larger number of any vendor’s industry standard x86 offerings to do the same work.

    http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/01/16/ibm-says-mainframe-not-dead.aspx

  • IBM is named a Hadoop leader:

    “In a survey of more than 1,000 Big Data developers, analyst firm Evans Data Corp. found that IBM is the leading provider of Hadoop among developers, with more than 25 percent of respondents identifying IBM’s Hadoop as their principle distribution,” the company announced Tuesday. “The survey also focused on key growth areas such as machine learning and streaming analytics, where 18 percent of developers cited IBM InfoSphere Streams as their preferred application for machine learning, making it the second most popular choice in the category.”

    http://adtmag.com/articles/2015/01/15/ibm-big-data.aspx

  • Mainframe with Mobile focus:

    The z13 also claims to be the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale and the first mainframe system with embedded analytics to offer real-time insights on all transactions. The latter capability helps drive real-time fraud Relevant Products/Services detection on business transactions by delivering “on the fly” analytic insights that IBM said are 17 times faster than comparable competitive systems.

    http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=03200113GNCW

  • IBM ranks first in registered patents (again)
    http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/01/12/4471247/ibm-ranks-first-in-us-patents.html?sp=/99/104/

Oracle

  • The man to watch at Oracle:

    Kurian’s sway within Oracle, as evidenced by the dynamic in these meetings as well as his growing responsibilities, has some current and former company executives convinced that he will one day succeed Ellison and run the technology company, which has a market cap of about $190bn. Even after Ellison named Hurd and Catz as co-CEOs in September, insiders said they believed Kurian was the man to watch at Oracle. One senior Oracle executive said that after Hurd and Catz were promoted, top executives worried about keeping Kurian motivated and happy. He continued to report directly to Ellison, now executive chairman of the board, along with Hurd, Catz and two others.

    http://www.gulf-times.com/opinion/189/details/423074/the-man-to-watch-at-oracle

HP