Tag: millennials

Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/16/2016

sn_chair_karsten-wurth

  • Workaholism Is the Threat That Masquerades as Dedication

    The difference between working 40 hours per week and working, say 55 or more, shows up in the quality of the work. In the ‘80s, the Whitehall II study in Great Britain highlighted a drop in cognitive function for those working longer schedules. Teams that spend more hours at their desks but get progressively less effective aren’t benefiting the business.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/282134

  • The working life is changing fast, companies need to catch up

    Explaining that work “doesn’t really work today”, Katherine von Jan, MD of strategic innovation at Salesforce, highlighted the better experience that customers have over workers as a hint that things aren’t right.

    The customer experience is at an all-time high, with ease of service from ordering to delivery of products and services – meaning our expectations are probably too high when we get into the office.

    https://www.siliconrepublic.com/video/salesforce-future-of-work-inspirefest

    The message is really good, but this poor woman is so awkward…

  • What It’s Like When a Coworker Tells You to Smile

    It seems that when I walked about the campus, I had failed to smile at the people who would determine my status as faculty or reject. It also turned out that I did not dress appropriately; interrupted men when they were talking even if they paused for breath and it seemed to me they were done rambling on and on; spoke out about controversial issues like presidential campaigns, civil rights, lack of diversity in both employees and courses; and a host of other things I did that identified me as a “left-wing feminist.” I knew I had an EEOC case when the female faculty member assigned to be my “mentor” explained to me that “you have to dress to please the men” in order to get tenure.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/what-its-like-when-a-coworker-tells-you-to-smile/505493/?utm_source=feed

  • Robots and AI won’t cost you your job anytime soon

    Robots function a lot like reptile brains. Technology hasn’t come far enough in biomimicry to create the right movements, expressions and thought patterns to bring AI to where it can work alone. Current AI technology, whether it’s an actual robot or just software, almost always need a human guide. At best, robots are relegated to one specific task that they can repeat multiple times.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3136563/emerging-technology/robots-and-ai-wont-cost-you-your-job-anytime-soon.html

  • Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries?

    Economists have found the same shift toward restaurant dining and away from old-fashioned grocers. Using Census data, the economist Mark J. Perry calculated that for the first time on record, Americans are spending more money at restaurants and bars than at grocery stores.

    Also:

    But today’s shoppers are springing for options in a market that supermarkets once monopolized. Modern shoppers divide their shopping among superstores like Walmart, supermarkets like Giant, specialty shops for bread and coffee, and online shopping for all of the above. It is what industry analysts are calling “grocery channel fragmentation,” and nothing in this retail sector is growing faster than than the low-end. In a reflection of the slow recovery, dollar and convenience stores accounted four in five new food retailers that opened since 2013.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/11/millennials-groceries/506180/?utm_source=feed

Photo: Karsten Würth

Posted on

News You Can Use: 7/13/2016

sn_tracks_Kaique Rocha

  • The Millennials Balancing Their Parents’ Job Searches With Their Own

    This represents a generational role reversal, prodded perhaps by labor-market forces that favor younger workers over older ones. Although the jobless ratedropped below 5 percent last month, figures specific to older workers tell a different story. A recent study found that 55 percent of Americans over 50 plan to work past the age of 65, primarily because they cannot afford to retire sooner. And, as of December 2014, job-seekers over the age of 55 had been unemployed for an average of 54.3 weeks, nearly twice as long as their younger counterparts.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-millennials-balancing-their-parents-job-searches-with-their-own/488621/

  • Applying Supply Chain Management to Deliver Faster with Higher Quality

    DevOps loves Deming… Agile has its roots in Deming, as does Lean, and does DevOps… as does TQM and SixSigma… This is just a fuller embrace of what DevOps already loves in Deming.

    More specifically to development, Lean introduced the 8 types of Waste and culture to manage and reduce waste which comes at the cost of delivering code, delivering value, and pleasing/delighting your customers. Software supply chains introduced an unmeasured – and therefore unmanaged – form of waste. Managing out elective re-work can massively improve developer productivity. A Fortune 100 insurance company achieved a 20% boost in developer productivity in the 1st year.

    For Operations, using higher quality projects can reduce service interruptions – as can avoiding elective attack surface of older and known vulnerable versions of otherwise high quality projects. Further, using fewer total versions of the projects you’ve chosen can reduce operational variance in production – improving quality of service delivered.

    Let’s also not forget that the same choices improve security with fewer incidents due to entirely avoidable, elective risk and attack surface. Further, when unavoidable attacks rear their heads, the tracking of which libraries went where (with versions) enable a significantly faster MTTI/MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Identify and Mean-Time-To-Remediate).

    https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/06/supply-chain-management-DevOps

  • Honeywell acquires Intelligrated for $1.5 billion

    Honeywell International Inc. said today it will acquire material handling automation provider Intelligrated Systems Inc. from its private equity owner for $1.5 billion, triggering a second wave of consolidation in the material-handling sector just two weeks after rival systems integrator Dematic Corp. was sold.

    http://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20170701-honeywell-acqiures-intelligrated-for-15-billion-dollars/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS-articles

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  • Penn State Is a Key Link in the Supply Chain

    Although the 27-year-old organization is still firmly rooted in traditional aspects of distribution, procurement and transportation, research efforts also focus on newer topics such as demand-driven supply networks, human behavior modeling and low-cost country sourcing.

    http://www.assemblymag.com/articles/93475-penn-state-is-a-key-link-in-the-supply-chain

  • Supply Chain Metric of the Month

    APQC defines procure-to-pay cycle time as the time required in days to pay suppliers, starting from the time that the purchase order is placed until the time that payment is made  to the supplier (e.g. procure-to-pay processing time). As shown in Figure 1, research from APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking in procurement shows that top performing organizations have shorter procure-to-pay cycle times. Top performers have a procure-to-pay cycle time of two months, whereas bottom performers have a cycle time of about a month and a half. At the median organizations have a cycle time of 25 days to pay suppliers, or 11 days longer than top performers. However, organizations at the median have a procure-to-pay cycle time that is almost 3 week less than bottom performers.

    https://www.apqc.org/blog/chain-supply-chain-content-you-can-use-june-2016

Photo: Kaique Rocha

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/15/2016

sn_sparkle_Jamie Street

  • Can Vendor Scorecards Cut Down on IT Project Failures?

    Besides providing performance feedback during a large project, the scorecards also are expected to be a way for the state to take into account previous performance in future procurements, something that has been difficult to do in the past because evaluations were based on requirements built into the procurement vehicles. “We had no systemic way of measuring performance and taking it into account,” Ramos said. “We saw that as a gap.”

    http://www.govtech.com/state/Can-Vendor-Scorecards-Cut-Down-on-IT-Project-Failures.html

  • AI Will not Save Procurement … It Will Only Hasten its Demise

    An AI can detect the presence of risk indicators that you have defined against known risks, it cannot identify risk indicators for unknown risks. If the algorithm doesn’t understand that a tsunami is a risk because it can damage harbours and destroy coastal plants, the risk will not be identified until it discovers a news story about how the supplier plant had to shut down. And if it does not understand that legal proceedings can bankrupt a small company, it could overlook a filing with the potential to bankrupt the supplier. If the supplier was strategic, that is something the organization would want to know about immediately.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/06/03/ai-will-not-save-procurement-it-will-only-hasten-its-demise/

  • DAO: A Sandbox For ‘Smart Contracts’

    Smart contracts are the digital equivalent of the pen-and-paper kind which, even today, are the gatekeepers to major business relationships. Smart contracts work by executing themselves automatically under a given set of conditions, which are pre-programmed into the software that supports them. In the case of DAO, funds will be transferred based on a majority vote, which itself is executed by digital signatures. Slock.it is the company behind DAO’s smart contract infrastructure.

    Also:

    The issue is one of control. There is potential for smart contracts to put buyer-supplier relationships under significant strain if, for instance, a dispute occurs and adequate consideration has not been given to the process for dealing with this in the digital setting. In computer-to-computer purchasing, for example, with which party does the burden of proof sit? The recent and public SWIFT-Bangladesh Bank saga has already showcased the extent of the tensions caused by disagreements over who’s system is at fault.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–harry-john/dao-a-sandbox-for-smart-contracts-620229

  • How to Keep Millennials in Procurement

    Another differentiating characteristic about millennials is that they are not as interested as previous generations in climbing the traditional career ladder, going from a junior buyer to a senior buyer, to a manager and on to procurement director, Peck said. They can be happy with lateral career moves that spark change in their daily routine or challenge them in a new way.

    Career training, too, is highly valued among millennials — something Peck pointed out was a huge positive for procurement and supply chain organizations. In her experience, Peck said it can be “like pulling teeth” to encourage other generations of employees to take training courses or continue their education. With millennials, however, this isn’t a problem.

    http://spendmatters.com/2016/06/02/how-to-keep-millennials-in-procurement/

  • The Purchase Order Is In … Now What?

    At ROYCE, we’ve been burned in the past because we were so starstruck that a luxury department store actually chose us that it blinded us from the far-reaching implications of that order. No one was asking the important questions — What’s their credit history? What are the logistics chargebacks? What the hell is a “loyalty discount?” (Side note: I will never forget the time that a prestigious UK retailer gave us a significant PO, only to subtly mention in the fine print that there were 21 percent off worth of discounts and co-op advertising costs, after already succumbing to aggressively discounted landed costs!) There’s nothing more anticlimactic than landing a career deal, only to meekly utter “thanks, but no thanks.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/276640

  • ‘Vendor overload’ adds to CISO burnout

    “The new CISO is more the CIRO (chief information risk officer) tasked with managing risk to data and technology,” said Dawn-Marie Hutchinson, executive director in the Office of the CISO at Optiv.

    “Five years ago, the role was buried many layers down in the organization, if it existed at all,” she said. “Today, the CISO is a business leader.”

    Diedre Diamond, founder and CEO of CyberSN, speaking at the recent SOURCE Boston conference, offered three other reasons: Lack of understanding of the role, lack of advancement potential and unhappiness with leadership or company culture.

    http://www.csoonline.com/article/3077243/it-careers/vendor-overload-adds-to-ciso-burnout.html

Posted on

News You Can Use: 5/25/2016

sn_conference_Benjamin Child

  • The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn’t Reject It

    A recent Motherboard piece took a look at the impact of no HR on company culture. It found that women are more often than not the most vulnerable employees due to startups’ lack of HR and general anti-harassment procedures. The article states, “Ultimately, these structural issues contribute to one of the greatest systemic problems facing working women today: barriers to advancement, known to many as the glass ceiling.” And over the years some of the biggest tech startups have had accusations of harassment levied at them.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3059673/the-future-of-hr-and-why-startups-shouldnt-reject-it

  • Go Deep and Go Wide with Procurement Analytics

    Data unification is a two-step process that catalogs all data sources and uses that information about data to build a global reference that shows how all of the data relates to the questions at hand. This resource is typically built through a combination of machine learning and smart sourcing of human experts, and provides three clear benefits: making exponentially more data available for analysis, eliminating the biggest contributor to analysis time overhead – data preparation, and building in repeatability so any analysis that has been done can be rerun at anytime with no repeat of the data preparation.

    http://www.procurementleaders.com/blog/my-blog–guest-blog/go-deep-and-go-wide-with-procurement-analytics-617110

  • A 40 Hour Work Week . . . Really?

    Of course, I’m being a fit facetious here but I don’t think it’s all that far from the truth. Here’s a shocking business statistic: if you or anybody on your team wastes just one hour per day — and please understand that I’m also guilty of this — it equates to six weeks of wasted time per year! Isn’t that incredible? That’s a lot of vacation time. My advice: just work hard when you are at work. Of course, we all need some down time to handle personal matters but do so sparingly because you can’t get those hours back.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272480

  • Call me crazy (regarding conference calls)

    A conference call is over when someone uses one of the many conversational gaps, false starts, or “No, you go” truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should put our ideas in writing. As if to say, “Yeah, I guess flip-flops weren’t a good choice for this 5K run.” Acknowledging that we’ve engaged in the discourse equivalent of a toddler’s squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool instead of the Indian Ocean.

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/hang-up-the-conference-call

  • Want to Improve Your Decision-Making? Shut up for 10 days.

    Insight meditation, also known as vipassana, is a method handed down by Gautama Buddha himself to his followers. Insight meditation focuses on maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations, without judgment. Students first take a vow of silence. They then enter into a daily routine of sitting for as many as 11 hours per day, renouncing all other religious or ritualistic practices, eating only vegetarian fare and not speaking except during a short Q&A session with the teacher.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/275536

  • How AI And Crowdsourcing Are Remaking The Legal Profession

    “If you were to download everything in the PACER system, it would cost you hundreds of millions, if not more,” says Lewis of Ravel Law, which has found an alternative by partnering with Harvard Law School to digitize its archive. “They’ve made an effort to collect every … court decision from every state and federal court over the last 200 years,” Lewis says. Ravel collects new information in real time. “The courts themselves are doing a much better job of pushing out today’s law,” he adds. Ravel has published the complete case law for California and New York. It aims to offer all U.S. federal and state law online by mid 2017, for free.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3059725/how-ai-and-crowdsourcing-are-remaking-the-legal-profession

  • The Chinese Millennials

    We have heard the stories of changing and increasing wages. The migrant workforce in China’s eastern coastal cities is also changing. Today, young people coming to the factory towns from rural China are less open to the long working hours, constant overtime and poor working conditions. Today’s Chinese Millennials stand apart from their parents and grandparents. They have many new economic opportunities, they are focused on the present, they are interested in more work/life balance, and they have become conspicuous consumers.

    http://www.scmr.com/article/the_chinese_millennials

Photo: Benjamin Child