Supply Chain

An update on the warranty industry

March 11, 2009

Eric Arnum, editor of Warranty Week, gave an overview of the industry as a whole. Clearly the recession is taking its toll. Starting with new home builders it has spread to RV makers, auto makers, various retailers, GE and others. Warranty is important in many of these company’s challenges and some, like Hyundai, are trying [...]

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First Look Tavant

March 6, 2009

Some weeks back I got a review on Tavant, a 700 person IT services and solutions company with a focus in financial services (mortgage, trading and security), ebusiness and Service Operations such as warranty management. I was interested in their warranty product as part of my research into the warranty claims space. The product – [...]

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Here’s what different in next generation warranty systems

March 5, 2009

Continuing some posts on next generation warranty systems in the build up to speaking at the Warranty Chain management conference I thought I would contrast how current generation warranty systems handle critical decisions with how next generation systems do so.

Decision
Today
Next Generation

Is Claim Valid?
Data validation rules are coded into the user interface that captures [...]

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Some thoughts on Next Generation Warranty Systems

March 2, 2009

I am going to speaking next week at the Warranty Chain Management Conference (registration is still open) on Next Generation Warranty Systems. I hope to post a couple of product reviews (like the SAS Warranty one already posted) this week but I thought I could also talk a little about my topic.
The basic premise is [...]

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DIALOG closing thoughts – better decisions for a smarter planet

February 12, 2009

One of the best things about being at DIALOG was the opportunity to meet a bunch of ILOG customers and learn how they are making better decisions in their organizations. It seems to me that every one of these customers is, in a very practical way, helping to build a smarter planet. The first group [...]

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DIALOG Keynotes – ILOG and IBM

February 4, 2009

Pierre Haren started up the keynotes with some personal comments about the excitement of being part of IBM, seeing more customers at DIALOG and hearing stories from customers about what they are doing with ILOG products. He is clearly enthused by the opportunity to reach more companies by being part of IBM than they ever [...]

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DIALOG The roadmap

February 4, 2009

On now to the roadmap, at least at a high level.
Right now there is the normal post-acquisition “blue wash” going on and by Q2 will deliver IBM versions of all ILOG’s products and, obviously IBM’s global sales force and Global Services are being spun up. The core of the roadmap is to move the BRMS [...]

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DIALOG IBM and ILOG – the strategic perspective

February 4, 2009

Getting started at DIALOG I got to spend some time with Tom Rosamilia GM of WebSphere, Sandy Carter and Pierre Haren, CEO of ILOG discussing the ILOG acquisition by IBM.
Tom went first by pointing out that the acquisition seemed like a good idea when it was announced and since then the Smarter Planet initiatives and [...]

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Transforming retail with analytics and decision management

January 12, 2009

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item:
Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of analytics [...]

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First Look – Sonetto Retail

December 29, 2008

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

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Next generation direct marketing with decision management

August 26, 2008

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign  Management.
She starts off with three great principles:

Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects – both explicit and implied.
Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.

All [...]

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Live from the Intalio User Conference – Green BPM

June 17, 2008

First session is Doug Neal from CSC on “New Aspirations for BPM – Green and Global”. Doug took us back to 2001 when BPM was new and reminded us that the driver was a need for change (that could not be supported by the ERP systems of the time). How we manage change has [...]

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Lessons Learned from BPM Deployments

May 23, 2008

Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field – a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]

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Here’s how to use EDM to support Earth Day

April 22, 2008

Well today was Earth Day – you knew that, I hope. I knew because last week I was at John Muir’s house with a wonderful group of 4th/5th graders doing a simulation of his period. So, in the spirit of Earth Day, how are Enterprise Decision Management and Smart (enough) Systems “green”?

If your marketing systems [...]

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After EDM – the future of business

April 11, 2008

The second part of my response to Dave Wright’s comment is about the kind of business one can run after one adopts EDM. To do this, let’s predicate the discussion a company that has adopted Enterprise Decision Management as a core management principle, implemented the technology and development approaches that support it and had long [...]

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Using EDM to effectively allocate resources

February 5, 2008

Continuing my series on using EDM to manage in a recession, allocating resources effectively. In a recession resources are, almost always, constrained and so the proper and effective allocation of resources can be critical. Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, is particularly useful in allocating resources to customers. This plays out in a couple of key ways.
Firstly, [...]

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How to use EDM to develop a competency in responding to change

December 6, 2007

A post by Randy Littleson on the Kinaxis blog today got me thinking about responding to change. The post discussed how a failure to develop a competency in responding to change leaves you scrambling. One of the key areas EDM is designed to impact is agility – the ability of an organization to sense, [...]

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Book Review – The world is flat

December 14, 2006

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
I have just finished reading “The World Is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. Firstly a health warning – it’s a REALLY long book. Even skimming some sections it took me a long while to read it. Overall it is a good if somewhat long winded read. [...]

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