ZDNet Must Read:
Analyst: News Corp.'s Google saber rattling really about MySpace
News Corp.'s alleged dance with Microsoft's Bing and Rupert Murdoch's big plan to de-index from Google is likely to be nothing more than saber rattling to secure a semi-respectable MySpace... Continued »
Category: Supply chain
August 31st, 2009
Report: Tech component inventory lean (perhaps too lean)
Inventory levels of key items in the technology industry’s supply chain—components like semiconductors, hard drives and interconnects—are very lean, according to a report by Goldman Sachs.
These tight inventories are the result of some proactive management in the supply chain. The tech industry saw demand slow and cut inventories to muddle through economic Armageddon. The problem: If Armageddon doesn’t come, Windows 7 boosts demand, Apple continues to deliver and consumers fall in love with tech we’re looking at potential component shortages.
Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey writes:
July 2nd, 2009
Tailoring Web technology to a bespoke dress shirt business
It’s not easy to mix up the monotony of putting on a shirt and a tie every day for work, but what if the shirt was made-to-order, with details of your own choosing?
Fashion startup ShirtsMyWay allows you to spruce up your tired work uniform and customize your own dress shirt from nearly-limitless options — from the color of the stitching around buttonholes to the shape of the breast pocket — and ships it to you for the price of an off-the-rack shirt from Brooks Brothers.
Always liked the look of the white-collar, blue-body banker dress shirt, but preferred the reverse? It can be done in two clicks. Like to keep things on the outside crisp and white, but prefer to have a little private bling on the inside? A few more clicks and you’ll have brown and white “French Rails” lining your collar and cuffs (see image below).
Or better yet, 20 copies of your new favorite shirt.
I spoke with Shanghai, China-based founder Michael Yang on how his startup is addressing the increased demand for custom clothing on the Web.
What gave you the idea for ShirtsMyWay?
Michael Yang: [Co-founder] Peter [Crawfurd] and I both wanted to start a company, and we had both been to Asia and had shirts made there for ourselves. The idea evolved over a very long process: we did some research online and saw that the customization wave was going up and online clothing sales were going up and put two and two together. We looked online and realized that people were only doing online tailoring, and no one was really doing design.
There are so many components to a shirt, and we thought you should be able to customize them all. You have the collar, the cuffs, the contrast fabric inside the cuffs, the sleeve, the placket, the yoke, the pocket, and you can go on. So we made every component customizable, down to the buttonhole thread.
That level of customization sounds daunting. How do you help the average customer choose?
MY: A lot of people simply love the level of customization — and some people are overwhelmed by the amount of options. We have a shirt model on the site that helps a lot with the visualization, so they can see what, say, a placket actually is.
Right now we’re working on a “shirtpedia,” where we try to educate people who don’t know so much about shirts. What kind of customers are we looking for? People who are interested in tailored or custom-fit shirts. We’re aiming for mass customization so that the average person can go in and do this. It’s a trend that’s going to spread to habit – rather than go to JCPenney or another offline store.
Your focus is only on men’s dress shirts. Is there interest in expansion to women’s shirts or pants?
MY: The natural progression that not only would come to mind would be to expand into customizing a whole wardrobe – shoes, pants, shirts, blazers, suits and so on. But it’s difficult to say right now. Originally that was our vision, but right now we see that there are things happening in our market — we’ve shaken it up a bit — and we probably have to take it as it comes.
We only launched in February, so we don’t have any pre-global economic downtown basis to compare to. Surprisingly, we are doing very well. The amount of sales we’re able to generate actually corresponds to our original goals. How is the economic downturn affecting the online industry? I’ve been looking at reports and some numbers indicate that online commerce hasn’t gone down.
So we’re already looking to expand. Right now we’re still tossing ideas around. We are currently shipping internationally — [North] America, Europe, Australia, Asia — but we pick certain countries because of the shipping costs. We have a policy of free shipping for most countries, so we’re already doing that.
You mentioned a “trend” in online custom clothing and a push away from brick-and-mortar stores. Is that really true?
MY: There are a lot of men who go online to buy clothing, and our initial idea was that men can’t be bothered to go into stores and shop around. There are a lot of men who want to just do it and get the package shipped to their door.
The current discussion right know concerning expansion is if the next step is to target women or to diversify into another product. Women buy practically 90 percent of the items in the household. We have gotten quite a few requests from women to make dress shirts for women. It’s quite a complicated process to diversify into women’s clothing. Peter and I have only have experience in men’s, rather than women’s, clothing. So we’ll possibly stick to what we’re good at. But you never know – my sister’s a clothing designer; maybe I’ll take lessons from her.
You and Peter are based in Shanghai, but you’re both from Denmark. How do you navigate the right channels to keep your business afloat?
I’m of Chinese origin; my parents are Chinese. They moved to Denmark and I was born and raised in Denmark. Peter and I went to high school together in Denmark and then the same university. I studied computer science and business administration and Peter studied international business. He worked in India for some time and I was in Denmark. As we started to itch, that entrepreneurship, we put our heads together in Denmark and moved to Shanghai to do the groundwork.
I speak Shanghainese, the native dialect, and I also have quite a big family here, around 20 family members, and they’re all entrepreneurs themselves. Beyond that, we have a consulting company here that is helping us with legal and accounting issues.
Peter supervises the operations and does the marketing, and I do the IT and supervise the accounting. We work quite differently, Peter and I — he does day-to-day work, while I do project work.
How does ShirtsMyWay function in the background? What happens behind the scenes?
MY: We use open source, which was a relatively natural choice for us. We run on PHP. When we started doing this there was a choice between Flash and AJAX, I picked AJAX. AJAX makes more sense if you want to do SEO — Flash is hard to control. AJAX is sort of like a lego box that you can piece anything together however you like it.
How does it work? People go online, customize their shirt, put in in the shopping cart and click order. We save the details so they can be retrieved later — users will be able to retrieve their own data soon. We have a back-end system that pulls up the order and sends it to the factory. We have an alliance with one factory that we’ve been working very closely with, which has only been getting better and better. They produce the shirt, quality control it and give it to us. We actually go in and quality control it ourselves. If it’s OK, we ship it out. If it’s not, we send it back to the factory.
We source our own fabrics because we don’t want to just put whatever the factory has up on our site. A lot of those fabrics are not so good, so we go out and handpick high-quality and stylish fabrics.
We’ve had around 0.2 percent or even lower return rate. For every 500 shirts we sell, maybe only one is returned. People are pretty happy.
The U.S. is our biggest market, for good reason. I think that in the States, people are quite far ahead on the innovation curve in order to be able to embrace the kinds of things that we’re doing. In terms of customizing your own clothes online, certainly I think that more people in the States do and would love do do these kinds of things than, say, Europe or Australia or other parts of the world. We do have a pretty good market in those other areas, but combined. The factor of embrace in the States is equal to the rest of the world put together. That’s the feeling that we get.
June 1st, 2009
The bar code turns 35
The invention that transformed the supply chain—the Universal Product Code bar code–turns 35 on June 26.
The UPC bar code has 59 machine readable black and white bars that identify products and its manufacturer. Despite all the talk about RFID devices taking over the supply chain, the bar code is alive and well.
The GS1 US, which develops and administers the Universal Product Code (UPC) for businesses in the U.S., dishes out a bevy of facts and figures. A quick look:
- The first live use of the UPC was in a Marsh Supermarkets Store in Troy, Ohio June 26, 1974. The product: A pack of Wrigley’s gum.
- UPCs are scanned more than 10 billion times a day in 25 industries.
- The average price per check out scanner in 1974 was about $10,000.
- Industry executives in 1974 projected savings of $150 million if the grocery industry moved to a UPC-based automated checkout system. PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that the impact on the food industry was 20 times greater than original forecasts. The firm’s findings were released on the barcode’s 25th birthday.
May 28th, 2009
AMR Research: Apple has the best supply chain; Dell No. 2
AMR Research on Thursday unveiled its annual ranking of enterprise supply chains and Apple and Dell finished No. 1 and No. 2.
AMR’s Supply Chain Top 25 is a report that ranks companies based on their ability to use their supply chain as a competitive weapon. According to AMR, this year’s ranking focused on companies that used their supply chain to monitor demand and adjust to a declining economy rapidly.
In theory, the companies with the best supply chain management should be able to deliver better earnings and grab more share as the economy improves.
AMR bases its rankings on peer and analyst opinion, return on assets, inventory turns and revenue growth. Here’s a look at the comments for the top five supply chain players:
April 19th, 2009
The flat of the curve: are we scared of innovation?
Kevin O’Marah, AMR Research’s Chief Strategy Officer, blogs a thought-provoking piece that highlights how so many retailers and manufacturers have failed to embrace collaborative supply chain models through fear of “giving more than they’ll get”. Kevin argues that consolidation amongst suppliers will accelerate in this environment as major industrials drive cost out of their supply chains by reducing their supplier bases. He adds,”what we have since seen is that cooperation takes a lot more than just setting up EDI, reverse auctions, or visualization. It takes trust, which apparently is still in short supply.”
Kevin refers to a piece of analyst foresight from nine years’ ago, where the logical next step in achieving supply-chain value was productivity gains across the economy driven by bilateral relationships (meaning win-win) between trading partners:
When some analyst designed that graphic, we’d just come through a major period of innovation where the Internet was forcing businesses to explore new business models - or face death by failure to change. So what happened to put the kibosh on businesses revolutionizing their supply/demand models?
When we look at the rise of global sourcing of back office support processes, namely IT support and finance, the common thread is cost-reduction, cost-reduction, cost-reduction. Where immediate cost-savings are on the table, companies can’t wait to disrupt their businesses. However, where they need to work more closely with others to improve speed-to-market, control inventory, or access new geographies and markets, it appears that an unwillingness to take a “risk”, and a lack of competence to embrace collaborative supply chain models are holding firms back. Dare I say that our businesses are scared of innovation - of challenging the talent of their executives to embrace technology and global delivery models, and work more closely with their suppliers and partners to achieve this? Moreover, if firms are incapable of embracing these models themselves, how long will it be before before business leaders reach out to third-party providers who do get it?
Something tells me it’s been the recent years of easy credit, easy growth, a sense of entitlement and a fear of disrupting business models that has stagnated innovation in global business delivery. However, fear of change can only last as long as these business survive. As Kevin’s headline emphasizes: “Consolidation and death”. Many businesses will only change when they are forced to, and it will require a new wave of firms which are prepared to embrace new collaborative business models that will form the next wave of growth in our economy.
December 4th, 2008
i2, JDA call off merger
JDA and i2 said they are calling off their supply chain wedding plans amid an uncertain economic picture.
In August (statement), JDA agreed to buy i2 for $346 million, or $14.86 a share, in cash. On Wednesday, i2 shares closed at $7.70. JDA was going to finance the deal with debt to avoid dilution to shareholders. Naturally, JDA wanted to renegotiate because the economy unraveled since the deal was announced.
According to a statement, i2 gets a $20 million breakup fee as a consolation prize. The two parties didn’t reveal details of their most recent discussions, but there’s an uncertain demand picture and both companies have seen their shares plummet.
Simply put, it makes sense for this deal to be scrapped. Does JDA really want to blow $386 million and assume integration risks in this market?
i2 noted that it has a significant cash balance to weather the storm. As of Sept. 30, i2 had $220 million in cash and equivalents. Here’s a look at i2 shares since the deal was announced:
August 11th, 2008
JDA Software scoops up i2 for $346 million
JDA Software said Monday that it will acquire i2 Technologies for $346 million, or $14.86 a share, in its latest step in rolling up supply chain management software companies.
i2 makes supply chain management software and JDA specializes in planning an optimizing those applications. The end game: Create a supply chain management giant that can better compete with larger players such as SAP and Oracle in the applications market. JDA also acquired supply chain management software company Manugistics in 2006.
JDA CEO Hamish Brewer said in a statement that i2 will double its addressable market and bring in more manufacturing customers. JDA has been a leading player in the retail and transportation supply chain management. The company said it expects to save about $20 million a year due to the acquisition. Here’s what the combined company will look like:
JDA’s purchase price is a slight premium to i2’s closing price of $14.16 on Friday.
April 3rd, 2008
HP lists its top suppliers
Hewlett-Packard on Thursday issued a mammoth social responsibility report including a list of most of its suppliers.
HP released the list “with the intent of promoting transparency and progress in raising social and environmental standards in the electronics industry supply chain.”
While this list may have transparency benefits, I find it a fascinating list because it exposes the HP ecosystem and results of a social responsibility audit. Most supply chain details are kept close to the vest and suppliers are largely unknown. HP’s list also surfaces a few companies–Elpida Memory, Kinpo Electronics and Pegatron to name a few–you’ve probably never heard of.
The list–delivered in HP’s 2007 Global Citizenship Report–includes contract manufacturers, electronic manufacturing services providers, original design manufacturers and commodity suppliers. If other companies follow HP’s lead the list may become a way to cross reference suppliers, find investments and also just point out emerging trends and companies we should watch.
There are a lot of details in the report, which is definitely worth checking out.
December 5th, 2007
U.S. Postal Service to Netflix: You're killing us on labor
Netflix’s return DVD mailers are apparently costing the U.S. Postal Service $21 million in annual labor costs. And the Postal Service wants some of its money back.
Simply put, Netflix’s return DVDs clog the postal machinery and require manual sorting. When Netflix subscribers open their mailers the leading edge of the package is removed. On return, the same package comes back without the hard edge and plastic instead and jams the sorters.
According to Citi analysts Tony Wible and Mark Mahaney a potential 17 cent surcharge to Netflix’s DVD return packages would crush the company’s operating income per subscriber (Techmeme).
The analysts, who rate Netflix a “sell” and Blockbuster a “buy,” write:
If Netflix has to bear the full brunt of this increase (without other cost offsets), monthly operating income per paying subscriber would fall 67% from $1.05 to $0.35. NFLX questions whether the USPS will accept the OIG’s suggestions, and if no hikes occur, the impact would be limited.
Here’s the math:
The Inspector General audit at the Postal Service didn’t mention Netflix specifically, but the hints in the report are pretty strong. Some excerpts from the audit report:
We initiated this audit based on concerns raised regarding potential preferential treatment given to a large digital versatile disc (DVD) mailer. Our objective was to determine whether PRM (permit reply mail) mailers’ mailpieces are processed in accordance with their approved classification and pricing.
The Postal Service generally processes PRM mailpieces in accordance to their approved classification and pricing, as outlined in the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM). However, employees manually process approximately 70 percent of the approved First-Class two-way DVD return mailpieces from one DVD rental company because these mailpieces sustain damage, jam equipment and cause missorts during automated processing. Nonmachinable mailpieces are subject to a surcharge. However, the DMM does not currently address the characteristics of the mailer’s two-way DVD return mailpiece that make it nonmachinable.
Because these mailpieces are not machinable, the Postal Service pays significant additional labor costs to manually process them. We estimate the additional labor costs to process these mailpieces were $41.9 million during the past 2 years, and will be $61.5 million over the next two years. We will report this monetary impact of $103.4 million in our Semiannual Report to Congress as $41.9 million in unrecoverable costs and $61.5 million in funds put to better use.
Add it up and you have the following takeaways:
- The Postal Service wants to add a 17 cent surcharge if Netflix doesn’t redesign its mailers;
- Congress will love this tidbit;
- A surcharge would crush Netflix, which is under pricing pressure already;
- It’s a safe bet that Netflix will redesign its mailers;
- The Postal Service is inefficient: Why did it take so long to even ponder a surcharge? A company would surely notice if a customer was increasing its labor costs.
On another note, Citi’s analysts confirmed that Blockbuster’s mailers don’t clog the Postal Service’s sorters.
As for that final takeaway, Wible and Mahaney reckon that the Postal Service may be looking to add surcharges to pay for other initiatives.
We are somewhat concerned that the USPS has singled out the rental by mail industry, which could allude to price increases despite any compliance with the mailers. To this point, the USPS proposed annual rate increase of $0.17 would provide $56.5 million in revenue and more than cover the estimated $31 million in annual manual labor costs, which implies that the USPS may be looking at online rental plans as a way to subsidize losses from other parts of its operations.
Netflix argues that it saves the Postal Service $100 million since it pays for first class postage both ways. But amid rising fuel costs and electronic delivery of mail and other promotions the Postal Service is likely to look to balance its budget somewhere.
March 26th, 2007
Coupa: Can e-procurement apps tackle the midmarket?
Can two Oracle alumni hit bring e-procurement applications to the midmarket? Coupa, a Foster City, Calif., startup sure hopes so.
Coupa, founded by Dave Stephens and Noah Eisner after years in Oracle's advanced procurement group, will announce Coupa eProcurement Express on Monday. The software is free and specifically designed for the midmarket.
The general idea behind the software is to make purchasing at smaller companies like shopping at Amazon or any other e-commerce company. Coupa CEO Stephens argues that the biggest reason e-procurement applications fail is lack of employee buy-in. In other words, if e-procurement is too difficult for employees there's no sense in going through the implementation.
Also interesting about Coupa's software is the way it's built. For starters, Coupa's e-procurement apps are open source. They are also developed using Ruby on Rails, a language that was chosen for development when the company launched a little more than a year ago.
Stephens recently spoke to ZDNet. Here's what he had to say on a few key topics. There's also a brief gallery highlighting key points.
Why does the midmarket need its own e-procurement software? Stephens says the idea for Coupa hatched while he was at Oracle. Many companies have installed e-procurement systems, used to purchase everything from office supplies to PCs to PDAs, but failed to get returns because employees didn't use them. For midmarket companies such as misstep could really hurt the bottom line. "Even if they could scrape the money together and put an e-procurement system in the implementation is not successful due to employee non compliance," says Stephens.
On open source technology, Stephens said Coupa's software is open source because the technology has improved dramatically and development can go faster. Coupa was able to build its first beta with four people. An enterprise version of Coupa's e-procurement software is in beta and so far has 3,600 downloads.
On getting employees to comply with corporate purchasing requirements, Stephens said the easiest way to get employees to follow the purchasing department's rules is to make the user interface familiar. Coupa's software is designed to look and operate like an e-commerce site. You can also review products, add tags and describe purchasing items. Stephens said Coupa is looking for a "Amazon.com meets enterprise" vibe with its software.
"Some systems have a highly regimented categorization system with parameters set by purchasing. With tagging, employees actually describe items and help the system get smarter," says Stephens.
How do you define a midsized enterprise? To Coupa, a midsized enterprise has anywhere between 100 to 5,000 employees. A typical Coupa customer has about 500 employees. For these firms an e-procurement system is needed to create an audit trail to track purchasing. Features like uploading entire catalogs from chosen suppliers aren't necessary. Why? Midsized companies don't have purchasing power so they are largely looking for efficient electronic systems to get off paper processes and better track "one off" purchase.
Why use Ruby on Rails for Coupa? "At time we started company Ruby was the only choice had to develop rapidly with the best productivity," said Stephens. "From a coding perspective we were coming from Java code so Ruby caught our interest. With Ruby 50 lines of Java are compressed to one. Our Java developers were unsure at first but after a bit they said they would never go back."
February 28th, 2007
Home Depot plots IT, supply chain improvements
Home Depot plans to invest an additional $900 million on logistics and $500 million on technology between 2007 and 2010 to improve its supply chain.
The returns could be impressive, according to executives speaking at Home Depot's analyst meeting. For instance, every one-tenth improvement in inventory turns means an additional $200 million in cash. Home Depot needs to improve its supply chain since it's competing with Lowe's and facing a housing downturn.
In a presentation, Mark Holifield, vice president of supply chain, said Home Depot would focus on inventory management. On the technology front in 2007 Home Depot will:
- Implement supply chain analytics;
- Install improved demand forecasting tools;
- Improve central replenishment;
- And improve merchandise financial planning processes.
Home Depot is also looking to implement a customer delivery tracking system in 2007 to better track deliveries. The general idea is to be able to track deliveries, orders and their status across the company between 2008 and 2010.
On the logistics front in 2007, Home Depot is looking to improve central distribution, cut lead time from order to delivery, manage freight and coordinate suppliers better. For 2008 to 2010, Home Depot is looking to consolidate logistics platforms and get better visibility as products move from supplier to the shelves.
It's safe to say that many of those aforementioned projects will involve SAP. Home Depot is powered by SAP for the most part.
Another observation from the analyst meeting: Notably absent from Home Depot's presentation roster was CIO Bob DeRodes. in previous years, DeRodes presented at Home Depot analyst meetings.
DeRodes still has a bio on Home Depot's site so his absence may just indicate the company's major IT rebuilding is downshifting a bit. Indeed, Home Depot's technology investment for 2007 lags previous years where the company spent $1 billion or so.
January 19th, 2007
DOD's supply chain management overhaul makes headway, needs metrics
Think your supply chain systems are complicated? Try being the Department of Defense, which spends $150 billion on its supply chain and is in the middle of revamping its processes and technology systems to eliminate waste.
Here are a few project management variables facing the DOD: The pressure: Wars are won and lost with supply chain management. The challenge: DOD has multiple systems and processes to modernize. The results: The DOD is still trying to figure out how to measure its progress.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.
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