You’ve heard the complaints: your systems are too clunky, slow, have too many steps, and they take too long to execute everyday transactions.

The dialogue plays out probably hundreds of times a day in offices throughout the world: users complain about to-hard-to-use systems and their IT departments tell them they just don’t know the right way to use them.

This can be a big problem, but costs and other impacts are not easy to measure. A rough estimate can be had by extrapolating the lost time per user across the enterprise.  A 15% hit to people’s productivity because the systems they use slow down their work actually means you need 1.176 people to do the work of one person.

Extrapolating this, if you have a 500-person organization, an equivalent of 88 of those people are needed only because you have sub-optimal systems.  As convincing as this seems, it’s hard to get the money to improve systems based on this argument. With perfectly-efficient systems, you wouldn’t actually need 88 fewer people because the sum of wasted time is across all 500 people.

What do you do? Two relatively low-cost options are user interface (UI – what you see when you look at the screen) tools and mobile applications.

UI Tools: There is an active market for these, which are intended to be used with widely-deployed ERP systems like SAP and Oracle. These solutions modify or enhance the system’s UI for simplified navigation and a more intuitive feel, and may combine several steps in a transaction or query into one, like an Excel macro.

One company marketing UI solutions (Winshuttle) claims to “turn everyday SAP users into heroes who transform the way their companies work.”

Solutions like this are only relevant for those companies that have full control over their systems environments – companies that own their own “instance” of the ERP system, versus those who use a SaaS ERP or one that is shared across many different business units. This is because you’ll need access “under the hood” to configure these tools.

Mobile: A shortcut (sometimes) to simplified ERP transactions is via mobile applications. A mobile application, out of necessity, must have minimal steps involving minimal data entry. No one wants a Windows version of the ERP system on their 5-inch smartphone screen.

This forces the software to consolidate steps in the transaction and pre-populate fields with user data and settings. If a given ERP transaction involves 5 or 6 steps on a desktop it will likely require only 2 or 3 steps on a mobile device.

Several of the large ERP vendors already have mobile versions of the most frequently used transactions, such as purchase orders and purchase order approvals.

You can always design your own mobile applications (there’s no shortage of people creating new smartphone apps), and doing so can lead to some very creative results that have a huge impact on user morale.

Image: Balzac Fresh Food Distribution Center, by Walmart

Few areas of the software market in the past ten years have been as hot as supply chain.

Supply chains in many industries have been trying to cut costs out of distribution networks while reducing order lead time and inventories. They want solutions for modernizing what has traditionally been a backwater: truck booking; warehouse management; pallet management; order picking; truck loading; yard management; and delivery discrepancy management.

This category also includes software for demand forecasting and optimal product deployment throughout a company’s distribution network. Demand planning software can be fraught with peril for companies lacking the discipline and attention to detail needed to master these applications. These applications can be difficult to evaluate, from a buyer’s standpoint. Proceed with caution.

Companies in the supply chain space, known as SCM, (supply chain management), include industry leaders Oracle and SAP, and firms like JDA Software, Manhattan Associates and Red Prairie (recently merged with JDA). JDA is a firm that has grown by acquiring industry-leading supply chain management applications such as i2 and Manugistics. The company claims that 6,000 firms worldwide use its SCM software.

Supply chain applications can be single-purpose or inter-connected, like an ERP system. The supply chain is like a business-within-a-business: it has at least five processes that must be interconnected in some way: 1) demand planning (what will customers order?); 2) distribution network planning (where should we store it before it is shipped to the customer?); 3) manufacturing scheduling (how much should we make, when?); 4) material requirements planning (MRP – what raw materials & supplies do we need?); and 5) warehousing, transportation, and shipping (store the product and ship it to the customer when needed).

A single-purpose application (Demand Planning, Warehouse Management, Transportation) will claim to solve your problems in one or maybe two of these areas. An inter-connected supply chain application will manage all five of these areas. Vendors that offer an inter-connected solution will present themselves as offering total SCM, or supply chain management, solutions.

It’s hard to carve up the supply chain and say one application is better in one area than another, because probably the most important thing is the integration between the five main segments of demand planning, distribution planning, manufacturing scheduling, MRP, and warehousing and shipping.

If you had to choose, the demand planning software might be most important, unless your customers place orders way in advance of shipment; on the other hand, you might have multiple manufacturing locations or warehouses and you need a solution for where to make and ship your product most efficiently.

Image: opensource.com

The term ‘adaptive software’ has at least two meanings: 1) software that is created with built-in capabilities to change its logic in the future; 2)  software that enhances an existing software application without significantly changing the underlying code of that application.

I have not seen real-world examples of 1) above, so I will focus on adaptive software as defined in 2) above.

The value of this type of adaptive software is in providing new functionality without the high cost of re-programming existing software applications.  Those existing applications are often referred to as “legacy” applications.  They could be five, 10, or 15 years old or older.  In some cases the company that wrote the program is no longer in business.  What do you do if you want to make changes to those applications?  In some cases adaptive software can be used.

Bob Kennedy, VP for business development at DMLogic LLC, describes in a recent article for supplychainbrain.com how adaptive software can be used to add features and functions to a warehouse management system (WMS).  He explained how companies used adaptive software with an existing WMS to create weight-check functionality and messaging and develop new screens to collect international shipping information.

I like the concept of adaptive software but a few hurdles have to be overcome, and you need to understand the limitations.

The main hurdle is access to the existing application’s database.  If you own the application and it resides on a server inside your enterprise this is probably not an issue.  But if you are part of a multi-company or multi-division enterprise all of whom depend on the application you want to adapt, you’ll need internal agreement on any changes (easier said than done!).

The limitations of adaptive software are …. not yet known, but I can guess they would start to be apparent when you try to change something very fundamental to the logic of the application.  Example?  Trying to use adaptive software to add a new unit of measure called “truck” to an existing WMS wherein you have only defined valid units of measure as “case” or “pallet.”

Having tried to find holes in the concept, I will say again I like the idea, because I think software vendors have intentionally or not created products that are too difficult and expensive to change.

Big ERP systems are a good example.  These systems are built with the back office in mind, they are workhorses and can scale as big as you want, but they are inflexible systems and they require disciplined data entry into the right screens at the right time with pristine data.

Can adaptive software solutions meet this challenge?  Can they provide a user interface for complex and heavy ERP systems that simplifies keystrokes and everyday transactions?  I think so, because we have already seen that mobile and tablet applications can simplify what are basically multi-step transactions.

Read Bob Kennedy’s article here.

Photo: “Trails in the Sand,” Dubai, by Kamal Kestell, CC license

If “Humanscale” computing is managing bags of sand, “Hyperscale” computing is managing each individual grain of sand in every bag.

“Hyperscale” computing (HC) is the processing of data, messages or transactions on a scale orders of magnitude larger than traditional computing.  HC is becoming a need for many businesses.  Why?

Consider a company that sells bottled water.  Its main business used to be selling truckloads full of cases of water to big grocery chains.  It has 25 different products, or Stock Keeping Units (SKUs).  The big grocery chains then distributed cases of water to its stores, which numbered 20,000.  The data requirements for the water company’s computers was manageable, even as the company grew rapidly.

Now, the company wants to analyze the performance of its products on store shelves by measuring things like velocity (how fast the product turns), price compared to competing products, and out-of-stocks.  It’s customers — the big grocery chains — are offering to supply data from their systems on every scan of every product in every store, because they too want to improve the performance of products on the shelf.

In one month during the summer, about 3.5 billion bottles of water are sold.  A data file from just one big grocery chain runs to 3 million lines.  How and where will you process this data?  Traditional databases will be too slow.  You will need superfast databases that distribute computing to many servers — this is called in-memory, or massively parallel computing.  This is an example of hyperscale computing.

Other examples where you would need HC: selling direct to consumers through their smartphones, where you might have to process millions of transactions say, during the Christmas holiday season; gathering machine data every second to monitor a machine’s performance (a General Electric turbofan jet engine generates 5,000 data points per second, which amounts to 30 terabytes every 30 minutes); and managing millions of product-attribute combinations.

The computing tools for hyperscale will not be found in your ERP system.  Trying to engineer your existing systems to handle hyperscale data and transactions will be a costly failure.  But there are tools available on the market today, and many of them are found in cloud applications, and in application hosting providers.

Cloud application and hosting vendors usually have much larger data processing capabilities, including automatic failover and redundant servers.  You can take advantage of this capacity.  For example, you can obtain, from a leading application hosting provider, at a cost less than the monthly rent of an apartment in New York City, 30 terabytes of storage and a massively parallel computing environment.

My advice:

• Identify areas of your business that are significantly under-scaled, or where you have large gaps in business needs compared to processing capability;
• Pick one and design a pilot project (many vendors are willing to do this with you at very low cost);
• Measure results and benefits, and if beneficial, expand the solution to other parts of your business.

It’s probably not OK to ignore this trend.  Even of you don’t need HC today, think about the future and where commerce is going.  If you don’t gain the capability for hyperscale computing, one or more of your competitors probably will.