As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the last few months we have seen growing interest in bite-sized applications in various vertical sectors. I have written about edge applications like telemedicine in healthcare, eCommerce and fulfillment in retail and food, distance learning in higher ed and many others.
Jason Prater and Marty Black, both ex-Plex, presented on their startup, Cella Technologies which is focused on waste on the shop floor. Machines often wait for materials (which have often traveled thousands of miles without an issue) while handling staff drive around in forklifts with walkie talkies. They are like taxis looking for pickups when digital technologies like "ride-sharing for forklifts" could eliminate the gap. Machines are getting smarter and predictively issuing requests. In the meantime, COVID has amplified the already difficult task of hiring workers for plants, their absenteeism and reduced productivity.
They say the waste from such "downtime waiting around" often exceeds that from scrap in many facilities.
They also describe other use cases to connect MES to the supply chain.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
This time it is Marty Groover, Partner, C5MI. C5 in the company name comes from his background in the Navy for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Counter-intelligence. He also spent years at Caterpillar and is now a big advocate for Industry 4.0 - digital factories and the industrial Internet of Things.
With ubiquitous sensors, machines are talking a lot more, and we are learning to understand their language. Marty talks about their Live Factory concept with uses cases like WIP and critical parts tracking, and others involving predictive maintenance around industrial assets.
He covers a lot of ground in under 15 minutes. You may also enjoy the longer interview I did with him in May here.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level execs and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This executives profiled in this series (and those in Analyst Cam and Burning Platform series) have talked about all kinds of human heroics - in healthcare, vaccine development, diversity moves; in IT, in HR, supply chains and more during the crisis. They have talked about massive scaling up/down, rapid innovations, pivots etc. In the huge ecommerce volumes of the last few months, the unsung heroes are, in addition to humans, warehouse robots.
Guy Courtin of 6 River Systems had demoed here their Chuck collaborative robots and how they can be deployed in smaller locations, closer to customers, without needing to invest much in traditional conveyors or large warehouse infrastructure. While Amazon and its Kiva robots get much of the attention, 6 River (now part of Shopify) and Chuck robots also deserve plenty of kudos.
So, I was really pleased to have Jerome Dubois and Rylan Hamilton, co-founders and co-CEOs of 6 River join this series - they were pioneers with Kiva, and now with the smaller, more agile Chuck robots. We talk about changes coming as more companies move to "micro-fulfillment" (as compared to very large Amazon fulfillment centers - see my tour report here) to accommodate new models like flash sales, order on-line, pick-up in stores, regionalized inventories, last-mile delivery expectations and constraints while keeping warehouse workers safely distanced, quickly trained and incredibly productive. We have a wide ranging conversation around how supply chains and the cold chain have stepped up during the pandemic and why we will need more automation to keep supply chains sustainable. We also have a philosophical segment about accelerated automation in every sector and the likely impact on society. As I described in Silicon Collar, automation has historically taken over "dull, dirty and dangerous" tasks and they describe how Chuck helps both employers and workers.
It is a fascinating conversation. Watch it and the demo of the Chuck bots. Acrobatics for sure. It's a nice way to wrap up this series on business heroics we have seen so much of this year!
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Yesterday, in Part 1, I ran a presentation by Mark Brewer of IFS on their Service Management offering for complex, asset-intensive industries and trends in those industries, especially during the pandemic.
Below is a 30 minute demo by Jonathan Hyden and Paul White which covers 4 segments:
Workforce Forecasting (across real-time and longer time horizons)
Remote Assistance (which has been especially handy during the pandemic)
Lots going on in this demo - road maps, heat maps, GANTT charts, merged reality (using a iPhone 8 cam, not an elaborate AR headset), simulations and dashboards
I have invited them back to demo some of their asset management/predictive maintenance capabilities.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
When I interviewed Darren Roos, CEO of IFS in September (see here), he provided examples from several complex, asset intensive businesses like aerospace and engineering/construction. He also pointed out how important field service is to them, and how complex that has become during the pandemic.
IFS is better known as an ERP vendor but its asset management and service capabilities are increasingly a differentiator. So, I invited them to present in this Analyst Cam series on their Service Management offering.
Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director for the Service Management product line presents below for about 15 minutes. He says Service Management accounted for over half of IFS's revenues in the first half of 2020.
He covers several industry trends including a shift in business models - he showcases Rolls Royce, Tomra and Kyocera and their outcome-based contracts in aviation, recycling (reverse vending) and copiers. He also discusses how aging field workers are being moved during the pandemic to remote, often from home, service guidance roles.
Tomorrow I will run Part 2 with a demo of the functionality.
Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of weeks, we have had several guests Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica and Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras.
This time it is Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research. He pioneered coverage of the Professional Services Automation (PSA) category two decades ago.
We talk about how the pandemic has affected services firms and the PSA category. He also discusses initial findings from his annual survey of the market - way more promising than he anticipated earlier in the year.
We also discuss why just about every application vendor has developed PSA functionality but are loath to develop operational functionality for so many other, wide-open industries. As he points out when he was at Oracle in the late 90s, the PSA functionality did not require as much investment as that in manufacturing or financial services, and yet generated a nice, predictable revenue stream. Also, since then just about every industry has had a growing services revenue component - field services, training etc - what he calls embedded services and have become new candidates for PSA.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
During the pandemic, a lot of attention has gone to the CHRO and the CIO as companies moved to WFH, as they plan on safely opening physical sites and as companies accelerate digital transformations. The Chief Procurement Officer, in some ways, has had to perform even more spectacular cartwheels. Think of how many supply chains have broken down (think PPE, toilet paper, meatpacking plants, anything sourced from China etc). Or how many customers have entered new markets to survive or thrive during the pandemic and how many new suppliers they have had to explore. Think also about new demands as companies accelerate diversity and sustainability initiatives.
I had a chance to catch up with Stephany Lapierre, Founder and CEO and with Matt Palackdharry, VP of Strategy at TealBook. The Toronto based company is helping companies develop what they call "Universal Supplier Profiles". Traditionally procurement has mostly relied on portals to collect information directly from suppliers and that gets stale quickly. With TealBook, the data layer is constantly maintained through AI and machine learning (harvesting data from over 400 million websites), so customers don't have to spend so much time maintaining their data, rely mostly on supplier-provided data or search for new vendors via their own web searches. The supplier job is also easier as they can build on what TealBook has already harvested.
I especially like that their focus is not just on indirect spend. With so many companies re-shoring or entering new markets, there is growing interest in new Tier 1 and 2 suppliers.
In the presentation/demo below Matt provides a product perspective (especially what he calls Autonomous Data Foundation in their stack) with a number of very nice vertical (particularly biopharma) and global examples. Lots of discovery, diversity, sustainability support. As he says just about every Fortune 100 company is now a customer.
Later in the week, I will run an interview with Stephany about megatrends and heroics in the procurement function.
I have been doing video interviews with a number of C-level executives about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 and related financial, diversity and other crises and the "New normal" they can expect going forward. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Bruce Bond, Co-Founder & CEO, Board Chair of Common Ground Committee which promises to bring light, not heat to public discourse.
Personally I have little interest in politics. I am a registered independent and don't spend much time watching or reading political media on either the left or the right. My heroes are innovative business executives and hard working common people. However, this series is about heroics during various crises and I have been wondering who is trying to do something to reduce the polarization we have been seeing in the country. The recent elections have made our differences even more intense.
Well, I found such a hero in Bruce, my former Gartner colleague (shame on me, I have not kept much in touch with him for two decades). He kindly appeared in this series and blew me away as he described how his organization has brought politicians and policy makers from extreme positions together on stage including Condi Rice and John Kerry on global leadership, Barney Frank and Larry Kudlow on tax policy, Donna Brazile and Michael Steele on racial justice.
His organization is also helping ordinary citizens like me with scorecards which emphasize common ground. As I mention during the talk, it would be nice if political media did not just focus on fact checks but also positively rated candidates when they discuss consensus. We cover other areas like bias in media, voter fraud and impact of political differences on friends and families.
I was particularly touched by his episode of musician Daryl Davis, a Black man who has spent the past 35 years on a remarkable quest of speaking with, and at times befriending, members of white supremacist groups. He has helped more than 200 KKK members to renounce their racist ideology. You can hear a podcast with Daryl here.
Overall, very inspirational conversation. Not sure I will become politically active as a result, but it certainly left me more optimistic that at least at a grassroots level we can move to more civil discourse.
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
In June, I had interviewed Jason Blessing, CEO of Model N. He had described how 24 out of 25 of his largest customers have worked on some life-saving COVID-19 related products or services.
Suresh Kannan, Chief Product Officer and Dave Michaud, Chief Marketing Officer presented to me about revenue "leakage" which comes from poor pricing and regulatory compliance especially in pharma and high-tech markets - excerpts in the video below.
5 months since the Jason interview has been a lifetime in the COVID-19 race. You can see in the recent presentation how influential Model N customers have become - in diagnostics (like Abbott), therapeutics (like Gilead) and vaccines (like Pfizer).
Even without the COVID-19 growth spurt, pharma and high-tech companies have complex customer pricing scenarios. In pharma, President Trump has announced plans for a "Most Favored Nation" paradigm and removal of rebates which will have a significant ripple effect on global pricing (see Model N's blog describing some of the complexities.)
While they have their hands full with their two verticals, I imagine their pricing algorithms, CPQ and other functionality will continue to attract customers from other industries. No CEO or CFO will turn down tighter revenue execution.
I must admit I did a double take when I read this from Bob Evans
"On top of that, Ellison mapped out Oracle’s desire to offer a massive portfolio of industry-specific solutions that fuse (no pun intended) the broad capabilities of his Fusion enterprise apps with unique industry-specific capabilities for vertical markets."
So I checked out the video where Rob Tarkoff, EVP Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud banters with Larry about the future of CX. From 22.06 to 29.55 they do talk about verticals, particularly around telecom. Larry adds "more to come" as he paints a vision of a "closed loop" enterprise connecting the front and back office and everything in-between.
Since the early 2000s, when Oracle went on its acquisition binge I have waited for them to start to dominate with industry applications. Retek, Portal, Primavera, I-Flex, Opower, ClearTrial, JD Edwards and many others gave Oracle a nice foothold in many large sectors of the economy.
At a personal level, Larry knows so much about oceanography, architecture, aviation and so much more - he is a Polymath. He helped Steve Jobs launch Apple's retail foray and look how well it has blossomed.
While they sell plenty of database and horizontal financial, hcm and CX applications to every sector, industry specific applications have been not been as prominent in Oracle marketing.
In April 2018, I wrote about Netsuite's industry approach
The reality is the verticals NetSuite and its cloud ERP and CRM peers have developed “books of record” for leave massive sectors such as utilities, insurance, hospitality and healthcare mostly untouched. That’s a lot of white space for new entrants to target.
I would love to see details - to me vertical applications do operational stuff - merchandising in retail, claims processing in insurance, net metering in utilities, support robotics and wearables on the shop floor etc. If it has those, why is Oracle not aggressively showcasing these capabilities?
I hope they are much more serious this time. During the pandemic, in all the C level interviews I have been conducting (see index here ), I have heard how vertical applications have helped some companies survive and others to thrive. They mention applications like:
Telemedicine in healthcare
PPP loan processing capabilities and mobile apps in banking
Distance learning in higher education
Drive-thru processing in food service and retail
eCommerce and robotic warehousing in retail
Last mile delivery in groceries, restaurants even car buying
Remote home buying and digital mortgages in real estate
Should Vinnie Vertical (as some call me for constantly asking about industry functionality) be excited about Oracle Industries this time around? I would like to catalog their progress like I did with 3 posts on Salesforce Industries in the Analyst Cam series couple of weeks ago.
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