Thursday, May 27, 2010
Ericsson Tops Green List Again
Great to see Ericsson garner kudos for its various sustainability initiatives. Earlier this month, Greenpeace ranked the company no. 2 on its latest ‘Cool IT’ leader board, and yesterday came news that the company won further praise from the group in its latest CSR study. All this comes on top of Ericsson winning a 2010 Green 15 award from InfoWorld magazine. Check out their Green 15 press release here. Trade Wings is proud to have played a role in helping Ericsson make its global Hardware Support Services more efficient and eco-friendly. Click here to read the InfoWorld article.
Posted by Todd Adelman •
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Friday, May 21, 2010
Making Sense of the Next Big Revenue Opportunity
Great discussion on Tuesday afternoon during our webinar on Telecom Managed Services. A big thanks to Jason Marcheck of Current Analysis for lending his time and expertise to the discussion. If you missed the session, we’ve just posted the recording here for on-demand viewing.
Back in early April, our CEO blogged about the enormous $200 billion managed services opportunity and there seems no end to the flow of news on this subject. Mobilicity, a new Canadian wireless carrier that launched last week in Toronto, has embraced managed services perhaps more than any other carrier at the moment, and Ericsson just announced a new multi-year deal with Telefonica in Brazil.
A modern day gold rush? Yeah, that’s a pretty fair analogy. If you think about it, what carrier/operator doesn’t want to reduce OpEx and drive top-line business growth? And what OEM isn’t looking for more client ‘stickiness’ and new rev streams in the face of declining wireline business?
Now, one doesn’t win these deals by simply showing up to the table. Success breeds success, and in the process differentiates one company from the next, which is why we put such an emphasis on gaining the competitive edge during Tuesday’s session.
Old measures of differentiation like size and scale still matter, but today carriers and operators are looking for service partners who can deliver the broad range of skills required to provision and manage networks under a variety of scenarios. OEMs that can leverage multi‐vendor asset intelligence and visibility into spares pools and excess inventories can quickly put themselves in position to deliver measurable benefits for their clients.
Here’s a quick example – sustainability. Consumer expectations and internal business requirements are driving companies to be greener, which means there’s a significant opportunity waiting for those who can help clients achieve their ecology management goals. Difficulty tracking the operating condition, location and value of network assets carries with it a pretty sizable environmental downside (e.g. transportation-related CO₂ emissions and storage-related energy consumption). Better visibility into assets leads to more environmentally friendly planning and provisioning decisions, and that ultimately leads to a clear market differentiator.
For more on managed services, be sure to check out our new white paper.
Posted by Billy Balfour •
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Multi-Vendor Services •
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Friday, May 07, 2010
Why are relationships so difficult?
I first heard the term Keiretsu in the mid-90’s with eyes fixed on Japan’s mastery of process efficiency and productivity within complex organizations. The ERP world was buzzing, and our CEO at the time delighted in applying the theories of Keiretsu to our company and its diverse ecosystem of solution partners. The very sound of the word still conjures for me a picture of an inherently successful, harmonious and Zen-like network of symbiotic business relationships.
Having just stumbled across the word again 15 years later, I’ve learned there are two types of keiretsu: vertical and horizontal. Vertical keiretsu illustrates the organization and relationships within a company (for example all factors of production of a certain product will be connected), while a horizontal keiretsu shows relationships between entities and industries, normally centered on a bank or trading company. Both are complexly woven together and self-sustain each other. A very good thing...exactly like it sounds.
But the truth is that global service and supply chains are far from optimal. With an appetite for greater agility and financial performance, today’s Telecom executives could use help optimizing processes to drive profit from the arriving tsunami of managed services opportunity. Without shared visibility into the flow of network assets in reverse logistics, integration points between manufacturers, outsourcing partners and customers are very hard to connect, and efficiency is dubious at best.
What’s needed is a collaborative view that bridges the information gaps, bringing together internal and external asset inventory data to make it easily available to buyers, planners and others. (People who don’t truly comprehend the challenge and opportunity will tell us that their ERP system handles this, yet they continue to lose tens of millions each year to service chain inefficiency, inability to extend product lifecycles or recover full market value for unused assets.)
Over the past decade, the really smart, relatively good-looking and insanely fun people at Trade Wings have developed a powerful solution that does for Telecom service and supply chains what ERPs have done for the production chain: deliver real-time visibility.
Users across the service and supply chain log into Re:source Visibility for a complete view of network assets in their own warehouses, their partner supply chain (contract manufacturers, repair centers, etc.), and the broader open market. The easy-to-use software lets buyers and planners quickly search and request multi-vendor material from within their ecosystem before identifying opportunities to purchase through the open market. (With 600+ of their regional buyers and planners now on the system, one of our customers saved ~$35 million USD last year, while significantly reducing WEEE flows. The critical benefits of this capability go on and on, so let’s just leave it at the goodness of 'profitability' and 'sustainability'.)
In addition to a consolidated view of supply and demand at your fingertips, there’s also a configurable Disposition Engine. The prescriptive tool automatically identifies material and quantities within your own stocks available for reuse, resale or recycling – after first ensuring that you have material available to support customer service requirements. No trickle production, expedites, exorbitant maintenance contracts. And, when products reach the end of their useful life, advanced asset intelligence in the system lets you calculate the total quantity and weight by project and disposition type for faster, more accurate WEEE reporting.
When it comes to "complexly woven, self-sustaining business interrelationships," perhaps all we need is a little more interijensu in our Keiretsu?
Posted by Lisa Clark •
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Supply Chain Efficiency •
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Thursday, April 29, 2010
Have You Been Too Slow to Change?
I had the opportunity recently to experience first-hand just how counter-productive some carrier strategies are when it comes to repairing network equipment. Given the size ($10B+) and history of the company we were speaking with, I had expected to find a state of the art, forward-thinking internal service organization with fully optimized processes. What I found was something completely unexpected – the polar opposite.
I’m paraphrasing here but this is what we heard from the head of materials management, “we sell everything we de-install at $1 per pound to our repair vendor regardless of what it is.” I then asked about how they handle spares and repairs to which the replay was basically “we buy the equipment back at full repair or replacement cost.” As you can imagine, there was a short period of uncomfortable silence as my team absorbed what we had just heard.
This example underscores just how easy it is to find managers in critical support roles making major financial and operational decisions without understanding the overall impact or what best-in-class methodologies exist in the marketplace. The idea that a public company, keenly focused on EPS and customer retention on the front-end, could maintain such an arcane process on the back-end is indicative of a lack of ecosystem visibility and the fundamental disconnect that exists between operations and finance.
The Telecom market is too competitive and cut-throat to spend time living in the past. In order to keep up, and succeed, carriers and OEMs need to be more agile and respond quicker to change. A well-executed reuse strategy can help bridge the gap between finance and operations, and help gain an invaluable window into what’s taking place within their ecosystems. Through that visibility, you can begin to devise unified goals and establish new processes around surplus and decommissioned assets that yield significant financial operating margins.
Posted by Todd Adelman •
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Spares Management •
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Monday, April 19, 2010
The “Spares vs Repairs” Debate
Can there be anything more frustrating than running around the house in the morning looking for your car keys only to find them sitting on the kitchen table – exactly where you left them the night before? That’s a direct byproduct of discursive and distracted thinking. In the early stages of client engagements we often see similar thought patterns plaguing carrier and OEM equipment repair strategies. Repairs are typically viewed as a necessary component of the service chain but other obvious economic and environmental repair-related opportunities constantly escape the guise of most managers. Why? Lack of visibility into their ecosystem and how it directly relates to their repair strategy. It’s that simple.
But change is on the horizon. At long last, we’re beginning to see the ‘spare v. repair’ conversation gaining traction among carriers and equipment manufacturers as the need to inject fresh ideas into their supply chain becomes too much to ignore. When we talk about repair strategies, ‘keys’ equate to visibility into the equipment install base, the ecosystem spares pool, planned upgrades and de-installs, and new managed service agreements. That may all sound complicated but once a dialog has been started about capturing asset data as opposed to physical assets, the ‘keys’ emerge pretty quickly. And one of the great benefits of visibility is that it reveals assets an organization already owns.
From a carrier or OEM perspective, finding assets you already own sitting idly should be like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Why deal with the costs and headaches of repairing equipment when a spare is ready to be put back into service immediately?Just as assets move from manufacturing and into the service and reverse logistics chains, the strategy for optimizing assets must also evolve. If service managers are to get the maximum value from reverse logistics flows, a different viewpoint is essential. Asset visibility is the single most important factor in reducing service managers’ repair costs. And that’s the power of a reuse strategy.
Posted by Todd Adelman •
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Reuse Best Practices •
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