Read the full artice at Oracle. Contact Gaea today to learn how we can help you implement a cloud solution that matches your unique enterprise needs.

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With the pandemic still raging across the globe, the question many organizations are asking is, are supply chain teams prepared to continue working off-site? The answer is, that depends on what software and processes they decide to use.

For months, teams adapted as best they could to what they initially hoped was a temporary situation. The strategic approach was to defer large investments in new solutions while the depth and breadth of pandemic-related issues were sorted out.

After about a year of trial and error, organizations have a better handle on which things worked and which did not to maintain smooth-running supply chains. As we head into 2021, here are a few recommendations based on those experiences.

Read the full artice at Supply and Demand Chain Executive. Contact Gaea today to learn how we can help you implement a cloud solution that matches your unique enterprise needs.

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Here are three significant consumer trends seen in the past months and how they affect the food industry today:

1. Consumer behavior is continuously changing
2. Increase in online grocery shopping
3. Savvy consumers

Read the full artice at Food Logistics. Contact Gaea today to learn how we can help you implement a blockchain solution that matches your unique enterprise needs.

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Servitization (or servitisation for those across the pond) refers to the refocus of sales strategy from a product-centric approach to a service-centric approach; from a-one-sale-and-done approach to a customer-for-life approach.

The term servitization has been in use since at least 2010, but the concept of prioritizing the long-term customer relationship over a short-term sale has arguably been around since companies began selling maintenance contracts, and unquestionably since the SaaS subscription model was introduced. The buzzword is new, but the concept is not. What is new is the cool new technology for delivering servitization. And the driving force behind this new technology is the increased customer demand for convenience.

The Three Servitization Models

Companies can deliver servitization via one of three models, with new digital technologies making servitization delivery faster and more effective across all three.

Improving core customer service is the actual service delivery part of customer service. Your company likely already has telephone or email support, but a slew of new digital applications like chatbots and service apps specifically designed to track and nurture customers. These new apps are very important as today’s customer on the service line may be tomorrow’s repeat purchaser.

Building new packages of aftermarket services is the delivery of service-related products after, or distinct from, the initial product sale. For many products this service delivery has traditionally included maintenance. One new development here is IoT (internet of things) sensors that can be built into your products. These sensors can report how, where, when, and by whom your products are being used, providing useful pre-sales qualification data.

Delivering your products as services is the change in your sales model from a single upfront sale from which a customer can use your product in perpetuity, to a customer pay-as-they-go model. For software products, the term software as a service, or SaaS, is common. This model may require significant adaptive product changes so usage can be monitored remotely, and a new financial model that recognizes a fundamentally different revenue stream.

Gaea implements Oracle supply chain management solutions that deliver results, including:

• A choice of channels through which to engage with your business;
• Tools like live chat and AI-powered chatbots to help everyone get the answers they need when they need them;
• A unified view of customer data that enables agents and bots to serve people quickly and effectively;
• Discrete devices that monitor product status in real time and help you deliver support proactively;
• Field service teams with access to customer and IoT data, so they can deliver the right service, the first time, every time;
• Sensors that monitor product usage, enabling customers to only pay for what they use;
• Data gathered at every point is used to continuously improve service, and the quality of the products you manufacture, and;
• Long-lasting customer relationships with your company and your field-service teams.

At Gaea, we build long-term partnerships with our clients. Most of our clients continue to rely on Gaea as a trusted advisor for many years after their initial software implementation.

Contact us using the form on the right and let’s discuss why Gaea is your best partner to help you adopt the customer-for-life approach of servitization, enabled by Oracle applications.

Learn more about servitization by reading Oracle’s eBook, The Manufacturer’s Guide to Digital Connected Service.

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Exciting and trusted digital technologies like big data, mobile, and traditional web technologies, are getting a lot of press these days. But how many companies are implementing digital technologies, and to what extent? Does implementation vary by sector? Are these companies realizing financial benefits from their investment in digital technologies? Should your firm accelerate its digital investment?

A recent McKinsey survey answers many of these questions. The survey results show that companies utilizing digital technologies, “digital reinventors,” are experiencing superior revenue and earnings growth versus their “digital laggard” counterparts. And looking forward, the surveyed companies realize that not embracing digital technologies may lead to almost one-third of their revenue being lost or cannibalized. This threat to companies comes not only from “digital natives,” but also from traditional companies that are aggressively adopting digital technologies.

Not surprisingly, the survey also shows that digital technologies are being aggressively adopted in industry sectors known for technology leadership, like high-tech, media, and entertainment. These sectors are also dedicating a much higher percentage of their workforce to digital initiatives. A strong correlation exists between dollars spent on digital technologies and revenue generated by these technologies.

Digital Technologies Encourage Growth

Technology alone will not create growth, but it does enable new ways to conduct business. Companies applying digital technologies are likely to be the same companies aggressively implementing other leading-edge management, marketing, or technology innovations. As the McKinsey article notes, “companies in this group are not only investing more in digital but also investing and executing differently.” These other initiatives may also be driving an elevated operational tempo and/or new opportunities.

Digital technologies are not solely responsible for revenue and earnings growth disparity. How they are used by each company is the key to success. Still, although varying in intensity by industry, digital disruption is real, inexorable, and accelerating. The McKinsey survey should be a wake-up call to any company who has not yet adopted digital technologies. Continuing to lag may lead to financial peril for such companies.

What if My Firm Isn’t A Digital Reinventor?

So how should a firm that isn’t already a digital reinventor proceed? Where should they start? The survey results indicate three possible entry points for digitization. Companies should:

1. Employ a dual approach of applying digital technologies to existing businesses while creating new digital business lines;
2. Experiment with digital technologies, particularly increasing in-house digital expertise among the company’s leadership, and;
3. Make decisive digital investment decisions, fully funding promising investments and defunding others.

If your company qualifies as a digital laggard or is simply not maximizing its full digital reinventor potential, Gaea is happy to help. We will:

• Provide you with an assessment about how your company is currently managing its supply chain management and enterprise project portfolio management operations and help you identify areas for digitization that will offer the greatest opportunity for positive ROI.
• Help you identify which specific digital technologies are likely to be most beneficial to each of your business lines.
• Offer detailed guidance and recommendations on specific investment decisions for each of these digitization initiatives.

Take charge of your digitization future. Complete the form on the right or call Gaea at 844 987 4232 today!

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Supply chain innovators have 60% better profit margins and 65% better earnings per share than their competitors. – Whitepaper, “Value Chain Innovation,” Manufacturing Executive Research Services

 
Legacy systems were designed from a supply-driven functional model, whereas new systems cover an end-to-end process that begins with the customer. “The focus has shifted to understanding what the customer wants and being agile enough to meet that demand quickly,” says Roddy Martin, Oracle vice president of product marketing for supply chain management.

In fact, lack of agility is the first legacy supply chain systems issue that results in higher costs for their users. Agile firms have excellent visibility into what their customers want, coupled with the ability to shift their operations to meet that demand.

Oracle identifies too little insight as the second supply chain system issue that results in higher costs. The key to having the right information at the right time to make important decisions is an integrated system that supports the end-to-end supply chain lifecycle. “When there’s not a single source of truth, the leaders can’t move quickly and with confidence,” Mr. Martin says.

Not being ready for new technologies is the third factor that ends up costing firms money. Soon, companies that use artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) will operate more efficiently and at a lower cost than their competitors. But non-integrated, siloed legacy systems can’t leverage AI and IoT data. And more than data needs to be integrated; to save money, your end-to-end business processes must also be seamless. Today’s supply chain systems offer this seamless flow.

Fourth, preventing security risks is more expensive with the typical patchwork of legacy systems, wasting IT time and money that could be invested in evolving your firm for expanded success.

Read the full Oracle article to learn more.

Contact us with the form to the right to begin a discussion of how Gaea can help you evolve your supply chain systems to save money, improve your operations, and become an agile company ready to leap on new market opportunities.

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Study Results

While 51% of North American executives cited supply chain sustainability as a major strategic priority, 12% placed no strategic importance on sustainability. Remaining respondents were split between addressing supply chain sustainability over the next 1-3 years (22%) or the next 3-5 years (14%). European results were slightly more optimistic, with 59% of those surveyed stating that a sustainable supply chain is already a strategic priority.

Regardless of region and the individual breakdown, at least half of the respondents don’t have any plans to move forward with sustainability any time soon. And even with the half that claim sustainability as a major priority, there aren’t many firm plans in place to do so. Why? As Munroe reported, “until regulations force action, many companies won’t be able to find resources and funding to make significant change.”

Results show that even among companies embracing sustainability initiatives, motivation is universally based on improving brand image rather than environmental impact. The studies also mention that environmental impact is a larger concern in North America than it is in Europe.

On the other hand, perhaps the glass is half-full and supply chain companies will take on sustainability not as an inevitable forced action full of regulatory requirements, but as an opportunity to be a leader in an emerging new category of efficiency. One that will ultimately help not just those leading the charge, but everybody around the world.

Is it wishful thinking to hope that there’s still a company or two out there willing to put people and the environment ahead of short-term profits? And won’t those pioneers ultimately reap the long-term rewards of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and brand recognition, making that initial investment in sustainability more than worthwhile?

There are still trails to be blazed.

Review the full West Munroe study here. →

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Oracle WMS does not yet offer the ability to perform transactions in a disconnected mode. While there are many reasons that a client might need such a capability, in this post I am focusing on the ability to do cycle counts in an offline or disconnected mode. While there are a ton of use cases for such an application, pretty much wherever there is a need to store and track inventory remotely, I am going to focus on two here, for the sake of brevity:

1) off-site storage, and;
2) the life sciences and health care industry.

Off-site Storage

One of the problems that today’s warehouses have to deal with is the issue of off-site storage. There are many reasons that warehouses have to utilize external storage facilities. While not optimal for the normal course of operations in the supply chain, they do offer a less expensive and temporary alternative that allows a business to deal with temporary spikes in demand. All too often this so called “temporary” storage solution has a way of morphing into a semi-permanent adjunct to the main warehouse. No matter the reason, the fact remains that many businesses do have to deal with this reality.

There are a host of challenges that this situation presents, including the need to manage FIFO effectively, minimizing travel and transportation costs, planning replenishment, and accounting for this inventory in your scheduling and lead-time calculation processes. One of the primary challenges we are seeking to address is the ability to maintain accurate inventory by having the ability to perform cycle counts. Most often these off-site storage facilities are managed by a third-party provider who has their own logistics system. Other times there is no wireless coverage available.

Life Sciences and Healthcare

The second use-case we have seen is in the life-sciences and healthcare industry where medical device manufacturers maintain consigned inventory with various hospitals and with their own sales people. Again, it is not possible to log on to your own network and effectively perform transactions.

We have tried in the past to do this through cell-phone networks. Although the technology exists, it has been our experience that the speeds and capabilities needed to perform such transactions are not yet where they need to be.Therefore, at Gaea, we decided to create an offline counting application that allows customers to schedule counts through Oracle WMS as they normally would, download them to their device of choice, and then be able to perform cycle counts at remote locations. Once they are no longer in their proprietary network, the app detects that it is no longer able to establish a connection with the host ERP and transitions to an offline mode. It then allows them to perform the cycle count of their choice (note that multiple cycle counts could be downloaded).

The app then simply syncs back up once they are back in the home network. Alternatively, the counts can be emailed for uploading into the host system.

We built this to run on pretty much any device that supports a browser, including iPhones, iPads, Android-based tablets and smartphones, and on Windows-based rugged devices. The goal was to build an app that allows you to do what you need to get done in the simplest and most unobtrusive way possible while addressing an obvious pain point for a lot of clients.

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Q: What customizations can be made to Oralce WMS MSCA mobile picking? Any examples?

A: Almost all WMS/MSCA pages can be customized to add additional fields, perform different validation logic when leaving certain fields, execute certain business logic, etc. The pick page can also be customized, but with more possibilities and complexities.

Sample pick customizations include capturing additional dimensional fields (e.g. length and width of an item) after a user scans an item, and later on populating those values in the delivery detail, and performing miscellaneous receipt or cycle counting on the fly when there is not enough on hand during a pick.

Q: How can we customize the pick page?

A: There are two techniques to customize the pick page. The first one is to follow the Oracle MWA implementation guide: extend the MWA function class, page classes, and modify the seeded form function to call these new classes.

The second one is a less-known but preferred technique. By inserting a configuration record into one of the MWA configuration tables, the extended page classes can be loaded on the fly. In other words, if you want to add a field to the main pick page, you only need to extend one Java file.

Why it is desirable to use the second technique and to enter uncharted territory will become clear in the following question and answer.

Q: Why is pick customization so important?

A: Three factors made the pick page much more complicated than most WMS/MSCA pages. Firstly, there are half a dozen flavors of picking all performed by the same page. Secondly, all flavors of pick starts with the employee sign-on page to capture data such as equipment and zone, which requires customizing a pick page with the traditional MWA technique to modify at least four more files. Thirdly, the pick page is built on “configurable page” technology, which adds another level of code to understand.

Q: Do we need to look at Oracle Java source code to do the customization? How?

A: Yes, you must read Oracle Java source code in order to proceed with your customization. According to your Oracle apps license, you must contact Oracle to obtain the source code. It usually takes weeks for the request to go through, and you have to tell Oracle not only which file, but also which version of the file (like 11.5.10.123) you will need.

If you are pressed for time, there are general decompiling tools for obtaining Java source files from class files, such as jad. And most of the files related to picking are under $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/wms/td/server.

Q: How about PL/SQL source code? Where are those files?

A: In most cases, you will also need to read PL/SQL code (and write your own pl/sql logic). Fortunately, PL/SQL source code is shipped with the Oracle installation, and those files can be found under $WMS_TOP/patch/115/sql and $INV_TOP/patch/115/sql.

Q: Can we modify the Oracle source files to add new fields?

A: No. In most cases, you should not modify Oracle source files, unless you are certain what you are doing is actually fixing bugs that may exist in the Oracle code, which we have occasionally encountered in the past.

Note that future Oracle patches or releases will wipe out your changes, unless you convince Oracle to include your changes (if they are bug fixes that will be generally useful to all customers) in their future code.

Q: We pick lot numbers. Is it possible to customize the page where lot numbers are entered? How?

A: Yes. Use the second customization technique mentioned above. Otherwise, you will have to extend six files to reach this page.

Q: What skills are required to customize the pick page? How do we evaluate whether we or an outside consultant is capable of customizing our pick page?

A: The following skills are mandatory: Java, PL/SQL, Oracle JDBC, MWA developer framework. Knowledge of code under $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/wms/td/server, or willingness to read this code, is highly desirable. To evaluate candidates for customizing pick pages, use this FAQ as a checklist.

Q: How long should we plan for developing and implementing pick customization?
A: A typical pick customization (e.g. adding an additional field on the main pick page to capture data), will take four to six weeks for an experienced consultant to complete.

Q: Can the same technique for customizing a pick page be used for other mobile pages?

A: Yes, it certainly can, and is usually easier.

– by Lei Zhang

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