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March 04, 2010

Smarter planet through smarter asset management – Pulse 2010

IBM’s annual service management fest Pulse concluded last week in Las Vegas (21st – 24th Feb 2010). What an event! This was one of the most well organized events I have attended thus far. While the attendance was close to around 5000+ customers and business partners (1000+), it felt like being in an Oracle Open World which usually has 30,000+ attendees. Sessions were well organized and distributed across tracks. I especially liked the separation of topics between general session and the track session. The general sessions were very helpful in providing overall IBM’s approach in the service management space.

 

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March 03, 2010

Automating Accounts Payable for Facility Management Firms

According to Gartner and Celent, it costs the average real estate company $21.00 per invoice to manually process paper invoices. Most people are shocked to learn this. Multiply this to the tens of thousands of invoices a facility management firm process every year and this amounts to a fairly significant administrative cost. Automating accounts payable reduces much of the labour and materials associated with paying bills, thereby saving time and money.

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February 24, 2010

Supply Chain Predictions for 2010 - how far are we from our end-state vision?

Last month, Infosys got a call from Supply Chain Digest magazine, courtesy the editor-in-chief Dan Gilmore to air our views on the key trends for Supply Chain Management in 2010. Supply Chain Guru Predictions for 2010 published earlier this month covered a set of 5 other eminent folks from MIT, Gartner, Descartes and so on, so I was happy for the opportunity to be featured amongst these industry thought leaders.

As primarily a package supply chain enabler, I stuck to my knitting and covered my theme along two lines (a) Improving efficiencies in the back-end supply chain to reduce costs and (b) Enhancing end-customer experience by augmenting the front-end supply chain. People ask me where the relentless pressure to slay every efficiency killer would end up. What next after Multi-channel commerce, end2end procurement, green asset management... whither goes SCM end-state?

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December 31, 2009

Tesco to Less CO: Can Tesco save the world?

Tesco has been blamed for concreting over the countryside, and running up endless air miles importing food and trucking it the length and breadth of Britain, but is Tesco now leading the business fight back against man-made global warming? I happened to watch this programme on Panorama – one of Britain’s most watched TV shows. This is what Tesco is doing to counter global warming.

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November 29, 2009

Enterprise Asset Sustainability

We do not inherit the earth from our parents, but borrow it from our children.

On December 7, 2009 global leaders and environment ministers from all over the world will meet in Copenhagen to discuss about climate change. Climate scientists are convinced the world must stop the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and start making them fall very soon. Corporations are discussing the implications of de-carbonizing the economy on their businesses. Some corporations are sincere in taking sustainability on whereas some are embracing it as a pure PR exercise. Whatever the reason, there was never a stronger impetus on sustainability than today.

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Leveraging Value from IT Asset Management – Insights from Gartner ITAM Summit

I recently attended Gartner’s IT Financial, Procurement & Asset Management summit in Orlando, FL (www.gartner.com/us/itam ). In line with Gartner image and spirit of shaping up and defining what’s hot and what’s not in the IT world, the summit was organized to present the current state and trends in IT Fin, Procurement and Asset Management world and would have certainly appealed to IT benchmark and best practice seekers.

Sessions were organized by tracks and during each timeslot, each track had a session going on a specific topic. I think this was done primarily to maximize the participation, which I believe was a good strategy as most of the sessions I attended were full house. I primarily attended ITAM sessions, though would have loved to attend the procurement ones as well (my portfolio included procurement services).

 

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October 06, 2009

Critical Assets: Manage them Right for Customer Delight

In my first blog I talked about the ten commandments of Physical Asset Management in which the first rule stated:

Thou shall identify critical equipments that provide goods or services that delight customers

Enterprise asset management was traditionally seen as an internal function of an organization with minimal impact on customer satisfaction.  With the advent of the service economy an organization’s focus has shifted on to the customer. There is a paradigm shift in the way asset management is viewed. It now has two important aspects – Critical Assets and Customer Delight. Asset Performance Management is the new buzz word with focus on delivering customer delight.

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August 27, 2009

Tapping Collective Maintenance Wisdom - An EAM Route?

I recently got a chance to go through an interestingly titled research report from Bill Polk of AMR going by the headline "Asset Management Algebra: EAM = ROI". In these times of increasingly deficient attention-spans, reading a 2-pager is always better than reading a 20-pager with authors belaboring the same point in multiple ways.

Apart from the usual benefits of EAM (ROCE, efficiency improvements, structured information etc) and its new found importance (movement from tactical to strategic), an interesting point which I haven't come across in many other places was about "Capturing and preserving data from an aging workforce". While implementing EAM systems, we typically think of labor management (thru the EAM app or via a little help from more high brow "Workforce Management Systems or WFMs") as a way to capture skills of the maintenance personnel thus making sure the right party is assigned to the right work order.

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Decalogue of Physical Asset Management

Air France flight AF447 disappears between Brazil and France with 228 people of board. Investigators suspect that the speed sensors (also known as Pitot tubes) may have been a major factor. Flight 447 had been flying in stormy weather that may have included icing. This can block the Pitot tubes, which then give false information to the pilots causing them to fly too fast or too slow leading to a crash.

 

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June 15, 2009

Smarter Planet makes Smarter SIs too, especially if it's EAM

One of the major thrusts we have been seeing with IBM of late is the "smarter planet" campaign. Stripped off the hype (justifiable for any marketing campaign), its a terrific way to differentiate oneself from mundane IT related offerings to something truly (in the real sense of the term) transformational. Back in April, CNN Money had am exhaustive article on the same topic titled "IBM's grand plan to save the planet", with the byline "Here is CEO Sam Palmisano's formula for changing the world: Find problems, throw in billions of dollars in R&D, add consultants and an earnest ad campaign - and watch the profits roll in."

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January 16, 2009

Rising Energy consumption – do we have a fitting response in Asset Management?

Till the oil embargo in 1973, the US and several countries in Europe had found it unimaginable to even think of saving energy. But that one event resulted in several austerity measures including new laws aimed at reducing energy consumption and at exploring alternative energy sources. The situation eased there-after till the ballistic crude prices last year resulted once again in the austerity measures taking center stage. Alarming situations require a fitting response. A similar alarming situation in rising Energy consumption is calling for an equally fitting response (in Asset Management).

 

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January 12, 2009

Contribute - 3rd of the 3C's of Sustenance

A strong maintenance strategy for micro assets may not be the most comprehensive way of ensuring unhindered business operations. Whilst the maintenance manager sweats out on tidying the trees, the CEO is ultimately responsible for the entire woods. What are the things beyond his control? Drought, Floods, Landslides, tsunamis or any other natural disasters. How about arson, terror attacks? Sole policy of paying  fat premiums to insurance companies (that can themselves falter and go bankrupt) would not be enough.

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September 23, 2008

Hurricane Preparedness: Pre and Post activities

Last weeks hurricane Ike that hit Galveston coast and passed through Houston left a long winding disruption in services in one of the five largest cities in US. While one really can't be 'too much prepared' to face such large scale force of nature but following basic Asset Management practices can ease out some of the suffering.

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September 02, 2008

Safety using Asset Management System

Preventing accidents in an office environment could be as easy as putting a notice in front of a shredding machine that reminds us to secure our Tie ends. But how about this …..stormy night , deep sea  oil platform, 13th day of the hitch and a 16 inch rusty valve to be turned ….where should we put a cartoon poster?

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