The following posting can also be viewed and commented on the Supply Chain Expert Community web site.

This posting continues highlights of the Kinexions 2011 conference being held this week in Scottsdale Arizona.  Readers can also reference our prior Day One dispatch which highlighted remarks from Kinaxis President/CEO Doug Colbeth.

Day one featured a full agenda of customer and partner presentations along with the first ever briefing session for industry analysts, partners and key market influencers.  Customer presentations included Barnes and Noble, specifically the Nook Division, who’s implementation pioneers a an entirely new area of support for Kinaxis RapidResponse, namely the incorporation of actual point-of-sales demand data into overall supply chain planning and visibility.  When implemented, this effort has the potential to be the largest deployment in terms of scope and user count of RapidResponse to date.  Matthew Red, Vice President, Supply and Demand Planning, took leave of the upcoming planned go-live to share his organization’s goal to have product demand visibility among 13,000 point-of-sales outlets implemented to support the upcoming 2011 holiday buying season. The clear focus for B&N is to focus on “sell-through”, namely where customers are buying and how the supply chain should best respond to outlet level demand.  Even though the go-live will occur in the coming weeks, Matthew was able to share lessons learned, which identified access to data as the biggest challenge along with the need to scale-back on original project scope because of implementation timing needs.

Another customer presentation included one by Lockheed Martin on managing its supply chain performance-based logistics need by utilization of RapidResponse.  The morning concluded with a presentation and demonstration of the new RapidResponse Control Tower from Kinaxis’s new vice-president of marketing, Kirk Munroe.  One of the highlights of this presentation was the articulation of the three design pillars for control tower functionality:

• Supply and demand balancing to responsive and predictable customer fulfillment.
• Planning, monitoring and responding only works if they are performed from one platform.
• Business problems are complex, but IT systems need not be as complex.

The pillars are simply stated but the meanings are all important.  We would hasten to add that business rule context is another very important consideration for any decision platform.

For Supply Chain Matters, and for others, one of the most talked about presentations during day one was delivered by McKinsey partner Paul Carbonneau. Readers should note that McKinsey’s reputation lies in consulting on C-level corporate strategy, direction and problem-solving, and to have a McKinsey partner talk to the importance of supply chain capabilities is a significant affirmation of how important global supply chain capabilities have become in C-level perspectives and concerns.  In that light, Paul communicated that the most expensive problems for McKinsey clients often are reflected in supply chain capabilities. Another significant reinforcement came from Paul’s comments relative to the March earthquake that occurred in Japan and the high-level awareness of the impacts of supply chain disruption and risk that has occurred across the C-suite right now.  My hallway conversations reinforced the fact that many manufacturers are re-visiting or initiating supply chain risk identification and mitigation.  An added takeaway shared by Paul was that McKinsey is advising clients to re-visit previous thinking and specifically three myths surrounding business process and technology implementation efforts. These include:

• Rather than linear rollouts of functional initiatives, pilot initiatives with the required cross-functional behaviors needed to sustain the new process.
• Rather than people first, process next, and technology last, with the implication of multi-year technology implementation calendars, frame the initiative with a defined narrower scope but with all three components required in the new or changed business process.
• Rather than getting the CEO on-board first, and risking a perceived colossal waste of time by that executive, bring C-level sponsorship on-board when definite pilot steps indicate meaningful benefits.

McKinsey further advocates starting with small ecosystem initiatives that include all required capabilities. Rather than spending enormous amounts of time getting organizational-wide consensus on a theoretical future end-state, launch “live-fire” exercises and iterative pilots that emulate what end-state could be. Accept the notion and provide support mechanisms that anticipate frequent failures, with constant learning and forward movement.  Finally, once pilots have provided valid benefits, scale quickly with serious investments in talent, disciplines, and required tools.

A final message reflected on future supply chain challenges that lie ahead and the need for, what Paul described as,  ‘maestros’ of supply chain planning and decision-making.  These are people who can think cross-functionally and cross-organizationalyl, who know where the right information resides, and how to leverage that information into various predictive options and scenarios to which  that the supply chain needs to respond.

It was a rather thought-provoking presentation and well slotted to kickoff a supply chain response management oriented conference. Supply Chain Matters will provide additional context and commentary in our summary impressions of this year’s Kinexions.

In our subsequent dispatches, we will provide highlights of day two of Kinexions 2011, along with summary impressions, so stay tuned.

Bob Ferrari

Added Note: Kinaxis is one of other named sponsors of the the Supply Chain Matters blog and the author provides services to this vendor.

The following posting can also be viewed and commented on the Supply Chain Expert Community web site.

Day one of the Kinexions 2011 began with a full agenda of customer and partner presentations along with a significant announcement regarding the renaming and product direction for the Kinaxis software suite.  The conference kicked off with a rousing rock music video featuring many of the employees of Kinaxis welcoming this year’s attendees to the conference.  This author has attended many, many software conferences and this is the first time we have witnessed an opening video that actually features the people behind the scenes and thanks customers for their business.  It was great.

Doug Colbeth, Kinaxis President and CEO opened the conference by summarizing three themes that he has consistently heard from his many conversations with C-level executives. The first was represented by a person jumping out of a building, namely that in today’s volatile business environment, executives often have the feeling that they have jumped into a free-fall zone, waiting for the bungee cord will stop the free fall. That bungee cord is often the supply chain responding to a significant event. The second major theme was the funnel cloud of demand volatility, with the implication that the need to effectively respond to constant market demand change is ever more important.  The third theme was visualized as a junkyard, representing a reflection of the current frustration among C-level executives of the lack of flexibility and business responsiveness to the current climate of business among the current IT applications landscape that populates many large firms today. That frustration is often reflected toward corporate ERP and legacy systems that were designed with far different assumptions related to the speed of business change, and the realities of highly outsourced and complex global supply chains.

Colbeth noted that these recent conversations have reflected the need by customers to have a unified information portal of the entire supply chain that could serve as a control point for more predictive decisions and actions. In many industry settings, the umbrella of supply chain business processes and related decision-making have broadened to include new product introduction, supplier management, risk management, sales, operations and financial planning as well as customer services management. The analogy of need is often drawn to having a control tower of the supply chain, a single point of command and control. Colbeth noted that rather than providing multiple applications and platforms, Kinaxis will continue to focus on a single platform that supports multiple supply chain related decision-support needs. He reaffirmed that Kinaxis will always have a built-in bias that the supply chain is the company’s center of the universe.  With that came the announcement that the company is renaming its product to Kinaxis RapidResponse Control Tower, which will continue to support broader supply chain business process decision-making needs. Kinaxis has four customers that are deploying various aspects of supply chain control and over the course of the conference, customers, prospects and market influencers will be provided additional perspectives as to planned functionality.

Needless to state, this is a rather bold and dramatic direction for Kinaxis, one that promises to provide added dynamics to the supply chain technology provider landscape.

In our subsequent dispatches, we will provide some additional highlights of day one of Kinexions 2011, so stay tuned.

Bob Ferrari

Added Note: Kinaxis is one of other named sponsors of the the Supply Chain Matters blog and the author provides services to this vendor.