Supply Chain Turbulence

Dr. Caplice helped to facilitate a discussion with about 40 or so Transportation-focused professionals and graduate-level students. The main emphasis of the discussion centered around what companies are doing now to help improve their ‘Recession Readiness’ and overcome Supply Chain Turbulence. From this discussion, and after hours to allow those soundbytes a chance to simmer, I extracted a few key takeaways for myself that I can use with my clients:

Taking A Leap: Moving My Business to Mac

I have been a Laptop-PC-carrying consultant since 1997, traveling in and out of the world of Windows from client site to client site. I work on enterprise-scale packaged software applications that run on big HP / Sun / IBM servers (some Win-Tel machines too). I interact with these machines, and the networks that my clients use, with my laptop. I also have to ‘integrate’ with their email / shared drive / printer world and be able to manage as if I were an employee. This also means that I have to know something about networking, file management, security, etc.

I am also a small business owner, and I am ‘the’ IT guy. That is the key turning point in this equation - I have the power to make changes if I’m tired of doing all the dirty work.

‘Standing’ Orders in JDA Transport

Here is a summary of the scenario or business requirement - Give us (the client) the ability to replicate our standing orders daily without a feed from the host order management system. These orders always go from the same origin to the same destination, and often have the same pickup and delivery time window.

Introduction

I envision this forum to become a searchable basket of information around application configuration, test results documentation, implementation best practicies, and other useful items for those working with packaged SCM applications. The writers & contributors will be highly experienced users & implementors of the applications they are writing about. The intent is to share information about the applications with all of those who are in search of answers about things that some may have already figured out.