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It would be unfortunate if electronics companies were to resist the integration of transactional data, such as geography, delayed shipments, and supplier payment terms, with master data, such as supplier, customer, and inventory management. There is a great wealth of data that can be collected from search engines and marketing and advertising platforms to provide insight into consumer interest and intent.
Such data harvesting should enable more accurate demand forecasts. Adobe, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce have been working to create platforms that not only combine internal and external data from manufacturers and suppliers, but also structured and unstructured data sources across the Internet from consumers. These unstructured sources bring in insight from social sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Imagine making a decision to fill a bill of materials to build a smartphone or tablet based on data gleaned from likes or dislikes in social networks or the number of tweets on a specific subject in Twitter.
In 2010, I wrote about using search engines to estimate product demand. Now experts like Arvind J. Singh, co-founder and CEO of Utopia, a global data lifecycle consulting and services firm, suggest mining text and searches, as well as social comments and recommendations in unstructured data, to integrate with master data. Now companies are finding ways to harness all types of marketing data in the raw materials procurement process.
Silo data
I'll resist calling the phenomenon "big-data," the collection of information from internal and external inputs, because I believe the electronics industry went though that in the early 2000s when Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart Stores, and Target began requiring suppliers to tag pallets with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. During the RFID boon, we heard about terabytes of raw data and how IT departments would struggle to determine what to keep or discard.
This next evolution, not revolution, introduces new silos of information. Not just customer and company data stored in CRM and ERP platforms or point-of-sale systems, but data from marketing and advertising platforms that measure sentiment and intent. It will create a better supply chain by improving component forecasts in specific geographic regions.
Integrating silos of data should come as second nature to electronics manufacturers and distributors. Even before the introduction of RFID into the supply chain, electronic components distributors expanded from the United States into Asia/Pacific as brands moved manufacturing to China, Vietnam, and India, looking for cheap labor and lower prices on materials. The more overseas acquisitions companies like Avnet and Arrow made, the more difficult it became to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms and inventory management systems. They had to figure out how to combine duplicate product descriptions.
Transactional + master data = insight
Accurate master data from inventory management systems, along with company finance, supplier, customer, and employee data, gives buyers information to identify the exact lead times, quantities, and pricing of raw materials for bills of materials and purchase orders. The data also provides information on the performance of suppliers when it comes to quality of parts, delivery, and prices.
Transactional data from geography, delayed shipments, or suppliers that have the shortest or the longest payment terms lets procurement specialists take action based on insights about the brand's top suppliers, which typically get the biggest part of the budget.
Every procurement decision should combine transactional data with master data, according to Singh. He gives electronic components procurement experts three best-practices for combining transactional and master data.
- Understand the source and accuracy of the data.
- Have access to the aggregate of transactions to analyze and vet the performance of the suppliers to negotiate using the information.
- Gain insight into supplier service levels across all component categories.
What do you think? If you use an approach like this, let us know your experience to date.
Laurie, great post… I'd be interested in your perspective on how mid-sized companies are (or are not) leveraging big-data properly. At first blush and with limited staffing and budget resources, I have to imagine it's an overwhelming task to consider for such companies.
Mid-size companies, depending on how you define them, are not leveraging data correctly. Most companies want to skin the surface for information, but it's only when you dig deep into the numbers that you find the better answers. Actually, that's where distributors or companies like Adobe and Salesforce could help with their expertise in data, offering a pay-as-you-go service. They already have the systems in place. I think that's the way to support smaller companies with big data, too, enabling them to scale up or down with services as needed. IDC expects the big data technology and services market to grow at a 31.7% CAGR through 2016. With that type of growth, even the small companies will require some sort of service.
Not a good sign at all but I feel this has some good points too. It will definitely create some sort of an awareness among the public.
It is not a good sign that countries start covert or open cyber wars. Unfortunately, this trend is on the rise and we see attacks on most nations by groups of hackers. Therefore, security must remain the first priority not only for the US but for all other nations too.
I wonder whether treaties will play a role in future cyberwarfare the way they did (or didn't) in conventional wars.
I don't have high hopes. I say this because much of this is done by hackers who barely care about laws. Since, none of it is State sponsored the treaties will not be an effective tool.
What do you think?
Well, it is a great thought and while I was thinking about, I finally reached the point that cyberwar started at the time of arpanet…then several decades ago…
I assume all countries engage in cyber security and dervied cyber attacks. China does it and so does US. Why US is crying foul? Are they loosing the edge in cyber espionage?
I may suggest one way of protecting it. Like we study it in control theory, introduce lots of noise in real data to misguide receiver. Even cyber attacker gets these plethora of data, it may be become very difficult for them to decode and make sense out of it.
Since the end of world war II , ther has been esoionage activity by almost all the countries to gather secret information about the political developments, the economic conditions, the warfare and so on.
The internet has given everybody another tool to do espionage as well as the disruptive activities like the cyber attacks.
Only differnece now is that unlike the earlier espiogae activity which involved sphisticated satellite systems which only countries like US could afford to deply, in case of the Cyber world it is more of a level playing field .
The way the media is reporting this, the US didn't take appropriate steps earlier becuase of a threat to privacy. I don't think you can get a bigger threat than China hacking your system. I'm no fan of Big Brother, but in this case, US government measures are the lesser of two evils.
The recently concluded world conference on international telecommunications tagged WCIT Dubai twenty twelve ( WCIT -12) was meant to address some of the pressing issues – internet governance being the top of agenda of the conference. But unfortunately this was not successfull as planned.
http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Pages/default.aspx
@WB: thanks for link, it reports very clearly the result of the summit; the point, in my view, is that Internet acts as medium, for one part, for providing positive services and for another part, for providing bad services. Not easy to agree on common and shared rules for Internet government.
@p_d: that's right and going further I am wondering the reason for still discussing about the way for using Internet in the negative sense; I don't forget for instance that at the time of tzunami in Japan, it was the only network running and it played a fundamental role in the emergency.
“don't forget for instance that at the time of tzunami in Japan, it was the only network running and it played a fundamental role in the emergency.”
Yes true and social media was a great help during that time but we have to remember that we are using the internet basically most hours per day so the risk of getting into trouble via internet is very high. A very thin margin divide the good from the bad in internet
>>Not easy to agree on common and shared rules for Internet government.<<
Well, if trading and marketing only place of getting success heavily hinged on internet. Why so difficult in agreeing on goals and objectives for the sustainability of internet as well for its development? Now that internet is practically becoming everything for the world – securing it remains a big challenge. The longer it remains uncheckmated the bad its for businesses of the world.
So the US is behind some attacks but is worried about China? Who's worried about the US? (the rest of the World).
They can't play the good guy and the bad guy, at least not in the same game.
That's right WB, the Internet is right now pervasive, but any region is aiming the control of the local users and this is not an easy step to run, in my eyes.
Why everyone is worried about China here ? I dont see any sensible reason for them to be so. They always reject whats been offered if its from US and now they start complaining.