Happy 5th Birthday Dataweave

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Last week saw us hit an important milestone – Dataweave’s 5th birthday. We have grown rapidly since our inception in 2006, with revenue growth hitting 35% this year.

To thank our many customers and partners, we braved the winter chill to drink in the breathtaking views from Cruise Bar in Sydney, and basked in the sophisticated splendour of the Amber Room in Melbourne.

Our partners put in a great showing, with BlueTeq, CSG, Excel4apps, IBM, itX, mcr, Oracle and Unlimited Solutions pitching in to help us to eat some birthday cake. Thanks again for your support.

CEO Sleepout raises $3.7m

I joined 250 other CEOs at Luna Park last night sleeping rough in aid of the homeless. Thank you to everyone who sponsored me – I raised over $3,000 through your kind donations. Altogether 1001 CEOs slept out across Australia and raised over $3.7m to support Vinnie’s great efforts in providing shelter and services to Australia’s homeless.

My Cardboard Bed

According to ABS statistics there are over  105,000 Australians homeless every night, including 7,500 families. More than 12,000 Australian children under the age of 12 have no home. A further 22,000 young people aged 12 to 18 are homeless, and most of them are estranged from their families.

The widespread tragedy of Mental Illness and family break-ups are significant contributors to homelessness -we can all help prevent these issues becoming tragedies by supporting our staff and our friends through  crises and depression. We heard last night from some of the homeless that Vinnie’s has helped – supporting organisations like this makes a real difference by funding them to help people get their lives back on track.

Mark Arbib and Tony Abbott we both there last night – well done guys – as business leaders and taxpayers we should all keep the pressure on the government to keep Mental Health and Homelessness high on the agenda, properly funded and not in the too hard basket.

The science of retail therapy

There is a lot of talk about the patchwork economy at the moment. Many retailers in particular have reported poor sales, and some have even run into financial difficulties. When major retail groups like Colorado and  REDgroup (owner of Angus & Robertson, Borders, Whitcoulls) collapse, alarm bells should start ringing.

ABS figures for Fashion Retail Industry revenue March 2011

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has just published retail industry figures for March, which clearly show tough times across the country for retailers.

Which makes the Zara phenomenon in Sydney even more remarkable. Zara is a European fashion retailer which has opened their first Australian store in the Sydney CBD. In the month since opening, crowds of shoppers have been willingly queuing for long periods just to get into the store, and emptying shelves at a dizzying pace.

Internationally, Zara has built their success on vertical integration, with tight management of retail inventory, supply chain, product design and manufacture. A major goal being to optimise inventory holdings, and reduce the lead time needed to bring new products to retail shelves.

Vertical integration is never going to be a viable strategy for most retailers. But technologies such as Oracle Retail Merchandise Planning and Optimisation can lift efficiencies to similar levels. The demand planning tools make it possible to automate restock orders across complex multi-supplier situations.

Getting pricing and inventory levels correct needs to be a continuous effort. Oracle’s sophisticated store merchandising tools can help plan and analyse product line profitability across branches, product categories, or product lines. You can even drill all the way down to how individual store shelves are performing.

The dark art of discounting can also be planned based on measured facts, with markdown and regular prices optimised based on actual inventory performance and supply chain considerations.

When products are sold, collecting and reconciling revenue by store can also be challenging, especially when you are dealing with multiple payment methods such as cash, credit, vouchers, gift cards and refunds. We use the Cash Management module in Oracle Financials, part of Oracle’s E-Business Suite, to help ensure accurate and timely reconciliation, so you always have an accurate view of your financials, allowing problems to be identified and solved quickly.

Shining light on the supply chain

Organising for someone to come and carry out a service at your home can easily become a nightmare. I think most people dread the thought of hanging around the house waiting for a plumber to fix a leak.

Of course there are many businesses that need to visit customer sites. It can be a major customer service challenge. In today’s world of rapid communications and social (or is it anti-social?) media, one of the quickest way to damage your organisation’s reputation is to have employees arrive late at appointments, and turn up with the wrong parts.

Some industries are dominated by tradesmen in vans, with rather haphazard systems for booking appointments and invoicing.

The recent federal government home insulation program showed just how chaotic things can become when demand rockets. The Hawke report into the problems of the insulation scheme is interesting reading. In an extraordinary single year of operation for the home insulation program, 10,000 installers worked in the field – performing 180,000 household insulation installs in November 2009 alone. Australian insulation manufacturers completely ran out of inventory, causing tradespeople to scramble madly for imported materials – contributing to the already chaotic situation.

Clearly, you don’t need to be a big business to have a complicated supply chain.

At the other end of the spectrum, the solar energy sector has grown steadily – and turned into a mature industry. The Clean Energy Council announced this week that regional towns in Australia have some of the highest use of solar energy – with 8 to 12% of homes already using solar. Places like Caloundra, Victor Harbour, Dubbo, Buderim, and Ballina are amongst the highest installed base. Even the big fossil fuel giants are starting to take note, as evidenced by the recent US$1.4 bn takeover of SunPower by French oil company Total.

With most components needing to be imported to order for clients, the solar energy sector has always faced tricky supply chain issues. Dataweave recently implemented a sophisticated Oracle E-Business Suite solution for Clear Solar – one of Australia’s largest installers of solar energy systems. You can read about the project in this recent article in ARN magazine.

When a client places an order with Clear Solar’s contact centre team, they also arrange installation for a specific date and time. This might sound straight forward, but it requires extremely sophisticated supply chain tracking and planning tools, as multiple components need to be imported, warehoused, and field employees allocated to install at specific times.

The Field Services module for the Oracle E-Business Suite makes it possible for Clear Solar’s customer service staff to give estimates of when equipment will be ready for install, and allocate installation staff to accurate appointment slots – taking into account travel times and costs. This all happens at the time of the order being originally made, weeks before the equipment even arrives in the country.

Supply chain issues are clearly important for all businesses importing, installing and servicing goods and equipment. Tier 1 applications like Oracle E-Business Suite can assist in this process and help rapidly growing companies meet customer demand and expectations.

Taking the sting out of Oracle licensing for VMware datacentres

Datacentre management tools have changed a lot in recent years, and VMware has played a big part in the revolution. Regardless of whether or not your organisation is using cloud computing style deployments, server hardware virtualisation has enormously improved flexibility for datacentres.

Lion's Mane Jellyfish, courtesy of Dan Hershman

Virtualisation does however have a rather nasty sting that can easily be overlooked – Oracle database licensing.

Oracle licensing is based on a straightforward model. If an Oracle technology product (such as Oracle Database or WebLogic Server) is running on a piece of hardware, the price paid for the licence is based on the number of processors within that server hardware platform.

Oracle offers favourable application licensing for software running on Oracle’s own Oracle VM virtualisation solution, by allowing the partitioning of the server. But for servers or clusters using non-Oracle virtualisation technologies (such as VMware), the price is based on the number of processors pooled in the cluster.

Tactics to speed up Oracle E-Business Suite deployments

I am happy to admit to a fondness for plain vanilla software implementations. To me, many software projects spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel – when they could have simply gone to a car dealership.

There are clearly tradeoffs and delays created by software customisation, so how do you actually speed up implementations without putting your business in a straight jacket?

I have spoken to many business managers who have been burnt by poorly executed and badly delayed ERP projects. In many cases they were burnt because of delays and project overruns. The most frequent cause of these delays was the need to carry out software re-engineering to achieve basic business workflows.

Now clearly work practices will vary widely between industries. The business processes used regularly by a company selling vitamins to supermarket chains will differ to those needed by a construction firm.

We have been working with Oracle’s rapid implementation software, Oracle Business Accelerator for E-Business Suite, which assists with this issue.  Oracle Business Accelerator (OBA) comprises a methodology, an automated setup tool, and a set of preconfigured business workflows. Each workflow can be thought of as a foundation which can be further modified. OBA for E-Business Suite simplifies and speeds up implementation by including 54 sophisticated business flows across financials, distribution, manufacturing, maintenance, sales, service, and projects.

For many situations, these OBA foundation pieces will be a great starting point, and get your project off to a flying start. Dataweave has handled many Oracle E-Business Suite deployments, and is one of the few organisations that is certified to use the Oracle Business Accelerators (OBA) tailored for Australia. In effect, the OBA tools and methodologies allow our clients to implement most common business processes without needing any complex software re-engineering.

This means that projects can proceed quickly, and usually means there are more resources available for change management and business process customisations. Using OBA methodologies, an ERP project which would have previously taken 6 months can be up and running within 3 months.

This obviously reduces ERP project costs and risk, as shown in this independent research by Nucleus Research.

Speeding up disaster recovery for your business applications

Over the last few months, the recent spate of natural disasters has come up in many businesses discussions. One of Dataweave’s team, and several of our customers were caught up in the major floods in Brisbane, so for many it has been a deeply personal experience.

In my experience, good planning and preparation are the best ways to manage the risks involved with natural disasters. In addition to incorporating high availability Oracle database technologies into your IT systems, you should have an up-to-date disaster recovery plan. In essence your “plan B” – covering an alternate set of procedures and infrastructure to be used in case of a major outage of key services, or when building evacuation is required.

My view is that your disaster recovery plan needs to cover several key areas, including:

• which business operations will continue
• which IT services are offered on the alternate infrastructure
• what system and device reconfigurations which might be needed for your plan B
• how data migration and service continuity will occur between production environment applications and Oracle databases, and the systems used in the disaster scenario.

While most larger organisations have basic plans in place, it is still easy for things to fall apart when a disaster occurs.

Printed documentation might seem unnecessary, but it can make or break your team’s ability to respond quickly. As seen in the recent Brisbane floods, power and communication outages can be lengthy, and occur with relatively short notice. Printed documentation might be the only technical info you can access if mains electricity is cut for more than a few hours.