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MAY 2004 |
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Welcome to the Fast Five Minutes! |
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Optura Updated - What Can We Do For Your Business Today? |
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Demystifying PCAs and SOAs - What Are They Really About? |
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Case Studies and Recent Wins |
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Executive Insight - Deja Vu All Over Again? |
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Optura in the News |
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Recent and Upcoming Events |
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| Welcome to the Fast Five Minutes! |
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What is Fast Five Minutes? It's a monthly newsletter from your friends at Optura designed to give you a quick update on what is happening in the process optimization arena as it pertains to you and your business. In it you will find:
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News on Optura's Solutions and How They Can Work for You and Your Organization - columnists from Optura's sales, process optimization, and technical teams, will discuss how Optura's solutions help to prescriptively fit an organization's workflow problems. Future articles will include discussions of vendor invoice management in a shared services environment, optimization of receivables/ credit management, and discussions of technology innovations designed to give your business infrastructures the tools needed to drive bottom line results. |
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Industry Updates - what is happening in the industry and how it may affect your on-going business pursuits. With all the changes we're seeing today in the industry it's hard to keep up on what's happening on how you may take advantage of it. Look to Optura for insight on what things you should be tracking and why. |
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Case Studies and Recent Wins - with over 60 of the leading Fortune 500 and 1000 companies in the market today using Optura's solutions, we want you to be aware of how others are improving their Time-To-Value and ROI delivery within their organizations. Look here for news on our ever-growing customer list as it continues to expand. |
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Executive Insight - in the area of process optimization, Optura has set the high water mark of thought leadership that continues to captivate the interest of industry and customer executives alike. As regular speakers at industry conventions and customer briefings, Optura's senior leadership is now bringing some of their insight to the Fast Five Minutes and you. |
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Optura in the News - Optura continues to be in the news as our market-leading solutions continue to drive significant ROI for our customers. Look here for linkages to industry magazines and other information sources where you can learn more about Optura from editors, authors, and analysts. |
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Upcoming Events - Optura continues to participate in regional trade shows, major industry events, and local user group efforts. We also participate in our own demand generation activities and it is highly probable that we'll soon be in a city near you - watch this space for details on where to next find Optura presenting our solutions! |
The Fast Five Minutes newsletter is published monthly by Optura, a subsidiary of SBI Group. We look forward to providing you with this information via email regularly - please let us know if there are other things you would like to see included. Contact Bob Monio (rmonio@optura.net) with questions or comments.
Enjoy your Fast Five Minutes!
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| Optura Updated - What Can We Do For Your Business Today? |
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Optura Continues to Evolve as Our Customer's Needs Change. As a leader in delivering business process optimization solutions in the industrial, chemical, energy, retail/CPG, telecom, and manufacturing, distribution industries, we work hard to help you get value from your systems and resources. In Future Fast Five minutes newsletters we'll help you understand more as we present success stories, product and industry insight, and articles discussing solutions to the common problems you face in your organizations - all written by the experts who implement these solutions today. But before we go any further, we'd like to give you an update on where Optura is and what you can expect from us going forward in the future.
What Optura Can Do For Your Business. No organizational structure is ever set in stone - nor should it be. Organizations need to adapt to ever changing market demands. In today's enterprise, organizations are often regimented by function, location or line-of-work with entrenched information systems that reflect these structural boundaries. The inflexibility of established enterprise software systems can often be the biggest barrier to fine-tuning a dynamic organization. To be effective, information and communication must flow across organizational and structural barriers in order to support the business of businesses - transactions and service. Workers need to collaborate across functional and organizational boundaries and information needs to flow across disparate systems.
Most enterprises have legacy application solutions in place with existing silos or islands of data supporting finance, manufacturing, human resources, logistics and procurement. The value of this data can be significantly enhanced when made available for repackaging, filtering, combining, and dissemination to other individuals, departments or partners that comprise a business transaction or service cycle.
Enterprises focused on business process improvement are choosing to develop better business practices by implementing composite applications, rather than replacing existing systems at considerable expense and disruption to the organization. Enterprise systems remain in place with established input and output methods as well as access controls and maintenance mechanisms. Composite applications provide the means to improve legacy application processes and ERP systems by collecting data and combining work procedures and repurposing and disseminating content for a much broader set of users and operations.
Figure: Composite applications optimize business processes with software systems supporting collaboration across organizational functions, systems and partnerships
Optura Solutions and Expertise.Optura is a leading provider of business process optimization and application solutions that run atop composite application frameworks. Optura has years of experience in optimizing enterprise systems with in-depth understanding of key workflow methodologies and integration technologies to ensure the delivery of quality business solutions. Resident expertise exists as a result of projects with progressive Fortune 500 companies in shared services areas like accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) and in vertical markets like consumer packaged goods, oil and gas, distribution, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Optura has developed the xCollaboration product line, a suite of prepackaged solutions that maximize customer return in multiple industries on existing ERP investments such as SAP. Optura's extensive domain experience with business process optimization ensures that solutions are integrated seamlessly, on time and within budget.
Here are some of the solutions and expertise we deliver:
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Vendor Invoice Management - Streamlines Accounts Payable operations by facilitating processing of invoices in, the routing of problem invoices, invoice approvals, and direct invoice entry, PO and invoice status checks and problem resolution for vendors. Over 28 different process workflows are included - all delivered through a secure and scalable portal interface. |
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Material Data Management - Facilitates the setup of new material masters in the ERP system. Set up of new products, BOM's, routings, and recipes accurately and in a timely manner. |
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Customer Order Management - Facilitates the entering and tracking of customer orders. Provides secure order entry, customer pricing, order status, ship-to history, sold-to account status, Works directly within the ERP system to obtain input for setting-up or editing customer masters accurately and quickly. |
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Business Results |
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Business process visioning and design
Business process modeling
Issues management
Exception processing and resolution
Success metrics
Scalable growth
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Reduced cycle times
Increased productivity
Lower costs
Strengthened partnerships
Rapid ROI
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For more information or help contact us at 888-658-0990. We look forward to working with you!
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| Demystifying PCAs and SOAs - What Are They Really About? |
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What are Composite Applications? Ever wonder what a Packaged Composite Application (PCA) is and why the industry is buzzing about them right now? Better yet - does the terminology behind Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have you even more confused? Well, you're not alone. As our respective businesses emerge into the growing economy, we're being constantly bombarded with managerial directives to cut cost, drive more revenue and - oh, by the way - figure out how to get more return on our IT dollar from our applications and services. This is quite a challenge and as Coleman Barney points out in his article, something that really is Déjà vu all over again. But this is a challenge that Optura can help you with - and PCAs and SOAs really can work to make it happen. Let me explain.
What are SOAs? Without getting into a shoot-out between vendors and their respective twists on the theme, let's make this simple. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an environment that harmonizes user interfaces (portals, desktops, etc.), workflow applications, and enterprise applications (with their respective data) through middleware. This middleware uses industry standard connectivity - web services - to allow a company to quickly plug-in applications and equipment while scaling to meet user needs - needs that usually revolve around interfaces, workflow, and access to data. Many companies offer these tools - for example IBM, SAP, Microsoft, BEA, and others are just some of the providers focused on insuring that you have the right plumbing for your SOA. Some - like IBM - even offer services models to help you insure that your environment provides the services level functionality required to meet your business needs. SOA is a highly abstracted term - but if you are an IT manager and want to service your internal customer's needs then you need to insure that you have the right middleware, methods of application acquisition, and enterprise architectures in place. This is very important when we move on to servicing our internal, Line Of Business (LOB) customer.
What are PCAs? Much like building a house, having the right foundation is the key to success - therefore once you've developed the foundation of your SOA in the organization, you can then move on to servicing your internal customers. Packaged Composite Solutions (PCAs) are pluggable process optimization solutions that leverage the combination of workflow, data integration/synchronization, and user interface to bring process savings to your business. Originally pioneered by organizations using Lotus Notes in the heady days of the 90's, companies were able to take advantage of immense cost savings by abstracting processes that originally existed in the back-end mainframe and minicomputer environments (ERP, CRM, etc.) into applications that ran on workflow servers like Lotus Notes/Domino. With the maturity of web application servers, these environments (IBM WebSphere, BEA) have become the environments of choice for hosting the next generation of workflow applications - now called Packaged Composite Applications.
How are PCAs Deployed? PCAs are built using J2EE or .NET constructs - with delivery of user information through Portals (or Web Browsers) and data synchronization facilitated through business integration tools (WebSphere Business Integration, BizTalk, Netweaver). These PCA applications address many of the core issues your businesses face today - on a sliding scale of small (departmental) to very large (shared services or multi-location configurations). These solutions bring high-optimized workflow in the form of a plug-in to your organization - all at a cost far, far, less than the traditionally developed applications. Why? Because they take advantage of pre-packaged business objects, data, and other things that you've already invested in and simply "tie" them together in a more effective fashion. PCAs are the direction that market-leading companies are taking with the IT services efforts and you have that option today, too!
So How Do Take Advantage of PCAs in My Organization? Optura account executives have honed their consultative skills over the course of many customer visioning discussions to the point where they can help you understand how Optura's solutions can work for you. Our products run on the most popular web application platforms, integrate with the various imaging systems and tools necessary, and optimize the industry's most pervasive enterprise systems (such as SAP). For more information or help contact us at 888-658-0990. We look forward to working with you!
Reference Tidbits: for more information on SOAs, you may want to check out the following informational site from IBM (a partner of Optura's) - www.ibm.com/webservices. There are also a large number of articles being written and posted by analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, etc. and in various trade journals. If you aren't doing an SOA today it's a guarantee that you will be focusing on one soon.
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Robert Monio is the VP of Channel Relations and a Client Partner for Optura/SBI. He can be reached at rmonio@optura.net.
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| Case Studies and Recent Wins |
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Optura Continues To Drive Bottom-Line Results for Its Customers! As Optura's message around Packaged Composite Applications (PCAs) continues to take hold, more and more customers are leveraging them to drive ROI and cost savings. This month we profile Pilgrim's Pride, one of the nation's largest Poultry producers.
Pilgrim's Pride - High Volume Vendor Invoice Management through Optura Solutions
Overview
If business success in the food industry were simply a matter of production, Pilgrim's Pride would have few equals. Pilgrim's is the second largest poultry producer in the United States. They process approximately 55 million pounds of chicken and 8 million pounds of turkey per week. Pilgrim's Pride is also a vertically integrated company that operates feed mills, hatcheries, grow-out facilities, processing plants and distribution centers. This allows Pilgrim's to have control over every phase and aspect of its highly successful business.
Challenge
Experiencing continual growth, Pilgrim's Pride found itself with a considerable challenge regarding invoice processing and accounts payable. With annual purchasing volume at around $1 billion per year and more than 220,000 purchase order (PO) and non-PO invoices being processed per year, Pilgrim's needed a better way to handle problem invoices that couldn't be processed for payment on the first try. Like most large companies using established enterprise application software solutions, Pilgrim's had challenges coordinating efforts to resolve invoice discrepancies in a timely manner. These challenges existed because of the manual processes used for resolving problem invoices and resulted in the following inefficiencies:
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Problem invoice resolution was a very time consuming endeavor for many groups involved, which resulted in low productivity and time wasted on mundane tasks |
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Lost and/or duplicate invoices became excessive resulting in duplicate payments to vendors |
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From start to finish of the payment cycle, invoices were near impossible to track with no visibility on status or history of payment information |
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Relationships with vendors were strained due to lost documents and late payments |
Optura Solution
Pilgrim's Pride selected Optura's Vendor Invoice Management solution to streamline problem invoice processing and solve invoice handling problems. Optura Vendor Invoice Management integrates workflow and Web services technologies with in-place ERP systems to create a composite application that optimizes and automates problem invoice management and resolution. Vendor Invoice Management ties seamlessly with ERP systems, such as Pilgrim's existing SAP implementation, using established invoice exception best-practices management. Optura prepackaged solutions accommodate 28 of the most common invoice exception scenarios. In addition, custom solutions can easily be developed that automate resolution with business rules, workflow, approvals and actions. Pilgrim's made the decision to buy this solution from Optura rather than build it internally, saving time and money and also allowing them to take advantage of the pre-determined, best-practice policies and automated workflows built into the solution.
Results
Pilgrim's Pride has easily realized its cost-saving objectives. Upon implementation of Optura Vendor Invoice Management, Pilgrim's experienced immediate improvement with measurable and quantifiable results over time. Payoffs include:
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Headcount redeployment: 10 positions between AP and Purchasing |
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Obtaining more vendor discounts for early or on-time payments |
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Problem invoice resolution turnaround dropped from an average of 30 days to 10 days |
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Virtual elimination of duplicate invoices received |
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Significant reduction in vendor hotline (payment status) calls |
So How Do I Garner the Same Results that Pilgrim's Pride Did?
For more information or help contact us at 888-658-0990. You, too, can take advantage of the benefits afforded by Optura Solutions in your Company!
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| Executive Insight - Deja Vu All Over Again? |
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Déjà Vu All Over Again. Here we are turning a corner and getting our feet back under us after a few rough years. The economic doldrums of the new millennium look to be behind us and the dawn of something new and better is in sight. Then, it happens again, just like in 1999 - a reminder of the hype and over promise of the Internet and the New Economy.
I was sitting in the expansive office of a CIO customer and friend of mine - a C-level executive for a $4 billion manufacturer who was digging through the mounds of budget spreadsheets, outsourcing proposals, and CapEx request sheets on his desk in search of a letter - a letter sent to him by his largest customer, an oil company. The oil company was notifying him - along with all of its vendors - that a deadline for the online submission of invoices had been set. All vendors would be using the standard POSC internet protocol for oil industry supply chain collaboration. My double-take on hearing this news was because just four years earlier, I was seated in the same office and being presented with another letter. A letter received by this very same CIO from his largest customer in the chemical industry. A letter telling him that going forward, all procurement would be conducted through an Internet Trading Exchange (ITX) being created by Ventro using the latest in emerging Java and XML internet standards. At the time, the news about Ventro had the CIO wringing his hands and wondering aloud what would happen to his pricing power on a trading exchange, what was it going to cost to make these specialized connections, how many of these connections was he going to ultimately be asked to make, could his less-than-pristine legacy systems handle these kinds of connections, and on and on. Needless to say, the CIO was wondering what he should do.
I was running an eBusiness consulting practice back then and whenever a customer came to me with questions about an ITX and the associated "disintermediation" threat the ITX brought with it, my answer was the same: Build a standardized hub to support the emerging internet connection standards but don't fall for the FUD of a trading exchange. There was yet to be a value proposition articulated for the majority of middle-man exchanges and therefore you shouldn't put any weight into their messaging or promises. Needless to say, this CIO heeded my words back then and they made it through the economic churn.
(By the way, do you remember Ventro? Maybe you remember the shareholder suit and the inevitable Securities and Exchange Commission investigation just before they shut their doors.)
Fast Forward to 2004. Even though there are similarities between these two letters, things have certainly changed. We've navigated our way out of the IT wreckage left behind by the hype and promises of the internet. And even though Ventro crashed and burned along with hundreds of other trading exchange wannabe's, the collaboration standards behind all that hype have continued to mature and companies in many industries have recognized the significant value and savings that can result from automating collaboration and streamlining the exchange of information up and down the value chain. So what does that mean if your postman delivers a letter to you like the one my friend the CIO just received?
First - some more background for you. Internet Trading Exchanges initially promised to be the clearing houses for buying, selling, cataloging, configuring, auctioning, archiving, pricing, and partnering. But, we now know better. This kind of wholesale change and loss of control being proposed back then was too unnerving for an enterprise to seriously consider. What we're seeing during this economic recovery is in sharp contrast to the loud talking and arm waving that surrounded claims about The New Economy in 1999. Changes are now more pragmatic - improvement is taking place in corporations function by function, department by department, in a re-engineering metaphor that Hammer could have only envisioned when he wrote his famous book. It's not an environment of in-with-the-new-and-out-with-the-old. Businesses and industries have begun to use the concepts and technology standards steeled in the fires of the internet crash, but they've left behind the absurdity of the New Economy mandate to remove all brick and mortar from the business model. CPG and Retail are picking up on UCCnet standards. High-Tech is behind the RosettaNet consortium. Investment and Financial research groups support RIXML. Oil and Gas is getting behind POSC. All are designed to standardize the way industries communicate and all of these standards support trading partner exchanges on a point to point level or through facilitated exchange consortiums.
At Optura we've seen the shift and we're helping our customers include a widening network of employees, partners, vendors, and customers in automated workflows and connections. We knew from our experiences through the late 90's that the internet would settle itself down and nuggets of goodness would emerge. To accommodate this we've spent a good deal of time expanding our product features to include highly collaborative functions that cut across the artificial boundaries established by enterprise applications. And we've based these new features on maturing internet standards for portals and web applications so customers can easily keep the investments they've made in the past in enterprise business systems - but yet are able to improve on those investments using a browser and the internet.
So Where are We Today? It's certainly not a case of going back-to-the-future and repeating strategies of the past. It's more like Déjà Vu - that familiar feeling that we've seen this somewhere before. The secret is combining business knowledge, reengineering of best practices, and the technology you've invested in to drive your organization forward - knowing that you will now see practical benefits and ROI resulting from your effort.
Coleman Barney is a founder of SBI Group and the President of Optura. He can be reached at cbarney@optura.net.
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| Optura in the News |
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Optura Continues to Make Itself Heard in the Industry - here are some recent announcements:
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April 28, 2004 - Optura announces participation with IBM as a Partner supplying composite applications for service oriented architectures and on demand infrastructure |
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April 26, 2004 - Optura Announces New Enterprise Composite Applications That Create Powerful New Business Processes That Enhance Existing ERP Applications |
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| Recent and Upcoming Events |
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Optura Continues to Demonstrate Industry Leadership - here are some events to take note of:
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April 18-21, 2004 - Optura is Silver Sponsor for National ASUG Event - Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta Georgia - Sessions and Vendor Fair |
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