|  By
Editorial Staff
In
1992, the decisive words "it’s the economy, stupid,"
spoken with the precision of a surgeon by candidate Bill Clinton,
summed up the Clinton-Gore campaign strategy to target a sluggish
economy, and placed the blame for the nations woes squarely on the
previous administration. It was a bull’s eye with the public.
Today, as we try to find solutions to the turmoil in the technology
sector, the Clinton words still ring true. The economic malaise
transcends sectors, and all companies need to increase performance
and asset utilization just to maintain their standing in the marketplace.
The ones that do the best job of it will emerge from the continuing
downturn as the new market leaders.
It's easy to blame the economy. Thousands of software and non-software
companies out there are losing their value and their footholds,
even though their products are strong and their business practices
sound. Indeed, Adexa has not been immune from the recent turmoil
in the enterprise application market, but we have managed to effectively
continue to add value to our customer base for a number of reasons.
We at Adexa characterize our solutions as the "intelligence"
required to operate an enterprise…much the same as a PC requires
an operating system. Adexa solutions help to optimize the use of
resources and allocate "CPU and memory"- where and when
resources are needed - at very high speed. Many companies view such
software as secondary to millions or billions of dollars of investment
that they make in their hardware, but the reality is they go hand-in-hand,
much the same as a PC and its operating system.
Our customers are benefiting from our solutions in a number of different
ways including the following evolutionary stages:
-Identify
erroneous and incomplete data. This cannot be done unless you
have an "active" system prescribing what is needed and
how frequently the actions need to happen.
-Identify the right processes and be able to institutionalize
such processes with the use of the software.
-Get visibility into exception areas and what has gone wrong or
what will go wrong.
-Optimize operations and allocation of resources by reducing cost
and building and keeping the right products.
On
a recent trip to a developing region in Asia, I came across a few
executives of a rather large automotive OEM. They indicated that
they really have no issues with delivery and/or return on assets
or profitability.
 I
was very intrigued that in this part of the world, they were so
advanced, but when I inquired further, I realized that, for them,
a delivery date of months away is acceptable, and that the color
of the vehicle will be ‘whatever you happen to get’!
Further, they sell the vehicles at a price that is three times higher
than in North America, despite the much lower cost of manufacturing
in the region. I am not sure this strategy would be too successful
in the West, given the level of competition. One wonders what will
happen to this company when competition comes in to deliver price-pressure
and alternatives for the end user.
There was a famous reengineering book that I read a few years ago.
It described three types of companies: ones that have run into a
brick wall and are wondering what to do next, those that can see
the wall ahead of them and are preparing to avoid it, and those
that are building the wall for everyone else to run into. I feel
there is fourth type of company, as exemplified in the example of
the Asian automotive OEM: those that do not even know of the existence
of a wall! I am happy to report that none of our customers fall
in that category. |
