While cruising through the cavernous lunch room at the Orlando SCM conference in February, I ran into an old friend, Tim Park. While at Intel, I had recruited Tim from my alma mater, the University of Michigan, to work in Intel’s supply chain process and system’s group. I learned Tim had left Intel to pursue a successful career in the supply chain SAP APO/SCM consulting world at Rapidigm and became their practice lead when Fujitsu bought Rapidigm in late 2006. I am very excited to say that Tim has accepted an offer with our firm (see press release) and will be our new Director of Business Development. He brings a wealth of knowledge, client contacts, and connections to top talent in our consulting niche. Tim has the unique skillset our clients desperately need – a strong supply chain business background with the technical/SAP knowledge to put it to work. I will pass on many of my biz dev duties to Tim as I move onto my role as Managing Director but won’t be too far from the sales and partnering action. Congrats to us… Tim is going to be a great addition to the team!

Taking a quick step back from the details, I wanted to spend just a moment introducing this forum. The intent is to share with folks our insights on the supply chain consulting industry that may be as specific as a new SAP capability but also as broad as an industry trend in Fortune 500 supply chain investments. Although we are a niche player in the field, we are actually considered mid-sized in this market. We only hire senior consultants that have “cut their teeth” with other firms for years and have established themselves as leaders so we often get handed the tough problems either directly from our clients or from the large firms that do not have the expertise. With 30+ clients across multiple industries, this gives us a pretty broad view of the overall supply chain market

My partners and I will use this forum to discuss the trends we are seeing and hypothesize how it may impact other companies. I live in San Francisco and passed a gas station this weekend where the $4/gallon ceiling had been breached – ugh. We all know that rising energy costs will increase corporate expense ratios but I will go into more detail on what companies are doing to mitigate those costs in form of supply chain process and technology investments. Other topics may include how Operations and IT teams never quite seem to work together as well as they should and how some basic facilitation may help. Of course, we will also have some deep dive discussions on a new feature or set of current features that SAP has released in their Advanced Planning and Optimization tool or other budding areas of their overall SCM module.

The driver for this forum was that I was unable to find anyone else addressing this subject matter for the supply chain sector. Our goal is to allow this blog to help facilitate some of that discussion in a consolidated place and of course… show prospective clients that we are the best firm in which to partner to solve these complex problems

Chris Botha and I conducted a workshop with a leading fertilizer company last week and were blown away by the intricacies and the far reaching impacts of this industry. The client is looking to improve their optimization process for long range planning currently being run (like most companies) on a whiz-bang set of xls sheets. Since their model doesn’t quite fit the standard SNP Optimizer, we suggested a phased approach of building a custom solver and then incorporate that into a standard IT implementation using the SAP APO Optimization Workbench. We have an excellent partner who specializes in supply chain optimization engines combining their Operations Research PhD’s with real business implementation experience. We are very optimistic that this will help the client run rapid long range optimization “what ifs” to help quantify strategic corporate initiatives. Drop me a note if you are interested in discussing this solution or other custom optimization options.

On a side note, the fertilizer business is a great one to be in right now. With the world population growing, poverty and nutrition improving, limited space for new farming lands, and the push for renewable biofuels, the world needs fertilizer!