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!

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!

Welcome to the new look and feel of our SCM Solutions website. With our growth over the past few years, especially in our relationships with direct clients, we wanted to improve the online content and ease of use for those getting information from our website. Along with basic company content and a continuously updated list of clients and services, our management team will be posting blogs commenting on supply chain market trends using SAP’s Supply Chain Management suite of tools, consulting resource complexities and opportunities, as well as interesting things going on at SCM Solutions. Please feel free to let us know what you like, don’t like, or notice is missing and we will continue to improve our online content.