Surprising Manufacturing Case Study Featured at IDC Outsourcing Forum shows how outsourcing is creating more onshore manufacturing jobs.
 Readers of U.S. and European press are too familiar with the plight of manufacturers—and how outsourcing is increasing cost pressures and sending even more jobs overseas. What is less known is that leading edge manufacturers are beginning to use outsourcing to increase local employment by making local companies more competitive.
Forum attendees will hear how Midwest U.S. manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller, which was featured in BusinessWeek’s The Future of Outsourcing, is creating a new business that turns around manufacturers by improving their business processes, which makes them more competitive and ends up increasing local employment in many cases. Forum presenter Vasant Bennett is President of Barry-Wehmiller International Resources (BMIS) and a chief architect of BWIS’s emerging service offerings. He spoke to the Global Human Capital Journal last week.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
 Midwest executives will have an excellent opportunity to learn how to take their outsourcing strategy to the next level next week, when IDC will bring their Outsourcing Forum to Chicago. Themed “Reinventing your business through BPO and ITO,” the Forum will feature speakers from Proctor & Gamble, Lucent, The Williams Companies, NiSource, Goodyear, Barry-Wehmiller and Hydro One Networks. In addition, world-class outsourcing providers such as Capgemini, IBM, Hewlett-Packard will offer practical advice, and several of IDC’s lead analysts will offer their insights.
I was able to catch up with event chairman Bob Welch, who previewed some of the Summit’s key themes. I also have information on a special registration deal.
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Bryan Doerr, CTO of IT services powerhouse SAVVIS, pulled off quite a feat at the Technology Executives Club Outsourcing Update in Chicago last week: in 30 minutes, he explained how visionary CIOs were increasing the value of “IT” by making it vanish. “IT” is not merely being commoditized but must entertain an even more ignoble fate—being virtualized—and this is an exceedingly good thing.
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Dr. Clotaire Rapaille served a delectable elixir to a packed room of B2B marketers at BIGfrontier yesterday. His talk spanned business in China, investing in India, a new value proposition for shampoo (think “breastfeeding”), why people drive Hummers to the mall, why French people don’t work and myriad others. Rapaille (“Rah pEYE”) lists half of the Fortune 100 has retained clients because he has a track record with helping them understand the inner structures of consumers’ minds and, therefore, how to communicate with them. Moreover, many of these inner structures hold true across cultures which can enable companies to develop offerings that will hold true globally. Sound impossible? Read on.
As usual, I will share my notes from the meeting and follow those with some of my insights but, unlike the usual custom, I have also interspersed some material from one of his major books to fill gaps. The topics he addressed were intricate and complex, and there wasn’t time to delve into the details of the background research.
Background
Rapaille, a Frenchman who subsequently became virulently American, began his career as a psychoanalyst working with autistic children in Switzerland, which gave him insights into how the brain worked and […]
Jim Champy, author of many management bestsellers, including Reengineering the Corporation, led a fascinating discussion 18 April 2006 at Chicago’s Standard Club, sponsored by Perot Systems. Beginning with the presentation, “Doing Business in a Flat World: An Exploration of the Next Era in Globalization,” Jim gave attendees an invaluable perspective on how executives needed to reengineer reengineering for the knowledge economy. He highlighted past transformational efforts in the industrial economy (the original reengineering) and focused on how to achieve change in the knowledge economy. As usual, I will summarize key points of the discussion first and follow up with my insights.
Reengineering: 20th Century
In the 80s and 90s, reengineering helped businesses improve their business processes. For example, an insurance company regularly required 24 days to issue a policy because 13 departments were involved, each of which had optimized processes for itself, not the enterprise (or the customer). In fact, to issue the policy took ten minutes of actual work; the rest was administrative time. Today, business models of the industrial era are becoming obsolete, but most companies haven’t yet changed how they manage their businesses. A default method of drastic organization change, often employed by IBM and many others, […]
The emerging knowledge economy will reconfigure the role of discovery in innovation in some surprising ways. First, a couple corollaries:
For most of the history of mankind, information has been scarce, and an important way that people innovated was through discovery. In agrarian and industrial economies, it was extremely important to discover new ways to transform raw materials in order to create new products. Since people lived in relative isolation compared to today, there was significant duplication of discovery efforts in pockets around the world. The pervasive TCP/IP network (i.e. Internet), combined with accelerating adoption of modern architectural approaches (i.e. service-oriented architecture) and messaging (Web services and XML) is unlocking the world’s data/information as a dizzying pace. It’s a cliché that we have too much information, and this trend shows no sign of abating. Moreover, software tools for automating the management of information are improving all the time. Of course, this development gives people an unprecedented ability to collaborate—on everything.
In the knowledge economy, discovery gets leveraged, pervasively and instantaneously. Discovery will remain extremely important to creating value, but I’m going to argue that it will play a cameo role in the hyper-innovation knowledge economy: crucial but supporting.
Anyone attending […]
Adam Hartung of Spark Partners led a compelling and thought-provoking discussion at this month’s MITEF meeting on 14 March in Chicago. Adam is a veteran of a bevy of management consultancies and large corporations who has spent the last four years researching a hypothesis about innovation, writing a book (The Phoenix Principle) and consulting. His observations are straightforward, profound and potentially healing for industrial economy companies.
Summary of the Meeting and Discussion “Lock-in” is a corporate phenomenon that is fatal for organizations because it prevents new thinking. New thinking is increasingly important because the market is more volatile than ever. Lock-in happens in a cycle: in its formative stage, the corporation experiences success, and success “hardens” into a success formula; it leaves an imprint on executives, workers and customers, who all identify with the success. Of course, the problem arises when the market moves and nullifies some key assumptions that are embedded in the success formula. There are three types of lock-in:
Behavioral lock-in: group-think, not invented here; slow decision making; rigid ideas about customers and products; sacred cows. Profits from financial manipulation. Structural lock-in: many, but one stood out–“biased toward easily quantified, traditional actions and against more speculative […]
The American Marketing Association Chicago Chapter held its Power Lunch round tables, 23 February 2006 in Chicago. I hosted Technology and Strategy tables, where marketing leaders from Fortune 1000 companies, startups and service providers exchanged impressions about emerging marketing trends and techniques. Here are my notes from the discussion.
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In the post-Internet-boom period, it’s easy to forget about some old friends, so here I thought I’d drop in and revisit e-commerce…
 The old joke about commitment being like a ham and eggs breakfast certainly applies to producers (of goods) and consumers in the industrial economy. The punch line is that the chicken (consumer) is involved, but the pig (producer) is committed.
A large part of producers’ inflexibility today is due to the fact that they are committed to bits (as opposed to bytes) at all stages of production and distribution: inputs, inventory, safety stocks, unsold goods, returns “… the whole catastrophe,” as Zorba says. These commitments are, in many cases, more important to producers than putting the customer first, and they represent a critical barrier to industrial economy companies’ intimacy with consumers because companies must sacrifice customer needs to maintain their operating realities. (For more on this, see Transformation: from Self-contained Company to Networked Global Organization.)
E-Commerce is steadily liberating producers from this dilemma in many categories. Let’s take a banal example. Probably most readers have shopped at “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” For many people, it defined the e-commerce experience. […]
A blog is not like a plant of the desert variety; it needs watering more often, so here’s an excerpt from my imminent Market Advisory on the marketing tectonic shift:
The Mirror: Customer Experience and Intimacy
We will see more changes in marketing practices from 2006-2015 than in the rest of the profession’s history because marketing will be the vanguard for the shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, which will demand competence in all encompassing customer experience in order to achieve differentiation. Similarly, the globalization of markets is accelerating: emerging markets will represent extraordinary potential, but addressing them will demand unprecedented innovation. In a bright spot, ongoing CRM and BI initiatives, combined with continuing standardization of architecture (SOA) and messaging (Web services, XML), will begin to deliver the proverbial 360° view of the customer.
The Customer Experience Imperative
The customer experience will be mandated from producer and consumer quarters. Consumers have product fatigue. In many categories, there are too many choices with little differentiation save price. Producers will have unprecedented information, which they will explicitly use to create experiences. In fact, no consumer wants a product or service anyway; rather, consumers buy products and services in order […]
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