Save the World. Save the Environment

While the Industrial Revolution has transformed the world from the stone age to what we see today, it is important for the industries of the world to keep an eye on their practices and advancements.

Let us not have the Industrial Revolution take us back to the stone age!

Let's save the environment with safer industrial practices and standards. Let's make the world a safer place to live. Click here for a larger picture.

IBM Global Truck Study - Insighful One..

10,000 hybrid trucks would reduce diesel fuel use by 7.2 million gallons per year

In an attempt to help the world turn Greener and help Truck Manufacturers transform their businesses, this study revealed three stunning findings as external forces to the Truck industry -

1. Technology - 71% of respondents feel so. Telematics will play a key role here.
   
2. Globalization - 54% of the executives feel so. This once happened to the light vehicle manufacturing industry - It's going to be a tough battle!
   
3. Sustainability - 48% of respondents feel so. With environmental and human safety regulatory bodies working hard to to bring in safety norms, this is going to be an area for the Truck industry to seriously look at.

A total of 91 executives across 13 countries were interviewed to complete this study. More information can be sought here.

Chemical & Petroleum Integrated Information Framework

One of the key challenges that the Chemical & Petroleum industry faces today is the inability to make timely business decisions in areas related to performance and field operations in both upstream and downstream parts of the business. The reasons for this challenge are plenty (functional and technical). From a functional perspective, some of them are -

1. Operational managers and production supervisors do not have access to visibility to the plant's assets
2. Failure reports get delivered too late, and are often signaled by an alarm (with sound and light)
3. Failure reports are not intelligible enough to understand the problem to decide on a course of action
4. All assets and entities in the plant adhere to their own standards of operation; this results in too many standards in one place; manageability becomes a key concern
   

Technically, the reasons can be attributed to -

1. A multitude of data sources
2. Too many instances of data get created from the different data sources
3. There are many systems that are involved in the managing of these data instances
4. Each data source follows its own standard in creating data; managing disparate data instances with unique standards becomes a challenge by itself

We at IBM, have been observing this for quiet sometime now, and we do have an answer now! Yes, IBM has come up with yet another innovative and business-driven solution called the Chemical & Petroleum Integrated Information Framework; in short, its called C&P IIF.
Chemical and Petroleum Integrated Information Framework (C&P IIF) is the software framework for real-time comprehensive integrated information across multiple disparate systems based on industry standards and an SOA approach. It enables real-time visibility and process collaboration with alerts and event management to speed problem determination plus optimization of existing resources:

• For upstream oil and gas, C&P IIF framework enables implementing integrated operations that can decrease production costs while increasing oil field recovery percentages
• For plants, C&P IIF enables real-time operations feedback driving integrations that can decrease production costs and improve refinery safety
• For drilling, C&P IIF provides a comprehensive view across heterogeneous drilling formats for corporate analysis and easier handoff to production

For more information, do visit the IBM Chemical & Petroleum Integrated Information Framework web page here. A PDF version of the brochure is available here. You can also write to me to know more on IIF.

Sources: IBM

Value-Based Positioning (vs) Cost-Based Positioning

No matter which industry we refer to, the way the positioning of products happen is predominantly based on the cost factor. The world has seen a great progress and the economy has had its share of the cake while corporations and companies put their bets on cost-based selling.

With the growing economies of countries across the globe and the growing world market, the consumer mindset (both commercial and domestic) has been looking to get better quality at a lesser cost. While this is good, this has reached a point of saturation. Many countries, especially in the Asian part of the world, has capitalized on this right from the first day. China and India have been the trendsetters in this space. In both, services and the product spaces, the two big developing nations have competed against the world (and between themselves) by proving to be the source of low-cost center/source.

The world market (both commercial and domestic) slowly has reached a point wherein the thought of cost (vs) quality has become a point of concern. While we saw China aggressively (and effectively) battling the 'cost' side of the equation with the lowest of costs, India has concentrated a little more on the 'quality' of products and services too. In the world of automotive, companies like TATA Motor Company, Mahindra & Mahindra, Reva and many others have effectively been able to market their products in the sub-continent while maintaining a high level of export to the Western markets in Europe and the United States. On the other side, there are companies like Geely, Chery, and other domestic automakers in China have high global-aspirations but have been having a tough time including quality-management and overall strategic focus.

The reasons behind the high success rate of Indian OEMs in the international market and the struggle of Chinese OEMs to enter the international market are primarily attributed to their approaches to the market. While the Indian OEMs have focussed more on quality (and started reducing costs without compromising the former), the Chinese OEMs have focussed on cost alone, with quality taking the backseat. There are many other reasons for the Chinese OEMs' low success rate - insufficient quality-management, lack of strategic focus are just some of them.
The world today is looking for value as opposed to just low cost. In lay man's terms, value can be understood as -

Best possible outcome from a system that is subjected to a set of constraints defined by the market

The market-defined constraints can be factors like quality, cost, size, etc; the outcome is the product or a service; the system is the manufacturer or supplier or enterprise creating the outcome.