Posted by
Lou Lazarus in
I recently spoke with John Paterson, IBM’s chief procurement officer, about a new, smarter supply chain initiative called Supplier Connection that IBM is announcing on September 14. We talked about the potential a smarter supply chain holds for small business suppliers and large corporate buyers. And we explored how building a smarter planet means using smarter systems to create new business and employment opportunities.
Q: Tell me a bit about the problem with today’s supply chain from a small business’s perspective.
Paterson: It can be very challenging for small businesses to become suppliers to large companies today. The application process can be quite daunting, especially when you are talking about small businesses that can’t afford to dedicate resources to manage through that process. The challenge becomes really intimidating for a small business if they want to become suppliers to dozens of large corporations, each with their own specific application forms, formats and requirements. Then you are talking about a major investment of time, money and expertise that most small businesses simply do not have. And since small businesses are the primary source of overall economic growth, there is an even bigger opportunity if this situation can be improved.
Q: So what’s the solution?
Paterson: We think at least part of the solution is to accelerate and streamline the application process – to make that process smarter. Nearly all procurement offices seek the same data, but companies collect that data in different ways, using varying formats.
So IBM, with the help of several other large companies from a variety of industries, is launching a free Web site, called Supplier Connection, that will be a central portal for small businesses to connect with the supply chains of large corporations.
The consortium of companies (which includes AT&T, Bank of America, Citigroup, Pfizer, and UPS) has agreed to use the portal to standardize and simplify their application processes. It will provide small and mid-sized suppliers with a single, streamlined electronic application form that can be filled out just once to potentially become suppliers to all the participating companies.
Q: Isn’t this something that the government could fix? How can corporations make a difference?
Paterson: It’s not enough to wait for government action. Corporations like the ones supporting Supplier Connection can provide real leadership and innovation. Government can certainly provide stimulus funds, tax breaks and better access to capital. But small businesses need access to both capital and new markets. And we think a bottleneck in accessing new markets is in the supply chain processes. For small businesses, there is no more stable or significant market than the supply chains of large businesses.
Q: What you’re describing sounds like a specific smarter system, but what’s the implication for building a smarter planet?
Paterson: Smarter planet is about addressing the problems and challenges gripping the world. One of those challenges is creating a smarter supply chain. Supplier Connection will help do that by allowing small businesses to connect with one another to work to meet the goals of the large companies.
But you’re right, smarter planet isn’t just about making the world’s systems instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. It isn’t just about making a system smarter; it is also about what you do next to unlock the full potential of those smarter systems. What are the issues and responsibilities that arise from that? Things like security, sustainability, transparency and job creation. Smarter planet is about using smarter systems to make economic activity more efficient, productive and nimble and to create new business and employment opportunities.
Q: You’ve been speaking with the Center for an Urban Future about those issues. What are some of the findings from their research, and how did those findings inform IBM’s plans for Supplier Connection?
Paterson: Their work highlighted the fact that becoming a supplier to large, multinational corporations is the engine of growth for small businesses, and that small businesses are, in turn, the engine of growth for the overall economy. The Center for an Urban Future’s study found that small firms can double their revenues and significantly increase their workforce after becoming a supplier to a large corporation. And their study confirmed that small businesses almost single-handedly sparked economic recovery during previous recessions.
Q: More specifically, what are the benefits small businesses can achieve through Supplier Connection? And what about large corporations like IBM?
Paterson: For small businesses, what we’re talking about is one-stop-shopping, enabling them to sell goods and services to a significant number of large companies. They can also take advantage of collaboration tools to work with other small and mid-size companies, and get on-line training, technical assistance and support.
Large companies will gain access to a broader and more cost-effective group of suppliers. And we think this exposure to new small and innovative suppliers will also help the larger companies to embrace innovation and change.
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Posted by
Steve Hamm in
- Analytics
- Government Services
- Green 500
- new intelligence
- Retail
- Smart banking
- Smart Grids
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Communications
- Smarter Energy
- Smarter Enterprise
- Smarter Food
- Smarter Healthcare
- Smarter Planet
- Smarter Public Safety
- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
- Smarter Water
- Smarter Water Management
- Smarter Work
There’s no shortage of contests for tech startups in this world, but IBM’s SmartCamp is different. The focus is on companies that aim to make the world work better, and is aligned with our Smarter Planet agenda. We launched the program last year in Dublin and conducted regional contests this spring and summer in Stockholm, Boston, Tel Aviv, London, and Silicon Valley. (This video tells the Silicon Valley story.) There are still two contests left, in Paris on Sept. 24 and Copenhagen on Oct. 7, before the finals in Dublin on Nov. 16. So there’s time for entrepreneurs to get involved. Check it out at www.ibm.com/ie/smarterplanet/smartcamp.
Posted by
Erica Topolski in
Instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Most often used to describe systems and technology, these words have echoed loudly through the halls of Lancaster House during the first few days of the IBM Summit at Start.
Imagination, Inspiration, Innovation, and Interactivity. This weekend at IBM Start a new set of “I” words emerged as the debates shifted to the people power that is and will be building a smarter and more sustainable planet.
Throughout the weekend one main idea was prevalent — changing human behaviour is critical to creating a more sustainable planet. On Saturday, business leaders were challenged to think about working with capital markets to change financial models, the need to change customer behaviour and attitudes, the skills needed for the future and how to make the journey to sustainability simpler for everyone. The debates that followed focused on how businesses could make more concrete advances towards sustainability and encourage the ideas and innovation needed to drive that agenda forward.
Then, on Sunday, the business leaders passed the baton to the Start Young participants knowing they could be the ones to win the sustainability race.
The Start Young for a Sustainable Future day at the IBM Summit welcomed more than one hundred and fifty, 16-21 year-olds to join the conversation on sustainability. The goal of the day was to empower youth attendees to grab the proverbial baton and start running fueled by the power of their imagination and ideas. Attendees were challenged to become the “I” generation and start building the planet they want to inherit by taking clear, simple and positive steps to build a more sustainable future.
Perhaps the most compelling directive from the weekend devoted to the people side of the sustainability debate came from Dame Ellen MacArthur who challenged attendees to “assume nothing, question everything and rethink the future.”
Video People & Skill for a Sustainable Future
Video Recap for Start Young
The IBM Summit at Start is honoured to welcome His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales gave a special address to attendees on the importance of sustainability.
To watch the speech visit the event live stream: http://www.livestream.com/ibmuk
Video Highlights of Day 3 at the IBM Summit at Start
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Abundant rains this year ended California’s three-year drought, but, long-term, the need for responsible water management and conservation continues. California Gov. Arnold Schwazenegger has asked the people of the state to reduce their water use by 20 percent by 2020.
In Sonoma County, one of the premium wine regions of the world, the competing demands for water from people, fish, and the wine industry requires the Sonoma County Water Agency to be smart about the way it manages water. It’s developing a new management system that gathers data from numerous sources and allows the water agency and its retailers to share data and coordinate the supply and demand of water.
What struck me when talking to leaders in Sonoma is how much collaboration and transparency matter in situations like this. With them, conflicts can be resolved. Without them, problems tend to end up being dealt with in court.
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It’s Water Week, so there’s plenty of water-related activity at IBM. Here are three items that are particularly interesting.
–The Nature Conservancy and IBM announced plans to launch a Web site called Rivers for Tomorrow, where watershed managers can map, analyze and share data about the health of local freshwater river basins to help out with cleanup programs.
–IBM’s World Community Grid, a network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, announced three new projects, in China, Brazil, and the U.S.’s Chesapeake Bay.
–IBM Research has launched a project called Creek Watch, an iPhone application that enables people to help monitor the health of their local watershed. Whenever people pass a local waterway, they can snap a photo and report how much water and trash they see. The data is collected and shared with local authorities so they can respond to whatever’s going on. Here’s a blog post about the program.
Posted by
Erica Topolski in
It’s Energy Day at Start. More than 160 business, private sector, and academic leaders are gathering at historic Lancaster House in London to discuss, and in many cases debate, the idea of smarter energy for a sustainable future. Continue Reading »
Following is a guest post from Rick Singer, IBM vice president of client experience, which includes our work with major sports properties:
Here’s a frustrating scenario for a sports fan at any kind of tournament: you’re outside the stadium and hear a cheer break out, but don’t know what action just happened on the court. At this year’s U.S. Open Tennis Tournament, all you have to do is take out your iPhone and use the IBM “Around Me” application to point your phone at the stadium and “see through the walls” to get up to speed on the score and match statistics.
Around Me is an augmented reality application, developed by IBM, for iPhone users at this year’s US Open that allows fans to get a glimpse of what’s happening on the court and also to find the closest restroom, first-aid stand and pizza vendor in the food-court. Now when you take a quick break to get one of those giant tennis balls at the Chase booth, or need a hot dog, not all is lost (in fact, Around Me could’ve found you that hot dog). It works by blending the iPhone’s camera functionality with the global positioning system (GPS) that is embedded in the tennis fan’s iPhone. All of this is supported by a smart infrastructure of IBM technology at the Open and backed up by our data centers. See here for a video that shows how IBM mobile technology is making the U.S. Open smarter:
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Of course, augmented reality and geo-location are great for enhancing the tennis experience for fans at the Open, but what’s also interesting is the implication for future innovation in mobile technology that goes beyond sports. IBM researchers are developing applications for mobile computing that span industries and solutions like Smarter Healthcare, Smarter Retail and Smarter Finance.
In healthcare, IBM is developing methods to transmit a patient’s vital signs from a mobile device back to a central location running analytics to evaluate and predict things like heart attacks. This kind of mobile web technology could actually save lives. Routine healthcare visits might also be done remotely in the future through sensor technology transmitted by mobile devices – these types of systems could even allow for more current and accurate patient records than what we have today.
In retail, IBM is looking at ways that vendors might leverage data from telecom providers to capture customer information and better reach potential clients. With data about what a consumer has recently purchased, who their social networks are and their current location, a retailer might be able to know, for instance, that a consumer likes golf clubs, has friends who like them too, leaves work in midtown at 6:30pm and passes by the sports store on his way home. In this way, retailers can target the right consumers in the right places at the right times through mobile tracking and mobile advertising.
In finance, IBM is evaluating the types of payment systems that will exist in the future. For example, with digital wallet technology for mobile devices, the role of banks will shift within a new ecosystem. By combining the data analytics that banking institutions will be able to utilize, along with mobile advertising for retail and GPS tracking capabilities, IBM sees the dynamics radically shifting in the future.
Today, we’re making a Smarter U.S. Open with mobile web technology… tomorrow, we could be making people’s lives better and helping to spur new business opportunities.
Editor’s note: Following is a guest blog from Mike Hausser, the director of asset management for the City of Cambridge in Ontario, Canada:
How do you start building a smarter city if you are a rapidly growing municipality of 125,000 with over 200,000 assets like buildings, sewer systems and roadways valued at more than $1.2 billion across 50,000 locations?
Here at the City of Cambridge, Ontario, we think we’ve got what it takes. And we have combined vision, technology and collaboration with the public and private sector to make it happen.
Today, in partnership with the Federal Government of Canada and IBM, we announced how we are using the Canadian Federal Government’s Gas Tax Funding to better manage critical city information and assets.
The Federal Gas Tax fund (GTF) is a key component of the Building Canada infrastructure plan. The plan’s intent is to strengthen Canada’s communities by providing predictable and long-term funding in support of municipal infrastructure that contributes to cleaner air, cleaner water and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Technological advances now allow cities to be instrumented, making it easier than ever before to collect data points and use that information to make real-time decisions in areas like traffic flow, water usage, sewage flow and overall water management, We believe a smarter city goes to work for its citizens. It measures and influences more aspects of their operations. These interconnected cities allow free flow of information from one discrete system to another, which increases the efficiency of the overall infrastructure. Finite resources are optimized.
Vision and creative leadership at a municipal level are critical. For example, some cities have used the gas tax funding to repave roads. We’ll do some of that too, but we have decided to take a more innovative, forward-thinking approach that lays the foundation for a smarter city in a number of key areas:
Water: It is a precious resource which is becoming increasingly scarce worldwide. Our new water management process calculates the outdoor water use volumes by customer. Through the interconnection of several independent systems, the collective datasets allow us to analyze the volume of sewage from homes and businesses against the volume of water coming in from ground water or rainfall. Problem areas can then be quickly targeted for detailed inspection. This process is helping improve the efficiency of our sewer systems and is reducing environmental impacts.
Traffic: We want to make driving easier for citizens of Cambridge. Traffic is counted and loaded into the new system automatically alongside collision records. This helps us do safety audits to more efficiently determine the need for changes in intersection design, speed limits, traffic calming and traffic control. This information is also automatically used to classify roads to determine the severity of road defects and prioritize repairs.
Our approach to traffic management also includes sidewalks. We have started mobile inspection of sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks each summer. The system tracks what sidewalks have been inspected and safety hazards and defects are identified on a map by the operator. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews. Progress is monitored to ensure defects are resolved within expected time frames.
Natural events that affect traffic are also managed using IBM software systems. For example, to better manage snow storms, we developed a set of response plans and templates. Resources are deployed based on the severity of the forecasted storm. These plans setup a series of work-flow controlled work orders. Each job ticket assigns work to resources in their respective routes or locations on a preliminary timeline that ranges from 24 hours to 24 days in the case of a severe storm.
Plow and salt route areas for roads and sidewalks are created for various levels of response and each area is reflected in the IBM system as a location. Based on the weather forecast, the manager in charge inputs an internal service request choosing the appropriate classification which represents the level of storm expected. The service request presents the Manager with questions that record the expected duration, nature, and extent of the forecasted storm.
The IBM system then generates the appropriate ‘package’ of work (based on the classification) with a series of job tickets each with an initial target start/end time, assignment to the appropriate manager, and appropriate routes and locations. These job tickets are currently paper-based. Our plan is to replace the current paper output with a “system-to-system” link by installing on-board computers in the plow trucks. In this scenario, the appropriate route is sent to the selected operator and the system will provide onboard navigation of an optimized route, re-optimizing on the fly to account for blocked streets.
Digital Infrastructure Management: Digital closed circuit television robot units crawl through sanitary and storm pipes to inspect structural and operational condition of pipe assets. The video and data is automatically loaded back into the system. Defects that need immediate attention generate a work order. Higher defect rates will trigger capital renewal/rehabilitation projects.
Being able to automate and more efficiently manage City services like leaf pickup, snow removal, water and traffic infrastructure gives us the ability to better service the citizens of Cambridge – today and in the future.
I believe we are living proof that a smarter city is reachable for all sizes of municipalities. With bold leadership and vision to use funding creatively, plus state-of-the-art technology and a commitment to bettering services and protecting precious resources, anything is possible.
Photo caption: A cambridge city worker uses computer system on bicycle to inspect sidewalks. The computer is mounted on a bike which is ridden across nearly 800 kilometres of sidewalks. Defects and safety hazards that fall within certain thresholds are queued and the IBM system then creates automatic service requests to generate the appropriate work order, or job ticket, for repair crews.
Posted by
Karl Roche in
Today we open the doors for 9 days at the IBM Summit at Start, just as a YouGov poll of over 2,000 consumers revealed that 47 per cent of British adults feel the plethora of information on sustainability is confusing and often conflicting.
The business community didn’t fair much better as 50 per cent of the public rate the way organisations convey their sustainability policies as ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. How can we change that?
May be changing that perception over the 9 days of IBM Summit at Start is asking a lot but we can begin to get things rolling. The key to the event is asking, what can sustainability do for business? This is a more authentic way to approach the subject so as to arrive at a place where the output makes sense to business and it’s consumers.
