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IN THIS ISSUE
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-- INTRODUCTION
-- BPMInstitute.org - Complimentary Membership for a Limited Time
-- FROM THE EXPERTS: Retailer/Supplier Collaboration - Reinventing the Future
-- FROM THE TRENCHES: Cost-Effective SAP Support
-- EARLY BIRD OFFER for BrainStorm San Francisco
-- The BrainStorm Difference
-- Calendar of Upcoming Events
-- Contact Us
-- BrainStorm Event Management Services
-- Changing Your Subscription Information

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INTRODUCTION:
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Business Process Management is one of the top concerns among executives today and as announced in the last issue, BrainStorm has launched a peer to peer exchange dedicated to BPM that you should check out. We have aggregated all our BPM material there, so you can easily get the answers you need about process management, along with a lot of other features. Go to BPMInstitute.org to join - membership is complimentary for the remainder of 2003.

In this issue we are covering two presentations from our Chicago conference. The first is by Cathy Hotka, formerly of the National Retail Federation and currently a consultant for retail issues. Cathy has been working with the International Mass Retail Association (IMRA), a group started by Sam Walton 30 years ago. She has organized the Retail IT Leaders Council for this group, and has recruited an impressive list of retailers and manufacturers. The focus is on collaboration, and they are talking about things and sharing information, often between direct competitors, that would have been unheard of just a few years ago. Read about retail on the cutting edge below.

On the outsourcing side of the conference, we are covering a case study on Cost-Effective SAP Support given by Seal Consulting, for Reilly Industries, a manufacturer of chemicals, textiles, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. Rahul Sethi from Seal gave the talk and explained how Reilly and Seal developed and implemented the project. There were three major steps in the process, involving both onsite and offsite centers and teams. Reilly's outsourcing effort is a good example of how careful planning leads to success. Read about it below.

Now is the time to plan to join us in either San Francisco (Sept. 15-17) or New York (Nov. 4-6).

Click here for agendas from BrainStorm San Francisco. We look forward to seeing you there.

Jon Huntress
Editor
 

The BrainStorm Group has developed a loyal following by providing the high tech industry with good, reliable, current, and unbiased information about technical issues since 1997. Interest in Business Process Management (BPM) has been growing rapidly in the past two years and has been a major topic at BrainStorm's Business Integration conferences.

Gregg Rock, CEO of BrainStorm, recognized the need for a clearing house or forum for information on what is happening in the BPM space. Acting on this need, and the many requests from BPM practitioners and professionals, BrainStorm has developed and will host a new site dedicated to peer to peer exchange in the BPM space.

The BPM Institute is officially launching today. Site features include:

• Access to dedicated BPM news, case studies and articles
• Free downloads of white papers and research
• Private peer to peer discussions
• Submit your articles to the BPM Bulletin
• Discounted/complimentary conference registration
• Solution locator directory
• Access to archived presentations from live events
• Roundtable meetings with industry experts and analysts

Check it out at BPMInstitute.org, and look for a dedicated announcement about the new site in your inbox soon. We put a lot of effort into making this site a primary resource for the BPM professional and welcome your feedback.

Complimentary membership is being offered during an introductory period - Join Today!

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FROM THE EXPERTS: Retailer/Supplier Collaboration -
Reinventing the Future
FEATURING: Cathy Hotka is principal of Cathy Hotka &
Associates
by Jon Huntress
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Cathy Hotka is principal of Cathy Hotka & Associates, a Washington DC based retail consultancy. She advises software companies and trade associations that work with major retailers and their vendors who supply the products.

Formerly of the National Retail Federation, Cathy now has her own consulting company. One of the clients she is presently working with is the International Mass Retail Association (IMRA). She is organizing their Retail IT Leaders Council. This group already has more than 30 members including Wal-Mart, Target, Dollar General, Coca-Cola and other heavies in the retail space. The goal is to facilitate IT collaboration between retailers and suppliers. The IMRA was set up 30 years ago by Sam Walton. Cathy said that creating this kind of council is much harder than creating a CIO council. CIOs are easy to find, but how do you find those responsible for collaboration of IT and business processes?

Cathy began her talk by listing some of the benefits of inter-company collaboration that have already been realized. Many of these companies on the Council do no business with each other, yet their IT needs are the same. There are big advantages for collaboration even among direct competitors. Cathy said that this kind of collaboration, unheard of just a few years ago, is now happening all the time. The benefits include:

• Member exchanges
• CPFR Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment
• Joint standards on innovations like Auto-ID (use of radio frequency tags on pallets or individual products)
• Floor-Ready Merchandise (hanger and tag requirements pre-established and ready to hang in the store

Future areas where collaboration is needed are:

• Image transfer (push/pull, mechanisms, resolution, storage media)
• Meta-data (many companies still share data about data on paper)
• Optimization data (use of statistical analysis on data to add value - no best practices yet)
• Collaborative product design (this will grow)
• Customer information

Cathy related that one company forced collaboration between their database and POS vendors. The CIO got the two vendors in the same room and told them that their products had to talk to each other and it wasn't his job to make that happen, it was theirs. All he offered them was word-of-mouth kudos if they got it to work, but if they couldn't, he would drop them both.

Collaboration touches all areas, said Cathy. With merchandise collaboration, it helps to know what is selling, where it is selling and how it sells. Currently, the manufacturers who make the product don't know the answers to these questions. With price collaboration, it would really help to know what the introductory price should be, the sale price, the markdown price, along with a markdown schedule based on certain triggers. Pricing is often done by the seat of the pants. Now new software algorithms are helping make these decisions.

Content management is a huge area of concern. Some of the issues are:

• Who owns the content at the manufacturer?
• How is it made available to the retailer?
• Who owns it at the retail company? (advertising, marketing, IT, merchandising, planning and allocation?)
• How do you archive old pictures no longer needed?
• Draft/mock-up pictures?
• What do we have on the web site?
• Expiration date on the picture? (image meta-data)
• Model in the picture? Will the model allow publication on the Web?
• Do you own all the images you have on your web site?

Cathy said she called the top people in mail-order catalogs and asked how they handled their image content, and most said they still do it on paper.

A new area of collaboration is on the product itself. Cathy said that one of the big problems in retail is that information has traditionally only traveled in one direction, from the manufacturer to the retailer to the customer. Many things inhibit two-way communication. Examples are a messaging format for transfer of data and what kind of collaboration software to use. Currently, email, phone, fax, and snail mail are used. Other considerations are how to share the data and with whom, how is it stored, and who owns it. These are business process issues that need to be addressed.

Other mechanical issues are:

• Extranets, common data elements, XML
• Access and security (who has access?)
• Posting of information (who does it and when?)
• Who can download?
• Protecting personal information

Collaboration can be very good for retailers and suppliers. Suppliers get increased relevance with retailers, and a better view of the end customers. Retailers get usable information to help spur assisted sales. Cathy said the IMRA Retail IT Leaders Council will address inter-company collaboration including the issues of protocols, best practices, collaborative forecasting, and the "Retail Demand Network." Two-way communication is actually essential to catch trends. Cathy pointed out that if the NEMS Music Store had been a chain store, the Beatles might never have been discovered. Brian Epstein had three people ask him for a record by a group called the Beatles, and he had never heard of them so he sought them out and signed them.

The bottom line is more profits. Doing business the old way is no longer viable for either the retailer or supplier. Technology allows for real collaboration now using XML, IP, and HTML. The proprietary systems don't work or are too expensive, and non-proprietary means web services of some kind. Security needs to become more important than it is today.

Collaboration is just beginning, but already the direction and benefits are clear. According to Cathy, we can now actually track customer desire, with collaboration allowing demand creation. Demand creation means strong brand loyalty and that means very strong repeat business, and this is what retail is all about.

There were several very interesting questions after the talk. You can hear this presentation and view Cathy's slides by logging on to BrainStorm University.
   

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FROM THE TRENCHES: Cost-Effective SAP Support:
Leveraging our Solution Centers for Projects and Support at
Reilly Industries
FEATURING: Rahul Sethi, Seal Consulting, Director of
Outsourcing and Technology
by Jon Huntress
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Reilly Industries has plants in the US, Europe, China and India. They make pharmaceuticals, vitamins, photographic chemicals, textiles, adhesives, agricultural chemicals, rubber, detergents, catalysts, corrosion inhibitors, and additives for food and animal feed. Outsourcing enabled Reilly to lower support costs and design a high-quality support structure that provides their worldwide SAP users with a stable and rapid response along with a full-time support and analysis team for their business users.

Reilly has an SAP ERP system running on a Unix operating system and an Oracle database that went live in 1998. The challenges were limited and shrinking budgets, limited technical resources, and limited expertise. End-user satisfaction was not high. The solution was to outsource much of Reilly's application management that included: