Brittle Applications
August 31, 2009
In a previous post, I said that MRP was a “brittle” application, and a commenter questioned me. What is a “brittle” application? Is this a technical term? What makes MRP brittle? All good questions.
A brittle application is one that doesn’t work at all unless a lot of disparate conditions are met. MRP, for instance, doesn’t work unless all the data is right, people know how to use the program, the demand for the products is stable, purchasing is also committed to minimizing inventory levels, etc., etc.
The notion applies to a lot of other programs besides MRP, though I’ve rarely heard the term used. But notice that it brittleness isn’t so much a feature of the program as it is the purpose to which the program is put.
Let’s take a simple example: a word processing program. For normal purposes, a word processing program in this day and age is not brittle. A rank novice can use it to type and print. But even today, if you want to use, say Microsoft Word, to put out a 16-page brochure, complete with illustrations, well, good luck, is all I can say. You try to get an illustration and have it float and change the size and put in a table, and–well, just try it, it’s a nightmare. So, to put a 16-page brochure together, Microsoft Word is brittle, but to print out a letter, it’s not.
The point about the MRP program that QAD wrote, which follows the APICS standard religiously, is that it’s brittle relative to the purposes for which it was intended. Pam and Karl and Evan (the founders of QAD) really believed that QAD’s could do supply chain management for manufacturing facilities very effectively. My point was that the program is too brittle. To get things right, you have to get all the data right and keep it right, etc., etc. And if you don’t, what you have is an overwrought and overcomplicated Kanban system, without Kanban’s virtues.
Are there other enterprise application systems that are brittle? Lots and lots of them, I think. Almost all the old, Siebel-style CRM systems were simply too brittle; they depended too much on the good-will of the salespeople, the accuracy of the sales model embedded in the system, the reliability of the sales cycle, etc., etc. You wouldn’t think that financial systems are brittle–after all, they have to work–but they often had components that were overly brittle: cash management systems, for instance, and fixed asset systems and budgeting systems.
What do most companies do when they have an overly brittle system? They use the system for lesser purposes. And they feel REALLY bad about it. So, the Microsoft Word user makes a brochure that is far less fancy, but more manageable, and the QAD MRP user uses the product for tracking inventory. And both of them keep on saying, “Well, one of these days, I’ll get around to really making this product sing.”
They shouldn’t. Brittle applications are brittle for a reason. A lot of the time, it’s because they’re really a special-purpose product, but yours is not that purpose. Some of the time, they’re brittle because they’re badly designed. Some of the time, the model they’re using (MRP is a good example) just doesn’t fit the situation you’re in. In any of the cases, the fact is that they really can sing for the right user, but that doesn’t mean it’s your fault if they don’t sing for you.
What do you do if you have a brittle app that isn’t singing? Give up on it. It won’t work for you. Get another app, one that works. Or change the process. Or just accept the fact that it will never work the way you thought it would.
In any case, good luck.
Is Supply Chain Knowledge Key for ERP Implementations?
August 22, 2009
I used to work at QAD, a small manufacturing software vendor. I subscribe to a QAD chat group, and occasionally people ask questions like the one in the title.
It sounds as if the person asking is peddling something–who knows–but it’s an interesting question nonetheless. What kinds of knowledge are necessary (key) for an ERP implementation? If you run a manufacturing company, is APICS (that is, supply chain) knowledge particularly important?
Certainly, QAD used to think so. When I was an employee, you got a bonus for becoming APICS certified. (APICS is the American Production and Inventory Control Society; to get certified, you had to learn how MRP worked and how inventory should be managed.) And certainly, when the product was designed, the focus was on matching supply and demand. The product was built originally for Karl Lopker’s sandal manufacturing business, and the idea was always to have simple, usable product that managed inventory well.
So you would think that the answer, at least for QAD users, is, “Of course APICS knowledge is key. Duh.” But I don’t think so.
You see, while I was at QAD and then for some years afterward, I looked at a fair number of installations. And what I saw was disheartening, at least if you believed in good supply chain practices. The systems weren’t really using good supply chain practices, at least as APICS defined them.
Let me give you an example, which APICS-trained people will understand immediately. One of the ideas of these systems is to reduce the amount of inventory you have on hand at any one time. To do this inside the system, there are two parameters that you have to set, lead time (which is the amount of time it takes for an order to be fulfilled) and safety stock (the amount you want to have on hand at all times). The longer the lead time or the higher the amount of the safety stock, the greater your inventory expense.
So what would you say if discovered that in not one or even two installations, but many, the safety stock and lead time numbers for most of the inventory were set once, en masse, and then never set again? Well, I’ll tell you what to think. These figures, which are key to making the system work, are not being used.
Now this was not just true of QAD Software; it was equally true wherever I went, no matter what software was installed.
So doesn’t this say that supply chain knowledge is key, after all? If they had supply chain knowledge, wouldn’t they have paid more attention? At first, I thought so. But then after a while, I realized that more supply chain knowledge would have made very little difference.
You see, that’s not why they were using the software. All these companies, it turns out, didn’t really care about getting supply chain stuff right. They managed the supply chain fairly sloppily–tolerated a lot of inaccuracy and suboptimal behavior–and they got along (in their minds) just fine doing that. They didn’t want to put in the kind of care and rigor that is the sine qua non for doing with these systems what they were designed to do.
What were they using the software for? Well, mostly to manage the paperwork virtually. Please don’t cringe, Pam, if you happen to be reading this. This is not a hack on you. The plain fact is that the companies needed to keep track of their commitments (orders), their inventory, and their money, and that’s what they used the system for. They needed a piece of paper that told people what inventory to move that day and where to move it to. And the system gave it to them.
To do this, though, you didn’t need much APICS knowledge or, if you didn’t believe in APICS’s recipes for inventory management, other supply chain knowledge. All you really needed was to be able to count, which most of the users could do without being APICS-certified.
So is supply chain knowledge key for an ERP implementation? Not at all. You can have perfectly happy users who have got exactly the nice simple implementation they need without much supply chain knowledge at all.
This answer, of course, raises lots of questions. What is key? Why do these companies tolerate sloppy supply chain practices? Wouldn’t they be better off if they cleaned up their act. Herewith, brief answers.
What is key? At a rudimentary level, the financials. You have to get the basics right, here, or you’ll never close your books. In a system studied recently by a grad student at Harvard Business School, 65% of the inventory records were inaccurate. Can you imagine the upset if 65% of your account balances were incorrect?
Why do they tolerate sloppy supply chain practices? I think it’s largely because more finely tuned systems are much more brittle. They take a large amount of care and feeding and their ability to take hard, rude, unexpected shocks is limited.
And wouldn’t they do much better using the systems? In many cases, no. You see, at most of the companies I’ve run into, the MRP/APICS model that QAD (and every other software vendor) provided is not actually all that accurate. To make a really significant difference, you need more sophisticated tools that are better suited to the specifics of your supply chain.
Comments welcome.
The Elephants and the Rabbits (Accounting at SaaS Companies)
August 19, 2009
Brian Sommer just posted a very funny piece on how SaaS CEOs can prepare for an earnings call. If anything, he understates the problem.
We have learned over the years how to respond to software company earnings calls. We look at license revenues; we look at revenues; we look at margin; and we decide whether the company is doing what it “should” do at its level of maturity.
What few people realize is that the rules governing SaaS vendors are different, so comparing SaaS vendors and perpetual license vendors is like comparing–oh, let’s try to avoid a cliche–elephants and rabbits.
This gives these guys so much opportunity to obfuscate that frankly, they don’t even need to practice.
To understand how this works, you need to understand the differences between the rules. I’ll stick with the basics. The key difference is that when a perpetual license vendor sells something on the last day of the month, they report the total amount of the contract as revenue; when a SaaS vendor sells the same software, they don’t.
With the perpetual license vendor, the idea of the accounting powers that be is that selling a software license is like selling a piece of packaged software over the counter. You sign the contract; they invoice; ka-ching. With the SaaS vendor, the idea is that they’re not selling an over-the-counter product, they’re selling a promise to deliver a service. And, since there’s always a risk that they won’t deliver, they can’t recognize revenue until they actually do that delivery.
Let’s see how this works in an example. What we’re trying to do is evaluate how sales are going. With a perpetual license vendor, at the end of the quarter, we can look at their reports and be able to tell, basically, what they sold, and how sales are going. If SAP sells a $1 million contract on June 30 (and ship and invoice), they report $1 million in license revenue, and we know that’s what the sales force did.
Now imagine that a SaaS vendor is working equally effectively. At the end of a quarter, they sign a $1 million contract that is effectively equivalent in the customer’s eyes. (Who knows, maybe SAP and Salesforce were competing and Salesforce won.) If we look at their revenues, we’ll have no idea that this is the case. Almost none of that $1 million will appear as revenue, because they are only allowed to report revenue for the days of SaaS that were actually delivered. For that $1 million contract signed on the last day of the quarter, SAP will report $1 million in license revenue, but Salesforce will only report $1,000, assuming they turned the product on that day and so delivered one day of a 1,000-day (3-year) contract.
This makes Salesforce look bad. But later on, things reverse. Imagine there’s a quarter when both SAP and Salesforce reps sell bupkes in a quarter. That quarter SAP reports $0 license revenue, but Salesforce reports the $90,000 that it earned from the 90 days of delivery on that old contract.
Two companies. Identical performance. Completely different-looking results. Now, we’re not completely trapped. We can get some idea of what’s going on, by looking at what are called the “bookings” numbers. (The booking is the amount of money invoiced during the quarter for the contracts that are signed.) Most financial analysts just use a quick and dirty rule of thumb for comparison purposes; bookings for SaaS companies are roughly equivalent to sales revenues for perpetual license companies.
if SaaS companies booked revenues the same way that perpetual license companies bill for revenues, this would be fine. But in fact, SaaS companies don’t necessarily book all the revenue from contracts like that $1 million contract that I’m using as an example. Very often, they don’t invoice for the product until it actually starts being used. So on that last day of the month, it’s reasonably likely that the bookings will be, say, $299,000 and the revenues $1,000 for that contract. But the rest of that $1 million won’t appear anywhere. It will be booked in the fullness of time, but by that time, we won’t really care.
So how do you compare the elephants and the rabbits? You don’t. To compare the two, you would have to know the value of the contracts that the SaaS companies signed And they have no responsibility whatsoever to tell you what that value is. In fact, they can say anything they want to about that imaginary $1 million contract; they can announce it, hide it, whatever. If this quarter, they want you to believe that they’re selling as much as SAP is, well, they can release figures that make it seem that way. And if this quarter, they want you to believe something else, well, OK. All perfectly legal. In our example, Salesforce and SAP are “actually” doing equally well. But there is no way of knowing this.
Oh, it gets worse. It turns out that the accounting standards that govern SaaS companies make margins worse than they “actually” are. So even if you did get data that let you compare sales accurately, the accounting standards would automatically make the SaaS company look less profitable than the on-premise company.
Awful, right? Not even close. You see, very soon, it’s going to get even worse. The accounting standards are changing. But hey, that’s material for another blog.
Delivering Sourcing Optimization
August 6, 2009
It’s a plain fact that there are certain kinds of math problems that even bright people don’t solve very well and computers solve better than we do. Some of these look surprisingly simple. If you’re a retailer, when should you mark down product and by how much? Or if you’ve got to make six deliveries, should you use one truck and make six stops, two trucks with three each, etc.
Entrepeneurs in the world of enterprise software have recognized this fact for a long, long time and have seen an opportunity there. They develop so-called optimization software, which solves an essentially mathematical problem and then provide it in various forms to the market. A few have provided only the engine itself, most of them ending up in I-Log, and many more that provide optimization solutions that address specific problems, like supply chain optimization, markdown optimization, or the subject of this post, sourcing optimization.
Now if there’s one thing that’s completely clear about optimization software, it is that the track record has been disappointing. I’m not just talking about the overpromising and underdelivering that afflicted the big-name supply chain optimization vendors. (No names, but you know who you are.) I’m talking about really wonderful products, like Joe Shamir’s ToolsGroup, which have struggled to put their tools in the hands of people who need it.
Sourcing is no exception to the general rule. In sourcing, optimization came to the fore when companies like FreeMarkets or Digital Freight wanted to set up sourcing “events,” where possibly hundreds of bidders could bid on thousands of line items, offering discounts for bundles of selected lines. What if A bids X for lines 1, 2, and 3, and B bids Y for lines 2, 3, and 4, etc.? This is one of those math problems that linear programming solutions solve better than human beings do.
A number of vendors still in the market place (you know who you are) proceeded to develop solutions for setting up and managing these events, which of course did a lot more than just figuring out which bids to accept. And to some extent, they worked; they did change the way many companies do business, and sourcing events are now fairly normal, with several large companies being big proponents.
But in my (admittedly somewhat limited) view, the optimization piece has been relatively unimportant. Certainly some companies have developed some good optimization algorithms, and they are used, but in the events I’ve seen or heard about, it’s not clear to me that the solutions they offered were actually all that optimal, and the reaction of buyers that I know to the solutions they offered have been tepid, shall we say.
I’m not surprised, as I say, because I’ve seen similar reactions from users of other optimization software.
Now I have a degree in math, and I’ve taken a course in linear programming. I know that the solutions they give you are better than what people can come up with by themselves. So are the people who don’t like these solutions just grousing? That’s certainly what most vendors think.
Well, the other day, I got a glimmer of the answer from some terrific research done by Vishal Gaur of Cornell University. (See my earlier post, “An Automated Replenishment System.”) He found in his case study that a solution produced by optimization software had a highly suboptimal operational effect because it was optimizing around the wrong things. The math was done perfectly, but the problem had been set up incorrectly.
This is always a problem in principle when you set optimization software chugging away. The software draws a box around the problem and finds the point inside the box with the best available solution. If you draw a different box (usually a larger one), the solution will be different, and will take longer to find.
In Professor Gaur’s case, the software developer had drawn the wrong box around the problem. Now what’s interesting here is that the software developer never knew that he’d done anything wrong. He delivered the software, and the IT people who were using it expressed satisfaction. And you might think, “Well, so what, even if it drew slightly the wrong box, it got roughly the right answer.” But in fact, when you change the box, you change the answer completely. So in this case, the users had to replace (manually) all the solutions the software offered (manually) with better and completely different solutions.
If you have optimization software, in other words, you have to draw the right box, or the answers that it gives you are not better than what you can provide, they are worse, often much, much worse.
Now look at how this applies to sourcing optimization. Let’s say that you set up the problem in one way. (You only allow bids from certain vendors, for instance, and you require that they offer discounts of a certain percentage.) If you draw the box differently, you will come up with quite different answers.
I was discussing this problem with Garry Mansell, president of TradeExtensions, a small sourcing optimization vendor. He argues that the only way of solving this problem is to provide a lot of services, along with the software. The experts that he provides (it just so happens, of course, that he’s in the business of providing this pairing) can keep the sourcing on track and make sure the right box is drawn.
Now I react to most honeyed words from vendors the way I react to offers of honey for my tea. (Hint: “No, thank you.”) But this struck me as roughly right. The problems that I’ve seen with implementations of myriad kinds of optimization software wouldn’t be solved, then, by fixing the software. It would be solved by helping people to make sure that they’re drawing the right box around the problem.
So who knows. Maybe Mansell is right. (Or maybe he’s just selling software. Or both.) But it seems to me to be a useful thing to keep in mind. If you’re looking at sourcing optimization software (or, more generally, any optimization software), don’t buy it and don’t use it, unless you have some serious experts, who can help you make sure that you drew the right box.
The Applicator 