Manufacturing jobs coming back to America?

Read the below link about how Wal*Mart is planning to increase their spend on the US manufactured merchandise. It will be interesting to watch how the retail industry and the consumers are going to like it. But it will be nice to see some jobs coming back to America.

Made in USA

Kroger is the 2nd largest retailer in the US..

Check the link below; Kroger is second largest retailer now, overtaking target and few other retailers....good show!

http://www.usatoday.com/story
/money/business/2013/07/09/kroger-harris-teeter-deal/2501231/

Outcome based pricing model

One of reasons why IT services is thriving because of the disruptive changes being introduced in the market. The latest on the block is the "outcome based pricing" delivery model. While the concept is not new, it is slowly gaining traction with the customers who are willing to take the risk of testing the delivery model. Following article in economic times provides a good overview about the model link.

I am sure the model will be very popular as we move forward. This is also set to rapidly disrupt the people supply chain planning for the large IT vendors as the traditional delivery models are based off the time & materials and fixed price model which factor in significant resources through out the engagement.

Please share your ideas and comments..

A Retail Success Story of a different kind

The economy meltdown that kicked off in 2009 impacted most of the industry, especially the retail as they had to immediately adapt to the declining demand and evaporating margins. Amongst the big box retailers, Costco success story has been remarkable. Refer the link below to check how the company transformed itself in to a larger player. Surprisingly, the report does not mention the typical success mantra around managing demand or supply, it is about how Costco addressed employee retention and benefits, which  offered them immense advantage in overtaking the other big retailers.

Costco Success Story

Enterprise solution for Small and Medium Business

Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) need a scalable, reliable and a cost effective solution. Few options in this category include solutions from NetSuite, SAP, Epicor, Microsoft, Sage and few others.

Out of the these, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Epicor, SAP and Sage seem to have depth and have received good analyst reviews. Microsoft dynamics is making strong inroads in to the ERP fort that was once dominated by SAP and Oracle.

While the above solutions have been in the market for sometime. The next few years will decide the future for some of the SME focused solutions. Strong domain expertise, solution vendors' commitment and differentiation, application hosting, partner enablement and finally cost will be the deciding factors.

SAP has a range of solutions like SAP Business One and SAP Business All in One, which offer significant advantages in the implementation speed and the cost.

Biometrics..just the beginning

Biometrics has been some major advancements in the last 10 years. Finger printing and other techniques are adopted by various countries to collect the information of their citizens and the visitors.

India's UID (Unique identification Program) is supposed to be the largest deployment of the biometrics solution. This program will provide an unique ID card (called Aadhar) to approx. 1.2 billion people!. Hats off to the folks who conceived idea and building the solution.

Check out the links; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics and http://onin.com/fp/fphistory.html for more information.

There are so many initiatives conducted or work-in-progress that are aimed to improve the overall customer experience, help organizations reduce the cost of delivery.....this will be an interesting space to watch in the next 1-5 years..