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Global Supply Chain Management For A Rapid And Dynamic Transformation Environment

May 6, 2020 BI News and Info

Large corporations with global operations define their global supply chains with the intent to match supply with demand. More importantly, they consider material flows, established manufacturing and co-manufacturing sites, storage locations, cash flows, technological advantages and restrictions, regulations, tax benefits, and market opportunities.

These supply chain operations run in technology systems of record, planning and analytical applications, and global trade management systems that support solutions to resolve a complex set of regulations to maintain compliance with export and import processes.

Many use global intelligent transfer price supply chain (GITSC) business processes to:

Optimize the landed costs for every product to the customer destination
Define the total costs of ownership
Define the relationship with the market and customers in terms of customer acceptance
Understand and manage customer satisfaction and market share

Here is an example of a GITSC that represents the flow of a product manufactured in China, reprocessed in the European Union, and finally sold in the United States of America.

Figure 1 1024x524 Global Supply Chain Management For A Rapid And Dynamic Transformation Environment

The transfer pricing strategy in this model shows how the product flow gains tax advantages by using operational ports in Singapore and the Netherlands to offload the tax revenue.

In this example, the GITSC model shows that the total global tax accumulated is $ 29.50, for a total accumulated profit of $ 611.50. If the same supply chain did not use the tax advantages of Singapore and the Netherlands, the estimated tax rate would be $ 192.30, with a net profit of $ 448.30. This example GITSC offers an 85% reduction in tax payments and 36.30% net revenue increase.

The following figure shows the GITSC transfer pricing model in blue and the standard supply chain transfer pricing model in yellow.

Figure 2 1024x599 Global Supply Chain Management For A Rapid And Dynamic Transformation Environment

Companies running GITSC models implement business processes supported by IT systems that allow the execution of transactional operations to comply with tax, foreign trade, and customs regulations.

Areas of opportunity for global intelligent transfer price supply chains

The first area of opportunity is the inclusion of an intelligent business system that supports decision-making to manage changes in the supply chain. This is both a challenge and an area of opportunity. These business-intelligence systems rely on the ability to collect transactional data across the supply chain. The objective of increasing the current analytical capabilities of the supply chain is to maximize global after-tax proﬁts by determining the ﬂow of goods and the transportation cost allocation between each of the supply-chain actors. The inclusion of simulation models is the first attempt to stabilize the decision making, with the changes inflicted on the supply chain elements, and the addition of artificial intelligence heuristic expert systems.

The second area of opportunity is to enhance current GITSCs based on lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. The opportunity lies in managing the supply chain ecosystem, not in an isolated and disintegrated industry ecosystem model.

This industrial ecosystem integration is considered the most important priority to enable supply chain ecosystems to efficiently operate in this new reality characterized by fast, dynamic changes.

Join us in our exclusive webinar session on May 19 to get an overview of the SAP Readiness Check tool, which gives a first analysis of your existing SAP ERP application, highlighting key project activities.

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How to Aggregate Global Data from the Coronavirus Outbreak

April 14, 2020 Sisense

As COVID-19 continues to spread, healthcare groups and companies of all kinds are under pressure to provide care in the face of increasing demand. Healthy Data is your window into how data is helping these organizations address this crisis.

As the rapid spread of COVID-19 continues, data managers around the world are pulling together a wide variety of global data sources to inform governments, the private sector, and the public with the latest on the spread of this disease.

In this article, we discuss how this data is accessed, an example environment and set-up to be used for data processing, sample lines of Python code to show the simplicity of data transformations using Pandas and how this simple architecture can enable you to unlock new insights from this data yourself. Let’s get started.

packages CTA banners Cloud Data Teams How to Aggregate Global Data from the Coronavirus Outbreak

The importance and impact of reliable data

Reliable data of this scale has helped to promote responsible decision-making in workplaces and communities around the world, including legislative action around international travel, the provision of emergency medical resources, the bolstering of financial markets, support for small business owners and proprietors, and medicine and treatment to those who are infected.

Households and families are also using this data to prepare for the nuances of everyday life that will change as a result of this virus, whether it be securing a paycheck, buying groceries and essentials, playing with their kids, inviting the neighbors over for a barbecue or walking the dog.

The importance of having properly-prepared data is paramount to the success of our attempts to mitigate and contain the spread of the virus, and the impact of information sharing at this level is truly transformative. But this type of globally aggregated data doesn’t just appear all on its own. Reliable sources need to first be discovered, retrieved, parsed, and aggregated together before they can be distributed around the world. This is not something we’ve been ready to prepare in such a short period of time until now.

Specific challenges involved with data related to the Coronavirus

Access to a reliable source of contagion data for a global event happening in real-time is not easy to discover. The major repositories that include data on public health issues or disease outbreaks can be accessed through an API.

Often the data is needed to be communicated to the public so quickly after it’s generated that it’s provided via more accessible methods first, leaving the programmatic access via the API for future historical analysis. These methods (PDFs or HTML tables) can be time-consuming to parse and scrape correctly and consistently across a bulk set of examples, yet that wasn’t enough to stop the developer community from getting started.

Since then, a team of researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins University has been retrieving PDF files posted on the websites of these organizations via programmatic methods and parsing their contents into CSV files stored on a public repository on GitHub. This repository has been starred over 15k times and forked over 7k times. It is being used as source data for engineers around the world to ingest into their data pipelines.

In providing a globally useful dataset they have connected with over 14 data sources from around the world and aggregated them into their data model. Not all these data sources should be treated the same way, they each have specific needs. Some data sources include confirmed cases while others included presumptive cases. Some data sources are Excel spreadsheets or HTML tables while others are location pins on Google Maps. And some are in completely different languages than English.

The team at JHU has done a fantastic job in performing the bulk of the tricky normalization for us, yet they continue to face challenges every day in conforming to the new shapes, sizes, and formats of data that seem to be coming online exponentially as this virus continues to spread across our people. In the next section we’ll provide the link to access this data and perform some data cleaning and normalization operations using Python and Pandas!

How to set up your own data environment for analyzing COVID-19 data

Data Access

Data access is provided by Johns Hopkins University. They have built a pipeline that ingests global situation reports from the World Health Organization, translates data from South Korea, China, and Taiwan into English and has access to 10+ other global sources that appear to be quite labor-intensive to retrieve (a lot of web-scraping).

While some cleaning and normalization has already gone into this dataset, such as converting all timestamps to a UTC time zone and addressing some inconsistencies related to update frequency, there are still plenty of opportunities for us to dive in and focus on cleaning and normalization activities that will unlock real insights.

#	Data Publisher	Scope	Source	Format	Update Cycle	Location
	Johns Hopkins University*	USA	GitHub	JSON	Daily	https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

* Johns Hopkins University is actively parsing daily situation reports from WHO and integrating into their data model for the open-source community to access

Data infrastructure

Here is an example of a simple, cloud-based architecture that is suitable for rapid deployment of a data pipeline. In the environment created for this article, a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) containing a Linux EC2 instance, a PostgreSQL database, and an internet gateway was spun up on Amazon Web Services and which was then connected to an external BI dashboarding tool.

How to Aggregate Global Data from the Coronavirus Outbreak

The pipeline manager hosts a Python installation and Apache Airflow task scheduler (developed by Airbnb) which operates the data pipeline. After simple configuration Airflow is up and running and is executing Python scripts itself, writing data to the database every time the source data is updated.

Meanwhile, the internet gateway allows for external BI tools to connect to the data using a trusted connection so the data can be explored visually, and reports generated for communication of information to others. This is done without needing to download a local copy of the data. This architecture allows for data in the database and downstream reports to stay up to date automatically.

Head in the Clouds 770x2501 How to Aggregate Global Data from the Coronavirus Outbreak

Processing and cleaning the data using Python and Pandas, writing to SQL database

And finally, we will go through a few simple examples of data cleaning and normalization performed in Python that can be used on this dataset in order to insert into a SQL table and query for valuable insights. The goal here is to format data sources into a common structure for effective bulk processing.

1. Combine data from multiple .csv files and dropping duplicates that may exist.

import pandas as pd
import os

df = pd.DataFrame()
for filename in files:
   filepath = f'csse_covid_19_daily_reports/{filename}'
   with open(filepath) as f:
 da = pd.read_csv(f)
   df = df.append(da, ignore_index=True, sort=False)df.drop_duplicates(inplace=True)

2. Fill null values with empty strings to prevent rows from being removed from subsequent table transformations.

df['Province/State'].fillna('', inplace=True)df['Country/Region'].fillna('', inplace=True)

3. Sort dates in descending order with most recent at the top.

df.sort_values(['Last Update'], ascending=False, inplace=True)

4. Convert datetimes to date and prepare to group and retrieve the most recent record from each date.

df['Last Update'].apply(lambda x: pd.to_datetime(x).strftime('%Y-%m-%d'))

5. Grouping and aggregating to retrieve the latest report from each day.

df.groupby(['Country/Region', 'Province/State', 'Last Update']) \
   .agg({
       'Province/State': 'first',
       'Country/Region': 'first',
       'Confirmed': 'first',
       'Deaths': 'first',
       'Recovered': 'first',
       'Latitude': 'first',
       'Longitude': 'first'})

6. Convert floating-point decimal fields to type “int.”

for col in ['Confirmed', 'Deaths', 'Recovered']:
    df[col] = df[col].astype(int)

7. Write the data to a SQL database.

df.reset_index(inplace=True)
df.to_sql('cssc_daily_reports', con=connection, index=False,    if_exists='replace')

8. Connect to your SQL database and visualize your newly written data.

In this graphic we see that China’s cases mostly leveled off after 3-4 weeks, while growth in other countries is still ongoing.

In this graphic we see the differences in new cases each day between the United States, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Fighting fire with data

As we continue to encounter global challenges at this scale, whether it be the coronavirus or another civilization-halting crisis, the importance of data collaboration across countries and state lines should not be underestimated. Not only because data wins debates, but because good data converts talk into consensus and action.

Govind Rajagopalan is a Senior Engineering Manager at Sisense. He has over 15 years of experience across both engineering and management roles with diverse companies, domains, teams, and technologies. He is excited to teach, help his teammates thrive, and have fun improving his craft.

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How COVID-19 Exposed Weaknesses In The Global Supply Chain

April 11, 2020 BI News and Info

It’s flooding the news everywhere: More medical equipment is desperately needed as governments around the world scramble to obtain more masks, ventilators, gloves, and sanitizer to support the latest hot spots impacted by the coronavirus. Nobody seems to know where to get these supplies, nor do they understand what the real demand and supply actually are.

At the same time, we see specific consumer goods items in extremely high demand. It is amazing that when it comes down to necessities, we all appear to need about 20 to 30 items, such as pasta, eggs, flour, milk, dried beans, and toilet paper. We have seen a huge demand for these items, which has led to empty shelves in retail stores.

China is also trying to get back to “normal” and restart production. However, there is a lack of demand now for many of the “non-essential” items they are geared up to produce such as cars, fashion, or high-tech products – especially when it relates to exports to Europe and the U.S.

Supply chains are broken

Just looking at these examples, it’s obvious that supply chains are broken.

We are accustomed to a well-oiled global supply chain that promises “same-day delivery” of many products. Local events such as extreme weather, wildfires, and earthquakes always had an impact on supply chains, but even if they bent, they did not break. This time it’s different – this time supply chains truly are broken.

There is lack of visibility, there is lack of collaboration, and there is lack of coordination.

Because almost all supply chains are still based on a transactional, reactive model, when we have an unexpected spike or drop in demand, it takes time for it to ripple through the multi-tiered supply chain. Therefore, it can take weeks and even months to adjust supply chains – and it will take weeks and months to get inventory out of the supply chain once we enter the “new normal.”

All in all, companies and the supply chains were not prepared for a pandemic.

We can rebuild them

There are some bright spots of positive news. Even if certain products are not always available on retail shelves, there isn’t a crisis in food supply or consumer products.

Also, many companies around the world started to re-purpose their production, with many brewing companies and distilleries producing hand sanitizers, fashion companies producing masks, and automotive companies looking to produce ventilators.

These are all honorable examples of how to make these kinds of changes on the fly, as difficult as they may be. We all expect high quality in these products (especially when it comes to medical devices) and many of these products have different regulations by country. Even if a plant can be re-purposed and adjust fast, what about the components for these products? Can suppliers deliver to all of these new production locations? The answer is yes, as it is proven every day.

This tells us that, despite the fact that supposedly “well-oiled” supply chains are broken, it is possible to react quite fast, re-purpose production, and provide the help that is desperately needed.

Technology is available to support companies to get this done. There are collaboration capabilities that ensure the integrity of the processes and the quality of the product. And yes, this can be set up on the fly – or at least in a very short time.

So, to answer the question, what’s wrong with the supply chains? They are broken, and they need to evolve to a new normal.

This will not be a mere fix of current processes and solutions. It will require a true change to a more real-time, data-driven, and predictive model.

I predict that all of the discussions about Industry 4.0 (the Fourth Industrial Revolution) and the digital transformation of industries will be accelerated as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.

To learn how supply chain leaders minimize risk and maximize opportunities, attend this upcoming Webinar with Richard Howells from SAP and Ben Wright, associate editor from Oxford Economics, to review a recent research study of 1,000 COOs and chief supply chain officers.

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Global Food Solutions Puts Affordable, Nutritious Meals in the Hands of U.S. Students

February 22, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Hayley Null, industry marketing lead manufacturing, food and beverage

Opportunity and challenge often go hand-in-hand — just ask Global Food Solutions. The Hauppage, N.Y.-based food distributor found itself at the crux of enormous opportunity a decade ago when the Obama Administration tightened school food regulations for the first time in a generation.

CEO Michael Levine saw an opening to take Global Food Solutions—then a young regional company looking to make waves with a healthy, sustainable approach to mass food production—to a new level. Levine knew that the big names in the space, companies like General Mills, Kellogg’s and Marriott, weren’t prepared for the changes that were coming.

“There was this massive demand that was about to hit the marketplace for better nutrition products on a massive scale for the school food service industry,” said Levine. “We saw this as a very unique opportunity to capitalize.”

So Global Food Solutions pounced. It started adding items to its list of product SKUs, adding school districts, and forming relationships with more distribution partners. Over the next several years, it found itself expanding across the country, and today it provides lunches for more than 5,000 schools, most located in underprivileged urban areas where student lunches are subsidized by the federal government.

Growth Breeds Complexity

But as the company grew, and its business became increasingly complex, its backend systems were not up to the task. It had been relying on a combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheet to manage financials, and Global Food Solutions’ growth exposed the limitations of that setup.

“We had these pockets of software that were doing specific tasks in the business for us, but none of them were talking to each other. It was okay when we only had a handful of SKUs and it was one manufacturer and we were only shipping in one state and it was very controlled,” Levine said. “But as we expanded our model, we began to push these systems to — actually, not to, but well beyond — a breaking point.”

The problems this created were ubiquitous. The company had distribution challenges; it struggled to track inventory; and its workflow from orders to customer service were choppy and disconnected. Levine recalls the company having to put band-aids on multiple areas where the siloed systems couldn’t keep up with the business.

“It absolutely was not going to be a sustainable solution by any means,” he said. “It was almost kind of running away from us, and we needed to find a way to get a handle on it because we knew that we couldn’t scale to the next level and do all of the things we wanted to do without the right software provider and the right services.”

The Search for an Answer

Finally, in early 2018, Global Food Solutions began to search for a solution that would help the company bring all of those pieces together. It looked at several options, including a newer QuickBooks Premier product and SAP for Wholesale Distribution Products. Ultimately, however, it turned to NetSuite, not only because of its current capabilities, but the flexibility it would offer going forward.

This was critical, Levine said, because the business was looking at doing some new things. For example, it wanted to create a workflow that would support the assembly of meal kits, which would require multiple components of the business to be tightly integrated. Those kits would be delivered complete and handed out as after school snacks for economically disadvantaged students who might not have other snack options presented to them.

“The NetSuite system was able to do those things with ease,” said Levine. “It’s built in a way that is ready to expand with us as we get there. The other software companies that we evaluated, they were just not able to do that.”

With SuiteSuccess, Global Food Solutions worked closely with NetSuite and had its system deployed and live in 85 days, allowing it to work with the system before the start of the following school year. Levine said the NetSuite Professional Services team made a number of recommendations throughout the implementation process that have really helped the business take full advantage of the technology.

Swift Results

In the short time the company’s been on NetSuite, it has already seen significant improvements. The company has cut the time it takes to receive an order, create a PO and confirm with vendors by 75%. For the first time, it has clear visibility into inventory, with data delivered in clear dashboard reports. And because its data is in a single system, Global Food Solutions has cut the time it takes to resolve simple customer inquiries that once took up to 30 minutes to mere seconds.

“It’s just amazing how we feel we’re able to get so much more time back to focus on growth and creation for our business and not worrying about things being wrong,” said Levine.

NetSuite also enables Global Food Solutions to achieve the scale needed to serve so many lunches despite having just 20 employees. The company relies on manufacturing partners for production and for tapping into their buying power to purchase ingredients, and also works with a network of distribution partners.

NetSuite has become the secret ingredient to making Global Food Solutions’ network work together seamlessly. It’s integrated with the company’s CRM, enabling emails to be easily attached to customer records, and is exploring an integration with Box to bring more data into view.

Far From Done

Much more is on the horizon. The company plans to tap NetSuite’s ability to bring automation into its workflow process. It wants to expand upon its demand forecast and planning capabilities, set up auto-generated purchase orders that would maintain stock levels. It also is looking to integrate with NetSuite partner Tesorio, which will help it improve its management of cashflow and receivables.

For now, however, Levine is simply enjoying the contrast between the past experience of running the business on disconnected, stitched together components, and enjoying the integrated, data-rich environment NetSuite has enabled.

Said Levine: “It has been an incredible breath of fresh air.”

Posted on Wed, February 19, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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NetSuite Lets Global Surf Industries be ‘the Biggest Small Company’

November 27, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Jason Toshack, GM ANZ, Oracle NetSuite

Flexible working has become more popular across the globe – and for good reason. Flexible working can empower employees to manage their own time, achieve a better work/life balance and it contributes to an inclusive company culture. Technology plays a big role in enabling companies to roll out flexible working policies, as cloud-based computing can seamlessly connect employees across the globe.

From humble start-up to a $ 15 million-a-year revenue business, the team at Global Surf Industries has been practicing a flexible working approach enabled by NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP.

Founded in 2002 and with a portfolio of some of the most well-known brands in the Surf and Stand Up Paddle Industry, the team lives by the mantra, ‘Life is better when you surf®’ and this attitude clearly shows in the way the team operates.

All employees are encouraged to work flexibly and in a way that best suits their lifestyle. For example, CEO, Mark Kelly, has been known to spend up to half the year running the business from a yacht.

“The most remote land-based location I’ve worked from is a small fishing village in Mexico called San Juanico, which is five hours from the nearest airport. But even sailing up the coast, if you’re off the side of the land you’ll still get a good enough signal that you can connect up pretty easily,” he said.

All of this is made possible with NetSuite ERP, because it brings together all aspects of the business in one place. As it runs in the cloud, the team can manage the business from anywhere.

With no physical office, employees have the flexibility to work from a location that best suits them, using NetSuite as a single source of truth for all operations. GSI uses NetSuite for real-time inventory management with distribution partners across Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa. The team are able to easily manage subsidiaries in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the U.S. with just a few clicks.

“The amount of time people spend commuting is unnecessary. Not having an office and working from home is irrelevant to our customers because of the service levels we provide,” Kelly said. “Our focus is on driving growth and providing an excellent customer experience.

“We have a ‘biggest small company’ mindset and it allows you to see what the business actually needs and often it doesn’t need people. It just needs better processes and that’s where we’re going with EDI (electronic data exchange) and automation, where we have scripts running through NetSuite. We’re eliminating data entry all together and we’re making all accounts payable electronic from our third-party logistics providers within a year.”

With a team of just 17 employees, Global Surf Industries is certainly on its way to becoming the ‘biggest small company.’ It now sells in 74 countries and is in the process of expanding to Europe. After all, life is better when you surf.

“NetSuite has allowed our team to focus on customers and work towards our main goal—becoming the biggest small company we can possibly be. We don’t feel encumbered by anything and there is really nothing we can’t do, it’s more about what we want to do,” concluded Mark.

Do you want to learn how to better balance your work and personal life? Read a special report on How to Run Your Business Without Burning Out

Quotes in this blog were originally featured in The Australian Financial Review.

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Posted on Tue, November 26, 2019
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Your Comprehensive Guide to The 2019 TIBCO NOW Global Tour Product Announcements

October 26, 2019 TIBCO Spotfire

The 2019 TIBCO NOW Global Tour has come to a close, but the inspiration to Innovate Everywhere will remain with all who attended. Each of our three sold-out events—Singapore, Chicago, and London—resulted in a multitude of innovative ideas to help drive digital business across the globe, thanks to our partners, customers, sponsors, and all who attended.

Now that the global tour has concluded, we thought we’d round up the most important announcements that were made, to keep you up to date on the latest innovations with the TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform:

Updates and Additions to the Connect Portfolio:

TIBCO Cloud Integration
- Now available in Microsoft Azure (Connect capability). Customers can now integrate their Azure apps, Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, and Sharepoint data all in a single cloud environment.
- New connectors available, providing access to Microsoft Common Data Service and as well as data from applications connected by TIBCO Cloud Integration into TIBCO Cloud™ Live Apps.
- The first iPaaS to provide native support for GraphQL.
- Child organizations allow for greater control and flexibility over the integration process.
- App-based subscriptions provide greater options to customize integration needs and allows customers to start small and grow as their needs expand.
Project Flogo^®
- Project Flogo^® now has a new, open-source web designer for building and testing resource-efficient streaming applications.
- CatalystML, a brand new open-source specification and Project Flogo implementation enables developers to transform real-time data streams for use with machine learning models—on a device, in the cloud, anywhere.
TIBCO Cloud™ Events can now proactively identify cases of interest to contextually identify meaningful events and determine next steps.
TIBCO Cloud™ Mashery
TIBCO Cloud™ Nimbus^® is now available on the TIBCO^® Connected Intelligence Cloud platform. It empowers business users to map, adapt, operate, and collaborate on strategic business processes.
TIBCO Messaging Manager 1.0.0, including an Apache Kalka Management Toolkit, allows for easier, continuous integration and deployment. It provides a central point of control and automation for all admins, operators, and developers.

Updates and Additions to the Unify Portfolio:

Updates and Additions to the Augment Portfolio:

TIBCO Spotfire^® enhancements include The TIBCO Spotfire Data Streams Connectivity Wizard. It offers a guided walkthrough for users to self-serve on connecting various streaming data sources, allowing users to connect to real-time data the same way they would for historical data in Spotfire.
TIBCO Spotfire added native connectivity for self-service access to TIBCO ComputeDB™ in-memory database, which is based on Apache Spark™ and Geode™ and optimized for analytics.TIBCO Spotfire now offers Snowflake Data Warehouse and Google BigQuery support. A new interactive AI capability in Spotfire allows running AI on selected data to explain the difference between selected and non-selected data.
TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Web Client now includes support from TIBCO Data Virtualization, allowing for unified views of disparate data sources.

Other Noteworthy Announcements:

Thank you to all who were able to join us during the 2019 TIBCO NOW Global Tour. Whether we saw you on one of our stops or not we hope you’ll join us in Las Vegas next year for the 2020 TIBCO NOW, September 22-24 at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino.

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Announcing The 2019 Power BI User Group Global Hackathon Champions!

October 12, 2019 Self-Service BI

It is with great pleasure that the Power BI User Group announced the 2019 Power BI User Group Global Hackathon winning team as…

Team Hydro-Québec of the Montreal Power BI User Group! Congratulations to our Power BI User Group World Champs!

Members of Team Hydro-Québec:

William Martin (Team Captain)
Maxime Tremblay
Francis Quenneville
France Cano

The Global Hackathon Judging Committee – consisting of Microsoft Product Team members Amanda Cofsky, Tessa Hurr, Kelly Kaye, and Will Thompson and 2018 Global Hackathon Winning Denmark Power BI User Group Leaders Erik Svensen and Just Thorning Blindbæk – remarked that the Team’s solution was visually very compelling, with a well-presented story. Great, easy to follow navigation around the report and beautiful drillthroughs. View Team Hydro-Québec’s winning dashboard and video overview to learn more!

The global hackathon has provided our worldwide Power BI User Group community with a fun and competitive opportunity to use Power BI to entertain, educate, and inspire people and facilitate positive change through the data stories that are visualized. Starting with local competitions, these teams were selected as the top teams in their local Power BI User Groups hackathon challenges. Teams were instructed to use data sets from public data sources only, and solutions could be built with either Desktop, Excel, Power BI Service, Embedded, or with any combination of these options.

Review all the final solutions here: Power BI Exchange
Local Finalists Include:

Thank you to all the competing teams, Power BI User Group Leaders, Judging Committee and community of voters for participating and making this challenge possible! Stay tuned for more insights about this Team’s hackathon adventure, as Team Hyrdo-Québec won passes to a Power Platform World Tour location of their choice.

While the Canadian stops may have passes, there are still opportunities to engage with experts and great users like these at upcoming Power Platform World Tour locations happening around the world during the next 3 months:

Don’t miss your chance to connect, engage and learn from your fellow Power BI community members at an upcoming event near you. Get engaged and join your local Power BI User Group community for FREE today!

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How to forestall the birth of a permanent global underclass

October 7, 2019 Big Data

Since last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, countless pundits, analysts, and tech experts have argued persuasively that major tech companies like Facebook should pay consumers for their data. A handful of forward-thinking business leaders are on board with the idea — just a few days ago, tech reporters discovered Microsoft’s plans to build a new “Data Dignity” team, whose areas of research include enabling consumers to buy and sell their data. Lawmakers are catching on as well. For example, at the federal level, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators has drafted the DASHBOARD Act, which would require social media companies to disclose the value of consumer data.

These proposals are headed in the right direction. For years, consumers have been happy to hand over mountains of personal data in exchange for access to so-called “free” web services like email and social networking. Our personal data has helped companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon become some of the richest in the world. However, while the biggest corporations of years past spent the vast majority of their income providing living wages to human workers, the tech-driven giants of today spend only a small fraction of that amount on labor (and wages are falling).

These businesses aren’t just hoarding consumer data — they’re hoarding the economic value that data represents, and they’re keeping their margins high by cutting wages and headcount wherever possible. This inefficient allocation of resources must be addressed, either by government regulation, or by the tech companies themselves. But where government intervention would likely be punitive (read: breaking up tech companies), a proactive response from the tech industry could prove to be a remarkable opportunity in the long run, and considerably less painful in the short run.

As it stands, the gluttonous behavior of today’s tech giants (Microsoft notwithstanding) has the potential to shut countless future workers out of an increasingly vital AI economy. In the worst case scenario, these companies will exacerbate income inequality around the world, precipitating the birth of a permanent global underclass.

Fortunately, all is not lost. As more and more jobs are automated out of existence, these companies could leverage the value of consumer data to create a new job market. In fact, paying consumers for their data might be the first step towards building a healthy AI economy where automation can co-exist with new forms of income and a thriving middle class. What’s more, this emerging AI economy could facilitate the creation of new income streams for workers that reward them for their expertise and unique knowledge, in addition to their data (far from a new idea).

Building a sustainable digital economy

We live in a world where the rapid progression of artificial intelligence and automation technologies is threatening to radically reshape our global economic systems, potentially eradicating millions of jobs in the process. These technologies offer incredible efficiencies that could very well eliminate most manual labor within our lifetimes, alongside many white collar jobs. Some new opportunities will spring up as a result, but that may not be enough to provide jobs for the 40% of workers who could be affected in just the next 15 years. This could result in millions of workers robbed of job opportunities and forced to rely on a universal basic income or some other form of government assistance.

This is all being accelerated by leading tech companies, who tend to be among the biggest innovators in AI and automation. For these giants, the elimination of human workers isn’t a “bug” in their increasingly automated business processes. It’s a feature. A March 2018 piece from the New York Times points out that businesses like Google and Facebook spend only about 5 to 15% of their income on labor. For more traditional players like Walmart, the share is closer to 80%. The AI economy is accelerating income inequality, and with only a handful of alternatives to our usual system of runaway capitalism, a revolution is all but inevitable.

The data market is still in its infancy, so it may not seem like a pressing issue now that today’s social networks only generate a few dollars per user at most, and that today’s businesses are far from achieving full workforce automation. However, over the long term, consumer data compensation could mean the difference between a sustainable future economy and a technological dystopia in which millions are permanently excluded from real job opportunities. Leaders in AI and automation have a moral imperative to find ways to integrate more people into the digital economy. Our industry must transition away from playing the role of modern day robber barons and work to build socially responsible platforms that reward people for their data, expertise, and skills.

Data is a resource, and data production is labor. With today’s tech companies deriving so much of their value from what is essentially unpaid labor, these companies have effectively enriched themselves by creating a form of digital serfdom. Data compensation is about more than fighting income inequality, or even just doing what’s right. It’s about mitigating the economic harm caused by our industry’s ruthless “winner take all” approach to consumer data. Royalty driven systems that pay people for the data that drives automation are not charities. They are integral to making the system work.

The efficient allocation of resources

In thinking about this subject, it’s helpful to return to British Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald H. Coase’s seminal 1960 article, “The Problem of Social Cost.” In it, Coase asserts that “the economic problem in all cases of harmful effects is how to maximize the value of production.” That is to say, when confronting economic scenarios in which one party causes harm to another, the only way to truly ameliorate those effects is to create “an efficient allocation of resources” that maximizes the value of production — ensuring a healthy economic system for all. By creating a system in which consumers’ data-generating labor is entirely uncompensated, our industry is not only failing to maximize the value of that production, we are deliberately diminishing it.

If companies like Google and Facebook were really focused on ensuring their long-term success, they would be falling over themselves to pay consumers for their data to stave off the rise of a global underclass. After all, Google and Facebook want to live in a world where there are billions of people who have the time and resources to use their products, browse their advertisers’ offerings, and make the occasional purchase. Likewise, Apple wants to live in a world where millions of people can afford to continue purchasing the next slightly different version of the same iPhone every two years.

However, these industry leaders are actively working to build a future in which vast swaths of today’s global consumer class will be permanently underemployed or unemployed — replaced by AI systems and automation — and also trapped in the indentured servitude of uncompensated data production. For modern companies dealing in technology and consumer data, true corporate social responsibility means consciously working to build and sustain an economic system that rewards all who participate in it, not just a lucky few who sit at the top. Paying consumers for their data today could play a crucial role in helping shape a sustainable, equitable new AI economy — one that’s rich enough to support a robust consumer class for generations to come.

Because if we don’t upgrade capitalism for the AI economy, we might as well kiss capitalism goodbye.

Antony Brydon is the CEO and co-founder of Directly, an AI-powered support automation platform.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Oracle NetSuite a Leader Again in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Systems for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises

June 27, 2019 NetSuite

gettyimages 1063562264 Oracle NetSuite a Leader Again in Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Systems for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises

Posted by Paul Farrell, Vice President, Product

For the second year in a row, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. has placed NetSuite in the Leaders quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Systems for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises.

One of only three vendors to be named a Leader among the 10 Gartner evaluated, Oracle NetSuite has improved upon its ability to execute and completeness of vision since the last Magic Quadrant, according to the report.

This is an important data point because customer satisfaction throughout the entire lifecycle has always been an emphasis for NetSuite, and the company has taken it to another level with the SuiteSuccess customer engagement model. Based on the experience gained from tens of thousands of deployments worldwide amassed over two decades, SuiteSuccess provides leading practices tailored by industry that deliver rapid business value. Intelligent, staged implementation begins at sales contact and spans the entire customer life-cycle so that there is seamless continuity from sales to services to support. It includes predefined roles, dedicated process flows and KPIs targeted by industry and pre-built reports and dashboards.

It’s not only Gartner’s data that, we believe, confirms this commitment to the customer is paying off, but NetSuite’s own internal measurements as well. In the past year that has meant:

45% faster go-lives
35% increase in overall Net Promoter Score (NPS)
97% increase in professional services NPS
45% reduction in implementation costs
10% reduction in change orders during implementation

It’s those types of results that has customers like The Second City in Chicago, the American Cancer Society and many more to sign on with NetSuite.

“Born in the cloud” as a multitenant application, NetSuite was created to run a business. It extends beyond just the cloud financials piece to provide a full ERP system with capabilities for Commerce, HR, CRM, professional services and more.

We believe, this is one reason that NetSuite is the only vendor in the Leader’s Quadrant that serves all the business sizes Gartner evaluated for in this report – midsized, large and global organizations.

Read the full Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core FMS for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises report.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises, John Van Decker, Robert Anderson, Greg Leiter, 13 May 2019

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Posted on Wed, June 26, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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The NetSuite Blog

Global Company looks to Rockton for Automating their Recurring Billing

May 24, 2019 CRM News and Info

Technology and automation go hand and hand. It’s all about increasing productivity by reducing the time it takes to do a particular task. With CMC Group, Inc. they knew they needed a way to automate their recurring billing, manual was not an option.

CMC Group, Inc., established in 1980 as a small label distributor. Over its 40-year history, CMC Group has expanded to include multiple companies of excellence, with world-class printing capabilities as the foundation. CMC Group has facilities in the USA, Canada, and the UK and sells throughout North America and Europe.

Manual vs. Automation

They had a business goal of adding subscriptions to their product line. After doing some research, they found Rockton Software as an option to help them with their business requirements.

Teamwork Gets the Job Done

The development team at CMC Group, Inc. were able to work with Rockton Software to fully realize the product capabilities and our requirement needs. “Rockton was not only exceptional working with us through problems and testing, but they also made sure we were satisfied with the solution.” CMC Group, Inc.

Life with Rockton’s Recurring Billing

CMC Group, Inc. can manage their customers’ expectations with proper billing and notification cycles within their Dynamics AX and CRM environment. The sales team loves the ease of use, with their buy-in, our subscription services have been an exceptional addition to help service our customers.

Expand and Grow

In the beginning, they started with only two subscription offerings for their customers. Now they offer 7-9 different subscriptions, with more on the horizon. This was all possible, thanks to their developers and the Rockton team. Together they made our ®.

What it means to Work Simpler & Easier®

CMC Group, Inc. goals were to meet the needs and manage their customer’s expectations. With this new subscription model, their relationship with their customers is stronger and allows them to communicate with the customer and automate the subscription process. They were able to take their Recurring Billing to a whole new level. They can manage the billing without team members having to do another step, and it is set up to automatically bill at the current rate on their AX trade agreement.

These are just some of the highlights. Please check out the full Case Study here.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

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