We have had many questions from the team on how this will change our operating model and structure. For at least the near term, very little will change. SCM�??s management team will continue to run the company as Axon�??s supply chain consulting arm. Our founding partners will be playing key roles in the new structure.  Pete King will own Sales and Marketing while Chris Botha will continue to his focus on delivery and customer engagements. The rest of the management team and I will play similar roles as today - building out the company and ensuring our clients and our employees remain our top priority.

As always, drop me or any of the management team an email with further questions and we will expand on the good news personally.

Most notably, we continue to see strong demand for our workshop services as we assist SAP customers frame their SAP supply chain transformation. We are excited to enhance our strategy and assessment services with a value engineering service. Our value engineering approach consists of benchmarking an organization�??s processes based on financial and/or operational metrics. The result is an actionable plan focused on realizing benefits of an SAP supply chain transformation effort.

We invite you to discover what our clients have come to know: the best-run SAP SCM engagements use SCM Solutions.

Both EDS and HP dabble in the supply chain market but usually as a bundle to much larger deals (like P&G). The merger will have an impact on two components that will ultimately benefit us in the industry: Talent and agility. First, the easiest place to recruit top consulting talent is from the big firms as their HR doctrines require pay scales that benefit the average worker and always underpay the superstars. The best consultants at the new HP/EDS will likely find themselves caught in many layers of bureaucracy and be looking to go independent or join small firms like ours. I know from experience that big company inertia drags top performers down to the mean. The second advantage we will have is agility. This new large firm will be gunning for massive full IT and Business Process services so many of the supply chain specific work won’t be lucrative enough for them to take on - especially ones that require workshops to get started. The engagement process itself will be a limiter for them to jump into midsize deals.

How do we capitalize on this? By doing exactly what Jim Collins suggests: growing at a controlled pace and doubling-down on our core competency of niche supply chain technology and business consulting.

On the ASUG side, Chris and I had a chance to attend some of the breakout sessions that show the direction that SAP is going with Supply Chain Software. Most noteworthy and standing room only were:

1. APO SNP and PP/DS Influence Council, presented by Eric Simonson, SAP Labs and Tod Stenger of SAP Labs
2. What�??s New in SAP APO 7.0, presented by Tod Stenger

It was great to see the packed Influence Council meeting with many vocal new users of APO. Customers that started with APO 4.0 or later and are now voicing their complaints, such as forecast netting and CIF issues.

Both sessions talked about the enhancements to APO which are primary for process industries, better reporting on CTM runs, and better performance for interactive SNP and DP planning. Customers will now be able to do cross plant characteristic based planning in SNP. They also mentioned that tank resources are now fully supported but only from a storage standpoint, not a reaction standpoint, i.e. two products go in and one final product comes out.

(Note�??I will update with Link to these presentations once that they are available.)

We also had a chance to sit in on some interesting client presentations, these included:

1. Dashboard Reporting for Solae, presented by Subbu Subramaniam (Director of Applications)
2. Demand Driven Innovation: Supply Chain Transformation at Kennametal, presented by Gary Dietz

From a Sapphire standpoint the SAP Pods where bustling with activity and we noticed quite a lot of people huddled around Supply Chain Pods, Business Intelligence and Business Objects Pods.

On the final day Hasso Plattner, Co-founder SAP and Chairman of the Supervisory Board, SAP AG talked about the future of SAP and software in general. His admittance that Google is providing software which is stable, simple, and fast over the internet was very interesting. As he called it �??cloud software�?? is a reality and SAP needs to address this. He presented the SAP Business byDesign suite which is completely portal based. (See www.sap.com for more information.)

All in all it was an excellent opportunity to meet current clients, make introductions with potential new clients and run into some old friends and bosses. It was good to see all the activity around supply chain software, which let�??s agree, is good for business!

This past Friday, Omar Zuberi and I did a briefing on SCM Solutions with a group of analysts at AMR Research. AMR is one of the top research firms and when it comes to specific supply chain research, they are the best in the industry. The analysts each specialized in different verticals (like Health Sciences, Mining and chemicals, etc, with one specializing in overall supply chain) and peppered us with really great questions throughout the session. After a quick overview, we spent most of the time discussing our workshop-based approach to helping customers frame their supply chain technology options. One of the analysts mentioned that SAP implementations are a commodity but I disagreed that any firm can implement technology but we are the best at merging the technology with the business goals to get the real value from the investment �?? he agreed that the business piece was critical and liked our approach. The goal is to keep the analysts well informed on our progress, client success stories, and even failures that they can write about to help their clients navigate through their own projects. We felt the session went very well and was easily worth the trip out to Boston for the face to face meeting - we have added two new clients through AMR introductions so far and hope to build on that in 2008.

My partners and I will use this forum to discuss the trends we are seeing and hypothesize how it may impact other companies. I live in San Francisco and passed a gas station this weekend where the $4/gallon ceiling had been breached �?? ugh. We all know that rising energy costs will increase corporate expense ratios but I will go into more detail on what companies are doing to mitigate those costs in form of supply chain process and technology investments. Other topics may include how Operations and IT teams never quite seem to work together as well as they should and how some basic facilitation may help. Of course, we will also have some deep dive discussions on a new feature or set of current features that SAP has released in their Advanced Planning and Optimization tool or other budding areas of their overall SCM module.

The driver for this forum was that I was unable to find anyone else addressing this subject matter for the supply chain sector. Our goal is to allow this blog to help facilitate some of that discussion in a consolidated place and of course�?� show prospective clients that we are the best firm in which to partner to solve these complex problems

We are seeing an increase in the number of good SAP SCM/APO consultants looking for positions so that may be an early sign of the market softening. Luckily, our direct business is growing and we will continue to hire these folks so we are even better positioned with talent when the economy comes roaring back.

On a side note, the fertilizer business is a great one to be in right now. With the world population growing, poverty and nutrition improving, limited space for new farming lands, and the push for renewable biofuels, the world needs fertilizer!

On Monday, Chris Botha and Reed Jinnette talked about how APO's native capabilities can be extended through customization enabling companies to meet those tough business requirements. Attendance was great and the questions were probing showing a high level of interest from the audience. Nasir Iqbal presented tips and tricks for implementing PP/DS on Tuesday with over forty people in the audience. His materials focused on the key design decisions that all implementations face and specifically the items to watch out for - the real pitfalls that can crater an implementation. Both of these topics were well received as SAP customers who are in the throws of an implementation are thirsty for real answers and experience in the details and not just a high level overview. The guys did a great job and we hope the folks in the audience took away key learnings. Send an email to me (scott.barrett@scmsolutions.com) if you would like a copy of the presentations.

We have caught up with some old friends and met new ones this week and look forward to following up and continuing to build strong relationships in this tight knit community of SAP Supply Chain Management.