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Cycle times

MM: Isn’t another dimension of supply-chain theory or supply-chain strategy, cycle time and defect rate? How quickly things move through? And how many times I have a defect or a rework at various parts?

MB: Clearly a focus on product quality and rapid processes—manufacturing and replenishment cycle times—are foundational capabilities today. Companies often lack visibility, quality and cycle time metrics across the organization. These metrics are often not visible to senior management, suppliers, and other key stakeholders in a company. The data may be buried in a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or an isolated system that tracks quality, perhaps even on a spreadsheet. One of our solutions targets quality and operations reporting, and it can make these metrics or dashboards visible to all interested parties.

Consider managing inventories across the extended supply chain—from suppliers, through one’s own supply chain through to your customers’ inventory levels. The largest players have developed sophisticated systems to have visibility of inventory across the channel or extended supply chain. The options for the mid-sized players are much more limited and often they have not been able to afford these systems. However, Web-based SaaS BI solutions, such as Oco’s offerings, now level the playing field and make these capabilities available to mid-sized companies.

MM: In your presentation at SaaScon, you had used an example of—I believe it was—Welch’s, as I recall?

MB: Yes. Welch’s is one of our customers.

MM: You were describing the notion of a vertical business intelligence and the notion of a horizontal business intelligence. Then you coined a new term called, “diagonal,” business intelligence. Could you just give us a quick reprise of vertical-horizontal and then the new neologism of “diagonal?”

Diagonal Business Intelligence

MB: Yes. Sure. This is the business school concept—vertical and horizontal markets.

A horizontal market is a solution designed for a specific business function or application area—such as a business intelligence software product. A horizontal market is one that can be used across industries (or across several industries).

MM: Databases. Web content management systems.

MB: That’s right.

In many cases, HR packages, for example. They’re not particularly industry-specialized. . They don’t have any inherent industry-specific requirements built into them.

Now, in many cases, in order to use them effectively, a company that purchases one of these packages has to build in or configure in that domain knowledge or best practices themselves.

MM: In fact, they really instantiate a database or tool with a digital business model. Or at least the logic of their business model.

MB: That’s right. And there is substantial cost involved in doing that. .

Vertical applications involve solutions that are really specialized to particular industries. In the retail industry, you might have size assortment planning for clothing. It’s absolutely specific. Not just for retailers, but for clothing retailers.

Or in the financial services area, a really good example is anti-money-laundering kinds of activities. These things are very specialized to a particular industry and add tremendous value. But the number of places that you can sell such a software product is a lot smaller than one of these horizontal solutions that you can sell across many industries.

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DAM as a Business Strategy

PvT: What type of competitive gains can companies expect from digital asset management?

MM: Well, first of all, digital asset management’s not a thing, it’s a strategy—that evolves through various what I call “process maturity stages.” For most enterprises, DAM entails operational digital asset repository. So that means you’ve got workflows by which to ingest digital assets and content, and tag these them correctly.

That means that you have content specialist, “cybrarian“, or asset services group who maintain overall quality of the both the metadata and source files—content, digital media, publishing templates, fonts, color profiles, and user accounts.

It also means that you have well-maintained metadata, descriptive taxonomy, and perhaps faceted taxonomy, by which to support very specific users in finding and retrieving what they want; and when they retrieve things, it means they’re getting the right file in the right format, including the correct permissions to use or alter the retrieved item.

Second a DAM-as-a-business-strategy entails automating activities, tasks, and workflows of digital asset creation. Automation both accelerates core business processes and lowers operational costs.

A more detailed examination of workflow reveals sub-systems for scheduling, collaboration, project management, (job jackets), review and approvals (online proofing systems—such a ProofHQ—that enable all approvers to use at one centralized commenting system, so everyone else can see everyone else’s comments), and dynamic rendering of images or database publishing of content to Websites or printed collateral. In more advanced DAM systems, firms use specialized XML databases containing product claims and pre-approved copy of marketing communications and packaging to further reduce time to market of products and promotional campaigns.

Third, DAM-as-a-business-strategy may include large file distribution, and more specifically large smart content distribution—automated packaging and publishing of finalized content into websites or microsites. Or it means that a firm can send a PDF file containing an ad to optimized for a particular magazine or newspaper—that’s been cleansed and scrubbed of all the bad PostScript data, funky TrueType fonts, and all of the pixel discontinuities or artifacts of vector and raster artwork files.

So, DAM-as-a-business-strategy become essential in orchestrating multichannel and multimodal marketing processes. Multimodal? The ability to pour content and services into engagement frameworks, engaging the particular criteria, means of consumption, and preferences of individual consumers.

Realignment of Sourcing Process in Marketing Supply Chains

When senior marketing executives really get DAM-as-a-business-strategy, they recognized smarter ways of buying creative services and marketing content as well as a whole new class of creative partners—small, nimble, and very innovative creative or customer engagement agencies—with whom to outsource or partner.

This oftentimes means renegotiating long-term contracts with advertising agencies and marketing service firms. This includes specifying the technical parameters by which creative partners will submit finished artwork, upload mastered digital assets into the DAM repository, affix the right metadata as a condition of payment.

So creative realignment—how a procures digital masters of marketing materials, ads, or online content—becomes the next phase of the process maturity model. We recently published a comprehensive white paper on collateral factories and how progressive levels of automation pay what what call productivity dividends.

At this point, many global firms punch into pan-regional localization factories such as Adnovate in The Netherlands or Arizona in Brazil. So that instead of having to manually localize or translate files in country, firms can centralize localization with highly automated systems.

This means instead of taking 7 to 11 weeks to localize print collateral for a reseller or retail channel across EMEA, I can now get that done in five to seven working days. Fabulous!

Beyond the lipstick of messaging

PvT: And from your point-of-view, how will marketing’s contribution to the organization evolve?

MM: Marketing is really about what I’ll now call engagement with customers and stakeholders that affect the purchase, consideration, trial, and ultimately loyalty and advocacy of customers.

Marketing remains core, fundamental to the value and purpose of a company. However, marketing must evolve beyond messaging—you know the old saw, lipstick on pigs.

Unfortunately, most senior marketing executives lack fundamental skill sets to innovate new services, especially digitally provisioned services.

Most senior marketing executives lack – are utterly bereft of what I call IT service management chops. And yet, the marketing executives that will have the big wins over this next 5 or 10 years will essentially be senior IT execs and CIOs that understand the concept of customer-making, the primacy of brands as a way of engaging customers in the value proposition, and more specifically, the provisioning of online interactive services as a core innovation to the customer-making process.

That’s why most chief marketing officers of major companies today will simply be out of the game in 3 to 5 years. They will have to retire out or do other sorts of boutique consulting because fundamentally they are suited up for hockey when everyone else is doing ballet.

Not good news, huh?

PvT: No, not at all. Not at all, and I’m sure most marketers would not want to hear that, so.

MM: Well, as I mentioned it before, William Gibson, has this great aphorism: The future arrives unevenly distributed, i.e., some people get it, some people don’t, those that don’t end up feeling a lot of pain and hurt as a function of being laggard on innovation-adoption curve and, more specifically, the future that arrived yesterday. We need to play a little catch.

Customer-making mindset, plus systems

PvT: Okay. So what do you consider as the core elements of a tightly integrated marketing model? And that’s sort of a loaded question…

MM: It sure is. Well, not to belabor the points that I’ve already made. First, you need to have a customer-making mindset; you must integrate the systems and compensation of pre-sales and post-sales to customer-making process benchmarks.

Second, you need to have the analytic discipline and rigor to be able to identify your ideal customers and predict lifetime or long-term value. You must understand your customer.

Third, you need to develop the operational capability of listening: mood of the market, voice of the customer, and patterns of engagement.

Fourth, you to put into place agile methodologies for the development of content and services used promotional reach and engagement.

Now some companies people start with the social media and social networks; they start with a voice with which some customer might connect and begin a dialog.

Social media enables a firm to initiate emotional connection with its customers, and get hints about what’s really going on, and then using those intuitions and soft perceptions drive a broad-spectrum analytic practice and develop true rigor about who is your customer.

So, you know, it can mean a Yin and Yang kind of thing where they feed on each other. It should result in a positive feedback loop: listening begats better content and services that in turn produces “earned media” in the form of praise and recommendations in the Web 2.0 mediaspace, that you inform above the line mass market creative strategies, and so on.

So to unpack your loaded question, the fundament challenge confronting the marketing executive today entails building operational capabilities within the context of an operational marketing platform—a business process-management platform for marketing-related activities.

Unlike marketing automation tools for “doing the marketing process”, the operational marketing platform must also support the rapid, agile development and provisioning new interactive services—essential software applications, service mash-ups, and widgets.

With good listening tools and process, combined with collaboration and scheduling systems, the operational marketing platform becomes an innovation-services platform

That idea nicely summarizes how innovation and marketing have converged in terms of a core competency, vis-a-vie this platform.