http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj Just another Blogs.gxs.com weblog Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:01:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en With an entire week devoid of any kind of air travel (vacation), I was a bit behind on my magazine reading. BusinessWeek published their "50 Best Performers" issue, but what I find absolutely amazing was a terrific article on the challenges faced by Chinese factories, due to rising wages ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/04/02/the-importance-of-driving-productivity-with-technology/ I just returned from a wonderful Spring Break vacation with my family, spent camping in our recently acquired pop-up trailer in the cave region of Kentucky. Mammoth Cave National Park happens to be very close to Bowling Green, so we took the opportunity to visit the National Corvette Museum, ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/04/01/really-just-in-time-at-bowling-green-kentucky/ GXS has a terrific set of clients in the retail industry, some of whom I have worked with for many years, so stories about the industry tend to draw my eye. The other day I was reading a widely syndicated piece from AP about retail retrenchment, when something caught ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/03/13/action-visibility-and-a-tough-economy/ A very interesting piece from AMR Research's John Fontanella on RFID reaching its tipping point.  This piece is free until March 14th, so click quickly! John is a terrific analyst, and I really think he hits some great points in this, but I think the most insightful is that the attempt ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/03/12/rfid-is-the-premature-standardization-over/ We had a really good session last week with an analyst who covers our industry exceptionally well -- and we had a really interesting debate about what multi-tenancy is, and whether it was import for SaaS (or any of the growing number of other "aaS's" sprouting up...).  For the record, ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/03/10/multi-tenancy-absolutely-critical-to-software-as-a-service-saas/ A bit of an unusual topic for me, but this was too good not to share.  Fortune Magazine recently did a wonderful article on the rise of the soy industry in Brazil.  What I found so fascinating about this article is how many trends can converge in a large agricultural ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/01/28/soy-a-component-in-the-supply-chain-of-everything/ The folks over at Supply Chain Digest have put together a collection of thoughts from industry and academia about what is going on in 2008.  Often collections like this are nothing but aphorisms, but this one is different.  Among the gems: Jeff Karrenbauer of Insight, Inc -- "the obvious ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/01/25/very-intriguing-views-on-what-2008-holds-for-supply-chain/ GXS spends a lot of time working on the concepts of "the hybrid model", where software and services are integrated to work together to optimize B2B, but this hardware and services combination is pretty interesting as well!  The idea of hardware service combinations is old hat for cell phone users ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2008/01/04/a-hardware-service-hybrid/ Hope you are having a wonderful holiday season, full of peace and joy -- but courtesy of a recent customer visit, I learned it is not at all restful for some elements of the retail supply chain... Many people don't realize that much of the supply chain activity (ordering, forecasting, etc) ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2007/12/21/a-hectic-holiday-season-for-the-supply-chain/ From time to time I like to blog about the work GXS is doing with partners, especially SoftwareAG webMethods and Microsoft (because I am involved in those).  Every so often, I'll get asked why we partner, and why we don't "build our own technology", so I thought I would share ... http://blogs.gxs.com/radkoj/2007/12/19/the-power-of-partnership/