Author Archives: Lewis Kilby

Showcase Project Success Stories

eChain Delivers Over $100 Million to Two Client Companies!

i2 Solution Experts eChain Technology supply-chain experts provide patent background research and analysis enabling i2 to claim $83.3 million from SAP to settle patent suit.  more		i2 Implementation Consulting eChain provides design and execution support for Kimberly-Clark i2/SAP Transportation project that returns $6.3 million in first 2 months more

eChain Designs and Delivers Cutting-Edge Solutions!

Solution Design and Delivery eChain designed and developed a custom analytical strategic marketing analysis and content management solution for FedEx.  The solution incorporates SPSS for survey aggregation and content management scoring and tagging  brochure

BizTalk, SharePoint and RFID solutions eChain was selected to design and build a custom Active RFID (RTLS) by a Private Healthcare Manufacturer to track medical assets, provide real-time inventory and movement visibility, and alerts. echain designed a solution that used emerging technologies (BizTalk RFID R2, SharePoint) to meet the customer’s rapid time to market requirement and delivered a functioning prototype in 4 months. more

SAP-Complete Renewal of Existing Accounting System(s)

When the Big 4 U.S. consulting firm and monster offshore staffing company leading the NYK Line SAP implementation began missing milestones and deadlines, eChain Technology was contacted to step in and provide engagement leadership to help bring this massive implementation project back in line and minimize excessive budget loss. eChain provided an extremely senior project veteran to work directly for the NYK Line executives to re-baseline the project, review and rationalize the project teams, and realign milestones and tasks. This effort by echain put the project back on track with realistic milestones and budget, and aligned the right resources to tasks to ensure success. Forward by echain Feb 2009.

Since 2004 NYK has been in the process of remodeling its entire group of accounting systems as part of an effort to strengthen the management platform across all lines of business and operations. This complex project involves standardizing accounting systems − formerly optimized individually for each job – across the entire group. This is a key strategy for NYK’s medium-term management plan known as “New Horizon 2007.” The plan was launched in March 2005, and it lays out NYK’s strategy for continuous growth. In April 2006 NYK went live with SAKURA, an integrated system that handles complex work requirements unique to the maritime transportation business and processes up to 600,000 accounts each month. NYK chose the SAP® ERP application to support the new accounting system, based on the software’s flexibility and wide range of functions to meet requirements unique to the maritime transportation industry.

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eChain Development Services

We design and build solutions that meet your vision in optimal technologies that ensures rapid and cost-effective time to market. eChain specializes in analytical and integrated solution development in multiple technologies, a COTS approach, and turnkey delivery. We are seasoned experts with a history of approaching projects of all sizes with an open minded, out of the box approach that drives faster development and properly implemented business rules. We thrive on challenges to meet deadlines at any cost and embrace leading-edge technologies.

• Dynamics AX Axapta X++ development, enhancements, bug-fix, integration, customization
• RFID – RTLS design, develop and install active, passive and hybrid RFID solutions
• Custom application development analytical and reporting solutions
• Middleware & Messaging development for synchronizing applications and businesses
• SharePoint development for intranet, distributed access and custom apps

Experience 100+ aggregate years designing, building and deploying enterprise solutions with exposure to multiple software packages/vendors, programming languages and technology platforms

Design Methodologies Knowledge and experience with agile and object-oriented methodologies (OOD), notations, and processes: Rational Unified Process (RUP), Extreme Programming (XP) , Unified Modeling Language (UML), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)

Development Technologies Extensive experience with the .NET framework and other technologies: C#, Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, ASP, JavaScript, J2EE, Visual Basic Script, Transactional development, asynchronous processing, HTML and DHTML, XML, XSLT, LDAP, .NET Enterprise Services

SOA Extensive experience designing and/or developing solutions in a Service Oriented Architecture

Server Technologies Experience with server software including IIS, MS SharePoint, Enterprise content management systems, MSMQ, BizTalk, Active Directory, .NET remoting, and Search engines

Infrastructure Technologies Strong understanding of infrastructure and security concepts. Working experience with server farms, firewalls, networks, and distributed systems

Database/Data Modeling Experience with database and metadata modeling, Oracle, SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

Customer Facing Ability to understand your business, prepare and make presentations to program leadership on architectural approaches and models to gain consensus, strong interpersonal and organizational skills, ability to work with executives and developers

Tools of the Solution Architect

Solution Architects perform the eChain Design activities, and are focused on solving business needs in an innovative and strategic manner. Decisions are evaluated against how they will allow the enterprise or a single software system to grow and perform in the long term. Great care is taken to create and identify opportunities for re-use. Budget, time to market, scalability and reuse are key decision factors in selecting the appropriate solution design from many alternatives

Business Needs Assessment (BNA) is a methodical, detailed analysis (BR0) and documentation of your companies business project requirements, business rules, scope, workflows, actors, use cases, process maps, etc., needed to gain consensus on the common vision of the business needs. The BNA is a critical step in successfully identifying and developing solutions that meet the business needs.

Fit Gap and Solution Blueprint A short engagement that builds on the BNA in which echain Solution Architects help you evaluate how closely the desired solution fits with your requirements and the improvements you would like to achieve for your business. The Solution Blueprint also helps to determine how to customize the solution to fill any gaps (so the solution can be tailored precisely to the dimensions of your enterprise and IT needs), and prepare a detailed guide to implementing your solution.

Custom Solution Design We design and build solutions that meet your vision in the optimal technology that will ensure rapid and cost-effective time to market. echain specializes in analytical integrated solution development in multiple technologies. Solution Architects follow a rigid methodology to clearly capture and document your business requirements, identify multiple technologies for Fit Gap and Solution Blueprinting, and deliver to you a documented Solution Design, recommendation, and time and cost estimate for realization of your vision.

eChain Solution Design Services

The essence of the eChain Solution Design Service is capturing and converting business requirements into architecture and design documents that become the blueprint for your solution. eChain Solution Architect facilitates business user and subject matter expert design sessions, documents the resulting design in industry-standard structures, and organizes the development effort. The Solution Architect and is responsible for ensuring that the final solution is true to the business vision and meets all the business requirements.

eChain Solution Architects are passionate, innovative, results-oriented individuals with commitment to success. We have extensive experience in architecture, designing, and deploying enterprise legacy, and web-based and web-enabled business applications. Hands-on experience in Object-Oriented Design (OOD), Unified Modeling Language (UML), stateless distributed architectures, and designing for scalability and performance.

Quantify & Recover Your Company’s Excess Costs

Your company profits are threatened by redundant activities, excess costs, inefficient processes and short-term corrective actions.

In the best of times, corporations and large businesses are established and run as a group of independently managed business units. Each unit has a set of performance metrics that, when met or exceeded, are often at cross-purposes to company profitability.

In challenging economic times, the cumulative effects of these corporate inefficiencies can be catastrophic.

The typical approach to corporate cost cutting is a dramatic reduction of inventory and employees to push down costs – an approach that hurts net income in the short term and destroys long-term viability.

The solution is a targeted series of improvements that are orchestrated to work together to enhance existing system capabilities and pull down excess inventory and costs while improving service levels and the core business. Results in as little as 3 months can increase net income even when sales are declining.

What is Included and How Does the Assessment Reduce Costs?

Quantify the Excess Cost Opportunity

Using our proprietary tools, we can tell how much excess cost your company is carrying in excess inventory, lost sales, etc. We can determine what cost and net income impacts can be expected by implementing the recommended improvements. This is a high level ROI estimate that we calculate in a few hours using your information.

The subsequent activities determine the specific actions that are needed to deliver the expected cost savings. We use the low hanging fruit method to identify and fix the easiest problems first. These are issues that are easy and inexpensive to fix, but have the highest value return.

Interviews and Summary Presentation

Key employee input provides great insight to the front-line and core problems. We perform a high-level interview with key business employees and executives. We then circle back for second interviews where necessary to resolve any discrepancies or gaps identified in the initial round of interviews.  Interview summaries are documented and provided as part of the final deliverable.

Demand Forecast

Using our own state of the art statistical forecast application, we reforecast your historic order and shipment demand with advanced algorithms and model fitting to validate your current forecasting capabilities and performance. Our objective is to determine if a vanilla system can forecast your demands better than you have historically forecasted. We evaluate your item and location aggregations for top-down or bottom-up forecast allocation approaches. We also look at any possible regression analysis that could help improve your forecast accuracy.

We will recommend and quantify appropriate enhancements to your forecasting approach and methodology that would significantly improve your forecast accuracy and entire supply chain: stock levels, and service levels.

Inventory Analysis

We perform a thorough inventory analysis looking at current, historic and projected stock levels, ordering patterns, minimum order quantities, volume discounts, pricing, stocking and shipping policies. We also review your current ordering system and procedures for best practices and optimal performance.

We typically identify several tactical (immediate fix item reports), and strategic opportunities. We produce up to 20 separate tactical inventory reports that allow you to immediately begin to fix your inventory problems and uncover root problems in purchasing/replenishment/ordering that can permanently fix your inventory problems. Typical tactical inventory deliverables include the following reports which detail top/bottom 50 to 100 problem items/SKU’s per area.

• Excess Inventory List – Where can you reduce inventory, and exactly how much to reduce without affecting service.
• Short Inventory List – Items that are consistently out and may be causing missed sales opportunities Minimum Order Qty – Items where the current minimum order quantity causes excess stock. Use this list to revisit minimum orders and discount pricing offset with vendors.
• Core SKU List – List of the critical products you need to stock, and optimal inventory levels needed to maintain stock & sales
• ABCD ranking – We will review your current ABC ranking and recommend changes if appropriate.
• Others as needed.

Recommendations

The final deliverable for the Operations Assessment includes the array of Tactical Inventory reports and detailed analysis of quantitative and qualitative work performed for system, process and technology changes that would improve your efficiency and reduce costs. These reports and presentation provide a roadmap for items that can be immediately fixed, and also more strategic fixes that can be planned and implemented in the following 3-6 months.

Recommendations are stratified and ranked:

1. Stop the Bleeding – Tactical recommendations critical for immediate improvements
2. Foundational – Improvements needed to ensure continuation of improvements
3. Strategic – Enhancements that align your business with best business practices

TESTIMONIALS

“eChain has been an excellent resource for our project. We have high expectations, but I would say that eChain Technology exceeded all of those. In addition, they helped identify other individuals in their organization when the need arose that were also fantastic. eChain is willing to do whatever it takes to meet deadlines and have been creative in solutions when necessary. It has been a pleasure working with eChain Technology.”
Amy Bare, Kimberly-Clark

“Lewis Kilby from eChain Technology is an excellent manager solving highly complex business and IT challenges. From Supply Chain strategy and optimization to Integrated Solutions implementations, Lewis has the skills needed to guide major change implementations on operating departments. Lewis’ success rate speaks for itself as he has successfully taken on very challenging projects in both IT and Business process. For RF Code, Lewis established the services division for a leader in RFID while globally integrating a fragmented supply chain. He fixed product lifecycle issues from Engineering to the Customer and reduced operating costs by 25% in the 6 months he was working for me on this project.”
Joe Dugan, President, RF Code

“I brought eChain Technology in to do an Operational Assessment of the demand planning and forecasting function. The expected result was a summary of what they found and an action plan to help us reduce our forecasting error and improve our fill rates. They completed a very thorough analysis quickly and presented a plan that was realistic and actionable. Execution of what we learned from eChain and their action plan was a critical component of the improvement (15%) in fill rates that we have experienced. I would recommend eChain to anyone that needed a similar assessment done in the supply chain area.”
Tony Sartoris, Perot Systems