Moderator:
Tony Baer (TB), principal, onStrategies; formerly an analyst with Datamonitor/Computerwire

Panelists:
Barry Vandevier (BV), CTO, Travelocity
Sandeep Gupta (SG), Vice President, Strategic Software Development, Equifax
Chris French (CF), Partner, Deloitte Consulting
Sam Paper (SP), Senior Vice President, Client Management and Credit Technology, Strategy and Service Orientation, Bank of America

TB: What is your strategy on .NET?

SP: We’re pleased with the responsiveness of ILOG in bringing .NET products to market.…

I was another fly-on-the-wall for the second analysts breakfast. This time round analysts from Gartner were on hand to answer questions around business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business rules management systems (BRMS) issues.

Analysts:
David McCoy (DM), managing vice president and Gartner Fellow
Daryl Plummer (DP), group vice president and Chief Gartner Fellow

Here’s a few of the questions I picked up on:

Question: Do you find that…

Fred Gewant, ILOG’s VP of Americas Field Operations, kickstarted the proceedings today.

Fred has been with ILOG for just over a year but was instrumental in encouraging ILOG to organize DIALOG 08, after a five year hiatus. Fred wants to make DIALOG an annual event, and given the intense interaction and positive energy generated in the first two days, the case for DIALOG 09 is looking very strong indeed! He…

In what I think was probably my favorite session of the day, Anna Ross from New Zealand’s Fonterra Cooperative Group Ltd. provided an excellent overview of her company’s operations and the many supply chain issues, challenges, and risks that Fonterra faces every day when competing in global markets.

True to the title of her presentation, Anna began with a quite extraordinary list of facts about her employer. Her first slide,…

In this session, Filippo Focacci, product marketing manager for ILOG’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) product line, presented ILOG Plant PowerOps (PPO) and how it was used to radically improve production planning and scheduling in Danone’s dairy manufacturing plants around the world.

PPO is ILOG’s new integrated planning and scheduling solution for the manufacturing process industry, specifically optimized for fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharmaceutical, and chemical processing applications.

The models…

In this session, Andrew Reese hosted a discussion with Rob Wehrman from 3M, Anna Ross from Fonterra and Derek Nelson and David Simchi-Levi from ILOG. The session explored strategies for handling complex supply chain networks and touched on challenges like green logistics, risk management and rising transportation costs.

The session provided real insight into the complexity inherent in manufacturing and shipping on a global scale. Below are a few snippets…

Moderator:
Steve Nunez (SN), product reviews contributor, InfoWorld

Panel:
Maura Cole (MC), Business System Specialist, aigdirect.com
Darren Koch (DK), Senior Manager, Revenue Management, Hotwire
James Taylor (JT), author of “Smart (Enough) Systems”

The session started with questions from Steve:

SN: How do you work with linking your business processes to rules?

MC: We work with Excel to test the rules. This is a fully manual process, although we can move to production quickly.…

Martin Brotschul, senior manager, Supply Chain Strategy Practice, Accenture

In this talk, Martin focussed on the impact of climate change on supply chain business models.

Customers are stepping up to environmental responsibility and demanding sustainability from the supply chain that produces the goods they use. The push has come from Europe but the US is catching up. Many companies are interested in instituting change before legislation is imposed upon them. Companies…

In this session, Bob Bixby, ILOG Chief Science Officer, discussed how optimization has become a key component in addressing common business and manufacturing problems today. He explained what has and hasn’t changed in approaches to optimization over the many years that he has been in the business.

Bob used IBM’s East Fishkill 300mm semiconductor wafer manufacturing plant as an example to explain the benefits that optimization and automated scheduling can…

David Simchi-Levi, MIT professor and co-founder of LogicTools, a division of ILOG

In this talk, David concentrated on the major trade-off facing supply chain operators - that between increasing plant capacity without increasing risk.

Redundancy

It’s difficult to build a forecast to build in risk. One way is to go through scenario (what-if) analysis. The problem here is that it can be difficult to predict every possible scenario and to determine which…