Avanade Blog: Agility to drive costs down?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Adam Warby of Avanade

I recently discussed the role of innovation in helping to differentiate and spur growth. And in my mind, an area of innovation that truly has game-changing impact is agility. Like the word “innovation,” agility is too often used as a buzzword, so what is agility and why is it important?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines agile as “able to move quickly and easily.” In a business context, agility is the ability for companies to stay close to customers and understand their changing needs, outmaneuver competitors, shift business strategies to respond to market demand and generate results faster. And often times, the larger your company, the harder it is to stay agile.

Even after four years since the start of the Great Recession, companies still hold a ‘do more with less’ mindset. This has put more emphasis on agility as organizations attempt to stay competitive with fewer resources. And technological advances have enabled new levels of agility that bring many benefits including cost, performance and revenue growth. One great example of agility is our customer, Aidmatrix.

Aidmatrix is in the humanitarian aid business – connecting those who have with those who need. More than 40,000 business, nonprofit and government partners use Aidmatrix’s supply chain management capabilities to mobilize more than $1.5 billion in humanitarian relief each year. During and immediately following a crisis, demand can reach up to 1,000 times the normal rate. When disaster would strike, Aidmatrix had to set up and tear down physical infrastructures at local data centers in the area of need. This slowed responsiveness and was costly. We helped them migrate to Windows Azure, and now, they can set up operations in a country at a fraction of the time with much lower costs.

Another example is our own Avanade business. As I noted in my post on Chris Miller, Avanade CIO, we have implemented an initiative to virtualize 90 percent of Avanade’s application services and reduced physical server inventory by 70 percent in the process. This gives us greater flexibility at significantly lower costs.

It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention. And it’s clear that business realities amidst economic turbulence have created a very real need to improve organizational performance by increasing business agility.

What do you think?

Read the blog on Avanade.com

FareShare Edinburgh Goes Live; Online with Aidmatrix!

Today marks an historic day for our partner Fareshare, the UK food charity. After a ton of planning, hard work and dedication by the FareShare teams, they have completed a 2-year network-wide rollout to get each of their operations across the UK online with Aidmatrix' Online Warehouse system. This involved converting a mix of manual processes, spreadsheets, databases and more into a single, uniform system and set of processes.

The benefits: FareShare now has a consolidated view of all their warehouse inventory across each of their depots across the UK. They can now access this information and perform global reporting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so they know exactly what is in inventory and what needs ordering. For FareShare, it is their first network-wide software implementation, their first on-line system, and it involved the support and advice of external consulting firm Accenture. FareShare is already seeing benefits from the system and anticipate many more benefits now that all their depots are online.

They also use the Aidmatrix Online Warehouse for KPI reporting to their food suppliers. FareShare and Aidmatrix are continuing to work together to develop the system so it can meet the specific requirements of the FareShare business model and network. Bottom line: FareShare will be able to serve even more people-in-need, more quickly and efficiently than ever before thereby supporting their mission to end hunger in the UK.

Aidmatrix congratulates the entire FareShare team on this accomplishment!

The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma delivers over 46 million pounds in 2011!

Monday, January 16^th, Melis Jones, VP of Programs, and I (AgencyExpress specialist) experienced a day in the life of a food bank, hosted by our friends in Oklahoma City. From food deliveries at churches in Oklahoma City and Moore, to tours of the warehouse operation and Worm Farm, we learned about the overall operation of a food bank “Fighting Hunger, Feeding Hope”.

Arriving at 6:45am, we spent the early morning hours shadowing one delivery truck making three stops in and around OKC to three faith-based food pantries, all of which had suffered damage from an F5 tornado in 1999.

Returning to the food bank mid-morning, the operations team began processing orders received through AgencyExpress/Ceres and building the routing schedules for delivery two days later. Next, a tour of the warehouse led by Steve Moran, VP – Operations, showed us numerous efficiencies, including the use of VoxWare technology to assist pickers in filling agency orders.

Out in the Worm Farm, we viewed the tilapia tank used to produce nutrients for the hydroponic farm. The Worm Farm is used primarily as an educational facility for groups of all ages, and I was invited to eat a lettuce leaf from the crop.

Later that afternoon, we joined a group of volunteers breaking down large quantities of frozen spinach into exactly 2lb. bags for agency orders; I felt like we were making an “I Love Lucy” episode alongside the Singing Spinach Volunteers which enthusiastically performed their tasks!

To complete our day, we learned about the receipt of product into food bank inventory and various initiatives managed by the Agency Relations and Programs teams. With a final “thank you” to Steve and his team, we headed back to Dallas truly inspired by what we’d seen in Oklahoma City.

If you’ve never volunteered at your local food bank, consider it. Countless hungry Americans receive food and hope from food banks such as The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma every day. Thanks again, to Steve Moran, Gina Ward, and their entire team in OKC. You are fighting hunger and feeding hope!

Charlotte Medley, Office Manager

State of Alabama: Individual Assistance Approved for Storm Survivors in Two Counties

OFFICE OF GOVERNOR ROBERT BENTLEY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012

MONTGOMERY – Governor Robert Bentley on Wednesday received notification that his request for federal assistance for survivors of last week’s severe weather has been approved for two counties.

Individual assistance was approved by President Barack Obama for Jefferson and Chilton Counties.

The assistance comes through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Based on individual needs, the assistance can range from funding for temporary housing to financial help with home repairs or replacements that are not covered by insurance.

“I am pleased with the President’s approval of this assistance,” Governor Bentley said. “Recovering from these storms will be a long-term process, and this individual assistance will greatly help people as they work to rebuild their homes.”

People in Jefferson and Chilton Counties who would like to apply for individual assistance can contact FEMA at 1-800-621-FEMA (3362). People can also consult the website www.disasterassistance.gov to register for assistance.

A request for individual assistance for people in Perry County is still under review by the federal government. Until a decision is reached, state resources, volunteer organizations, and other resources are being sought to assist people in Perry County as necessary.

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For more information, contact the Governor’s Press Office at 334-242-7150.

Avanade: Nonprofit Saves 20 Percent in Data Center Costs with Cloud Solution

Avanade and Accenture expertise reduces migration costs

Business Situation

The Aidmatrix Foundation has developed a global reputation for helping business, nonprofit, and government partners make a difference in the lives of people around the world. When disaster strikes, organizations in charge of providing humanitarian relief—food, clothes, medical supplies—turn to Aidmatrix for its webbased, supply-chain technology. The company’s solutions cover procurement, warehousing, donation management, transportation, and consulting and are built from the ground up with one goal in mind: to help disaster response organizations deliver aid as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. 

Natural and human-caused disasters follow no agenda, so Aidmatrix must be ready at all times to quickly deliver its solutions to partners anywhere in the world. Unlike typical businesses, demand for the nonprofit’s products follows unpredictable spikes interspersed with periods of relative inactivity. During and immediately following a crisis, demand can reach up to 1,000 times the normal rate. Aidmatrix stays prepared by hosting its solutions in three data centers across the United States and one in England.

“We have to maintain a certain level of assets at these data centers to be prepared for any eventuality,” says Michael Ross, Vice President for Delivery at Aidmatrix. “Until recently, outsourcing the management of the physical servers at the data center was an ongoing expense. We paid up front for space and physical infrastructure that we didn’t use all the time. We also paid for server maintenance and for updating our software. We would have preferred to allocate our IT resources toward enhancing our solutions.”

If a crisis occurred where Aidmatrix had no preexisting infrastructure, the company used to go through a long and expensive process of identifying a location to host servers and run its software to help local aid delivery.

Read the full case study from Avanade

Aidmatrix President & CEO Keynote Speaker at the International Disaster Conference & Expo

Aidmatrix President & CEO Governor Scott McCallum was a keynote speaker at the International Disaster Conference & Expo in New Orleans on January 18th. He also served as Moderator on a panel titled "Public-Private Sector Synergies - Mobilizing International Resources for Global Disaster Aid, Response and Recovery". Panelists include:

• John "Jock" Menzies (American Logistics Aid Network)
• Ty Prettyman (AirLink)
• James Lee Witt (Witt Associates)
• Dan Stoneking (FEMA Private Sector Office)
• Ky Luu (Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy)

Read more about IDCE

Accenture: Helping Aidmatrix deliver critical humanitarian relief assistance via the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform

Client Profile
The Aidmatrix Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit organization committed to providing supply chain management, fundraising and volunteer management solutions that, in turn, help relief organizations procure, manage and deliver aid when humanitarian crises arise around the world. More than 40,000 business, nonprofit and government partners use Aidmatrix’s solutions to mobilize more than $1.5 billion in humanitarian relief each year.

Business Challenge
While Aidmatrix had historically managed its applications from third-party data centers in the United States and several other countries, the organization recently decided to move the provisioning of its IT infrastructure to “the cloud.” Aidmatrix believed a cloud-based IT infrastructure would not only lower its operating costs, but also allow it to access additional computing capacity as needed to respond more quickly and effectively to crises anywhere in the world.

Ultimately, Aidmatrix selected Microsoft® Windows® Azure™ as its cloud platform because of its high efficiency, agility and ease of use. Also important was the fact that Windows Azure is hosted at one of six data centers worldwide, meaning that Aidmatrix’s critical applications would almost always be hosted close to a disaster area.

Microsoft, which had helped Aidmatrix develop a proof-of-concept to confirm the appropriateness of the Windows Azure platform, suggested that Accenture and Avanade—an Accenture majority-owned company dedicated to helping clients maximize returns on their Microsoft investments—be engaged to help migrate and integrate a number of critical applications to the new platform. Aidmatrix agreed. In addition to having extensive Windows Azure skills and experience, Accenture brought a deep understanding of the Aidmatrix organization, its technical environment and its business objectives. For nearly 10 years, Accenture had provided technical and consulting services to help the organization chart a course toward high performance. As Michael Ross, Vice President of Delivery at Aidmatrix, noted, “We had a long relationship with Accenture, so we had no questions about the quality of the work that would be delivered or the experience that would be brought to bear.”

Read the full case study