Exclusive interview with Gary Master, Publisher, DC Velocity
On-Demand Labor Management & Productivity Solutions
Next View Software Launches On-Demand Labor Solution May 18th, 2010
| Next View announced it has launched its industry leading On-Demand, Subscription-based Labor Management (LMS) solution. Gary Master, Publisher at DC Velocity (www.dcvelocity.com) recently interviewed Bob Rosales, Business Development Leader of Next View about this announcement. The following interview will shed some light on this innovative offering. |
Gary Master: Why On-Demand LMS?
Bob Rosales: Next View Software’s solutions are all web-based and available in either an On-Demand or traditional on-premise model depending on the client’s needs. We have been successful with our On-Demand WMS and evaluated the Labor Management & Productivity market and saw an opportunity to fill a gap that exists among traditional LMS providers. We have listened to many prospects and they all want to take advantage of the productivity improvements and labor savings associated with an LMS, but were unwilling to commit the dollars associated with traditional LMS offerings currently available and they wanted more than just a simple productivity reporting tool that lower-end vendors provide. Our On-Demand LMS product and service offering allows our clients to implement these savings in a shorter period of time and at a greatly reduced costs compared to traditional hardware/software license offerings. Our On-Demand LMS is subscription based and offers customers many benefits including: elimination of large capital expenditures associated with most traditional LMS implementations; minimizes the need for scarce IT resources; allows customers to ramp up and down very easily based on seasonal workforce requirements and as they rollout the solution across their supply chain network. At the end of the day, it’s all about driving a better ROI and time to value for our clients.
Gary Master: What are the current capabilities of Next View’s On-Demand LMS?
Bob Rosales: Next View’s On-Demand LMS is a feature/function rich Labor Management and Productivity solution. We are providing what many analysts and consultants describe as “Tier 1” functionality at a much more attractive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Our On-Demand LMS offers clients an even stronger ROI and payback over traditional LMS solutions and further offers them capabilities beyond those that they would receive with lower-end productivity reporting systems. Next View’s On-Demand LMS supports a wide variety of labor standards (Engineered Labor Standards, MOST, MTM, historical averages and more) as well as configurable drill-down dashboards and extensive reporting and query capabilities. We support our clients further with labor planning, time & attendance integration, incentive reporting and more. Together with our implementation partners we can offer a very flexible and scalable menu of services including implementation, training, on-going audit and review all in support of our client’s Lean and continuous improvement initiatives. With Next View’s On-Demand LMS we can provide the benefits of labor savings to customers with a single distribution center as well as those customers with large, global supply chain operations.
Gary Master: What is the future of Next View’s LMS product?
Bob Rosales: That’s a great question! Clearly we will continue to expand our current functionality and we will look to add new functionality based on input from our customer community, partners and the market in general. The workforce productivity market has been around for a long time and continues to evolve in terms of functionality and technology. As an On-Demand, web-based application we foresee excellent possibilities for additional functionality, stronger vertically-focused solutions as well as more standardization of ‘engineered standards libraries’. We see advances coming in terms of Labor Forecasting & Budgeting; more sophisticated scheduling; more advanced personnel coaching and development and of course, increased visibility with solutions such as Next View Live. LMS solutions can have a tremendously positive impact not only on your supply chain operations but they clearly crossover into HR and Financial Management. The enterprise-wide benefits are endless.
Gary Master: Is this a re-packaged version of your full function LMS?
Bob Rosales: No, this is the way our LMS was designed from the beginning. Many of our competitors go to market with several different versions and flavors of software to meet these market demands. In fact, we see many competitors buying smaller, less-functionally rich products to address the on-demand market. The advantage with our solution is that we offer Tier 1 functionality on a very scalable platform – it is the same software for all customers. With our integrated workflow, we make it very easy to implement our solutions across warehouses that are very simple as well as the most complex DCs out there. The benefit is that our clients deal with one solution and the result is greatly reduced training, implementation and on-going support costs – they are not dealing with “Flavor X” in their simple DCs and “Flavor Y” in their more complex facilities. With Next View, they implement a single solution, it’s that simple.
Gary Master: Can I implement Next View’s On-Demand LMS if I don’t run your WMS?
Bob Rosales: Of course. That’s the beauty of our architecture and On-Demand offering. Our On-Demand LMS is designed to help clients leverage the investments they have already made in existing supply chain applications. With our web services integration architecture we can incorporate data from virtually any WMS or ERP system and feed it into our LMS. We want to make it easy for our clients to realize the benefits of our On-Demand LMS while minimizing the impact on their existing WMS or ERP system. Our On-Demand LMS offering is a very strong complement to existing supply chain applications that a client may have. We’ve designed our solution to integrate easily. If a customer likes their WMS and ERP that’s great – we can work within that environment with no problem. Clients can also run Next View Live in conjunction with our On-Demand LMS as well as third party WMS or ERP solutions.
Gary Master: Tell us a little bit about Next View?
Bob Rosales: Next View Software was founded in 2007 by a team of very experienced supply chain software practitioners. Our goal is to provide innovative, on-demand supply chain applications aimed at improving productivity in terms of labor, inventory and space. The leadership team at Next View has been developing, selling, implementing and supporting supply chain software solutions for over 20 years and this cumulative experience is the basis for our latest offerings. We took a look at the market and saw opportunities for web-based, on-demand supply chain software applications. If you look at the supply chain software market it tends to morph every few years and now is the perfect time to leverage the latest technology to deliver solutions that offer fantastic ROI and time to value over traditional supply chain applications. The combination of experience, technology, strong global consulting and implementation partners provides our clients with a very compelling total solution for taking their supply chain applications to the next level. Given the state of the global economy, everyone is looking to save time and money and to leverage those savings for years to come – that is exactly what our on-demand solutions do for our clients.
Gary Master: Describe some of Next View’s innovations?
Bob Rosales: Next View has developed innovative solutions not only in terms of technology but also in terms of the way we are delivering our solutions to our clients. Clearly our technology is leading edge in terms of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0, web services-based interconnectivity but our solutions can be delivered in either a traditional on-premise or cloud computing model. We are perfectly positioned to ride the rising tide of on-demand/cloud-based computing with our clients. We’ve taken this innovative approach even further by integrating workflow technology into our applications – this provides outstanding benefits to our clients and implementation partners in terms of time and cost to implement. We have virtually eliminated traditional ‘hard coding’ techniques for configuring, extending or implementing our solutions. Our integrated workflow provides our customers with a highly-visual and flexible method for configuring our software and offers better time to value over competitive products that do not employ workflow. In addition to our Warehouse and Workforce Productivity solutions, we have introduced Next View Live – our real-time supply chain visualization and collaboration solution. Next View Live takes real-time data feeds from our WMS and LMS, as well as other third party applications (ERP, TMS, carrier networks) and displays your supply chain activities in real-time. With Next View Live you can literally see what is happening in and across your supply chain operations including manufacturing and even retail locations. Next View Live is a powerful solution for managing and controlling inventory, labor, shipments and more. We’ve taken this a step further and provide configurable, real-time KPI’s, news tickers and metrics to support a more pro-active management approach to supply chain management. Imagine being in Chicago and viewing your Singapore DC operations in real-time. We are delivering the power of these solutions to clients today, it’s all very exciting. A lot of software companies talk about visibility, we actually deliver it, in real-time.
Gary Master: What does Next View’s On-Demand LMS solution cost? How long does it take to implement?
Bob Rosales: Our On-Demand LMS offering is a subscription-based model so you pay as you go. Gone are upfront license fees, hardware purchases and complex scheduling of scarce IT resources. We would be happy to discuss this offering with anyone interested in learning more about it, all they have to do is give us a call or go to our website for more information. To find out more about Next View’s new On-Demand LMS, call +1.602.524.7662 or go to www.nextviewsoftware.com .