With all due respect to the management at TAVA, whom I think very highly of, making a claim that they'll be in the supply chain business soon is one that I don't put a lot of near-term value in. It is analogous to a plumber waking up one day and deciding that he is now a heart surgeon, because both professions involve pumps and pipes!
Here are a couple of reasons why I think you need to discount this in terms of 1-4 year impact:
1. TAVA's skill sets are misaligned with those required for this type of consulting. Most of the Y2K assessors are low-level "technicians" and even their senior staff are most comfortable with plant floor controls and automation, not enterprise-wide logistics, including the new hires.
2. TAVA's sales model is only slowly moving from tactical to strategic, and will take a good while to get up to speed selling these types of services.
3. There are many more well-established consultants in this space, and late arrivals to any market tend not to make a big dent.
4. Very, very few companies actually execute on their grand plans to tie the plant floor to the logistics systems at the kind of detail you'd find in the automation layer. And this is not a technology issue, simply a case of "most bang for the buck". Realize that in many of the industries TAVA serves, manufacturing costs are mere pennies of the total product dollar. Simple interfaces that coordinate and track order status and feed back production costing information to the financial systems are generally all that are needed.
TAVA's opportunity here is purely as a "piggyback" play...and my experience has been that partnerships with companies like I2 and the like bear little fruit for the "lesser partner"...and you must also realize that every plant floor systems integrator with more than 10 employees and a vague knowledge of IT is chasing the same space!
So, I think it is a great idea and a good opportunity for them, but it will take quite a while for it to generate significant revenues, and adds yet another "cost side" impact during the ramp up of this new business.
I must also admit that I felt a bit like this was a trump card that was played too early...almost made me feel like they were starting to have doubts about the ability to achieve the hypergrowth they need on Y2K...
Trying to keep expectations realistic so that these guys at TAVA get a chance (and the time they need) to make their sound strategy a reality...if everyone keeps upping the hype and raising the bar too high, they'll never get the chance... |
