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Technology Stocks : TAVA Technologies (TAVA-NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Bullotta who wrote (16905)	5/14/1998 12:40:00 PM
From: Jack Zahran	Respond to of 31646

Supply Chain is not a new business for them. They have a few offerings and the Y2K work has opened the doors for them to the decision makers who also are responsible for the supply chain. I agree with you in principle, but the fact that they have had a supply chain practice and are bringing in the right personnel compresses the time-line significantly. As an example of their ability to execute, look at how quickly they grew their Y2K offering which began as a database to handle a few of their current client needs. Notice too their partnership with Oracle which highlights the Supply Chain, which I posted on this thread about 9 months ago: alliance.oracle.com If the link requires a password: try guest/welcome

To: Rick Bullotta who wrote (16905)	5/14/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: M. Frank Greiffenstein	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Supply chain work... A well thought out post, Rick. I would add that the term "supply chain management (SCM)" is being used very loosely on these boards. You post partially addresses this issue by noting the misalignment of TAVAs skills base with SCM. Working with individual members a large company's supply chain is not the same thing as SCM narrowly defined. If TAVA goes and works on the factory floor of three of GM's suppliers, they are not engaged in supply chain management. Companies like MANU are true SCM companies in that they write the software that ties them all together. I do not believe that TAVA engineers are writing this kind of software. Their BevOne, BakeOne software products are designed for process control at the individual factory level, they do not tie together rpocess controls across plants. I recognize that TAVA is involving itself in the marriage between front office IT and factory floor automation (just like predicted many months ago by CK Houston), but I see no indication that their role is writing the software. DocStone

To: Rick Bullotta who wrote (16905)	5/14/1998 12:52:00 PM
From: Steve Sanchez	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

one of mr. bullotta's points: 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. one of TAVA's case studies to refute your claim: (from tavatech.com under Case Studies link) Chesebrough Pond's USA Challenge Chesebrough Pond's USA manufactures a variety of consumer products including toothpastes, lotions, creams, hair sprays, deodorants and antiperspirants. "Where we once had one brand of hand lotion, we now have to manufacture a number of different kinds to meet the varying needs of our customers," J. Keith Unger ,manager of automation engineering, points out. Compounding the situation is the intensifying competition from around the world, unpredictable economic conditions and the increasing regulation of products and work floor practices. To be successful, Chesebrough realized they must both improve flexibility and institute more aggressive control of their entire supply chains. Manufacturing needed to be positioned as a strategic opportunity. The construction of a 51,000-sq. ft. expansion in Jefferson City, Missouri offered the opportunity to employ emerging new technologies. All production of Mentadent, Close-Up, Aim and Pepsodent toothpastes are consolidated at this plant. Their challenge was to be able to move products to market faster and be prepared for more frequent changeovers and smaller batches on the production floor. In addition, they had to beat competition - Mentadent's early success was threatened soon after its debut when tartar control versions of arch-rivals Colgate and Crest began to appear. Solution To the rescue: advanced manufacturing technology and a state-of-the-art plant. TAVA Technologies/ACS designed the Jefferson City plant with a new manufacturing system that has an entire batch life cycle that is planned, executed and recorded in one integrated system. John Schaefer, manager of manufacturing systems design at TAVA/ACS, explains that the design effort began with the generation of General Design PracticesT that would govern development of all user interfaces and the control logic. "This would allow the interfaces supplied by multiple vendors and applications to conform to one 'look and feel,' and would simplify system maintenance for plant personnel." Of importance to Unger was the reduction of time it took to begin production of a new recipe . . . from months to hours. So the facility was designed using the Instrument Society of America's new SP-88 guidelines for the design of batch processing controls. "The reason I am such a believer in the new SP-88 guidelines," Unger says, "is because of the flexibility they give us to create and reuse recipe procedural libraries." The sophisticated control system was designed to integrate and aggressively manage all steps in the operation, including production scheduling, inventory supply and control, process control and automation, quality control and engineering maintenance. To operate this sophisticated new facility, TAVA/ACS created one of the first fully-integrated SCADA/MES applications. The system integrates supervisory control and data acquisition with high-level batch management, all supported by an open-architecture, relational database management system running on a Hewlett Packard server. Outcome The facility received the Automated Plant of the Year award from Control Magazine, a leading industry publication. More important, Chesebrough protected its early Mentadent advantage from competitor attack by racking up a 2.6% increase in oral-care market share from 1993 to 1994. The construction schedule was beaten by three months, which Chesebrough attributes to TAVA/ACS' formalized design methodology. The new control system gives Chesebrough the capability of testing new product formulas right on the production line. This has reduced the time it takes to begin production of a new recipe . . . from months to hours. The new facility is seeing benefits in inventory tracking, on-line recipe optimization, increased throughput and quality control. (end of case study) there are other case studies given. steve

To: Rick Bullotta who wrote (16905)	5/14/1998 6:11:00 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31646

...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. So I guess "supply chain" companies have other means of obtaining the components they supply, other than manufacturing them?? Whew!!! What a relief!!! I was having nightmares thinking about all of the potential embedded chip problems that relatively small companies were facing with THEIR manufacturing systems. Nice to know that the only entities that actually manufacture something are the big end-user companies. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Regards, Ron