A few weeks ago, OL&T announced the migration of mission-critical systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What does this really mean? Well, for starters, OL&T will save money while enhancing the performance and scalability of our infrastructure.
Our systems really are “mission-critical” to our customers, as all of their transactions are handled through this technology platform—they can’t ship without them. Prior to revamping our infrastructure using Linux servers, we had a mix of Windows and proprietary Unix servers. This was getting costly as the company’s transaction volume grew. So OL&T decided that the time was right to completely refresh our infrastructure. Going through Red Hat, we’ve created a much more cost-effective and scalable server infrastructure. Red Hat is also more user friendly and manageable than Windows and proprietary Unix servers. So now our server infrastructure is run more effectively, with solid support, and more cost effectively. That makes perfect sense to me.
Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation (OL&T) is introducing some new customer-accessible functionality for interactive web dashboards. There will be a new menu item within the web apps that you use today. These Interactive Dashboards allow a user to select from among several metrics that they would like to track, such as freight spend by mode, number of shipments executed by location, and weight shipped by mode. You can select the type of graphical display you would like, and the timescale of the graphs (e.g., monthly, yearly, quarterly). The user interface behaves more like a desktop software application than a traditional web application. Each metric is displayed within a window, which can be moved, resized, tiled, etc. You can save your configuration for the next time you log in. The whole thing still runs inside a web browser, so there’s no need to install any new software, and as with all OL&T enhancements, they are accessible immediately. The dashboards run on top of OL&T’s data warehouse. All of the key metrics are pre-processed and stored in a special data mart. The system responds faster than a traditional web application, so when the user makes a change they see the results very quickly. That’s why we call it the “Interactive” Dashboard.
Dashboards allow managers and executives of OL&T’s customers to keep tabs on high-level supply-chain metrics. They supplement other mechanisms for providing client with actionable data about their supply chains. These include self-service query screens that clients can access over the web, custom analytical reports provided by our client services organization, and periodic status updates from our analytical and procurement staff, who provide not just the reports themselves, but market insight and root cause analysis
So the new interactive dashboards provide clients with another level of insight into their supply chains—an up-to-date, high-level summary view, which each user can personalize.
OL&T clients who are interested in early adoption of this technology should contact their client services rep. We are always interested in your feedback so that we can continue to improve this functionality.
With the loss of Jevic as a national less-than-truckload carrier, the chemical and process industry lost a principal carrier of temperature-sensitive products. This will make shipping these products during the upcoming winter much more difficult. Purchasing people will need to take into consideration alternatives such as ordering products on a schedule in which they do not sit in trucks or unheated warehouses over weekends. This will require better coordinated order planning on the part of purchasing.
Another option is to source material from companies stocking material closer to the end-user.
Finally, there are other means to keep products warm in-transit, such as blanketing and with container blanks encapsulated in plastic film.
It’s now the third and final day of the LogiChemUSA 2008 Conference. There has been a great deal of networking, idea sharing and realization of what it takes to keep businesses going. Read the rest of this entry »
The second day of LogiChemUSA 2008 in Atlanta started off with opening remarks from Jack Weiss, CEO of WAM Systems. Jack presented a survey last year on tracking what keeps CEO’s up at night and compared the ’07 results with ’08 statistics. Read the rest of this entry »
First day at LogiChem and I attended a presentation on “Proactive Supply Chain Risk Management to Mitigate Future Disruptions” given by Bill Adams, Director of Americas Logistics for Hercules Corporation. Read the rest of this entry »
This is something totally new for us; it’s an adventure for us all. While there are several well established industry and media blogs covering logistics, and many commentators on technology, the “social media” phenomenon hasn’t yet targeted the chemical and process industry sector. We aim to change that. We invite you to join us on what we hope will be a very interesting journey. Read the rest of this entry »
