The value of finding out what you don’t know
The other day I was sitting with one of our larger customers going over plans for the next phase of the Pedigree OneView deployment when I was reminded of the observations from Donald Rumsfeld that there are things we know we know, things we know we don’t know but it’s the things we don’t know that we don’t know that are the biggest concern. The topic at hand was fuel inventory management and the customer was surprised to see how many wasted miles were saved when he could see his customer’s inventories and driver locations mapped on Google Earth. The value of correlating information from different systems across the supply chain isn’t new, Wal-Mart figured that out decades ago, but I’m seeing more and more that we are changing is the costs of ‘knowing what you don’t know’. A decade ago this was a huge capital expense in hardware, enterprise software and system integration (a mindset still clung to by the vendors that apparently don’t know that cash is king in today’s world), while today you can bring your assets and inventories online for the cost of a cell phone bill. It’s always nice to hear those “Aha!” moments from customers when they see benefits above and beyond what they expected. Wonder what else we don’t know…