This highly informative article, written by researchers at the W. P. Carey School of Business, gives insight into the changing attitude and environment surrounding cloud adoption, as well as what incredible changes it will bring to organizations: "rapid business-process calibration, increased use of analytics, as well as possible issues around the tax implications of cloud-based IT spending."

Bramasol had the opportunity to participate in the Stadium and Arena one2one Summit held in Lake Las Vegas at the Revella this past week. The three day summit provided stadium and venue executives the opportunity to hear from key thought leaders on current industry challenges and from service providers on new market offerings.

Kevin Cope, President & CEO of Acumen Learning kicked off day 1 of the summit with a keynote address detailing how stadium and venue executives could build a smarter, faster, and more valuable organization.  He provided many case studies and organizational best practices on how best to manage and deal with the five most fundamental elements in a business: cash, profit, assets, growth, and people.  His Socratic presentation style leant many opportunities for the audience to engage and learn from his many case studies.

Pat Christenson, President of Las Vegas Events, and Brian Mirakian, Director of Populous Activate headlined day 2 of the summit.  Pat spent most of his keynote time discussing the transformation that has taken place in Las Vegas and how the city is building (or renovating) a number of venues across the city to satisfy the growth demands being placed on it.  Brian truly wooed the audience with a forward thinking presentation on how emerging technology is positively effecting stadium design and the fan experience.  Being a technology guy myself, I was extremely impressed with Brian’s presentation and how technology is being used to build a smarter, more engaging facility for fans.  The foundation of Brian’s vision is based on bringing brands to life by identifying strategic opportunities for engaging fans at all levels.  From the time fans steps onto the property until they depart, they will have an experience that is executed at every single footstep across a number of media formats.

Lou Marciani, Director of the National Center of Spectator Sports Safety and Security and Sandy Keehn of GEO (Guest Experience) Advisors concluded the event with great keynote messages.  I personally know Lou from his current days at Southern Miss and was impressed with his continued knowledge of how to best deal with the ongoing security threats and risks to fans. Lou brought forth deep expertise in this area leveraging both domestic and international situations.  Sandy probably impressed me most with her message around customer service.  Many, many businesses (included those in the stadium and venue management) invest millions of dollars in their brands; however, those brands are constantly being tested and torn down through poor customer service.  Sandy discussed the extreme importance of how organizations support and even advance their brand through amazing customer service, and she demonstrated how organizations should link their service strategy to their brand.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t touch upon Bramasol’s engagement in the summit.  John Froelich and I had the opportunity to conduct two boardroom presentations to key stadium and venue executives where we discussed Bramasol’s (and SAP’s) strategy for engaging the sports and venue management industry.  We showcased our offerings that were focused on three major areas: maximizing performance and revenue, increasing fan experience and loyalty, and maintaining event security.

The Sports and Venue Management industry are facing serious challenges in terms of maximizing performance and revenues.  Organizations:

If I had a dollar for each time that I’ve heard the words, “paperless society”, I’d be drinking a Mai-Tai, watching the waves roll-in from my private Hawaiian beach-front property.  Well maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the reality is that after 40 years of talking about it, technology is now here to support the concept.
 
In March 2013, Aberdeen Group published a document titled, Mobility Making Waves in Manufacturing, I couldn’t agree more but would like to add two words and change the title to, SAP and Mobility Making Waves in Manufacturing, and these aren’t the Mai-Tai watching kind of waves.  In 2005 SAP purchased Lighthammer, in 2006 they acquired FactoryLogic, in 2008 Visiprise, in 2009 Business Objects and then in 2010 they added Sybase, today I understand the vision which drove these acquisitions.
 
Now when I meet with prospective and current customers and they say we want a paperless shop-floor with full security, we want our operators, from their mobile devises and without leaving their workstations, to have the ability to clock-in and out for the day and to log-in and out of an operation, and we want them to have the latest work instructions and 3-D documents and they should be alerted, also via mobile devise, when their equipment is starting to trend out of tolerance, I can look them in the eye and say no problem.
 
Just in time, a concept has become a reality.  I say just in time because, from what I’ve observed, the next-generation workforce is all about “swipe and tap”, a fact that none of us can deny.

Packsize Taps Into Global Manufacturing and Demand and Grows 40% with SAP and Bramasol

Chosen as one of Forbes America’s Most Promising Companies, the Packsize story is one manufacturing companies need to watch. Join this webcast to learn how Packsize partnered with SAP and Bramasol to establish a solid foundation to support a yearly growth rate of 40%. After implementation of the SAP Business-All-In-One solution, Packsize has achieved global visibility into manufacturing demand and status, procurement needs and sales activity. With that result Packsize continues to attract marquee companies across the globe and recently just established a relationship with Staples as their sole supplier for On Demand Packaging®.

On June 25 - 26, 2013, SAP will host a large, national Customer Value Network (CVN) event focused on manufacturing, with Bramasol as a sponsor. Join the manufacturing industry's thought leadership community for this educational forum. Network and learn about the transformational opportunities in manufacturing today and what is working and successful for other companies in managing their business, growth and profitability on industry best practices and technology solutions.

I was just listening to an interview from last week’s SAP’s Sapphire user conference where SAP’s Co-CEO, Bill McDermott reported that SAP’s cloud business grew by 380% in Q1.  He didn’t break it down, but one can reasonably assume that the bulk of this growth occurred in business applications like core ERP, SCM, SFM, HCM solutions.  It got me thinking about where we are with Analytics in the cloud.  A report published last fall by noted BI analyst Howard Dresner tells how adoption of analytics in the cloud is still in the early innings.  This makes sense.  As business applications move to the cloud, more businesses get familiar and comfortable with this new computing model.  Perhaps more importantly, it puts business data—the lifeblood of analytics—out in the cloud making the move to cloud BI a natural next step. 

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Packsize is a Bramasol customer that has made an impact on its customers, communities and environment with its innovation through a foundation created using SAP. Packsize is much more than a shipment company; it's a company that innovates and is always thinking about how to run their business better, because their business is the business of their customers.

Bramasol worked with Packsize to ensure supply chain efficiency with an SAP solution that works for their business. As you can see from the pictures below, Packsize builds boxes- but not just any boxes, it builds them to shipment size. To the most demanding measurements based on a cubic algorithm that takes all the information loaded in the SAP system and can precisely pinpoint the size a box needs to be to fit a shipment. This can be one box or many boxes. No need for fillers, packaging and waste that is commonly found every time a shipment is sent.

The impact is huge. Shipping savings, cost of distribution savings, transportation savings- all throughout the value chain from order to shipment to disposal. Customers can price more competitively because they pass savings along in shipping to their customers.

Working with Bramasol to Ignite Possible, Packsize is a great example of how SAP is helping to make the world run better every day. Stop by booth #2518 and meet with the Bramasol team to see how we can make your business run better and ignite possible with you!

In picture:
CEO Hanko Kiessner, Packsize
CFO Bradley Wittwer, Packsize