On a cloudy Portland day almost a decade ago, I and two colleagues - Steve Hochman and John Thorbeck - pulled up in John's black Ford Explorer SUV to the office building that housed our startup, SupplyChainge. We were discussing what to name our revolutionary optimization and operations concept and software, which we believed could double profits at most apparel and footwear companies. "I'm not going to let anyone get out of the car until we finalize the term", said Steve. So, a few minutes later, we had Lead Time Optimization, or LTO for short.
We went on to trademark the term. When we partnered with Infosys (the Infy US CEOs Phaneesh Murthy and Basab Pradhan took a big bet on us) and went out to the industry, we did so under the banner of Lead Time Optimization. You can still find an LTO whitepaper I co-wrote with an Infy colleague Anil Pahwa on the Infosys website here. And there were other partners like IBM and Sun (see a Sun press release here).
SupplyChainge had a few good successes, by our standards. But when SupplyChainge broke up due to personal issues and the assets were transferred to Predictix, we thought the term LTO was gone for ever. So we were surprised today when another SupplyChainge colleague Prashant Kumar found via Google that the multi-billion dollar company Infor has put out a solution offering called Lead Time Optimization, almost totally identical in its target customer, its terminology and its concepts to what we had developed. Their whitepaper on the subject even quotes an article by Prof. Warren Hausman of Stanford, a SupplyChainge Board member, and John Thorbeck, my SupplyChainge co-founder! You can read the Infor Lead Time Optimization whitepaper here. I am skeptical that they have actually done all the very hard work required to make LTO succeed, but am willing to be convinced.
It is somehow satisfying to see that something that was just in my head at one time, and which we as a team had slowly built up into a full-fledged concept, application and commercial solution, is now being pitched by a leading software company. As Steve Hochman, now global head of supply chain strategy at Nike, says today, "SupplyChainge was about 10 - maybe 20 - years ahead of where the industry was when SupplyChainge was founded". And we were not smart enough then to know how to bridge that gap.
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7 comments:
Respected Sir,
Your blogs have always been a real life managemen learning.
Yours Sincerely,
Pr Avinash Choudhary(Fall 09)
Interesting! I think it was an idea that resonated with a lot of people. I have friends who still retain a pretty clear idea of what LTO was, even if they weren't supply chain experts. Maybe LTO will be for you what Wiki is to Ward Cunningham.
Smiley, Bill. BTW, I will be in Portland in Feb/March and will meet up with you as well as with Steve H.
Thanks Avinash, you are too kind.
I am curious why you guys did not make headway with LTO at Predictix ?
Predictix has a superb set of people but they were already into a bunch of things, with a good degree of success. In the final analysis, we could not get anyone to champion it full time, and the fact that I was an infrequent visitor did not help either.
Kudos on the work done, and too bad it couldn't fructify then. From an educator's perspective, maybe you can make a good case-study out of it and sell to HBS! It indeed is great learning for new entrepreneurs.
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