Next week at AdvaMed2010 in DC

Next week I will be attending AdvaMed2010 in Washington DC in an attempt to mingle with the top of the food chain of the Medical Device industry. If you didn’t know AdvaMed is the premier industry organization for the Medical Device industry and the AdvaMed2010 conference is its annual meeting. Essentially it is a place for smaller Med Device companies to market themselves to venture capitalist and larger companies.

Medical Devices is one of our core markets at NNE Pharmaplan and hence we are hoping to leverage this event to make ourselves better known in the industry. Kind of old school marketing but I am hoping that there is value there? I look forward to an interesting week and getting to meet some interesting companies and people. Also last time I have been to DC is in 1995 so I am long due. If you are around give me a shout.

Extreme Gobbledygook - Funny

In connection with my recent post about describing what I do a colleague reminded me of the famous Rockwell spoof about the “Retro Encabolator”. I thought this would be interesting to share and yes, this is really kind of nerdy and techie-humor but none the less funny. This takes gobbledygook and to another level – enjoy.

What is it that I do?

Have you ever tried to explain to somebody what it is that you do, who is unfamiliar or not that interested in what you do. I have that problem with my wife and family all the time. When I try the interest-loss is immediate – somewhere after the middle of the 3rd sentence. When I ask my kids what they think that I do – they say that I sit in front of the computer all day and talk on the phone, which in a way is quite precise. Typically a specific keyword from my description sticks and so when asked what I do, it comes back as; ‘I think he is fixing software’, or ‘oh yes he is training’.

Although this may seem trivial the exercise in explaining what it is that you do is very valuable. When marketing in the new media it is important to tell the story in simple language – I call it the ‘children’s’ explanation. A simple plain English description of what it is that I do, without using any technical or industry jargon and without complicated adjectives. The less ‘gobbledygook’ the easier it is for people to understand and by the way it also helps to keep their attention. As in the Hebrew adage – “If you explain it slowly, I will understand quickly”.

Try it you will be surprised how hard it is and how much value it brings.

Here is mine:

I help people and companies in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry that produce medicine, drugs and tools for doctors with their computer systems. The use computers to make sure that their products have no defects, as wells as to make sure that they produce their products exactly the way the recipes instruct. The computer systems save and maintain all the information during the production so that it can be used to analyze what happened if there is a defect, or how to improve the production process. The computers also help automate some of the steps in the process.

Word Cloud of this Blog

Just for fun I thought it was interesting to visualize what this blog is about. I found this tool called Wordle via the Duct Tape Marketing blog that I read. I think it is an amazing way to visualize out what a blog is about, in my case not surprisingly mine is about... well metrics, intelligence, and manufacturing. It is nice to get this verified.

Using metrics and what it tells us about Manufacturing Intelligence

In continuation to some of the other posts in the topic of metrics and KPIs, this time I would like to discuss the use of metrics. So, not so much what the metrics are or which metrics are most important, but how do we use them. If we look at how analysis is performed we may be able to gain some insight into how the data should be collected and structured. This may be for example to support lean or process improvement initiatives. The idea regardless of methodology requires that the team or person gain an understanding of the process and its behaviour based on the data at hand.

I think the best way to frame this up is to tell the story of a persona in a simple scenario. Let’s consider Patrick Process Engineer who is trying to understand yield fluctuations specifically and maybe the yield’s behaviour in general. He is perplexed about why he cannot accurately predict yield given that most of the processes are “in control” (yes, another one of these myths about processes). What he really is striving for is an understanding the process and the best way to investigate it – in other words analyze the process.

Obviously Patrick will be looking at the Yield metric(s) and once he sees some fluctuation he will embark on an analysis. Typically he will perform what I call a high-level analysis, which is kind of a “look-around” in the data and maybe other related metrics to determine patterns. But wait, why patterns. Well whether we like it or not when we analyze processes we naturally look for patterns since that is what complex processes really exhibit. I guess I need to write a bit more about the complex adaptive behavior of manufacturing systems, but let me leave that for a future post. For now let’s just say that the patterns really tell us about the dependencies between the different metrics and parameters in the system.

OK, once Patrick has performed is “high-level” analysis he may then start digging a bit deeper in to some of the areas that may lead him to the root-cause of the fluctuation. He may perform some more detailed analysis, maybe choose to monitor some specific metrics, define some additional more detail or focused metrics. If he really is trying some advanced analysis he may try and observe dependencies between metrics for a period of time. That means monitor maybe a few metrics and how they change in relation to each other.

What is described here is really a simple scenario of human behavior exhibited when we perform troubleshooting. Although this as simple behavior for us, when we think about the data and data structures that we need to support what Patrick is trying to do, we may quickly realize that the complexity abounds. Modern business intelligence concepts such as multidimensional analysis, OLAP, and practices for data aggregation provide the tools. However it takes a lot of work and process knowledge to transform the base process data to such information structures.

This I believe is the main challenge in modern manufacturing systems. Compounding this problem is that effective analysis needs to use information from all the host of system that may reside in a manufacturing business, i.e. ERP, MES, Automation, Historians, LIMS and others. Most manufacturing intelligence tools that are in the market today simply do not address this simple scenario. If we do our inbound marketing work correctly and draw up the scenarios above, with Patrick our main persona, the problem definition is straightforward; however the engineering task required to solve it is not.

Experimenting with the "New Rules of Marketing"

During the last few years I have been learning and experimenting with the concepts of "The new rules of marketing", David Meerman Scott (see his blog). I must say that it has been a great learning experience. The latest exploit is helping my Wife to promote the rental of her mother’s house. We found a semi free website that allow listing of rentals. We made sure that it ranked high in a relevant Google search. Then we created a Facebook group and thus we started to promote it through our online social network, which apart from FaceBook also included Twitter, LinkedIn, and this blog of course. It is really kind of an experiment but I really love to see how it unfolds. My Wife is ecstatic about how quickly you can reach out to people for help in promoting it.  She is constantly on Facebook looking at how many people joined the group. Yes I know that is not directly equal to somebody actually renting it but it still has a certain buzz to it. 

I have been doing similarly in building my personal brand and also marketing the sub division that I live in. We have created a blog that is used to exchange and share information with our members, a Twitter profile to send updates and information around, a Facebook group, and a Google profile. I must say that it has taken much longer than I expected to gain momentum. However I have been receiving very positive feedback about how well this works and more, and more of our members are starting to use all these different resources. Of course there is the added value of promoting our neighborhood allowing people that may be interested in a home purchase to get a peek at our community and the people who live there – hopefully this will also help our real estate value.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing according to Pragmatic Marketing

This may be redundant information but I wanted to make sure that it is persisted somewhere for reference. It is really a summarized version of some of the teachings from Pragmatic Marketing.

Inbound Marketing

Understanding of the markets that are targeted by the company's/products' "distinctive competencies". The idea is to gain unequivocal understanding of the market, the people working in this market, and specifically the problems that they have. The goal is to provide product features that directly solve the problems in the market. In order to do that the product management activities are focused on defining and prioritizing these problems and conveying them to the product development as market requirements. The driving concept is that a product (and its features) need to do a job for the customer. For example: Online bill pay. the job is to pay bills, if you did not have this capabilities you would have to do it manually which is time consuming and tedious. Therefore it is a Market Oriented feature it solves a distinct problem for the customer.

Outbound Marketing

These activities involve the positioning and messaging of the product. It involves traditional marketing as well as what is now widely adopted "the new rules of marketing" using the internet as the main conduit. Using "viral marketing", new media, blogs and eBooks are some of the methods. The goal of all of these activities is to generate demand and leads that can be turned into license revenue by the sales team. One of the methods to expose the products to the market is using a concept called  "Marketecture". The idea is to describe the product (and its features) to the market not by its technical functionality, but by the problems that it solves for the users. In other words it is a market oriented description of the product that is developed as a result of the "Inbound" activities.