Jerome Reygrobellet presented the STMicroelectronics application where various TIBCO technologies including CEP were used to improve operational efficiency in the their manufacturing processes by “identifying and removing non-value-added tasks” as production proceeded. STM are in the semiconductor business - $10B in sales in 2010, 53,000 employees, and 14 production sites around the world, and launched this productivity improvement program in 2007, with the IT project started in 2008. The first version of the application was delivered in 9mths (June 2009). The project involved using RFID to track and trace the production components, and a “Smart and aware Sampling Tool” to optimise the amount of manual testing at each stage of the production process. The goal was to achieve a >10% improvement in production efficiency and achieve an ROI of less than a year - in fact the results for the first version were an improvement of 14% and an ROI of < 6 months. Impressive.

Thanks to TIBCO exec Murat Somnez for pointing out this WSJ article on retailer (and TIBCO customer) JC Penney and their exploitation of IT to:

• integrate social media sites and targeted promotions
• provide a unified view of customers across “bricks and mortar” and e-commerce outlets
• use RFID in supply chain to improve stock level operational visibility

In particular: “Within the next 18 months, Penney shoppers will be able to receive location-specific promotions on their mobile devices when they walk into a store. They’ll also be able to get deals and see product reviews in stores by taking pictures of bar codes with their phones.”

Nice to see further exploitation of event processing in the mainstream, and it will be interesting to see how retailers improve the overall “shopping experience” by extending sensory inputs from just standard shop displays to include smartphone channels. Indeed, optimising the information passed on to shoppers across multiple channels and locations in stores (yet avoiding sensory overload!) is probably going to keep their retail psychologists busy too!

I just saw this article on applications for RFID (those nifty radio-based micro identity chips) from a major ERP vendor’s perspective. The relevant categories for “RFID deployment” were described by Krish Mantripragada, SAP, as:

1. Process automation: managing the processes involved in handling RFID-enabled goods. In other words, see BPM.

2. Track and Trace: in other words, CEP.

3. Analytics / decision support: RFID will generate lots of data to analyze, although you could also do that in real-time as well as run traditional BI and analytics techniques on them. The term “decision support” means rules technology, which of course you can also embed in your rule-driven CEP solution…

4. Application enrichment where the existance of RFID data triggers some behavior such as marketing, cross-sell etc: this is event driven and either event or data correlation, both well within the capabilities (and current usage) of CEP.

QED.