SigmaWay Blog

Lean manufacturing techniques can be employed to supply chain management as well. Before that we need to have an overall view of priority and inefficient areas. Maintaining a minimal level of inventory by cooperating with suppliers and having accurate forecasts is the key. Efficient transportation system through long term contracts and shipping agreements is needed. Keeping up-to-date with latest Warehouse Management System (WMS) software to store and evaluate data.  Picking processes constitute a major portion of overall expenses thereby optimizing it would trigger shortened lead times and improved quality. Returns need to be managed properly in the supply chain management, especially for e - retailers. Lean requires discipline, potential investment in technology, and a continued commitment to its principles and approach.Read more at: http://www.sdcexec.com/article/12336165/eight-tips-for-running-a-lean-supply-chain

Now a days we are receiving phishing emails. Security experts have discovered that these phishing emails contain Pony malware which when downloaded and opened, crashes the system moments later. In the background the infected attachments start invading the system and give access to all important credentials to the hackers. Now follow these tips to avoid becoming a victim to phishing emails:

• Note that publisher is not used for file sharing or word processing. If you receive these type of file, just be cautious of phishing attack.

• Install antivirus or anti-malware which will detect these types of files and alert you if any suspicious activity is running in background.

• Continuous changing of password and having a strong password will help you from hackers from hacking or accessing all your important credentials.

So, continue using these cybersecurity tips to be protected from these malicious activities.

Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/cybersecurity/phishing-emails-spread-pony-malware-01783728#ifY3P7jKyFeVx4Y7.97

What is cloud computing?? It refers to a broad set of policies, technologies and controls deployed to protect data, application and associated infrastructure. Its sub-domain is computer security, network security and information security. Working on a cloud or not is a basic question asked to every employee. For instance, people working in hospitals are generally blamed for disclosing health records of their patients. Talking to a layman, it is a group in an organization connected through networks, but even if the hackers are good at hacking, the data will remain safe within the company boundaries. Therefore, cloud computing is very wonderful stuff to work upon, but only in a secured way. To know more please read the following article by Dennis Stevenson (author): http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/original-thinking/cloud-computing-must-be-securre-75892

Cost- per -contact should be metric that should be used by customer contact centers'  to judge efficiency .Skill- based routing(SBR) can directly connect the caller to the agent reducing time taken per call. Average abandon time (ABT) can be used as a metric also. Workforce management tools forecast the amount of calls in the future and agents' work schedule throughout the day. Workforce Intelligence deals with division of agents according to their specialization in terms of skills so that lesser time and cost are spent. Last but not the least self-service options would benefit in terms operational efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.Read more at: http://www.incontact.com/blog/reduce-cost-per-contact-5-tips/

 Swiss exports have fallen for the third year in a row. This hasn’t happened since 1930, in the depths of the Depression.Experts attribute the fall to a few factors. First, American imports have fallen 28% as more and more people abandon watches or settle on Apple Watches. Younger people don’t want to buy watches at official sellers, instead choosing to go online.Watch sales have fallen before. The recent recession flattened new sales as traders sold their fancy Rolexes and Pateks at a discount just to get liquid.The Swiss can fix this. They need  to educate the next generation about the history of the things they want them to love,and they also need to make including some techy stuff which would attract young generation. Read more at : https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/swiss-watch-exports-dropped-for-a-third-year-in-a-row/

Everyone wants to improve in their life. This is possible when they think and imagine as imagination is a step towards innovation. This can possibly happen when you start asking innovative questions. This will help you to rethink what is the solution to a problem and how to tackle that. Some questions that will help you, your organization towards achieving success. 1. Questions that help our dream, 2. Questions that help us to think differently, 3. Questions that helps us in travelling in our past, present and future. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/business-innovation/what-drives-innovation-01774400#AHBeYOy3QQXA3hHA.97

Getting people to visit your website is not so easy especially today. If you are using the payment the third party or payment redirection then you are giving opportunity to your customer to go away and never come back. This article by Sandra Wrobel-Konior(Content marketing manager) discusses about the cons of payment redirection. Cons of Payment redirection:

1. Client’s reaction: When a customer adds some product to the cart and goes to payment button and then if it is redirected to an external website with different logo and URL, then it may discourage, creates a confusion and frustration.

2. Control and customer support: In case the payment process goes wrong, then due to third party you may have limited access over what is happening and you can’t fix it immediately.

So, for customer satisfaction, attraction and retention you should create your payment gateway and ensure the security, seamless and hassle free operation. Read more at:

http://www.business2community.com/cybersecurity/payments-redirection-affect-business-01744133#I2bbOtz6T6YdoQ6G.97

Nowadays, Internet is everything to us. But, there are some security problems too, and these costs companies millions of rupees. So, companies can create a data security solution and this article explains the steps of creating data security solutions.

1. Understand exactly what level of security each customer needs?

2. Create and maintain a security policy with the help of “Data Flow” and remember that.

3. Internal data security staff is not enough so hire every time data security professionals.

4. Test, test and then test some more every time for every single event that takes place.

Read more at:

http://www.business2community.com/cybersecurity/create-data-security-solution-customers-will-love-01783502#55QiyVDK1HSftqTB.97

Let's think of the security infrastructure of your application as its doctor. Let's say you have a cough, sore throat and runny nose and if the doctor assesses external symptoms, then the doctor will prescribe the wrong medicines as he has not done internal test to know what is happening inside the body. This same thing can happen to your application, allowing attacks on account information. A Web Application Firewall (WAF) cannot see what is happening inside the application and that is why it uses "Signature" to determine if the code in the request is threatening. So, the best way to protect your application from vulnerabilities is to combine both external observations and internal tests. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/cybersecurity/signature-based-security-first-step-01773479#qAVrXsrP3ape3Hb5.97

Ideally, your answer is "No" and aim of this blog is to keep you cyber safe in 2017. There are no ensured that malicious actors won't get to your data, here are some tips which will diminish the likelihood of having your data hacked. 1. Have unique, complicated, difficult to crack password.

2. Reduce the reuse of password.

3. On regular basis update your password.

4. Prevent “Dictionary Attacks”.

5. Keep your security and privacy settings current.

6. Enable two-factor authentication or 2-step verification.

7. Don’t store your password saved in the browser.

8. Have a security program installed.

9. Install software updates.

10. Be suspicious of URLs before you click.

Now play it safe.

To know more please read the following article:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/do-you-know-what-it-feels-get-hacked

Data Science experts spend lots of time solving problems using streaming data processing. There are many misconceptions about modern stream process space . Here are few of them There's no streaming without batch :  These limitations existed in earlier version of Apache Storm and are no more relevant in modern stream processing architectures such as Flink. Latency and Throughput: Choose One : A good engineer software like Flink is capable of low latency and high throughput. It has been shown to handle 10s of millions of events per second in a 10-node cluster. Micro-batching means better throughput : Though streaming framework will not rely on batch processing, but it will buffer at the physical level. Exactly once? Completely impossible: Flink is able to provide exactly one state which guarantees under failure by reading both input stream position and the corresponding state of the operator. Earlier traditional data flow had to be interrupted and stored in applications to interact, but new patterns such as CQRS can be developed on continuously flowing data. As the stream processing further evolves we will have more power computational models. You can read more at : http://dataconomy.com/2017/02/stream-processing-myths-debunked/

The growth and development of digital financial services or modern banking platforms as we see today is a continuous evolutionary project unlike traditional software projects , it doesn’t have a beginning or end.To maintain a competitive edge, an organization must consider the following :

User Experience : Every single cent of investment in well designed customer experience would generate a huge rate of return.

Simple Personal Finance Management : A large proportion of banks still cannot offer 100% online account opening facility which shows the potential in this area. Banks should tread carefully and do not rush just for the sake of winning the competition in market.

Bots and Data :  Bots can hold intelligent conversation with your customers using natural language. Integrating bots on your financial platform would help you to achieve competitive edge.

Context : Banks should aim at varying the channel of their services according to the product.Users are more likely to access content on their mobile phones and  banks must take this fact into account.

Modern day banks need to adapt these changes and at the same time take care of current trends and experience of competitors, Simply cherry-picking best solutions doesn’t guarantee long-lasting success.Read more at : http://dataconomy.com/2017/03/choosing-digital-banking-platform/

Household survey data plays a critical role in sustainable development goals on poverty and hunger. Food constitutes for almost 50% of household budget, especially in low income countries. It was found that about 800 million people were chronically undernourished in 2015-16.Thus a proper measure of food consumption is essential for the well being of any population. Practitioners are guided to improve the design of surveys and minimize the cost of the survey. As the technologies become available a global program of survey methodology research will help the global statistical community to explore the domain. You can read more at: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/sdgs-1-2-meeting-demand-more-and-better-household-survey-data

How will these emerging technologies and evolving business models be adapted to and used in developing countries? Consider three trends that are rapidly developing, both in the logistics space and elsewhere: the Omni-Channel Approach, the Sharing Economy and Big Data.Shipwire provides a logistics marketplace of value-added services, allowing companies to send inventory to any warehouse and store on demand, by providing integrated order-entry systems that handle the pickup and delivery of goods.In this case, our “learning laboratory” looked at how emerging technologies and evolving business models can transform logistics systems – not just in advanced economies like Singapore, but also in developing countries in the East Asia and Pacific region and beyond.You can read more at:http://blogs.worldbank.org/trade/future-here-technology-trends-currently-shaping-world-logistics

Advances have been made in applications of self-driving vehicles, automated drones, and embedded sensors. Uses of data are requiring more efficiency from existing infrastructure and challenging the industry to evolve infrastructure for the future. As the industrial internet embeds sensors across a range of products and equipment, companies have been expanding opportunities to react to, service interruptions quickly and access data to develop long-term strategic improvement. You can read more at : https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-coming-tipping-point-in-data-driven-logistics

Scaling databases for enterprise require to have to integrate wildly disparate data sources, satisfy stakeholders with competing expectations, and find the structure hidden in unstructured data.One has to carefully consider tradeoffs between data integrity and constant uptime, between.You may have a legacy system that stores data in tab-delimited files, unstructured text files coming from handwritten notes, and one or more conventional database management system and data from all of these sources needs to be read by and integrated into a single system.Read full article at : https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/insights-on-scaling-and-integrating-databases

Hadoop, Pig and Hive, HBase and other NoSQL point solutions onto Spark, Flink, Drill, and Kafka were built to handle individual aspects of the three V’s of big data (volume, variety, and velocity).If a storage system can scale linearly, then we can put the applications on top of the storage platform. If the application runs where the data is stored, then we don't have to worry about moving the data later to perform analytics.Model of messaging delivered via Kafka and MapR Streams can achieve rates about one million events per second with a minor investment. These technologies take a little time to understand and get comfortable with, but may be worth the investment.You can read more at : https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/using-microservices-to-evolve-beyond-the-data-lake

Adoption of Internet of Things rose dramatically in the year 2016. Factors like the increased numbers of sensors and connected devices, a growing pool of IoT developers, and real-time data and analytics support for IoT systems are a few of the major reasons for its expansion. "The Internet of Things Market", by Aman Naimat, presents a snapshot of IoT culture. It  describes a data-driven analysis of the companies, industries, and workers using IoT technologies. As the volume of data sets grow and more robust computation power evolves and scalability will lead to more IoT breakthroughs which in turn will lead to more  business investment in the future. You can read more at : https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/all-grown-up-the-iot-market-today

Data matching is the task of identifying, matching, and merging records that correspond to the same entities from several source systems. These entities may be people, places, publications or citations, consumer products, or businesses. The major hurdle that encounters while solving this problem is lack of common entity identifiers, easily available information like name, address, etc. that may change over time is usually of low quality and produce poor results with high error rate. Technological advancements in the last decade have made it possible to scale data, matching on large systems that contains millions of records and improved accuracy. You can read more at : http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/data-matching-entity-identification-resolution-linkage

A very little time is spent on thinking about how to deploy a data science model into production. As a result, many companies fail to earn the value that comes from their efforts and investments. In production environment data continuously comes, result are computed and models are frequently trained. The challenges faced by companies fall into four categories:  Small Data Teams: They mostly use small data, often don’t retrain models and business team is involved in a development project. 

Packagers: Often build their framework from scratch and practice informal A/B testing , generally not involved with the business team

Industrialization Maniacs: These teams are IT led and automated process for deployment and maintenance , business team are not involved in monitoring and development

The Big Data Lab : Uses more complex technologies , business teams are involved before and after deployment of data product

Companies should understand that working in production is different than working with SQL databases in development , moreover real time learning and multi-language environments will make your process complex. Also a strong collaboration between business and IT teams will increase your efficiency. Read more at : http://dataconomy.com/2017/02/value-from-data-science-production/