The recently held Epicor Insights 2012 user conference was the very first one to combine former Epicor and Activant customers. Reportedly, there were 4,000 attendees, including 3,000 customers and 400 vendor partners.

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I recently had the opportunity, during Epicor’s global customer conference, to talk with Chad Meyer, director of product marketing, and he shared with me some of the highlights of Epicor’s vision and strategy for cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). Read the rest of this entry »

Vendors of customer relationship management solutions, and the companies that use those solutions, praise the advantages of having a 360-degree view of the customer. The approach is meant to provide a company with a full picture of its customers in order to enhance the customer experience, provide better customer service and support, and improve the company’s sales and marketing initiatives to better target those customers.

One problem that many companies face in using their 360-degree view stems from having focused on only one or two of these objectives. But as its name implies, a 360-degree view demands a holistic approach. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS & IMPLEMENTATIONS

Girl Scouts of the USA selects NetSuite ERP
Industry tags: Non-profit organizations
“Shifting software systems to the cloud is a current trend for organizations of many types, especially for non-manufacturing and service management organizations. Girl Scouts of the USA is a great example of such a move. Dispersed across the country, the organization needs to provide system access to all its councils, and support warehousing and e-commerce functionality to run its online store. Cloud ERP software allows organizations to quickly adopt such technology without incurring high upfront expenses.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• NetSuite ERP profile

Midsize pharmaceutical company Pernix Therapeutics Holding Inc. selects CDC’s Ross ERP
Industry tags: Pharmaceutical and Botanical Products, Life and Natural Sciences
“Pernix has wound up its ERP product selection with Ross ERP of CDC Software. The company’s key expectations for the new software include facilitating business growth, improving efficiency and compliance, reducing costs, and mitigating risks. Certain data quality validation processes are also slated for improvement, and traceability will be increased. Ross ERP is a software designed for such types of businesses, and is certainly capable of supporting process manufacturing specifics. See my recent Certification Report for more details on Ross ERP.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Ross ERP profile
• Ross ERP vs. Infor, IFS, Lawson…

Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project (NVIRP) selects Agresso ERP
Industry tags: Construction
“NVIRP is a state-owned entity that plans, designs, and delivers irrigation renewal projects for Australia’s Northern Victoria Region. It is a large multi-directional infrastructure project that required management via modern ERP software. NVIRP performed a deep and thorough software selection process, resulted in its selection of Agresso ERP as its core supporting software. The system’s flexibility, transparency, and ability to respond rapidly to changing requirements were the central points of the software selection that allowed Unit4 to win versus tier-one vendors.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• Agresso ERP profile
• NVIRP backgrounder

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For over a decade, Arena Solutions has been redefining the product lifecycle management (PLM) space with a suite of cloud applications that enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to work better together — from first prototype to full-scale production. In 2000, the two co-founders founded bom.com, a Web-based application for managing items, bills of material (BOMs), and engineering changes (this was the world’s first cloud-native PLM system).

In 2002, bom.com changed its name to Arena Solutions and expanded into a full engineering change order (ECO) management and collaboration tool that is used by thousands of people, including seven of the top ten contract manufacturers in the world. Arena has helped hundreds of innovative manufacturers bring better products to market faster with its cloud offerings that speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and help them collaborate on product changes with strategic partners across the globe. The vendor has over 500 corporate customers, 20,000 individual users, and millions of BOMs in the system.

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Your organization has selected to purchase an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software—or any other type of software for that matter. The next step is to find the software provider that will deliver and implement the software for you. This can be the vendor, an independent software vendor (ISV), or an authorized reseller, often called a value-added reseller (VAR). Finding the right service provider for your organization is a challenging feat. Oftentimes, a positive reference from a company that has already performed software implementation with a selected VAR or software vendor seals the deal. But as references have the potential for subjectivity and bias, you need a standardized approach to assessing the provider’s performance. Read the rest of this entry »

There are five stages that usually make up the lifecycle of a product: introduction, growth, maturity, decline, and termination.

During introduction, companies typically focus on the success of the product. Maturity is the stage when their focus is to take advantage of momentum and sell as much as possible. Only during maturity or decline do they start worrying about product end-of-life—which may be too late, as the transition from maturity to decline can happen very quickly (not to mention that there is no clear delimitation between stages, which means that a product can move from maturity to decline in its lifecycle without the manufacturer even noticing). Preparing for a product’s end of life should definitely start earlier, but the question is when and how they should approach it.

In order to understand that, let’s take a look at some basic concepts of product end-of-life, as well as the most important challenges that companies face when managing it. Read the rest of this entry »

After a hiatus of several years, the stars and planets were again aligned for me to be able to attend the AribaLIVE conference in early April 2012. And boy, what a difference several years can make! The last time I attended, in the mid-2000s, Ariba was behind its worst times of the early 2000s and the dotcom ”boom and crash.” For those that are not sure what I am talking about, in the early 2000s, Ariba had quite over-invested in its resource-heavy and inflexible client-server supplier exchanges and was bleeding cash.

The turnaround started when the company decided to focus on spend management software and know-how (sourcing, contract management, spend analysis, invoice automation, etc.), rather than on merely providing the “plumbing” for procurement transactions between trading partners. While the financial performance and posture of Ariba were noticeably improved by the mid-2000s, the company was still criticized by some market observers as being too conservative and focusing on traditional solutions.

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Sugar CRM announced the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution at Sugarcon 2012, its annual conference. After the event, I had a very interesting conversation with Jan Sysmans, senior director of product marketing, and Chris Bucholtz, editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders, and would like to share the most interesting findings here with you.
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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS AND GO-LIVES

Los Angeles County selects SAS to provide analytics services and applications
Industry tags: BI/business analytics
“Los Angeles County will use SAS predictive analytics and data mining solutions as well as SAS BI solutions to fight organized fraud within the Department of Public and Social Services. Uncovering more than 200 probable fraud cases = BI and business analytics at their best.”—Jorge García, TEC BI Analyst

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Whether it is an enterprise resource planning (ERP), a customer relationship management (CRM), or any other system, acquisition and deployment of enterprise class software is usually a significant move for a company of any size and industry. It leads to disruption of the company’s business activities, so much so that hardly any employee is left unaffected during such a major project. Read the rest of this entry »

TIBCO, a Palo Alto, California—based provider of a diverse number of business and information technology (IT) software applications, has announced the availability of TIBCO Spotfire 4.5, its business intelligence and analytics platform. This new version contains enhancements in different functional areas. Read the rest of this entry »

The first of week of May marked a flurry of news by up-and-coming cloud enterprise applications vendors. During salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in Chicago, Kenandy, Inc. announced release 2.0 of Kenandy Social ERP, the first cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built entirely on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise cloud computing platform. The new release adds financials and order management to Kenandy’s manufacturing management core, specifically for product companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is
like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
—Bill Gates

Business metrics—the quantifiable measurements by which a company’s performance is gauged—are part of the broad area of business intelligence (BI) or business analytics (BA). Read the rest of this entry »

On April 25, Pentaho delivered Pentaho Business Analytics 4.5, and I had a chance to get a sense of its new features via a demo prepared by Pentaho. Two main topics were at the forefront of this new offering from the Orlando-based company: visualization and performance.

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