Given the majority of participants in a selection committee are not enterprise software specialists, quality enterprise research on applications is crucial. Even if you are employing consultants (with their cute business attire and boxes of love they give during the holidays—my PM brother-in-law once scored a leather jacket, but I digress), it’s still important to be well versed about the solution sets you are considering. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a danish on my desk that I want to eat. Actually, it’s half a danish… almond, homemade with butter. But first, this week’s white paper topic: ecommerce.

I’m actually going to direct you to a datasheet by AppFinity on e-commerce solutions. This does require registration, but it’s worth it. Not necessarily for the datasheet alone, but to access other white papers. I know, white papers sound like they are meant to be dull. You hear “white papers,” and think “white bread”, and if you’re in North America, you think of “Wonderbread” which tastes like sawdust. No, that’s not true. I suspect sawdust tastes better …. (sigh… danish).

When written well, a white paper won’t leave you feeling manipulated into buying something. Rather, will give you a better understanding of the issue and how your company can resolve it either with or without the vendor’s product. (I’m told Mike Stelzner’s book is good–I would tell you more, but I haven’t read it yet. I’m waiting for someone to take pity and send me a free copy. )

Anyhow back to ecommerce. Ecommerce is the commerce of goods and services over the Internet. Transactions involve credit cards, Paypal, and other types of electronic funds transfer mechanisms. In the US, ecommerce grew faster than the total economic activity in manufacturing, retail, merchant wholesale, and (selected) services in 2006.

Like any retail or point of sale system, ecommerce software needs to integrate with other areas of the company, such as accounting, customer service, inventory and shipping, etc. to ensure that product is sent out in a timely manner. The data sheet by AppFinity lays out a couple of other points that need to be considered when looking at an ecommerce solution.

Here’s a little tidbit (tidbit. timbit. bad press): white papers, modeled after government documents, were adapted by the private sector in the 1990s as a messaging tool.

The Hague Declaration, recently published by The Digital Standards organization, proposes that all governments adhere to free and open standards for IT activities. Something that strikes me about Digistan’s declaration is its basis in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and not a technical document. The three things The Hague Declaration calls on all governments to do, are as follows. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start this blog post with a huge disclaimer: I have no intentions of wilfully beating up on SAP whatsoever!

Sure, the enterprise applications titan has lately been embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit with archrival Oracle over improper use of support data through its TomorrowNow third-party support (recently discontinued) subsidiary.

As if this wasn’t enough, SAP is being sued again, and this time over an allegedly failed software implementation. Namely, in late March, Waste Management Inc. filed suit against SAP with claims of fraud (or gross over-promise, if one wants to sound a bit gentler here). Read the rest of this entry »

Introducing “Green” to Projects

There is a growing trend in IT organizations to reduce the environmental footprints that are typically generated from large enterprise IT project initiatives. To achieve this goal, a group of prominent IT organizations Read the rest of this entry »

Part III of this blog series analyzed the relatively recently launched Deltek Vision 5 [evaluate this product] and Deltek Costpoint 6 [evaluate this product] suites. It also tackled the related potential opportunities for Deltek. For one, key up- and cross-sell opportunities should come from:

• Additional modules, especially from the newly minted Deltek EPM [evaluate this product] suite: The majority of new Deltek customers initially purchase a single module or a select few modules of the suite (e.g., project management, financials, human resources [HR] or timesheets) and add more modules a few years after implementing the initial modules; and
• Migration from entry-level and/or legacy products to Costpoint or Vision: Deltek GCS Premier [evaluate this product] is a low-cost entry-level application suite designed for smaller contracting firms. As GCS customers outgrow these systems, there is opportunity for migration onto Costpoint. Similarly, we expect legacy Deltek FMS, Sema4 and Advantage customers to migrate onto Vision or Costpoint (depending on industry), as their scalability requirements exceed system capabilities. These legacy products were designed for small professional services firms.

As for focused geographic expansion, due to largely offering products that support only English, Deltek’s initial focus will logically be on English-speaking countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. International geographies have so far represented only a few percentiles of total revenue, but the company plans to generate 20 percent from international markets over the next three to five years, mostly via expansion into the UK and Australia/New Zealand. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardian’s excellent article How to Do Business Like the Mafia lists 7 rules for running a successful business—legitimate or otherwise.

And where there are business rules, of course, there’s enterprise software.

Which led me to wonder just how the Mafia would go about the enterprise software selection process. Read the rest of this entry »

A brief journey of what functionality ERP engineer-to-order systems must support.

Just like the mythical character in the film E.T., who was far from home in an unfamiliar environment, companies that have years of experience working with a discrete ERP system sometimes feel that they are out of this world in trying to adapt the system to the unique elements  in the engineer-to-order (ETO) world.  Read the rest of this entry »

A definitive agreement was reached between HP and EDS today where HP will purchase the global outsourcing company for $13.9 billion ($25 a share).

EDS is a global technology services company centering on information outsourcing. It serves both the private and public sectors, with core areas including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries.

HP is one of the world’s largest technology companies with revenues totaling $107.7 billion for the four fiscal quarters ending Jan. 31, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

We submitted this question to our analyst team to get their collective opinion. Read on to find out what they had to say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Besides the ongoing (seemingly never-ending) presidential campaign and celebrity scandals/gossip, food safety is very much in the news. Indeed, incidents of outbreaks, contamination, product recalls and whatnot flood TV channels as breaking news every now and then. Consumers, governments and the various members of the food supply chain are rightly concerned about food safety, and there has been increasing pressure for food and consumer product goods (CPG) supply chain traceability, in a pervasive manner.

Consumers and governments (both becoming ever-more educated and informed on one side, but still confused on the other side) are concerned about the safety of the food supply and protecting the public. While demanding more product choice and delivery speed, consumers have been voicing fears over food safety in the wake of recent salmonella outbreaks (remember the contaminated spinach or major chocolate recall cases?), cases of pet deaths due to poisonous imported pet food, lead-tainted imported children’s toys, anti-freeze tainted imported toothpaste, and so on…

The ever-longer and global food supply chain (often called “from farm to fork”) includes crop farmers/growers (utilizing fertilizers and pesticides), feed processors, livestock farmers (that might feed and treat animals accordingly [or not]), manufacturers (primary and value-add food processors), packaging and labeling sites, distributors, retailers, and food service companies (restaurants and cafeterias).

These supply chain member companies have to be concerned about the consumer safety issues, plus the potential negative and even fatal impact on their brands and businesses. For instance, high-and-mighty retailers customarily want ever higher service levels from suppliers (without any negative publicity), while the overall industry itself wants to protect “brand” value and reduce recall costs. Read the rest of this entry »

Disconcerting? That’s hardly what one feels when losing a laptop, and when it’s stolen … ? 

Lackadaisical, however, seems to be the approach most enterprises take when it comes to safeguarding laptops. The theft of a laptop is devastating to a company, because data is so precious. It’s not just a matter of losing trade secrets, which is also a major concern, but a person’s name is one of the most important assets she has (remember Tina Turner?). Read the rest of this entry »

From one of our readers comes this question:

I am a student of IT Management; I have an ERP course and I am supposed to write an article to review new aspects of ERP systems. I’ve decided to explore the reasons for using data mining techniques in ERP systems—and to look at different modules to which these techniques have been applied. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series analyzed the relatively recently launched Deltek EPM suite, which came as a result of three focused acquisitions. It also analyzed the suite’s resulting potential cross- and up-sell opportunities and its prospective additional revenue for Deltek in a standalone manner. However, Deltek has not been sitting still when it comes to continually enhancing its core products either.

Deltek Vision 5 Series

For example, the new Resource Planning module of Deltek Vision 5 [evaluate this product] was devised to allow project managers to assign staff to projects and immediately see the impact on labor utilization. The managers can then modify resource assignments to meet project needs, whereby color coding provides focus on resources.

The new module also offers real-time insight into employee billing rates and actual labor charges. It provides visibility to align resources for upcoming projects in order to increase overall resource utilization. The available tools give project managers a view of employee utilization by project or across all projects by day, week, month or year. In addition, the enhanced Resource Search feature allows for projection of future staffing allocation. Read the rest of this entry »

In IP Telephony 101, I looked at the pros and cons of IP telephony, and a few of the considerations you should explore before making the switch to VoIP.

We’ll turn now to the nitty-gritty of VoIP systems: the architecture, the equipment, the network structure, the software, and what you can expect to pay. Read the rest of this entry »