The story so far: Mike Chelonia, TurtleSpice’s comptroller, has been tasked to select an ERP system by his CFO. Facing pressure from his VP Wade Sharkey to short-circuit the selection process and select Big Gun Software, Mike gets a reprieve when Wade Sharkey is over-ruled by the CEO.

Now Mike has to decide how to handle TurtleSpice’s business process documentation. When we asked you what you’d do in Mike’s shoes, you voted Read the rest of this entry »

As is the case with white papers, vendors’ press releases (PR) can range from blatant bragging about the “latest-and-greatest” product capabilities (and other marketing “fluff”) to tastefully asserting competence and educating the market about specific issues.

One example of the latter would be Emptoris‘ April 2008 PR on the findings  of a panel of financial and procurement experts that have worked and consulted with leading Fortune 1000 companies. These experts offered their advice to chief procurement officers (CPOs) on actions to take to weather, and even excel in, a potentially uncertain economic environment.

The expert panel participated in a brainstorming session with leading financial, technology and procurement consultants to offer a list of immediate and intermediate steps that companies can take to gain greater control over spending and effectively reduce costs. Read the rest of this entry »

For all you baseball fans living in the US and Canada, you can probably appreciate that we are quickly approaching what is referred to as “the dog days of August.” This is when the pennant races are close, and almost every game has added significance for a team’s chances of making it to the playoffs.

As I was enjoying one of those rare idyllic days lying in the backyard hammock and reading the sports page, it occurred to me how the good teams are not just about one or two great players. Rather, they are comprised largely of players whose natural athletic ability may not necessarily match that of the few superstars on the team, and who may not be found basking in the limelight, but who consistently work hard and practice on a daily basis. These are the players that, when given the opportunity, can deliver the key play or get the big hit when the game is on the line.

This made me think about how in a manufacturing environment, the most unlikely areas can contribute in a critical situation. In many organizations Read the rest of this entry »

The story so far: Mike Chelonia, TurtleSpice’s comptroller, has been tasked to select an ERP system by his CFO. Swamped by phone calls from software vendors and consultants, and facing pressure from his VP to short-circuit the selection process, Mike faces some tough choices. When we asked you what you would do in Mike’s shoes, Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest challenges (or business pain points) for pharmaceutical manufacturers (or life sciences companies) is the long cycles that are required for research and development (R&D) and product approval. This is particularly a challenge for manufacturers of generic drugs, for which cycle times can average 20 months or more (and the full time-to-market period upwards of 12 years).

Why are long cycles a problem?

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After several years (if not decades, even) of painstakingly corralling and setting up all their custom data, objects, tables and whatnot, and making sure that these static and/or dynamic transactional data are secure, many enterprise applications users have realized that the time is long overdue for them to start looking at ways to make their applications more process-savvy. Read the rest of this entry »

Flexi wins again.

I recently completed a certification exercise for the Flexi Software’s FlexiFinancials package, a functionally rich accounting package that is complete in every way and geared for the banking, insurance, and financial services industries. A package that has integrated business objects with drill-down searching and with full functional and reporting capabilities.

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Every so often, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) analysts—our in-house panel of experts—receive questions from readers on a variety of software-related subjects. While mostly in the realm of software selection, evaluation, the latest technology offerings, or simply questions about business issues, on occasion we receive a request that piques our interest—especially when it is slightly outside of our realm. In an interest to keep our readers informed, we selected one reader’s question and decided to highlight it here—along with our responses. The subject?—segregation of duties (SOD).

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The story so far: Mike Chelonia, TurtleSpice’s comptroller, has been tasked to select an ERP system by his CFO. When we asked you what you thought Mike should do next, you voted overwhelmingly Read the rest of this entry »

No, my intent here is not necessarily to provide a typical analyst alert after attending a vendor’s annual user conference, in this case the QAD Explore 2008 in Orlando, Florida (US) last month. This is not to imply that there was nothing there to write home about either.

Quite the contrary, the multiple-day event was, well, eventful for market observers and hundreds of QAD’s global customers from both an official (announcements, product demos, etc.) and a fun (food, booze & entertainment) viewpoint. While all of the recorded keynote and breakout sessions can be seen here, the event revolved around the following major themes and highlights: Read the rest of this entry »

Customer support agents (CSAs) are the first line of support for the client when a problem arises. If a level-1 CSA has tried all introductory problem-solving skills, has referred to the company knowledge base (KB) for a possible solution, and is still unable to resolve the problem, the incident ticket is escalated to second level (L2) support, where CSAs have advanced training and more knowledge on how to resolve the issue. If the problem is software-related, the CSA at this level can guide the user on how to fix the problem. If the client is not computer savvy, the CSA can remote into the client’s workstation, and by taking control of the client’s machine, can resolve the problem more efficiently. Now if the problem is hardware-related, the ticket must be sent to third level (L3) support. This is when an on-site technician must go to the client site and physically change hardware parts or peripherals in order to close out the ticket.

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One of the thrills of working as an analyst in ERP for TEC is that I get to evaluate many different ERP systems and business products. This time, I assisted my peer, Sherry Fox, for the certification of Ramco’s human capital management (HCM) product. Its HCM product is part of a complete suite of products that falls under Ramco’s Enterprise Series 4.1.

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Welcome to TurtleSpice ERP, our new series on software selection!

We’ll follow one company’s software selection process, from beginning to end—with your help. Read the rest of this entry »

As a little kid growing up in former (and erstwhile happy) Yugoslavia and watching my elders, day in, day out, downing dozens of strong Turkish coffees with their neighbors and relatives (while discussing sports, weather, world politics, and the neighborhood gossip) I would sometimes naively ask for a sip of coffee. The deterring line (a bogey-man tale) from my folks would be that “kids that drink coffee end up with a tail on their rear side.”

A few decades later (being currently admittedly addicted to Starbucks triple-shot espresso drinks), it appears that modern supply chains suffer from long tails, albeit not due to anyone’s premature coffee consumption. That (and much more) was the enlightening conclusion of the recent Webcast entitled “Long Tails and Optimizing Inventories” conducted jointly by AMR Research, ToolsGroup, and Supply Chain Digest. Read the rest of this entry »

Step away from the decision–let’s look at the meta-selection. The SageCircle blog features some recent posts on selecting analyst services. So here we are, TEC, guiding all sorts of people in their selection processes for software, recommending best practices, developing custom research, etc., and the interesting thing (if I read the SageCircle blog correctly) is that our recommended software selection best practices can be applied for clients seeking analyst services, of the sort we offer, hence a meta-selection.

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