[Editor’s note: Frank is not a composite character. He is a real person, employed at a real company. I’ve changed certain identifying particulars at his request. Read the rest of this entry »

Boy, we have come a long way in the search for talent. Long gone are the days where company’s would place an advertisement in the classified ad section of their local newspaper’s and wait for the perfect candidate to call and request an interview—although some organizations today feel this is still a very effective recruiting method and often use it in conjunction with other channels.

Today, it’s more about what I like to call “cyber recruiting”—using social media tools for attracting and finding the right person to fill a job. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter are some of the main social media tools used by today’s forward-thinking organizations and allow recruiters to target the exact skill sets required for often difficult-to- fill positions. Candidates that were once far beyond the recruiter’s reach are now right there at their fingertips. Read the rest of this entry »

February and bleak mid-winters are not exactly the high season for software user conferences in North America, and thus I accepted the invitation by UNIT4 (formerly Unit 4 Agresso), the second-largest business applications provider in continental Europe, to its UK 2010 user conference. The attraction, in addition to the Celtic Manor Resort in lush South Wales as the venue (where the 2010 Ryder Cup will take place later this year), was the fact that this was, for the first time, a unified event for both Agresso Business World (ABW) and CODA Financials customers (and customers of many other lesser-known products in the large UNIT4 family).

Frankly, I was a bit skeptical about what new and exciting I might see and hear about at this event in light of the vendor’s analyst tour in Boston in late 2009. Even that very recent analyst tour did not present any earth-shattering news compared to what I had already ascertained in my mid-2009 report on positioning of ABW, CODA, and CODA 2go within Unit 4 Agresso. 

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A little heads-up: We’re going to start having videos on TEC’s Web site. We’ll produce videos in the future but the first step we’ll start with is a library of links to freely available ones from YouTube. Although YouTube mainly serves as a source of entertainment, there are videos for other purposes as well. After a little searching and watching, here is my playlist of YouTube videos related to product lifecycle management (PLM). Read the rest of this entry »

Montreal, QC — April 1, 2010 — Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC), a world-wide leader in enterprise software evaluation, has released a new decision support system for pragmatic decision makers who already know what’s most important for their company: jDICE™ (just Decide—Ignore [Your Idiot] Customers and Employees).

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the phenomenon of the service economy or the increasing importance of the service sector in industrialized economies. Especially in a sluggish market, the service delivered after the initial sale of a product is what can truly differentiate competitors.

The service opportunity is also there, since after-sale service is quite difficult to replicate. Thus, while durable (hard) goods orders decline and product-based profit margins diminish in maturing and commoditized industries, service margins remain very healthy. When consumers or businesses focus more on maintaining what they have vs. purchasing new products, after-sale service can have a substantial impact on any company’s revenue, profitability, and customer loyalty levels.

Thus, Part 1 asserted that one saving grace for the economies of these developed countries (the Group of Eight [G8] and beyond) could be the post-sale service or aftermarket business model in which services to repair, maintain, and optimize products are sold to installed bases. Part 2 then discussed the accompanying service lifecycle management (SLM) software category and the potential benefits of using mobile computing technology.

We might want to note here that the word “resource” throughout this series refers to any type of mobile field worker including engineers, technicians, inspectors, surveyors, gang, crew, shared vehicle and so on, while “job” or “task” refers to any type of work that these resources perform. Given the apparent market growth opportunity, service chain optimization would be about putting the right resources in the right places at the right times to deliver superior service to customers while keeping costs down.

As simple as that, right? Well, not really (and thus the Scylla & Charybdis reference). 

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