Two recent blog posts by Oleg Shilovitsky (PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective and PDM vs. PLM: A Process Perspective) got me wondering about what a true product lifecycle management (PLM) system actually is.

In his posts, Shilovitsky discussed the differences between product data management (PDM) and PLM from the perspective of

• data (scope and control of the data) and
• process (coverage of product lifecycle activities)

I have a bit of a different perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

When APICS invited me to be part of next October’s international conference on best practices for global supply chain and operations management, I started exploring ideas revolving around best practices, including this deceptively simple question:

What is a best practice, anyway? Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, we have witnessed Infor’s aggressive advertising campaign against its bigger rivals that are conjointly called “Big ERP,” where it is blaming them for inflexibility, neglecting customers’ interests, and charging enormous amounts of money for their software and service. As an alternative, Infor and its competitors offer a variety of tier 2 systems that can supposedly satisfy rigorous business’ requirements and, at the same time, are more agile, and less costly. This also applies to the small and medium size ERP market, where Big ERP vendors have been trying to aggressively invade in the last few years. I was interested to see what the difference was, by having the opportunity to compare features and functions of not only software products but groups of them.

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IFS is a public business software company (listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange) founded in 1983 with headquarters in Linkoping, Sweden and with US$362 million in revenues in 2009. The company develops, supplies, and implements IFS Applications, an integrated and component-based extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite built on service oriented architecture (SOA) technology [evaluate this product]. The vendor has about 2,700 employees and more than 2,000 customers (with 830,000 individual users) in more than 50 countries.

In terms of a functional footprint, IFS Applications is comprised of ERP, supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), business intelligence (BI)/corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise asset management (EAM), maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), and projects (planning, accounting, and delivery). Make no mistake, IFS will not compete as a best-of-breed SCM, CRM, PLM, or BI solution, but these capabilities are more than adequate within the extended ERP context.

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You’ve gone through months (possibly years of preparation) and now you’re down to the final stages of your software implementation project. No matter how successfully you have executed the project to date, it can all fall apart if your service provider (software vendor or value added reseller [VAR]) can’t do its job properly! Read the rest of this entry »

These days, the concepts of business process management (BPM) have become more unified, and BPM functionality from different vendors seems to be more converged. However, organizations may have their own reasons for adopting BPM—different business features and requirements will lead to different matching points between adopting organizations and BPM solutions. In the mean time, BPM vendors are using various selling points to differentiate their product offerings and to touch target customers’ nerves in various ways. Based on my recent interactions with the BPM vendor community, I’d like to discuss a few different angles (other than the generally-recognized core benefits of BPM such as transparency, efficiency, and optimization of business processes) that a user can take to dive into the BPM water. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started by analyzing a certain change of the guard and a related product strategy shift at Infor. Two late June 2010 news announcements, which were entitled “Infor Simplifies Connectivity and Data Sharing with Infor ION(tm)” and “Infor Selects Microsoft as Preferred Technology and Tools Provider for Infor Software,” were then demystified in an interactive and constructive dialogue with Soma Somasundaram, SVP of global product development (a recent internal promotion) and Massimo Capoccia, director of product management technology.

The article ended with stipulating the four major components of the newly minted Infor ION interoperability and business process management (BPM) framework. 

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During an asset’s life cycle, you can save money acquiring, using, and disposing of it at the right time. When your activities do not require many assets, it is easy to understand what the optimal use of an asset is, but when you use sophisticated tools; heavy machinery; and hundreds of trucks and forklifts things can get a lot more complicated.

Depending on how you use it, any tool or equipment can have a utility ranging from useless, if you keep in its box, to extremely useful, if you know where, when, and how to use it. Traditional enterprise asset management systems (EAM) or computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) cannot always provide the answers to the questions above. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year I attended the JDA FOCUS 2009 conference to realize that Scottsdale, Arizona-based JDA Software (NASDAQ: JDAS) has become a force to be reckoned with in the vast supply chain management (SCM) space. Although far from being a vocal or touchy-feely company, throughout its history JDA has been run fairly effectively by applying basic principles of sound management. These principles of profits and prudently spending within its means have been rare in the software business, and JDA’s results have been impressive for a very long time.

Throughout most of its history, JDA has also acquired a number of companies that were often doing badly, typically because their management was long on strategy, vision, and ambition, but short on execution. JDA has been able to rectify the situation, time and again. The company’s acquisition criteria have been as follows: strategic fit, market leadership, and relatively modern software architecture of the acquired product. 

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The TDWI World Conference in San Diego has finally begun, and as a media partner, TEC will be covering this event in its entirety. The next series of brief posts will be dedicated to the conference’s highlights whose theme is “Creating an Agile BI Environment .” Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series positioned all four Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) product lines and concluded that Microsoft Dynamics AX [evaluate this product] has been selected as the ace and global “platform” player in selected industries in the Dynamics ERP lineup. In other words, the product has been providing an industry-enabling layer upon which certified partners can build their sub-vertical solutions to cater to the so-called long- tail niches.

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Since Aras decided to stop asking for license fees for Aras Innovator [evaluate the product]by switching to the business model that the vendor calls enterprise open source, , free and open source software (FOSS) product lifecycle management (PLM) as a topic has been talked more frequently than before. On his blog site Daily PLM Think Tank, Oleg Shilovitsky has touched upon open source PLM from different angles in more than 10 blog posts. Comments to these posts are also very interesting to read. To join in the discussion, I decided to dig into the software selection statistics captured at Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) to see what the users (more precisely, PLM seekers) think of FOSS PLM. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the major modules of integrated workforce management (WFM) suites that organizations can deploy to better schedule and assign work in their production and distribution facilities and in retail stores. Concrete examples of commercially available products included those from Kronos and RedPrairie Corporation, given those two vendors’ notable recent moves in the WFM field.

While Part 1 explained the data collection, time and attendance (T&A), activities, and absence management modules of WFM (and their importance), Part 2 focused on the forecasting and scheduling, reporting and analytics, and talent management parts of WFM. The final part of this blog series will analyze the retail sector’s particular WFM requirements and some vendors’ offerings.

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I have no reason to doubt Kirill Tatarinov, thus far the longest-standing corporate VP of Microsoft Business Solutions, when he keeps reassuring the market by stating that “Microsoft equitably loves all of its children.” Indeed, the Microsoft Dynamics division and its staffers are careful not to reveal any individual enterprise resource planning (ERP) product results (growth, new licenses, etc.), as everything publicly reported is lumped under the overall Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Business Division results.

Still, there have been many indications and plausible reasons why Microsoft Dynamics AX [evaluate this product] might be the ace in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP rotation (to use a baseball analogy). Shortly after the 2002 acquisition of Navision (which also included former Damgaard’s Axapta product, the predecessor of Microsoft Dynamics AX) and the late-2000 acquisition of Great Plains (which also included Solomon, Microsoft Dynamics SL’s predecessor) there were some obvious demarcation lines between the four ERP products. 

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It’s been many years since this question of compatibility between lean practices and enterprise resource planning (ERP) was rigorously discussed and brought many controversial and opposite opinions to the table. Can these two work well together, or do they have no place in each other’s space? It seems like even after all this time—and discussion—the jury is still out the final verdict. The answer is not a simple “yes” or “no,” but rather lies somewhere between.

Advocates of lean concepts protect a lean manufacturing organization from technological invasions, propagating the principle that “simpler is better” and believing that almost any informational system is a waste (non-value adding). On the flip side of the coin, there are thousands of ERP vendors, users, and manufacturing managers that use traditional methods based on complex data and transactional systems who won’t accept any other alternative way of conducting business. Read the rest of this entry »