Is your boss the main reason you call in sick on Monday mornings? Do you need to “manage” your boss in order to get any work done? Do you find yourself in the position of having to defend your boss when talking to colleagues?

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For years (if not decades) now, but especially during tough economic times, companies have been trying to better analyze their enterprise spend over their comprehensive pools of sourcing categories (and individual items and commodities within these categories) and suppliers.

The idea here is to find room for improvement and savings by pinpointing strategic centralized (consolidated) procurement opportunities for a better negotiating power, discovering better (and worse) performing contracts and their individual terms and clauses, by eliminating costly maverick spending, and by dealing only with the best and most reliable suppliers. For more information, see my previous blog series entitled “Are Spend Management (or SRM) apps Suited for the Mid-market?” and TEC’s article entitled “Thou Shalt Manage (and Cherish) Thy (Best) Suppliers.”

While many companies have experienced significant benefits and improvements by deploying spend analysis solutions from specialists such as Ariba, BravoSolution, Emptoris, Oracle, Proactis, SAP, SAS, and Zycus, those benefits do not come by easily or cheaply. Namely, every comprehensive spend analysis implementation is, in fact, an implementation of a sophisticated business intelligence (BI) solution.

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Living in close proximity to the headquarters of PTC (NASDAQ: PMTC) in the Boston metropolitan area, and given numerous contacts and interactions with the vendor in the past, it might sound surprising that only this past summer I attended the vendor’s annual PlanetPTC Live conference for the very first time. Well, at least my former colleague Kurt Chen did attend PlanetPTC Live 2010, and based on his report from the time, there were no major earth-shattering announcements.

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Parametric Technology Corporation, aka PTC, has fearlessly put their product lifecycle management (PLM) solution Windchill 10 through the TEC certification program. The writing of the full report is currently underway. I wanted to give you this little teaser as to what you can expect from this new and improved version of this popular solution. Read the rest of this entry »

To work in the software industry world it is often necessary to think radically, or “out of the box” in order to innovate, solve problems, or stay ahead of the competition. Today we start a series of interviews with some of the thinkers who are reshaping the software industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of my recent blog series, Filling the Holes and Breaking Down Artificial Walls in a Process PLM Solution Set, established that the product lifecycle management (PLM) software market for process industries (i.e., food & beverage, life sciences, chemicals, paints, consumer products, etc.) has not been well-defined as compared to its counterparts in the discrete widgets manufacturing and fashion (apparel) industry segments.

Indeed, the process PLM solution market is currently a mosaic of established generic PLM providers and a plethora of specialized vendors with solutions that cater to only a part of the entire process PLM scope. The recent acquisition of Enginuity (mostly for its formula management capabilities) by Dassault Systemes only proves the point and the need for some consolidation in the market.

My post then analyzed typical workarounds to solve the puzzle of integrating these specialized solutions, most of which focus on structured data, which is insufficient for creating adequate multi-media product specifications in this day and age. 

Part 2 of the series analyzed other typical constraints of generic PLM solutions that claim process PLM expertise, such as the level of these process PLM vendors’ global enterprise support as well as available solution configuration options and ongoing change capabilities.

The series ended with the promise of separate future posts talking about some concrete process PLM add-on products that are already generally available (or that will be available soon). This post is the fulfillment of that promise.

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Although this year Judith Rothrock could not attend herself, she’s the driving force behind the annual JRocket Marketing Grape Escape^® industry analyst event, now in its 11th year. As always, this year’s Grape Escape was a well-organized event hosting some key industry players. It afforded me and my colleague Gabriel Gheorghiu another opportunity to meet the software vendors who are JRocket Marketing’s clients and obtain the latest news and updates straight from the source.

Here’s the skinny on three of the vendors that gave informal presentations. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that Business First from W4 is now available for online evaluation of business process management (BPM) solutions in the Project Portfolio Management Evaluation Center, joining the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing BPM functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

In this issue of BI Hits the Road, I’d like to take a look at the mobile offerings of two business intelligence (BI) software providers: MicroStrategy (see vendor profile) and QlikTech (see vendor profile). These companies’ mobile BI strategy development efforts have paid off in fervent interest in their solutions by small to large organizations in various industries. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of what it calls “People Cloud,” which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning, talent management, and collaboration technologies. The post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, I discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. My post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs: 700 employees, 1,600 customers, and 23 million users worldwide (its solutions have been deployed in 195 countries in 30 languages). Read the rest of this entry »

My recent attendance of the PlanetPTC Live 2011 event was a great learning experience. Look for an article with my impressions on the conference and on PTC’s strategy with regards to the novel PTC Creo suite of design applications leveraging both the direct and parametric modeling (and in the wake of the release of nine Creo 1.0 applications), embedded software lifecycle management (with the MKS Integrity acquisition), mobility, etc. coming soon.

This blog post, however, will discuss handling configurable products in both the back-end engineering/design & manufacturing departments and on the front-office/sales side (including direct sales, resellers and the indirect channel, and consumer self-service).

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CRM has changed enormously over the past decade. New technologies and changing customer behavior have both had a great impact on the way companies manage their existing and potential clients. Read the rest of this entry »