This post starts with a trivia question: Please name the mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor that has existed the longest in the market with an ERP product that has never been merged with another product? In addition, the vendor and its product offerings have never been covered by TEC and myself. As a hint, the company was founded in 1979 and has always focused on discrete make-to-order (MTO) and engineer-to-order (ETO) manufacturing.

Is there anyone out there wanting to venture a guess? If more hints are needed, it is not MAPICS XA, which was founded in 1977 by IBM, but now belongs to Infor and is currently called Infor ERP Discrete iEnterprise (and before that had changed many ownerships and shared a roof with other ERP products). SYSPRO has been independent since 1978, but has been a frequent topic on this site. It is not QAD either, which has been independent since 1979, but TEC has repeatedly reported about this vendor (see the most recent article on the company). It is not ABAS Software AG either, which has also been independent since its founding in 1980 (TEC just published an article on the company).

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Nuview Systems recently updated the request for information (RFI) to reflect the changes to the level of support to the latest version of its product NuViewHR Product Suite 4.15 SP 2. Following an onsite demonstration and product overview by NuView Systems’ director of sales engineering, David Park, and vice president of sales, Lloyd Lambert, I am pleased to announce that NuViewHR Product Suite 4.15 SP 2 is TEC Certified for human resources (HR) functionality.

Learn more about the process for certifying vendor products by visiting the TEC Certification page on our Web site.

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Siemens recently closed the acquisition of Vistagy, incorporating it into Siemens PLM Software. Vistagy is a provider of specialized engineering solutions including applications for design and manufacture of advanced composite materials.

Composite materials are made of two or more constituent materials that when mixed retain distinct properties. The composite is generally designed to achieve a specific set of attributes, such as lightness, strength, flexibility, durability, etc. Despite their high cost, composites are increasingly being used to manufacture disk brakes for sports and luxury cars and orthopedic dentures, as well as being used in airplanes, wind turbines, and even space ships. Read the rest of this entry »

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), a software solutions and platforms provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, is ending 2011 on quite a positive note. Not long after its partner and user conference Progress Revolution 2011 this fall (see TEC’s exhaustive report on the multiday event), the company first picked its new CEO in Autodesk’s former top executive Jay Bhatt in late November (well thought-out succession planning, as the company’s outgoing CEO Rick Reidy announced that he would be stepping down several months ago).

Then, in early December 2011, Progress acquired privately held Corticon Technologies, an innovative business rules management system (BRMS) provider. The company’s official press release can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us
to notice what we never expected to see.
—John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.

Data visualization is core to business intelligence (BI), as it’s the means by which data is communicated to the user. Results, alerts suggestions, or even more controlled guidance—all of these elements are passed through the data visualization function of a BI application. No matter how much importance software providers give the aesthetics of visualization, all agree that a BI or business analytics application requires a visualization framework that is clear and simple and able to communicate the intended message. Here are three major trends of the last year that are reshaping the BI and analytics space: Read the rest of this entry »

During briefings with small ERP vendors, I often hear the argument that they are more flexible and can better respond to their customers’ needs than larger vendors. The ultimate example: “You can even talk to the CEO if you need to.”

But would you want to? Bypassing the usual workflows and calling the CEO (this actually really happens) may not be a recipe for the best technical support ever.

Besides, from my experience working with and for small ERP vendors, I know that if you want to talk with the CEO, it’s likely that you’re unhappy about something (customers rarely call to congratulate the CEO for the team’s great work). Or, you’re trying to get something from the vendor without going through the formal process of, say, submitting a developmental request for new features.

I know that small ERP vendors are more willing to make compromises and create special relationships with their customers, but there are also disadvantages that you need to consider. Let’s take a look at the challenges you might encounter during the selection and implementation process, and some of the things that you can do to avoid them. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, to most of us accounting sounds as exciting as watching paint dry, but no business can survive without properly managing its financial means. Especially in these days of scarce cash, processing invoices faster and more accurately by the accounts payable (A/P) or billing department is critical so that the accounts receivable (A/R) folks can get their cash faster. An efficient A/P function is something that all companies want, but few have been able to achieve.

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Managing data—particularly in large numbers—still is and probably will be the number one priority for many organizations in the upcoming years. Many of the traditional ways to store and analyze large amounts of data are being replaced with new technologies and methodologies to manage the new volume, complexity, and analysis requirements. These include new ways of developing data warehousing, the emergence of big-data providers to store and analyze very large sets of information, and new hardware and software technologies to speed the data analysis process, among others.

One of the important players in this fierce and competitive space is Kognitio, a company founded in 2005 with headquarters in Bracknell, United Kingdom, and offices in the United States in Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis.

Kognitio is a provider of data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) systems that incorporate in-memory, massively parallel processing (MPP), as well as an interesting virtual online analytical processing (OLAP) cube solution.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Roger Gaskell, chief technical officer (CTO) of Kognitio, and got some of interesting insights on Kognitio’s systems as well the BI and the data warehouse space in general. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series described the genesis and current state of affairs of Workday – a novel company that was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006 by two great IT minds and PeopleSoft alumni: Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Part 2 of this series then got under the hood and analyzed Workday’s secret sauce: its object-oriented and in-memory database (IMDB) and definitional services approach, which involves no coding by developers.

The final part of this series will discuss who should be a good fit for Workday and who might not, and why.

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TEC’s 2011 Focus on HCM, Talent, and Recruiting

Over the last several months, I have been working on revamping TEC’s Human Capital Management (HCM) Evaluation Center to ensure that it includes the vast variety of human resources (HR) and related enterprise software solutions available on the market today. My current research initiative is to develop a recruitment and staffing space for our HCM Evaluation Center.

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The 2011 holiday shopping season seems to have arrived a bit sooner for SAP, who forked out US$3.4 billion for SuccessFactors during the first weekend of December 2011 (see SAP’s official press release). Another curiosity of the acquisition is that it took place on Saturday, which hasn’t prevented bloggers and twitterers from swiftly contributing with their off-the-cuff opinions.

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TEC is coming up with four new buyer’s guides for 2012, and one slot is reserved for supply chain management (SCM) solutions. My main reason for pushing for this was that the global business landscape has been battered significantly by a slew of economic, political, social and environmental events over the past five years. This has resulted in significant losses for businesses around the world.

It is no secret that the world is going to engage in  a fairly trying period for the foreseeable future. And businesses will need to examine their outside environment more closely than ever before committing themselves to action. They will also need to take measures for obtaining greater visibility into and around their supply chain in order to adapt more quickly to changing circumstances.

TEC’s 2012 SCM Buyer’s Guide will discuss the issues that will continue to challenge supply chains, specifically in regard to managing complexity, achieving insight into the chain, and managing collaboration within the chain.

Here is a short synopsis of items I’ll be covering in the guide. Read the rest of this entry »