A couple of days ago, my laptop decided (all on its own) to jump off my desk.

Lucky for me, it survived almost completely undamaged except for a broken latch, which seemed easy enough to fix.

So I decided to order the replacement part and fix it myself.

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Part 1 of this series talked about my long-standing coverage of Exact Holding, and in particular about my recent update briefing with the Exact Americas division. My post concluded with the vendor’s intent to go back to its local roots and push its well respected North American manufacturing and distribution enterprise resource planning (ERP) products, especially Exact Macola ERP.

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Are you a woman working in BI? Do you work with women in BI? Take our survey. This is part of the research for a special report I’m preparing on the role of women in the field of business intelligence (BI). Read the rest of this entry »

The 13th Vendor Shootout for ERP is a great opportunity for companies looking for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to evaluate some of the important players. Previous editions featured Oracle E-Business Suite, IFS, Sage ERP X3, SYSPRO, and others.

The 13th edition features eight vendors specializing in discrete manufacturing, with one exception (SAP Business ByDesign, which focuses on services). Read the rest of this entry »

My recent series on how to plan and manage in uncertainty and volatility (which conditions have become the “new normal” in many sectors and industries) has generated much interest and many comments. As mentioned in the series, the inspiration came from Kinaxis customers’ case studies presented during the Kinexions 2011 user conference.

Ottawa (Canada)-based Kinaxis has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts lately in these days of dispersed complex supply networks and outsourced and offshore manufacturing (with so-called brand owners and their vast network of suppliers). After over 25 years in existence, and some name changes for both the company and its products since the inception, it is not exactly easy to explain what Kinaxis offers (or even better, where its capabilities start and end in the realm of supply chain management [SCM]).

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A phone interview is one of the most effective ways of assessing an applicant’s communication skills early in the hiring process. It’s often better than the in-person interview because the candidate tends to be more at ease than with a face-to-face interview. However, phone interviews can be time-consuming and costly for the hiring company. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few months, we have built TEC’s Human Capital Management (HCM) Evaluation Center with a comprehensive set of features and functions, allowing our users to compare a wide variety of human resources (HR) and related enterprise software solutions available on the market. Last year saw the development of the Talent Management software evaluation competency, which nicely complements our core HR, learning management system (LMS), talent management (TM), incentive and compensation management (I&CM), and HCM software evaluation competencies. And now we are extending our reach to recruitment and staffing software evaluation.

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I recently published a TEC article about my attendance of Emptoris’ Empower 2011 user conference this past fall. What follows now is my deep-dive interview with Terrence Curley, Senior Vice President (SVP) of Product Strategy and Development at Emptoris, with the idea of developing some of the main messages from the conference.

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Take our mobile BI survey. The business intelligence (BI) space is finally seeing mainstream adoption of mobile capabilities, and increasing numbers of software providers are developing mobile BI capabilities to meet the demands of their customers. This evolution is shifting the way people consume and use data. TEC is currently preparing a report that captures the landscape of mobile BI. Read the rest of this entry »

When the economic crisis hit, organizations scurried to find ways to cut back and keep their businesses afloat. Survival was key. Investments and projects of all kinds were put on hold, including upgrading and replacing enterprise software systems. A forecast alert by Gartner showed that enterprise software spending between 2008 and 2009 dropped by 2.6%. No doubt, enterprise software spending is one of the areas in which organizations consciously chose to cut back.

This blog post reviews the impact of the economic crisis on enterprise software buying behavior across a comprehensive list of industries and identifies those industries that suffered the most. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’m in the process of developing the 2012 Supply Chain Management (SCM) Buyer’s Guide, which will be discussing the challenges that businesses face with managing their supply chains and the role of software in mitigating those challenges, I thought it would be worthwhile to conduct a short survey and see how companies today are faring with some important SCM issues. This survey will shed light on the areas often eluding businesses and that are wreaking havoc on their supply chains, as well as areas that are receiving much attention. The results, as well as recommendations for improvement, will be integrated into the buyer’s guide, which is slated for publication in March of this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced LeveragePoint as a cloud-based newcomer to the business-to-business (B2B) pricing market with a novel pricing approach: value-based pricing. In this day and age of highly accelerated new product introductions, history-based pricing approaches are often inadequate. My previous post explained the company’s approach and current state of affairs.

Part 2 follows with my discussion with LeveragePoint’s CEO Steven Forth both during my recent visit to the company’s head office in Cambridge, Massachusetts (US), and via follow up correspondence. Steven Forth is CEO of LeveragePoint and sits on its board of directors. He is responsible for strategic direction, finances, and key relationships.

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Yesterday SAP announced its strategy to provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with the services of the SAP HANA platform via SAP HANA analytics for SAP Business One and the SAP HANA Edge Edition. Read the rest of this entry »

TEC recently completed certification of Tenrox’s project management software Project Workforce Management. Download the report now for a detailed analysis of the software’s strengths and weaknesses. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hard to imagine that organizations like SAP or former Business Objects (BO)—now a division of SAP—were once start-up companies. Nowadays on the business intelligence (BI) scene it’s almost impossible to avoid the BO initialism. Like many other successful companies, SAP has grown into itself by offering a product that applied a radical approach to a business problem solution, and this is particularly true of its BO stack of BI solutions. In this installment of my Thinking Radically interview series, I had the pleasure to speak with Timo Elliott, a prominent personality in the BI space. Read the rest of this entry »