SOFTWARE ADOPTIONS AND UPGRADES

Peace Hills Insurance selects UNIT4’s Agresso Business World
Insurance
“UNIT4 won this faceoff against Oracle JD Edwards, MS Dynamics GP, and MS Dynamics NAV thanks to its unique capabilities to effect business change within the software. Peace Hills plans to implement three Agresso ERP modules: Financials, Planner, and Expenses from Agresso suite.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

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Part 1 of this blog series introduced the concept of (Rapid) Response Management in the realm of supply chain management (SCM) via a software category pioneer, Kinaxis. The currently bullish Kinaxis has a number of customers that are SAP ERP customers too, and for a long time SAP was at first dismissive (or at least ambivalent) regarding the need for Response Management, as the company had its own well-known SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (SAP APO) product. In addition, Kinaxis has had to compete with other advanced planning and scheduling (APS) providers such as JDA Software (former i2 and Manugistics), Logility, and Oracle.

Since November 2010, SAP has been distributing a supply chain solution by a lesser-known German software company ICON-SCM as SAP Supply Chain Response Management (SAP SCRM) by ICON-SCM, a solution extension to its own SCM suite, SAP SCM (see TEC’s article entitled SAP SCM – Stepping out of Obscurity). SAP had investigated several options to satisfy this role, and presumably one of those options might have been Kinaxis. For its part, Oracle released its internally designed standalone product in 2009 called Oracle Rapid Planner, which can be layered on top of Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) products and other ERP products.

Now, Kinaxis feels vindicated by Oracle and SAP’s endorsement of the market at long last, but is slighted by the IKON-SCM partnership, plus, it is a fierce competition now. In addition, isn’t “optimization” part of the SAP APO name, and why then did SAP introduce a separate SCRM solution? It seems we may be talking about different kinds of optimization. Maybe in certain situations it’s more appropriate to use one kind of optimization versus the other.

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Atex knows what media companies need for publishing online today. And while its Web content management (WCM) solution puts editorial teams at home in the digital media environment, Atex wants to be your WCM system even if your company isn’t part of the media industry. Read the rest of this entry »

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the 2012 Supply Chain Management Buyer’s Guide is here. Download your copy now.

In this buyer’s guide, I address a topic that deserves more discussion among supply chain strategists: collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series started with the assertion that product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions are becoming increasingly important to enterprises, to a strategic degree. However, not all PLM products are created equal, especially in light of their different origins. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working at TEC for a year now, helping our team of Analysts as they manage their demanding workloads, nurture their ideas, and provide interesting content to our two-million-plus subscribers.

It’s a pleasure to hash out ideas and watch as the organic process of writing and editing results in new angles and fresh approaches to software industry issues.

As we expand the scope of our content, which largely means keeping a pointed focus on the data in our models (i.e., What’s new in SCM? How can we ensure our ERP space is totally current?  Which new vendors or products do we need to add to the fold in the next quarter?), I am constantly on the lookout for new talent to add to the team. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the lean enterprise paradigm swept across the manufacturing industry, I doubt many business people would have considered accounting as a serious tool for changing the mindset of decisions makers and how businesses operate. It turns out, however, that there’s more than one way to do accounting, and the accounting approach an organization uses can have a significant impact on a business’s direction. Read the rest of this entry »

It was interesting and perhaps telling that on the so-called “Super Tuesday” on March 6, 2012, when the Republican (GOP) presidential candidates were duking it out in 10 US states, two once-fierce competitors in the spare parts planning & optimization (SPP/O) space decided to merge instead of continuing to bludgeon each other. Indeed, Servigistics and MCA Solutions have competed for virtually every major deal in the space since their inceptions over a decade ago.

The NY Yankees vs. Boston Red Sox or LA Lakers vs. Boston Celtics sports rivalry analogies could describe the software rivalry here: there was never any love lost in the process, and the companies and their staffers were monitoring each other keenly (and crowing over each other’s occasional misfortunes or missteps).

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In this day and age of globalization, ever-shorter new product introduction (NPI) cycles and overall product lifecycles, partner collaboration, and whatnot, product lifecycle management (PLM) software solutions have lately increased their strategic significance to enterprises. In his recent Forbes blog post contribution, PTC’s CEO Jim Heppelmann touts PLM as a new path to shareholder value. He argues that the PLM repository of data should be an enterprise system of record rather than mundane transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous blog post, I discussed the importance of data management capabilities of a business intelligence (BI) solution. To recap briefly, the Pareto chart below reveals the most sought-after functionalities of BI software solutions according to TEC data, with data management and business performance management (BPM) coming out on top. Now let’s discuss the second most popular functionality of a BI solution: BPM.

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Sharp-eyed visitors to our Evaluation Centers may have noticed a new addition recently: ERP for Manufacturing (SMB). Read the rest of this entry »

Headquartered in Vancouver, BC (Canada), with worldwide offices and business partners, privately owned Maximizer Software delivers customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and professional services to meet the needs of small to medium businesses (SMBs) as well as divisions of larger enterprises. Read the rest of this entry »

The voice of the customer (VOC) concept has been around for decades, but the Internet and social media technologies have finally enabled it to its fullest degree. We have all heard of (and perhaps even contributed to) customers venting their anger or expressing their delight with some vendor’s service or some product’s characteristics and performance via online forums.

A company’s ability to spot market trends in a timely way and find competitive info such as good or bad sentiments about its products and brands should go all the way back to the design department (and its suppliers). Read the rest of this entry »