Cegedim Relationship Management released version 8 of its customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Mobile Intelligence. The product continues to target life sciences clients, such as Biolab and Liomont. The press release underlines new capabilities for mobile, as well as customer-centric reporting and analytics. The solution falls in line with the present-day customer-centric ecosystem that was detected by theorists like Mr. Greenberg at the turn of the century. Worth underlining is that CRM software for life sciences continues to remain a customer-intimate zone that is unlikely to become social.

When companies buy software tools what do they expect from them? Guided by common sense, one might think that a software tool is expected to render clunky manual methods gracefully automated. As a result, information and knowledge would be diligently arranged in databases and easily searched, found, and accessed.

Let’s imagine, for instance, a customer relationship management (CRM) system and further look at its issue management component. What can it do? It can store cases as reported by clients (title, description, etc.). The software automatically assigns case numbers to make things easy. A priority can be ascribed to each case. Cases can be placed in queues or assigned directly to a person. Processes such as supervision or escalation can be embedded in the system as well.

So, once the system is installed and in place, no more manual tracking of issues, no more Excel, no more confusion!

But let’s not fool ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile computing (mobility) has been the major theme of the ongoing IFS World Conference 2012 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Given that the sales of smartphones and tablets have recently exceeded the sales of PCs, this path of discussion is logical. IFS has embarked on the following three-step path to workforce mobilization:

• Reach—when people are out of office, reach them via notifications, reminders, etc.
• Act—enable transactional users to use full ERP suite remotely via IFS Touch Apps for smartphones and tablets, in the same manner as when they are in the office. The look-and-feel will be the same as using IFS Enterprise Explorer on the desktop, with the addition of “touch” capabilities for tablets.
• Transform—with the input of professional ERP users and roles (e.g., road warriors), IFS hopes to transform some industries’ best practices via mobile devices (e.g., field service tasks)

At the conference, IFS launched seven new smartphone apps in the IFS Touch Apps series. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of part III of this series, the software selection team at MegaResistCap had turned in their software selection votes to the company’s executive operating committee. Jim, director of information technology (IT), was anxiously awaiting the voting result, which was now being announced by Francois, the company’s chief legal counsel. Francois wasn’t one to mince words, and got right to the point: Read the rest of this entry »

Workday, Inc., was enthusiastically greeted by investors on its first day of trading with the stock jumping 74 percent. Workday was founded in 2005 by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri following Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft. Staying true to these human capital management (HCM) and financial roots, Duffield and Bhusri have built the PeopleSoft of the new millennium and investors have rewarded them richly for their focus and vision. Read the rest of this entry »

IFS, the global enterprise applications company (whose World Conference 2012 is currently taking place in Gothenburg (Sweden), announced that Merrill Technologies Group (MTG), a leader in the machining, fabricating, and systems integration fields, has selected IFS Applications as its new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Read the rest of this entry »

High-level enhancements in TeleStaff 2.8 were announced by Kronos last week—Microsoft database compatibility, bidding, reporting, and data consolidation. It is worth pointing out the performance of Kronos TeleStaff and the (less talked about) public sector workforce management suite since Kronos’ May 2011 acquisition of PDSI and the TeleStaff product. Read the rest of this entry »

Zurmo has released a new version of its Open Source CRM. The  0.7.5 version offers new social CRM elements, the option to add profile pictures, and custom lists while searching. One new feature worth underlining is Mission—a new gamification component that invites “co-workers to challenge one another in exchange for a reward.” In fact, Mission proposes a unified vision of all customer interactions within an organization by displaying each department’s customer conversations to other departments.

QAD is arguably the first enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor with a built-in full-fledged business process management (BPM) system (Savvion BPM) within its development platform, Progress OpenEdge. Indeed, SAP NetWeaver PI is mainly about process-based integration (and Pegasystems, IBM BPM, and IDS Scheer by Software AG often complement those capabilities for, say, case management or rules-based processes), while Microsoft SharePoint has some workflow management capabilities and is mostly good for document-based processes. Needless to say, BPM is about much more than system-centric integration, portals, and document management. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Emptoris and Ariba are gone as independent spend management software suite vendors (acquired by IBM and SAP respectively), is SciQuest trying to take their place? The company may indeed have those aspirations, based on its 2011 acquisition of AECsoft for Supplier Information Management (SIM), Supplier Diversity, and Sourcing Technology, and the recent 2012 acquisition of Upside Software for its leading Contract Management capabilities. Most recently, SciQuest acquired Spend Radar LLC, a rapidly growing provider of easy-to-use and flexible spend analysis software. Read the rest of this entry »

IQMS announced that Bead Industries, Inc. will implement its EnterpriseIQ ERP manufacturing solution to support current operations and anticipated growth. Bead Industries is a 98-year-old company with two divisions—Bead Electronics (specializing in high-speed cold forming of precision metal contact pins and the automated assembly of custom interconnects) and Bead Chain, along with a wholly owned subsidiary, McGuire Manufacturing Co. Bead is also anticipating future growth in the form of acquisitions. Read the rest of this entry »

Under the terms of the newly announced partnership with Rosslyn Analytics, Differentia Consulting, one of the United Kingdom’s largest technology consultancies and QlikTech’s largest UK partner, will develop QlikView apps using Rosslyn Analytics’ cloud-based RAPid enterprise data enrichment platform for clients in the UK and Ireland and their associated global affiliates. 

The important bit here is that Rosslyn has brought QlikView business intelligence (BI) visualization into the cloud using the RAPid platform.  Read the rest of this entry »

OpenText announced that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) is deploying OpenText’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. Because some organizations cite their concerns with the security of cloud-based solutions, it’s notable that a large government agency’s deployment will be cloud-based. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I discussed Deltek’s journey from its founding in 1983 until its recently announced impending delisting from NASDAQ and going private under Thoma Bravo’s ownership, for the second time in its history. The article presented some opposing views on what this acquisition might mean for Deltek, its customers, and partners.

In light of the company’s recent quarterly results and the upcoming Deltek Insight 2012 user conference in mid-October 2012, this post features my conference previews discussion with Patrick Smith, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Communications at Deltek.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the introduction of PureData, IBM’s PureSystems family has a new way of dealing with large amounts of data with speed and intelligence to provide insights and support specific business goals.

These computing offerings, called “expert integrated systems” by IBM, have built-in expertise to reduce the cost and complexity of deployment and maintenance, so customers can expect to have an IBM PureData system up and running in 24 hours. Read the rest of this entry »