With little doubt that the US economy is in or near recession, the big question now is whether we’re heading into a global credit freeze and financial meltdown. If the worst happens, all bets are off—we’ll be pretty much in uncharted territory. But if we do manage to escape with nothing more severe than a typical recession, what approach should you take towards IT spending? Read the rest of this entry »

TEC’s Vendor Showdown series is the most popular regular feature that we run here at TEC. So far, we’ve run quite a few Showdowns, and usually things go smoothly, but sometimes there’s more that goes on than meets the eye—and then it’s usually problems, as you’ll see in a moment. I should know, I’m the person who writes TEC’s Vendor Showdowns.

For those who’ve never seen one, Showdowns compare three software solutions (it could be ERP, or CRM, or BI, or HR, or any of the over 20 different kinds of software that we cover) on the basis of pure functionality. We publish a series of charts based on the latest RFI data we collect from the three vendors, provide a bit of commentary, and let the reader see who placed first, second, or third, both overall and by main modules. (Here’s a link to the latest ERP Vendor Showdown featuring Infor, Epicor and Lawson, and you’ll see what I mean.) Read the rest of this entry »

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to maintain their competitive advantage and increase sales while lowering costs. Analytics helps organizations identify whether they are getting the most out of their resources. Is the money they spend going to good use? Are they proactively identifying ways to cut costs while maximizing resources? Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever been involved in selecting a business software solution, you know how tricky it can be. Today’s software systems are quite complex, and it can be very difficult to tell which vendor has the solution best suited for the special needs and business processes of your organization. One way to help avoid making a bad choice is to have a complete list of software functions to refer to.

Let’s say you’re going to be choosing a new ERP system. With a list in hand of all the functions an ERP system can perform, you could flag all the functions your organization requires, prioritize them, and then submit them to vendors to see if, and how well, each vendor supports them.

Creating this prioritized list of functional requirements and submitting it to vendors would not only help make sure that no functionalities important to your organization are forgotten or overlooked, it would also help you eliminate those vendors who don’t support, or only poorly support, the functionalities your organization requires. You would be taking a giant step toward making sure you don’t end up with a software system that isn’t designed to do what you want it to. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at TEC, our most popular feature is something we call a Vendor Showdown. We take two or three vendors who market the same type of solution (ERP or CRM or business process management, or HR, etc.), and compare their functionalities head on. The results are based on the most recent RFI information we gather from the vendors.

As a quick example, our discrete ERP RFI contains a list of  3,690 feature functions. The vendors fill out the RFI by indicating whether or not they support each of the 3,690 feature functions, and if they do, how. For each feature function, the choice of vendor responses are: supported out of the box, not supported, supported via 3rd party solution, supported by modification, supported by customization, or not yet rated by the vendor.  All we do then is run all the responses through our decision support engine and write an article discussing the results, illustrated by some graphs. Read the rest of this entry »