The recently held Epicor Insights 2012 user conference was the very first one to combine former Epicor and Activant customers. Reportedly, there were 4,000 attendees, including 3,000 customers and 400 vendor partners.

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For over a decade, Arena Solutions has been redefining the product lifecycle management (PLM) space with a suite of cloud applications that enable engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to work better together — from first prototype to full-scale production. In 2000, the two co-founders founded bom.com, a Web-based application for managing items, bills of material (BOMs), and engineering changes (this was the world’s first cloud-native PLM system).

In 2002, bom.com changed its name to Arena Solutions and expanded into a full engineering change order (ECO) management and collaboration tool that is used by thousands of people, including seven of the top ten contract manufacturers in the world. Arena has helped hundreds of innovative manufacturers bring better products to market faster with its cloud offerings that speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and help them collaborate on product changes with strategic partners across the globe. The vendor has over 500 corporate customers, 20,000 individual users, and millions of BOMs in the system.

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After a hiatus of several years, the stars and planets were again aligned for me to be able to attend the AribaLIVE conference in early April 2012. And boy, what a difference several years can make! The last time I attended, in the mid-2000s, Ariba was behind its worst times of the early 2000s and the dotcom ”boom and crash.” For those that are not sure what I am talking about, in the early 2000s, Ariba had quite over-invested in its resource-heavy and inflexible client-server supplier exchanges and was bleeding cash.

The turnaround started when the company decided to focus on spend management software and know-how (sourcing, contract management, spend analysis, invoice automation, etc.), rather than on merely providing the “plumbing” for procurement transactions between trading partners. While the financial performance and posture of Ariba were noticeably improved by the mid-2000s, the company was still criticized by some market observers as being too conservative and focusing on traditional solutions.

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The first of week of May marked a flurry of news by up-and-coming cloud enterprise applications vendors. During salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in Chicago, Kenandy, Inc. announced release 2.0 of Kenandy Social ERP, the first cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system built entirely on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise cloud computing platform. The new release adds financials and order management to Kenandy’s manufacturing management core, specifically for product companies. Read the rest of this entry »

During my several years of attending events organized by the cloud computing evangelist salesforce.com, such as Dreamforce and Cloudforce, Xactly Corporation has always had a prominent stand at the expo floor (another fixture at these events has been BigMachines, and not surprisingly the two vendors are close partners). In a nutshell, Xactly’s on-demand software lets sales professionals know, well, exactly what they are getting out of their sales wins.

The company’s flagship software, Xactly Incent, helps sales representatives and other sales professionals determine compensation for sales transactions. Additionally, sales executives can use the company’s analytics software to analyze post-sales information such as what, where, and to whom their product lines have been sold and how profitably.

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My recent article SAP SCM – Stepping Out of (Relative) Obscurity analyzed SAP’s revamped comprehensive supply chain management (SCM) suite, its major components, and its supply chain process bundles. In addition to receiving a number of public comments and ratings by TEC’s readers, I was recently roasted privately during a lunch meeting with a couple of peers.

Namely, they expressed their surprise at the quite positive tone of the article, and at the lack of my typical skepticism (and sometimes sarcasm). Well, perhaps I am a sucker for a good “big picture” vision, and it seemed to me that SAP had created a compelling strategic story. The ideas such as the “Visual Enterprise” sounded refreshing to me, especially after several years of SAP being quiet on the Line of Business (LOB) applications delivery front. At the end of the day, it was important to highlight that the solutions that SAP is offering for supply chain executives expand across the traditional TLA (three letter acronym) boundaries of SCM, product lifecycle management (PLM), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution system (MES), etc.

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Anyone who has been covering the product lifecycle management (PLM) market will have likely met Oleg Shilovitsky at some industry events or at least read one of his impartial and knowledgeable blog posts on the available PLM vendors, solutions, and market trends. Shilovitsky has been building software products for product data management (PDM), engineering, and manufacturing for the last 20 years or so.

He spent 11 years (from 1999 to 2009) working for Smart Solutions, an Israeli company with the SmarTeam PLM offering, and then for the mighty Dassault Systemes, after it acquired SmarTeam and merged it under the ENOVIA PLM brand. Over these years, he held various positions in the company’s research and development (R&D) group and management, with the most recent position being ENOVIA SmarTeam Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

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TEC’s mid-2011 article, which reported on the Deltek Insight 2011 conference, indicated that Deltek has lately become the leader in market intelligence for government contractors (in addition to long being the leading provider of GovCon enterprise software solutions and professional services). By using Deltek’s market intelligence services, companies are able to benchmark their performance against their GovCon peers.

As of late 2011, Deltek has been hosting a number of in-person seminars and Webinars that are related to Deltek’s Clarity survey — the industry’s largest annual survey of government contractors (Deltek also does similar surveys for the architechture and engineering [A&E] and marketing agency space). Deltek’s third annual Clarity Report for Government Contracting, available today, unveils the results of Deltek’s annual study of top performance benchmarks in government contracting.

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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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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.

My post then explored the strengths and weaknesses of the first group of PLM solutions: those coming from stalwart computer-aided design (CAD)/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) providers including Siemens PLM Software, Dassault Systemes, and PTC, with Autodesk and Gerber Technology only lately joining the PLM fray. Then I analyzed the advantages of the second PLM group: the Big Three enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors, who are SAP, Oracle, and Infor. NGC Software would be an ERP and PLM combination in the fashion/apparel industry.

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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.

With Apple recently leapfrogging its once seemingly untouchable competitors via innovation and delivery of cherished products as well as with the rebirth of General Motors (GM), Chrysler, and Ford via innovation and a departure from their former gas guzzlers with numerous quality issues, it is difficult to debate the importance of product development and its enabling technologies. But not all PLM solutions are created equal, especially given their different origins.

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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 »

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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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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