Rimini Street, Inc., a vocal third-party maintenance and support provider for enterprise software, including SAP and Oracle Corporation’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite (EBS), Oracle Database, and Hyperion software, recently announced that UCI International has selected Rimini Street to support its Oracle EBS applications to save substantial annual support fees. UCI International is a manufacturer and supplier of vehicle replacement parts and car care products in North America, with facilities and offices throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, and China. Its brands include Airtex Products, ASC Industries, Autolite, FRAM Filtration, Holts, Prestone, and Wells Vehicle Electronics.

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While SAP has lately given huge publicity to in-memory computing via its incessant promotion of SAP HANA, the technology has been around since the late 1990s, and there are currently over 50 software vendors delivering such proven solutions. Most recently, during the COLLABORATE ’13 Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conference, Oracle announced new Oracle In-Memory Applications for Oracle Engineered Systems, leveraging dynamic random access memory (DRAM), flash memories, and the near zero latency InfiniBand network fabric to run ten to twenty times faster than commodity hardware. These tools can achieve these impressive speeds by transforming batch processing to real-time and shortening response time with improved user interface (UI) rendering.

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As part of its recent major global IT transformation, Telefónica has selected TOA Technologies as its global field service management (FSM) solution provider. This is a global contract agreement for TOA to be the standard FSM provider with its ETAdirect solution suite, covering all 24 countries in which the telecom provider does business across Europe and Latin America.

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Microsoft Convergence 2013, which took place in mid-March 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana, was reportedly the largest annual Convergence conference ever, with more than 11,000 attendees. Although I could not attend the multiday event in person, today’s collaborative technology marvels made it possible for me to follow it fairly closely even from a thousand miles away. Many of the conference messages I first heard at the Microsoft Dynamics’ Fall Analyst Event (FAE) back in November 2012, where the industry analysts and bloggers got conference peek previews (see blog here). Featuring high-profile customers, such as Chobani Inc., Habitat for Humanity International, Revlon Inc., Shock Doctor Inc., and Weight Watchers International Inc., the opening keynote by Microsoft Business Solutions president Kirill Tatarinov talked to how Microsoft Dynamics, as a unifying fabric, is “uniquely positioned in the market to serve as a catalyst to help businesses unite their organizations, unite their people and technology, and unite with their customers.” Read the rest of this entry »

At its annual TotalConnections 2013 customer summit, SumTotal Systems LLC announced a new ambitious human capital management (HCM) platform called elixHR, a virtual single source of truth for an organization’s human resources (HR) data. With elixHR, companies will be able to extend and link disparate HR information and processes, as well as external enterprise systems and information, to access comprehensive employee data, processes, and analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

Plex Systems Inc., provider of Plex Online, a cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) offering for manufacturers, recently announced the results of the survey entitled “2012 ERP Study: Implementation and Usage Trends for SaaS/Cloud vs. Traditional Systems.” Conducted by the Manufacturing Performance Institute (MPI) on behalf of Plex Systems, the study assessed implementations of ERP systems, satisfaction with those implementations, and the extent to which ERP systems have benefitted organizations.

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Sharp vertical focus is helping QAD win in the Russian market against the fierce local competitor 1C. QAD recently announced Saturno-TP, a manufacturer of interior auto parts, selected QAD Enterprise Applications to support its manufacturing operations. Saturno-TP is an automotive parts supplier focused on the development and production of interior parts such as interior trims, door panels, parcel shelves, pillars and other injection-molded and thermoformed parts, luggage compartment components, and sun visors. Read the rest of this entry »

The announcement on April 1, 2013, entitled “Epicor Announces Newest Release of Epicor LumberTrack,” might have sounded like an April Fool’s joke to anyone unfamiliar with this esoteric offering. But Epicor LumberTrack (formerly from Progressive Solutions) is indeed a comprehensive business software solution for lumber and wood product manufacturers and wholesale distributors (hardwood and softwood sawmills, panel mills, value-added remanufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and brokers).

Progressive Solutions was in business for more than 20 years, and it was recognized on numerous occasions as one of the top 100 employers in Canada and top 20 in British Columbia. In 1995, the decision was made to focus on systems for the forest products industry, and out of that came LumberTrack, which has been the leading vertical ERP system in the marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Pearson, a global education company, has selected Cameleon Software’s Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution as part of a business transformation initiative aimed at enhancing the customer experience. Anticipating the growing need for customized and personalized services, as well as the shift from paper to digital content, Pearson adapted its business processes to the market changes and, as part of its strategy, implemented a CPQ solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Founded in 1980, abas has lately been coming out of its “dark horse” and “best kept secret” stature to become a fiercely competitive provider of cost-effective enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for midmarket manufacturers and distributors. Most recently, Ironware International Inc. has chosen abas Business Software as its new ERP provider. Ironware was founded in 1988 by Karin Eaton to distribute Pierre Picard’s stylish handforged iron lighting and furniture.

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A day after a major win in India, Epicor announced that the Water World Group of Companies has selected to implement the flagship Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in its offices in Egypt and the USA. Water World is Egypt’s leading water treatment company that specializes in water treatment systems, including technology used to purify and filter potable water.

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While multi-CAD (computer aided design) situations have been a matter of course at large manufacturing organizations, it appears that multi-PLM (product lifecycle management) software deployments will follow suit. To that end, Aras, an upbeat open source PLM software solution provider for large enterprises, recently announced that MAN Diesel & Turbo (MAN), a provider of large bore diesel engines and turbo machinery for marine and stationary applications, headquartered in Augsburg, Germany, has selected Aras Innovator as a supplementary platform for engineering process automation. Read the rest of this entry »

In its early days in the 1990s during the first wave of trading exchanges (anyone still remember the crash and burn of Commerce One?), SciQuest used to help manage procurement and inventory management for reagents, those substances or compounds that are added to a system in order to bring about a chemical reaction (or are added to see if a reaction occurs). SciQuest’s Enterprise Reagent Manager (ERM) is a procurement-focused chemical inventory solution used by seven of the world’s top ten life science organizations and leading higher education institutions.

SciQuest has since quite expanded its industry savvy and spend management functional footprint to now be a leading provider of cloud-based business automation solutions. Staying true to its roots, SciQuest and eMolecules just announced a partnership to make eMolecules’ catalog of in-stock molecular building blocks available within SciQuest’s ERM platform. As a result, ERM users can now directly purchase in-stock molecular building blocks via eMolecules’ market-leading database.

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IQMS is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) vendor that tries to deliver as much native functionality as possible. But computer-aided design (CAD) and product data management (PDM) are highly specialist capabilities. To that end, IQMS has just released its SolidWorks PDM add-in. With more than two million license on the market, SolidWorks is an established 3D CAD application owned by Dassault Systèmes. Manufacturers use SolidWorks rendering tools to create, simulate, publish, and manage product data, parts, and tools. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2013 started with a notable win for Epicor in India as Pradeep Metals Limited, a leading manufacturer of closed-die forgings for the oil and gas, valve, instrumentation, petrochemical, and general engineering industries around the world, announced that is has selected the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The company chose Epicor because it met the company’s business requirements to be easy to use and to have a flexible technology platform.

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