Whether it is an enterprise resource planning (ERP), a customer relationship management (CRM), or any other system, acquisition and deployment of enterprise class software is usually a significant move for a company of any size and industry. It leads to disruption of the company’s business activities, so much so that hardly any employee is left unaffected during such a major project. Read the rest of this entry »

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), a software solutions and platforms provider that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, is ending 2011 on quite a positive note. Not long after its partner and user conference Progress Revolution 2011 this fall (see TEC’s exhaustive report on the multiday event), the company first picked its new CEO in Autodesk’s former top executive Jay Bhatt in late November (well thought-out succession planning, as the company’s outgoing CEO Rick Reidy announced that he would be stepping down several months ago).

Then, in early December 2011, Progress acquired privately held Corticon Technologies, an innovative business rules management system (BRMS) provider. The company’s official press release can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Having improved many of its functionality features, Bizagi recently released version 9.1.6 of its business process management (BPM) software. I’m pleased to announce that the Bizagi BPM Suite 9.1.6 is a TEC Certified system for BPM functionality.
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I’m pleased to announce that the Bizagi’s BPM Suite 9.1 has recently joined the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing business process management (BPM) functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that Business First from W4 is now available for online evaluation of business process management (BPM) solutions in the Project Portfolio Management Evaluation Center, joining the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing BPM functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that the Ultimus Business Process Management Suite has joined the ranks of TEC Certified systems providing business process management (BPM) functionality. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series presented the opportunity of service economy and associated complexity of providing consistently an experience of customer service excellence. The article then introduced KANA Software, a provider of Service Experience Management (SEM) solutions. Although KANA has focused on enabling superior customer service for its enterprise clients since being founded in 1996, it has experienced periods of ups and downs.

Having been acquired and taken private under Accel-KKR in late 2009, the vendor has since regrouped and come out with its renewed value proposition. Part 1 concluded with KANA’s SEM approach and accompanying solutions that blend customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), business intelligence (BI), and knowledge management (KM), social media monitoring, and many other parts.

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In this service economy it is not surprising to hear about smart innovative companies whose businesses have been blossoming due to the superior customer service they provide. Zappos and its “Powered by Service” tagline is a crown example.

Many vendors that offer customer service software solutions, especially those that bundle customer relationship management (CRM) with business process management (BPM) capabilities and even infuse knowledge in the service process, have been doing quite well, such as Pegasystems, SwordCiboodle, salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 3, inQuira, RightNow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Care Framework (CCF), and so on and so forth. But achieving consistently excellent customer service and satisfaction is not easy by any stretch of imagination. Research shows that over the last 15 years customer satisfaction has dropped by over 20 points (true, we as customers are becoming more fastidious, but that is our right, isn’t it?) while the cost per interaction has more than doubled, in great part due to agents’ errors and repeated service resulting in issue resolution calls.

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Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the runaway success and genesis of Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The article outlined the main reasons for the collaborative product’s widespread use and then analyzed its evolution.

Part 2 talked about SharePoint’s typical proven use case scenarios as well as about the product’s shortcomings and points of concern. Due to its workflow management and document management system (DMS) capabilities companies often attempt to use SharePoint as a full-fledged business process management (BPM) platform, but how successfully?

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Accounting and Business

Accounting departments have long suffered from being considered as serving a lower-priority function and playing a subsidiary role to other departments in any business—i.e., a “non-value creating” activity. Many business owners and top managers consider accounting as government mandated and a pretty much useless function. They also view accountants as boring bean counters whose only role is to prepare a few insipid reports a year, and who are known for their constant irritating interventions to “more valuable” departments with unclear (for most personnel) requirements and standards that others have to maintain for reasons unknown. And I wouldn’t be surprised if all top managers secretly dreamt of ridding themselves of those annoying accounting people and finally doing whatever they want, without looking back at the “weird” needs of the bookkeeping department. Or at least outsource them as much as possible to minimize their involvement, cut expenses to nearly nothing, and forget about them—all the more so, as information technology (IT) allows for performing such outsourcing nowadays.

However, accounting and financial activities, and the people who carry them out, definitely deserve to be better regarded by others. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed the runaway success and genesis of Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). The article outlined the main reasons for the product’s widespread use and analyzed its evolution. So, what is it that SharePoint’s treasure trove of tools (a la “grandma’s attic”) can (and can’t) do for companies?

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Notwithstanding Microsoft’s recent purchase of Skype, some pundits have started to question its relevance in the long term (in view of the ongoing consumer mobile devices and/or social media success of Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, salesforce.com, etc.).

However, there are still many Microsoft products that are quite relevant. One of them is undoubtedly Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Until the recent runaway success of the Kinect for Xbox 360 “gesturing entertainment platform” (which Microsoft hopes to deploy well beyond the juvenile games playing use, say, in harmful industrial environments), SharePoint was the product that reportedly grew the fastest to the US$ 1 billion mark in revenues (and it had been the fastest growing Microsoft technology for three straight years before the advent of Kinect). Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series analyzed Manhattan Associates’ innovative Supply Chain Process Platform (SCPP)-based analytic applications, including Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) and Total Cost to Serve (TCS). I discussed other Manhattan SCOPE suite modules as well as the company’s recent evolution from being a mere supply chain execution (SCE) provider.

In Part 2, I zoomed in on the Distributed Order Management (DOM) module, which is a critical “cerebral” SCOPE/SCPP application. I explained the DOM inner workings via a few scenarios of how the system could take customer orders and decides which location is best suited to fulfill them based on inventory on hand, inventory in transit, and complex delivery requirements and preferences.

Manhattan Associates’ platform pieces also enable the vendor to identify new ways to combine solutions to uniquely address industry-specific business problems. At the 2011 National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Conference, the vendor revealed the next generation of Zero Disappointment Retail (ZDR), a concrete deployment of its SCOPE, SCPP, and multi-channel order management concepts in the retail sector.

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Part 1 of this blog series analyzed Manhattan Associates’ innovative Supply Chain Process Platform (SCPP)-based applications, such as Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI) and Total Cost to Serve (TCS). The Manhattan SCOPE suite’s modules were also discussed as well as the company’s recent evolution from a mere supply chain execution (SCE) provider.

The article concluded that Distributed Order Management (DOM) is a critical “cerebral” application of the entire suite. A smart order management system takes customer orders and decides which warehouse (or any other viable inventory location) is best suited to fulfill them based on inventory on hand, inventory in transit, and delivery requirements.

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Part 1 of this blog series analyzed Epicor and SYSPRO, the two renowned enterprise resource planning (ERP) mid-market incumbents that heavily harness Microsoft’s platform tools. To that end, the business productivity tools that were illustrated in my recent blog post on what 2010 might have meant to Microsoft’s business solutions (which reflected on the highly publicized mid-2010 launch of Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and Visio 2010) were illustrated in context of Epicor and SYSPRO’s technology environments.

Part 2 will analyze how Epicor and SYSPRO are addressing other enterprise applications capabilities and market trends. What role might Microsoft’s tools play (or not play) in these regards? 

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