Over the past couple of years, the electric utility industry has changed in terms of the different software solutions available. The old approach to addressing this industry’s needs was the “best-of-breed” approach, meaning that software vendors were creating solutions addressed to only one group or business unit within the company doing one specific task. Generation, Transmission, and Distribution all had their own specific software packages that were almost never fully integrated with each other. Or, the interfaces were poorly designed, thus creating a lot of data issues and discrepancies.
Part I of this blog topic introduced MCA Solutions and its flagship Service Planning Optimization (SPO) solution for planning and optimizing spare parts [evaluate this product]. That blog post also tackled MCA’s notably good times during 2007. In the meantime, an informative post on MCA was also published by the Sourcing Innovation blog.
A related 2007 milestone at MCA included a significant expansion with both new and existing customers in core markets, including aviation and defense (A&D), high-tech, and semiconductor manufacturing. Specific wins included the first joint effort with SAP for a large commercial aircraft manufacturer, expanded work with the US Navy to include planning for the entire naval aviation fleet, and successful deployments at new medical and capital equipment customers.
In addition to working with the largest corporate customers, MCA also cited growing revenue in the mid-market. With its SPO OnDemand Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, MCA hopes to bring to smaller service organizations the same capability that service leaders in the Fortune 500 are seeing value from, but with a much lower upfront software and information technology (IT) infrastructure investment.
These benefits are attributed to lower monthly costs and faster implementations. The vendor will be expanding this offering in 2008 to make it even more appetizing and faster to deploy. The most recent win with the OnDemand SPO solution at Unisys Corporation might be a sign of succeeding with on-demand model at larger corporations as well as appealing to the mid-market. Read the rest of this entry »
Traditional Japanese Decision-making, or Ringi
The decision-making process in North American companies operates within a centralized system, and generally takes a top-down approach. In Japanese companies, however, the approach to making decisions is the opposite: it is bottom-up. This traditional and formal decision-making process, which is even now employed in Japanese governmental offices as well as companies, is called the ringi system.
This week BMC announced it had secured the purchase of ITM Software, a business management provider. BMC is a publically traded data center automation company that competes directly with CA Inc, HP, and IBM. It’s clients include DELL, Home Depot, and Toyota. Over the past two years, BMC has been busy snapping up different IT companies, such as Proactive Net (June 2007), RealOps (July 2007), and Emprisa Networks (October 2007). It’s wholly-owned subsidiary, Bengal Acquisition Corporation acquired 96.7% interest in BladeLogic. Read the rest of this entry »
In the ERP world, discrete, process, and mixed-mode manufacturing is at the core of how manufacturing is done. Without an ERP system, manufacturing becomes a daunting task.
There are three main types of manufacturing: discrete, where parts can be disassembled (such as automotive manufacturing); process manufacturing, which is an ingredients-based manufacturing (industries include coatings/paints, oil and gas, pharmaceutical, and food & beverage); and mixed-mode, where manufacturing firms do both types of processes to produce a final product. An example of this would be clothing: the materials are constructed through process manufacturing and assembled by a discrete process.
When we talk about the benefits of learning management systems (LMS), training and employee competency usually come to mind. For that reason, LMS is often considered a less-than vital business activity (since it doesn’t address “core” business issues). Add to that the fact that nobody really enjoys training, and you’ve got a recipe for, well, no LMS.
However, when it comes to compliance issues—that bugbear of service industries—you may find you haven’t got much of a choice. Learning management systems are favored by regulated industries (for example, financial services and biopharmaceuticals) where compliance training is essential.
Compliance issues, of course, come in several shades:
- regulatory compliance (financial services industry, legal, accounting, other professional services)
- industry compliance (such as certification and licensing requirements in the insurance services)
- good ethical practices
Things continue to be busy for both Microsoft and HP as they try and make headway in the ever-competitive IT industry.?
Not abandoning it’s pursuit of the lucrative online advertising market, Microsoft has made a deal with HP to make Internet Explorer the default browser on HP PCs. Read the rest of this entry »
Part I of this blog post introduced the burning issues of food safety and the ensuing need for traceability. To the end of providing entire food supply chain traceability and information visibility, mid-March, during its CUE 2008 annual user conference, Lawson Software announced the availability of Lawson M3 Trace Engine 3.0, the first version offered within the US market.
The application is designed to help companies in the food and beverage (F&B) industries improve product quality and help prevent and manage potential food safety and quality risks. It specifically helps companies strengthen and simplify the process of tracking ingredients and finished products through complex global food supply chains. Read the rest of this entry »
Let me start this blog post with a huge disclaimer: I have no intentions of wilfully beating up on SAP whatsoever!
Sure, the enterprise applications titan has lately been embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit with archrival Oracle over improper use of support data through its TomorrowNow third-party support (recently discontinued) subsidiary.
As if this wasn’t enough, SAP is being sued again, and this time over an allegedly failed software implementation. Namely, in late March, Waste Management Inc. filed suit against SAP with claims of fraud (or gross over-promise, if one wants to sound a bit gentler here). Read the rest of this entry »
Part III of this blog series analyzed the relatively recently launched Deltek Vision 5 [evaluate this product] and Deltek Costpoint 6 [evaluate this product] suites. It also tackled the related potential opportunities for Deltek. For one, key up- and cross-sell opportunities should come from:
- Additional modules, especially from the newly minted Deltek EPM [evaluate this product] suite: The majority of new Deltek customers initially purchase a single module or a select few modules of the suite (e.g., project management, financials, human resources [HR] or timesheets) and add more modules a few years after implementing the initial modules; and
- Migration from entry-level and/or legacy products to Costpoint or Vision: Deltek GCS Premier [evaluate this product] is a low-cost entry-level application suite designed for smaller contracting firms. As GCS customers outgrow these systems, there is opportunity for migration onto Costpoint. Similarly, we expect legacy Deltek FMS, Sema4 and Advantage customers to migrate onto Vision or Costpoint (depending on industry), as their scalability requirements exceed system capabilities. These legacy products were designed for small professional services firms.
As for focused geographic expansion, due to largely offering products that support only English, Deltek’s initial focus will logically be on English-speaking countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. International geographies have so far represented only a few percentiles of total revenue, but the company plans to generate 20 percent from international markets over the next three to five years, mostly via expansion into the UK and Australia/New Zealand. Read the rest of this entry »
A definitive agreement was reached between HP and EDS today where HP will purchase the global outsourcing company for $13.9 billion ($25 a share).
EDS is a global technology services company centering on information outsourcing. It serves both the private and public sectors, with core areas including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries.
HP is one of the world’s largest technology companies with revenues totaling $107.7 billion for the four fiscal quarters ending Jan. 31, 2008. Read the rest of this entry »
Besides the ongoing (seemingly never-ending) presidential campaign and celebrity scandals/gossip, food safety is very much in the news. Indeed, incidents of outbreaks, contamination, product recalls and whatnot flood TV channels as breaking news every now and then. Consumers, governments and the various members of the food supply chain are rightly concerned about food safety, and there has been increasing pressure for food and consumer product goods (CPG) supply chain traceability, in a pervasive manner.
Consumers and governments (both becoming ever-more educated and informed on one side, but still confused on the other side) are concerned about the safety of the food supply and protecting the public. While demanding more product choice and delivery speed, consumers have been voicing fears over food safety in the wake of recent salmonella outbreaks (remember the contaminated spinach or major chocolate recall cases?), cases of pet deaths due to poisonous imported pet food, lead-tainted imported children’s toys, anti-freeze tainted imported toothpaste, and so on…
The ever-longer and global food supply chain (often called “from farm to fork”) includes crop farmers/growers (utilizing fertilizers and pesticides), feed processors, livestock farmers (that might feed and treat animals accordingly [or not]), manufacturers (primary and value-add food processors), packaging and labeling sites, distributors, retailers, and food service companies (restaurants and cafeterias).
These supply chain member companies have to be concerned about the consumer safety issues, plus the potential negative and even fatal impact on their brands and businesses. For instance, high-and-mighty retailers customarily want ever higher service levels from suppliers (without any negative publicity), while the overall industry itself wants to protect “brand” value and reduce recall costs. Read the rest of this entry »
Part II of this blog series analyzed the relatively recently launched Deltek EPM suite, which came as a result of three focused acquisitions. It also analyzed the suite’s resulting potential cross- and up-sell opportunities and its prospective additional revenue for Deltek in a standalone manner. However, Deltek has not been sitting still when it comes to continually enhancing its core products either.
Deltek Vision 5 Series
For example, the new Resource Planning module of Deltek Vision 5 [evaluate this product] was devised to allow project managers to assign staff to projects and immediately see the impact on labor utilization. The managers can then modify resource assignments to meet project needs, whereby color coding provides focus on resources.
The new module also offers real-time insight into employee billing rates and actual labor charges. It provides visibility to align resources for upcoming projects in order to increase overall resource utilization. The available tools give project managers a view of employee utilization by project or across all projects by day, week, month or year. In addition, the enhanced Resource Search feature allows for projection of future staffing allocation. Read the rest of this entry »
Consona claims to be one of the market’s rare CRM offerings that is both operational and collaborative, with many years of a broad range of consulting, technical, and business process services that have created the related methodology and blueprint.
Consona CRM Portfolio
The vendor believes that it offers the best value for price in the market due to the extensive product’s flexibility and adaptability, ease of customization, configuration, integration and upgrades, and due to the depth of the product’s extensibility.
These capabilities come from the combination of Onyx Adaptive CRM (i.e., BPM, BI, SFA, customer service, customer data management and customer data integration [CDI]), KNOVA (i.e., self-service and knowledge management [KM]) and the partnership with Million Handshakes (part of Portrait Software) for marketing automation. Read the rest of this entry »
How many of you have walked into a store with the expectation that the product you purchase will probably not work? How many industries do you think can get away with product defects and incompatible components?
For almost three decades, the software industry has convinced consumers that “Bugs” (product defects) and “System Integration” (incompatible components) is a cost of doing business. Granted… enterprise software can comprise of millions of lines of code performing very complex operations. Moreover, today’s complex global economy made possible by the internet has complicated things further with businesses required to support the multiple languages, government regulations, and consumer demands of its customer base. Read the rest of this entry »
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