Apriso, a provider of global manufacturing software solutions, has introduced a Packaging Solution for Global Manufacturers to better manage complex packaging operations and conversion processes. Manufacturers in the consumer goods, food and beverage, and consumer electronics industries who implement this solution should have up-to-the-minute visibility into and control over plant floor systems, processes, and performance to enable better informed decisions and respond faster to change with accuracy, while still retaining the operations intelligence necessary for world-class product traceability and regulatory compliance adherence.

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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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Perhaps the best examples of continuing innovation in the existing Oracle ERP product lines were some announcements at the Oracle JD Edwards Partner Summit 2013. The event took place January 28 to February 1, 2013, in Broomfield, Colorado, with more than 600 partner attendees from 31 countries. Oracle announced the launch of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Health and Safety Incident Management solution, to help organizations reduce or eliminate costly health and safety incidents. The solution manages the business processes associated with recording, tracking, reporting, and analyzing a health and safety incident. With 250 million occupational accidents reportedly occurring worldwide each year, health and safety should be a concern for all organizations.

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Per Intuit’s most recent Small Business Employment Index, the employment rate is gradually improving. Intuit and LinkedIn have agreed to host the first “Hire Smart” event for small businesses looking to hire their first employees. This free event at Intuit’s HQ in Mountain View, California, is slated for April 27, 2013.

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It appears that SAP HANA’s launch has been the catalyst for not only in-house innovation, but also SAP’s onslaught of tuck-in acquisitions of its close partners. After the recent SmartOps acquisition in the supply chain management (SCM) space, SAP today announced plans to acquire Camilion, a provider of insurance product development, product lifecycle, and underwriting solutions that help insurance companies improve the quality of the business they underwrite and bring new products to market faster. Camilion was founded in 2001 and insurers use its products to gain enterprise-wide agility with their products and underwriting. The vendor was privately held, with offices in Canada and the United States. SAP and Camilion have collaborated since 2008.

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Last week, FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company formed as a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com, announced the availability of trust.financialforce.com, a resource for customers that describes the control processes, security, application quality, and platform monitoring environment that underpin all FinancialForce.com cloud business applications. Built on the Salesforce Platform (a.k.a., Force.com), FinancialForce.com applications inherit all the benefits of the investments made by salesforce.com in infrastructure, data management, controls, security and certifications including SysTrust, Truste, VeriSign Secured, Safe Harbor, SAS70, and ISO 27001. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of part III of this series, the software selection team at MegaResistCap had turned in their software selection votes to the company’s executive operating committee. Jim, director of information technology (IT), was anxiously awaiting the voting result, which was now being announced by Francois, the company’s chief legal counsel. Francois wasn’t one to mince words, and got right to the point: Read the rest of this entry »

In the first two parts of this series (part I, part II), Jim, director of IT at MegaResistCap, learned that the company’s recently rolled out enterprise resource planning (ERP) system would have to support global trade management (GTM) functionality more quickly than expected. He had sent an e-mail off to his chief information officer (CIO), Mike, suggesting a new project be set up and managed by the project management office, MegaPMO. Now, with some trepidation, he awaited the response from the CIO.

The week following Jim’s e-mail passed without a reply to his message. Was the CIO trying to distance himself from Jim’s message? Was the executive operational committee upset by the suggestion of another software project after they just got through the high-cost ERP rollout? Or did they agree with the suggested approach? Read the rest of this entry »

When we left Jim, it was 7 pm, Sunday night. Jim, director of IT at MegaResistCap, had received a message from his CIO. The company’s legal counsel wanted to know if their systems were able to support the company operating as a “deemed exporter.” (See Part I of this series.)

Jim knew he needed to work his magic and offer a solution or at least a direction to management—that’s why they paid him the big bucks. He put himself on a schedule for the evening:

1) Research, 7–9 pm;
2) Proposed solution steps outline, 9–11 pm.

It was also part of his position to stay on top of the latest industry directions, but he had lost touch over the last year and a half during the ERP rollout.

Jim started googling “deemed exporter regulations.” The US BIS Web site was informative but like all government Web sites, it was filled with acronyms, regulations, subregulations, and references that led to other government agencies that Jim thought only existed in spy novels. The not-so-subtle references also pointed out that the fines assessed for single civil violation can result in a $250,000 (USD) civil fine or twice the amount of the transaction. Criminal violations carry a penalty of up to $1 million (USD) per violation and imprisonment for up to 20 years! Read the rest of this entry »

Jim, information technology (IT) director of MegaResistCap Inc., was finally getting back to a reasonable schedule 3 months after the “go-live” date of the company’s new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. He was hoping to spend the weekend in the garden, and was looking forward to checking messages on Sunday to get ready for a productive week. That was, until he saw the memo from the company’s chief legal counsel, forwarded by his chief information officer (CIO), Mike. Read the rest of this entry »

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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I recently published a TEC article about my attendance of Emptoris’ Empower 2011 user conference this past fall. What follows now is my deep-dive interview with Terrence Curley, Senior Vice President (SVP) of Product Strategy and Development at Emptoris, with the idea of developing some of the main messages from the conference.

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For me, the third week of December 2011 was a week of revelations of sorts in the realm of enterprise applications. Amid all the IT punditry/buzzword talk throughout the year about cloud computing, analytics, mobility, social, and in-memory, there were two concrete announcements in mid-December from two vendors that gave me pause. Both vendor product announcements are still far away from their commercial use in earnest, but their visionary nature is what had impressed the usually skeptical analyst in me (to the point of being accused of Drinking the Kool-Aid).

First, at SAP’s Influencers Summit 2011 in Boston, I learned that the much-publicized SAP HANA offering is not merely an in-memory server blade appliance for quick analytics and data crunching. Rather, it is the underpinning of SAP’s future architecture, both on-premise and in the cloud, and it is a general-purpose database in its own right. Look for an in-depth article on this topic, and you can read this 2011 review article by TEC’s analysts in the meantime.

Another revelation took place during UNIT4’s winter Boston tour in the very same week.

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Sure, to most of us accounting sounds as exciting as watching paint dry, but no business can survive without properly managing its financial means. Especially in these days of scarce cash, processing invoices faster and more accurately by the accounts payable (A/P) or billing department is critical so that the accounts receivable (A/R) folks can get their cash faster. An efficient A/P function is something that all companies want, but few have been able to achieve.

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Part 1 of my recent blog series, Filling the Holes and Breaking Down Artificial Walls in a Process PLM Solution Set, established that the product lifecycle management (PLM) software market for process industries (i.e., food & beverage, life sciences, chemicals, paints, consumer products, etc.) has not been well-defined as compared to its counterparts in the discrete widgets manufacturing and fashion (apparel) industry segments.

Indeed, the process PLM solution market is currently a mosaic of established generic PLM providers and a plethora of specialized vendors with solutions that cater to only a part of the entire process PLM scope. The recent acquisition of Enginuity (mostly for its formula management capabilities) by Dassault Systemes only proves the point and the need for some consolidation in the market.

My post then analyzed typical workarounds to solve the puzzle of integrating these specialized solutions, most of which focus on structured data, which is insufficient for creating adequate multi-media product specifications in this day and age. 

Part 2 of the series analyzed other typical constraints of generic PLM solutions that claim process PLM expertise, such as the level of these process PLM vendors’ global enterprise support as well as available solution configuration options and ongoing change capabilities.

The series ended with the promise of separate future posts talking about some concrete process PLM add-on products that are already generally available (or that will be available soon). This post is the fulfillment of that promise.

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