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.
TEC analyst Alex Hankewicz was positively purring after his certification of the IFS Applications EAM functionality a couple of weeks ago, thanks to what he called its comprehensive functionality and well thought-out and scalable architecture.
He’s not normally very effusive, so when he described it as “one of the best I’ve seen,” I thought it was time to offer readers a walkthrough of TEC’s EAM Evaluation Center, which you can use to generate a free shortlist of EAM solutions.
Given the majority of participants in a selection committee are not enterprise software specialists, quality enterprise research on applications is crucial. Even if you are employing consultants (with their cute business attire and boxes of love they give during the holidays—my PM brother-in-law once scored a leather jacket, but I digress), it’s still important to be well versed about the solution sets you are considering. Read the rest of this entry »
The Guardian’s excellent article How to Do Business Like the Mafia lists 7 rules for running a successful business—legitimate or otherwise.
And where there are business rules, of course, there’s enterprise software.
Which led me to wonder just how the Mafia would go about the enterprise software selection process. 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 »
While most discussions about the Software as a Service (SaaS) market revolve around the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpSource, etc., the name Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) rarely comes to mind, unjustifiably.
While Progress itself is to blame in part for a less aggressive marketing effort (and for the-best-kept-secret-in-the-market status), it is still puzzling that the Bedford, Massachusetts (US)-based provider of application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration, and management of business applications is not more regularly mentioned within the press and analyst circles.
A company that was founded in 1981 and with about US$500 million in revenues in 2007, with over 110,000 customer sites and over 2,000 employees in 90 offices worldwide certainly deserves due attention. This is especially the case given the company’s long espoused goal to maximize the benefits of information technology (IT) while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). Read the rest of this entry »
I’m often asked about the “Vendor Shootout” event that appears on the TEC website and marketing calendar.
While the term ‘shootout’ may conjure up images of a Wild West scenario - vigilante cowboys taking shots at each other from the shattered windows and tumbleweed strewn, empty streets of a deserted Midwest town - a group of likeminded ERP Value Added Resellers (VARs) in the mid to south East USA are redefining it. Read the rest of this entry »
Much has been said and written lately, on TEC’s web site as well as on many other peer sites, about the on-demand deployment model, especially about multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS). The opinions there have ranged from an absolute infatuation with the “technology of the 22nd century” or so (thereby rendering the traditional on-premise model completely passe) to much more reserved and cautious stances.
My idea here is to start with a series of blog posts discussing the various quandaries about these subtle (or not) technology choices and nuances, and to also give many protagonists in the market a chance to voice their opinions too.
Today’s topic is sort of “Which model will win at the end of the day, if any?” In my opinion, co-existence of the two deployment models will continue for quite some time to come, since each has its advantages for certain situations. Anyone who thinks one model will dominate for every possible use of software is just not an enterprise software connoisseur, is not a serious person, or is just an aggressive salesperson. Read the rest of this entry »
Part II of this blog topic analyzed Epicor’s forays into the attractive retail sector via the CRS Retail acquisition two years ago. Most recently, with the acquisition of NSB Retail Systems, Epicor has further expanded its functional footprint, market share and geographic presence in the sector. Namely, NSB added over 200 specialty retail logos, thereby more than doubling Epicor’s retail install base.
While many analysts like Gartner, AMR Research or Aberdeen Group have quickly come up with their customary brief alerts, the usual-suspect bloggers have not seemed that interested in this event, with the notable exception of Frank Scavo in his Enterprise Systems Spectator blog post.
I concur with the assertion coming from both Epicor and the above analysts and bloggers that the retail sector is much more promising and with many more “greener pastures” than Epicor’s traditional overcrowded manufacturing and distribution sectors. The retail applications market is indeed large (AMR Research is predicting its size to be over US$10 billion by 2011 from US$8 billion today), growing (at an estimated 7.1 cumulative annual growth rate [CAGR]) and quite fragmented (whereby Top 5 vendors accounted for only 33 percent of the market in 2006, and no vendor currently has over 10 percent market share).
Epicor also cites some favorable trends in the sector, such as that (as with other industries) the adoption of packaged software will become the common technology approach, and that retailers too have become more interested in acquiring an integrated set of applications from a single vendor. Read the rest of this entry »
Even in such a volatile stock market and under investor/regulatory scrutiny, going public as a means of getting some capital investment is still an option — the most recent examples being Deltek and NetSuite. On the established public vendor side, CDC Software, Epicor Software, Lawson Software and Oracle (if not even SAP too) would be examples of mostly unrelentingly acquisitive vendors in the enterprise applications space.
On the other hand, there has been a general feeling lately of a money crunch in the private equity and venture capitalist (VC) world for those software companies that still prefer to remain privately-held and yet acquisitive. Some of these vendors have been discussed in my recent “ERP Reincarnations” posts, Part I and Part II.
In other words, can the likes of Infor, Consona Corporation and Solarsoft really continue without running out of steam? Namely, besides Solarsoft’s continued acquisition activity of late (including the offer to acquire the United Kingdom (UK)-based Chelford Group, where the SSI-World’s versatile TROPOS product is a part of the business), once seemingly unstoppable Infor and Consona have lately taken a noted break. Read the rest of this entry »
Puzzled by process? Dazed by discrete?
First, let’s understand who should use a discrete ERP application.
Lawson Software (NASDAQ: LWSN), headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, the United States (US), and with offices around the world, provides software and service solutions to about 4,000 customers in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and service sector industries across 40 countries. Its solutions include Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and industry-tailored applications.
Lawson has not lately been accused of being too exciting, glitzy or so, at least not compared to a decade ago, when its erstwhile slick marketing machine was crafting catchphrases like “self-evident applications (SEA)”, “drill-around”, “web-addressable applications” and so on. Some recent attempts in touting corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a witty marketing spot on YouTube have been noted (even acknowledged by the competition), albeit with mixed reviews/reception.
Nevertheless, according the “still water runs deep” adage, Lawson’s relative quietness certainly does not mean that the vendor has not been active in the field and in its research and development (R&D) labs. I’ve been made aware of many recent moves to execute on the roadmap that was outlined at the vendor’s CUE 2007 conference. Read the rest of this entry »
Part I of this blog topic introduced SYSPRO and its traditional vertical solutions. It also analyzed the vendor’s PragmaVision strategy to provide to pragmatic (yet visionary) technology buyers’ need.
Towards the end of offering proven technology to pragmatists, SYSPRO’s fully-integrated solution suite [evaluate this product] connects to disparate systems via Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies. All the above-mentioned modules are based on standard Extensible Markup Language (XML) formats for information exchange, and Web service technologies for enhanced interoperability between disparate systems and for collaborative commerce. SYSPRO’s thoughtful approach to adopting new technology, such as Web services and SOA platforms, again reflects the desires of its sensible buyers, who are driven by business needs rather than by the latest headlines. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, a few months after Part I of this blog post was published, which focused on Deltek’s pre-New Mountain Capital private equity investment era, the time has finally come for us to analyze why being again publicly traded should (or should not) work better for Deltek this time. If one is to judge merely by the most recent financial figures, it would appear to be working well, but my focus here is on some lingering “softer” issues too.
So, when the new management team took the helm at Deltek in mid 2005, it realized that many good things had happened over the previous two decades at the company, but that one can never be too complacent. Indeed, room for improvements existed in many regards, or at least some challenges could always be turned into opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »
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