Another challenge that distributors are facing is that of increasing imports from developing nations. This leads to port congestion, which only increases the need for improved cross docking.

I’ll describe what cross docking is, how it is conducted, and the different software applications that are out there to aid distributors facing distribution challenges. (more…)

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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. (more…)

But how about you? Is it good for your organization? (more…)

Indeed, several macroeconomic trends seem to be helping the PLM market, starting with the rampant offshoring of facilities and/or expansion of outsourcing and contract manufacturing overseas. There are also escalating mergers and acquisitions (M&As) within multiple business sectors and the inexorable spate of regulatory and compliance mandates within many industries and geographic regions.

This dovetails into the relentless pressure for companies to innovate and bring ever more functional (if not even “ever-cooler”) products, that have ever-shorter lifecycles, ever more quickly get to the market, and thus differentiate, especially in the electronics/high-tech and consumable packaged goods (CPG) sectors. (more…)

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.

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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.

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My intention here is rather to acknowledge that, as part of my daily routine of doing research on vendors and their strategies and offerings, I’ve read a ton of white papers in the last decade or so. And yes, these have ranged from vendors’ blatant bragging about their capabilities (a la the “Every man thinks his own geese swans” proverb) to some exceptional ones that were quite educational and established someone’s expertise in something.

One latter example would be the white paper entitled “Manufacturing Outsourcing: Seven Common Pitfalls to Avoid” and authored by Symphony Consulting and Arena Solutions. Why? (more…)

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.

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Lead generation is a process that uses information to create interest in an enterprise’s products or services. It’s end objective is to generate sales.

Several steps are involved in this marketing process. Before a company begins, it needs to define the market that its product or service caters too, segment that market, and then identify its most profitable areas. Once this is done, the leads generation process begins. The leads generation process involves prospecting, preapproach, approach, and close. As a prospect moves through the leads cycle, information is being created and filtered. Sensibly, a business should use this information to follow up with its customers to see if they were satisfied with the service or product, and then generate leads metrics which will be used to further refine the leads generation and sales process. 

The leads generation process gathers a lot of information and involves a lot of tracking, and it should generate dialogue not only between the company and customers, but within the company between sales and marketing in particular. A leads management solution uses different methodologies and practices to govern this information and distribute it to the appropriate people within an organization. (more…)

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

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Essentially we’d like additional research analysts for enterprise software subjects such as BI, asset management, ERP, etc. Candidates must be able to apply critical thinking skills to all aspects of their research.

If the following job description interests you, please contact us.

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