Siemens’s Industry Automation division, which includes Siemens PLM Software, continues with its strategy of offering manufacturing organizations virtually anything they might need—from product ideation and design to actual manufacturing execution and plant automation (including even the actual hardware products from sister divisions at Siemens). Still, the giant knows that hardly any large manufacturing company will procure everything from a single vendor, and thus it is more than happy to provide customers (and even competitors) with its best-of-breed (BoB) software components. Either way, Siemens is happy to help customers make smarter product development decisions, at various lifecycle stages, leading to better products. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

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