As ERP becomes more and more of a commodity, vendors are faced with the challenge of delivering an affordable core offering by delivering just the right mix of “standard” back-office capabilities and the vertical-specific capabilities demanded by the customers they serve. In light of this reality, some vendors have positioned themselves as best-of-breed ERP vendors that serve certain key verticals or microverticals by delivering comprehensive solutions to meet the specific needs of their clients; while other vendors pitch an ERP “platform,” allowing partners or clients to fill in the industry-specific needs.  In any event, both cases demonstrate the increased maturity level of buyers of enterprise software. Read the rest of this entry »

When I speak with distribution executives nowadays, they all say the same thing: “We are struggling to keep our heads above water because of the economy.” However, before the economy took a turn for the worse, they talked about low profit margins, high inventory levels with low turns, and an erosion of their profitability because of their warehouses. I am often forced to ask, “Is the economy really that bad? Or, is your inability to deliver what your customers want, when they want it, and at a competitive price making it seem worse to your organization?”

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In this blog, we want to make readers more familiar with the logic behind our Evaluation Centers on our Web site by categorizing them—and, at the same time, we want to represent our understanding of manufacturing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems classification in general. We did not reinvent the wheel, but we are one of the few companies offering software selection services that provide all the tools you require to find your way to the right ERP for your business needs. All you have to do is to follow our logic, which starts with very simple business processes; but it can get more and more complex, depending on the type of activity you do. Read the rest of this entry »

With all the recent talk of the economy and the environment, I thought it would be relevant to look at some of the small things we, as individuals, can do to help our companies battle the economic downturn while saving our planet. Today, social responsibility is not only good PR, it makes good business sense. Here are some simple steps you can take to help your company go green while still keeping extra “green” in its pockets: Read the rest of this entry »

The Green Philosophy

There has been so much hype about “green” that many organizations are adopting it, but what is “green”, really? We hear and see it everywhere—in the food we eat (green beans), during our morning routine (green contact lenses), on our way to work (green traffic lights), in our down time (green tea), and during the course of our work day (green initiatives).  Green initiatives can be seen in every industry and every sector: from marketing to engineering, from infrastructure to architecture, from supply chain to technology, and more.  Read the rest of this entry »

Manufacturers serving such retail giants as Wal-Mart or Costco are exposed to severe challenges—not only because of the economies of scale these outlets demand, but also because of the investment required in technology and capital equipment to manage the sheer volume of manufactured goods. Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series explained ToolsGroup’s value proposition for achieving service level excellence in distribution environments. The point of the Service Optimizer 99+ (SO99+) suite’s name is that a “99+ percentage” represents the gold standard in customer service levels, and it takes a product purposely built to achieve service level excellence and to support such a high standard.

ToolsGroup’s latest version of software continues to build on the functionality needed to reach this goal.

Back to Mitigating Long Tails

Having put the necessary pieces in place, over the past year ToolsGroup has turned a particularly keen eye toward how to succeed in environments with a “long tail” demand. The long tail theory originally held that in an environment such as the Internet-based retailers (so called “e-tailers”), which is less affected by physical manufacturing, product and distribution constraints than so-called “brick-and-mortar” retailers, demand will spread across a huge array of items (a.k.a., stock-keeping units or SKUs). Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series introduced the notion of long tails in modern supply chains. That blog post also introduced the vendor ToolsGroup and its solution for planning and optimizing finished goods in distribution environments.

So, How Does ToolsGroup Solve the Distribution Puzzle?

Most of the benefits are driven here by the distinctive Stock Mix Optimization capability that has delivered higher service levels with much less inventory for ToolsGroup customers. As its name suggests, the feature is used to define and manage the right mix at each location in the supply network to deliver the targeted customer service level. 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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Just one generation ago, the courier industry was essentially nonexistent. Today, in 2008, it is one of the largest means of transporting daily shipments for all industry sectors. According to the US Department of Commerce statistics, air freight accounted for nearly 40 percent of all international trade merchandise in 2007, equaling about $4.8 trillion (US), with express delivery accounting for 20 percent (or $2.4 trillion) of that amount Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe just for the sake of change (or some fun), let me start this blog post as a quiz question. It could go like this:

Can anyone name the mid-market incumbent manufacturing and distribution-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor that has a global presence (through regional territory distribution centers and a global reseller network in the United States [US], Canada, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Australia and the United Kingdom [UK]), an install base of 12,000 companies in over 60 countries, and the channel consisting of a few hundred value added resellers (VARs) that contribute to about 85 percent of its revenues?

As some helping tips, the privately-held vendor was incorporated in 1978 in South Africa, and has since grown organically (with no major acquisitions thus far) to about $60 million in revenues. Well, for those (rare few I suspect) that have guessed we are talking here about SYSPRO, may I boldly suggest an audition for the “Jeopardy” (or like) quiz show?

In any case, for nearly 30 years, SYSPRO has been offering a broad range of extended-ERP solutions for small and mid-sized manufacturing and distribution organizations (the sweet spot being the companies with US$10 million to US$250 million in revenues).

I believe that SYSPRO has survived largely unscathed through all the mayhem and carnage in its market via the right combination of product and technologies, plus a successful “partner-dominant” go-to-market strategy that can (and should) be leveraged more aggressively going forward. Read the rest of this entry »

One renowned vendor seems to have contributed to the 2007 holiday shopping season. That would be Irvine, California, the United States (US)-based Epicor Software Corporation (Nasdaq: EPIC). With over 2,500 employees worldwide and with projected 2007 revenues of $414.5 million (not including the pending acquisition), Epicor is the global leader in the mid-market, serving over 20,000 customers worldwide.

With more than 20 years of operating history (since 1984, including a number of acquisitions and name changes), Epicor today delivers comprehensive enterprise software solutions with a sophistication and maturity that competes with Tier One vendors, but typically at a fraction of the cost associated with these bigger brethren solutions. Namely, these large enterprise systems, though highly functional, have traditionally also been quite complex and expensive to purchase, install, integrate, and maintain. Read the rest of this entry »

Take note if you’re evaluating software for any of the following types of systems.

• learning management
• POS or merchandising
• financial software
• CRM
• distribution-oriented ERP

We recently published updated ratings on a number of vendors’ products. Individual reports are available for purchase, or better you can review the ratings in-depth using a free evaluation centers trial. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates.

Knowledge Management Solutions’ KMx product, which is an integrated e-learning package, is up-to-date as of its 4.3 version in the Learning Management Evaluation Center.

Retalix targets companies with retail and distribution requirements. Depending on what your company does, you can view its products’ functionality based on our ERP - Distribution, SCM, Merchandising, or POS models of enterprise software.

Two significant updates in the area of enterprise financial software are online for comparison. One is for the Lawson S3 Finance system and the other is for Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Finally, the latest information on Sage SalesLogix is available in our CRM Evaluation Center. It covers a 30% change from the previous ratings and shows new or increased support for over fifty features.

Because we continuously update our knowledge bases with new ratings and research, I’ll make an effort to publish short notes like these periodically.