On November 1, 2012, RedPrairie Corporation and JDA Software announced their merger. Under the terms of the agreement, the entities affiliated with RedPrairie will effect a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of JDA common stock for $45 per share. My initial positive and negative thoughts on the merger were outlined in Part One of this blog series.

Cynical and jaded market observers will see this merger as a déjà vu whereby two software companies that have been unable to perform to their full potential are coming together with the hope things will improve just like that. Read the rest of this entry »

My blog series in 2009 entitled “A Tale of a Few Good SCM Players” talked at great length about RedPrairie Corporation, JDA Software, and Manhattan Associates, including their corporate history and acquisitions. The general feeling at the time was that hardly any of these three great supply chain management (SCM) software companies would remain independent in the long term.

It took a few years for two of these companies to decide to merge, but on November 1, 2012, RedPrairie and JDA announced their merger agreement, under the terms of which the entities affiliated with RedPrairie will effect a cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of JDA common stock for $45 per share. Read the rest of this entry »

The point of The Millennial Report is not so much to compare Gen Y to Gen X or other groups as it is to help retailers understand the mindset and shopping patterns of a hot consumer age-group. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Industrial lubricants manufacturer IRMCO selects ProcessPro Premier ERP software
Industry tags: manufacturing
“This case is a textbook example of an improperly selected ERP system that needed to be replaced. The manufacturer, which operates in a process-based production environment, has finally found an appropriate system that is specifically designed for this type of manufacturing: ProcessPro Premier. The company’s previous system was primarily focused on discrete manufacturing, and it required multiple workarounds and manual business processes. Certainly, the resulting business information wasn’t sufficiently integrated and the system wasn’t very convenient. ProcessPro Premier is supposed to fix all these issues, as well as bring new features that weren’t previously available.” — Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Analyst.

Overview: ProcessPro Premier
Compare ProcessPro Premier with other leading ERP solutions.

Internet marketing firm selects KeyedIn Solutions
Industry tags: Internet marketing, project portfolio management, project management
“Single Throw, an Internet marketing company, has selected KeyedInProjects to support the company’s growing project portfolio. Single Throw needed a solution with project management capabilities to manage hundreds of projects and integrate with third-party solutions. KeyedInProjects is a flexible, scalable, and full-featured application suite for project management, PPM, program management, and professional service automation (PSA). According to Elayne Attara, VP of operations at Single Throw, KeyedIn Solutions have ‘enabled better organizational structure and better communications,’ which will result in ‘better service delivery across the board.’” — Ted Rohm, TEC Analyst Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Swiss investment bank UBS selects cloud-based Oracle’s Fusion Human Capital Management
Industry tags: Finance and Banking
“With extensive worldwide operations, UBS provides its clients with wealth management, asset management, and investment and (in Switzerland) retail banking. A cloud-based HCM solution indeed can be a good option, technically. Traditionally there have been concerns revolving around security and data ownership, which is especially the case for a Swiss financial institution. But as a long-term Oracle customer, USB has elected to deploy cloud-based application across all its operations in over 50 countries to cover about 65,000 employees. I believe the vendor’s reputation was another significant factor in this decision.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

City of Hayward, California selects Tyler’s Munis ERP
Industry tags: Public Administration and Defense
“Hayward’s 25-year-old ERP system was overdue for replacement. The old system cannot meet today’s requirements and lacks much functionality. After scrupulous research and comparison, Hayward settled on the Munis ERP system from Tyler Technologies. The city will deploy multiple modules: financials, HR management, utility billing, content management, and self-service for vendors, clients, and employees. The software vendor will also provide the city with improved everyday business processes in order to increase overall service levels for Hayward residents.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

Kimberly-Clark Professional selects PROS Pricing to support sales
Industry tags: manufacturer of tissues, personal care, and health care products
“Apparently, PROS’ SAP integration capabilities were very important to the manufacturer (a SAP ERP user), as was the vendor’s pricing data science. To increase revenue via optimized pricing was the driving factor here. In addition, PROS has a lot of experience in the paper industry, and it understood the client’s business. The parties were reportedly quite sincere while talking about the project team too. In general, PROS very much promotes a partnership approach, as evidenced by its over 96% renewal rates.”—P.J. Jakovljevic, Principal TEC Analyst

• TEC article (Jan 2012): Two Vendor Execs Discuss the Current B2B Pricing Market (and Its Future)

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The recently held RedShift 2012 user conference was reportedly a huge success for RedPrairie, a vendor of supply chain management (SCM), workforce management (WFM), and multi-channel retail solutions. (I could not attend the multi-day event in person, but I was kindly debriefed by RedPrairie after the event). The business world has lately been transformed by a host of phenomena such as digital commerce, mobility, demand volatility, empowered consumer, multi-channel retailing (buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere), social, cloud, big data, fuel cost volatility, supply chain segmentation, and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

The SuperYacht Group selects NetSuite
Industry tags: services industry
“The holding that includes magazine and Web site publishing, event hosting, marketing consultancy, and creative services has consolidated and centralized all its activities on cloud-based NetSuite ERP. The company has replaced its point solutions—solutions that had obviously become too tiny for them. The group has reported increased productivity, compared to operations under old systems, and quicker business processes.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Analyst

• TEC profile for NetSuite
• Press release

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My recent article SAP SCM – Stepping Out of (Relative) Obscurity analyzed SAP’s revamped comprehensive supply chain management (SCM) suite, its major components, and its supply chain process bundles. In addition to receiving a number of public comments and ratings by TEC’s readers, I was recently roasted privately during a lunch meeting with a couple of peers.

Namely, they expressed their surprise at the quite positive tone of the article, and at the lack of my typical skepticism (and sometimes sarcasm). Well, perhaps I am a sucker for a good “big picture” vision, and it seemed to me that SAP had created a compelling strategic story. The ideas such as the “Visual Enterprise” sounded refreshing to me, especially after several years of SAP being quiet on the Line of Business (LOB) applications delivery front. At the end of the day, it was important to highlight that the solutions that SAP is offering for supply chain executives expand across the traditional TLA (three letter acronym) boundaries of SCM, product lifecycle management (PLM), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution system (MES), etc.

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Part 1 of this blog series articulated the acute need to bring supply chain planning and execution together so that enterprises can react quickly in an informed and confident fashion. The Boston Red Sox‘ September 2011 collapse was used as a poignant example of how even the best long-term planning can be rendered useless if there is no responsiveness during crunch time.

In general, if we know that our plans are inherently wrong to start with – because we can’t forecast and predict accurately – why do we still insist on religiously executing that plan? On the other hand, if you need to make a change, shouldn’t you be able to evaluate the holistic consequences of your decision, especially in these days of scarce credit and working capital?

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced Reflexis Systems, whose task execution solutions have helped over 110 retailers and their suppliers worldwide execute their strategies and increase profits. The article analyzed Reflexis’ genesis and evolution from a task management specialist to an integrated retail workforce management (WFM) platform provider.

Reflexis’ Retail Execution Management platform features labor budgeting/forecasting/scheduling, time and attendance (T&A), task management, and key performance indicator (KPI)/compliance solutions to enable retailers to align their store labor/activities to corporate goals and institutionalize best-practice responses to real-time metrics. As mentioned in Part 1, Reflexis’ customers, many of which are Top 250 global retailers, have reported improvements in store-level compliance with corporate strategies; higher productivity of merchandising, field, and store management; and increased sales and profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent post (Software and Human) Help Wanted in Overwhelmed Retail Stores talked about how much attention (and IT investment) retailers pay to their merchandize planning and supply chain optimization processes as compared to their store-level task execution, even though this is where “the rubber meets the road.” I concluded my post with the fact that there are dozens of retail workforce management (WFM) vendors and solutions, but not many have the required store-level task management capabilities.

Read the rest of this entry »

My recent series on Quantum Retail presented the many difficult merchandise range and assortment planning issues that retailers face, and the ensuing tough decisions that they have to continually make in that regard. But a lesser-known fact is that even though retailers spend multiple billions of dollars on planning activities and supporting tools to bring customers to their stores, they only execute at about 60 percent efficiency in their stores at best, thus leaving trillions of dollars in merchandise at risk. Read the rest of this entry »

My recent article on Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH) and RedPrairie Corporation stated that these two vendors continue to duke it out at almost every large-scale selection deal for a warehouse management system (WMS), distribution labor management system (LMS), and/or transportation management system (TMS) solution. But over the last few years they have also pursued somewhat different expansion routes from their traditional supply chain execution (SCE) realms, where they will likely face different competitors.

To that end, RedPrairie has been rounding out its solutions set for retail stores while trying to attract the lower-end of the WMS and TMS markets via on-demand applications. For its part, Manhattan has been rounding out a portfolio of supply chain management (SCM) software solutions dubbed Manhattan SCOPE, which stands for “Supply Chain Optimization, Planning through Execution.” Built on a common Supply Chain Process Platform (SCPP), the SCOPE suite combines the following sub-suites to enable overall supply chain optimization: Planning and Forecasting, Inventory Optimization, Order Lifecycle Management, Transportation Lifecycle Management, and Distribution Management.

The article then went a bit deeper into the guts of the SCPP technical underpinning. But SCPP is not a mere “geekware” toolset, since it also comes with its own applications and solutions. These solutions offer the broad supply chain insight and analytics that are critical to an executive’s ability to proactively manage the holistic supply chain. 

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My 2009 series on a few good supply chain management (SCM) players portrayed Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH) and RedPrairie Corporation as fierce competitors. Indeed, these two vendors continue to duke it out at almost every large-scale selection deal for a warehouse management system (WMS), distribution labor management system (LMS), or transportation management system (TMS) solution.

Curiously, both vendors are now headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, US, after RedPrairie’s mid-2010 HQ move from Waukesha, Wisconsin, US (which remains a major office that is undergoing a major renovation). Atlanta is also the base for Infor, Logility, CDC Software, Servigistics, and many other enterprise software companies, but I digress.

Over a last few years these two vendors have also pursued somewhat different expansion routes from their traditional supply chain execution (SCE) realms, where they will likely face different competitors. Recently, at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Big Retail Show 2011, I had a chance to meet with both vendors to discuss their strategies. 

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Given our shared presence in the Boston metro area, I’ve had numerous contacts and interactions with Kronos Incorporated in the past, but this fall was my very first attendance of the vendor’s annual user conference: KronosWorks 2010. That attendance was a worthwhile use of my time and a great learning experience about the company and its customers. As some background, here is Ventana Research’s report from the previous conference, KronosWorks 2009.

Kronos is the global leader in workforce management (WFM) solutions that enable organizations to control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity. Tens of thousands of organizations in 60 countries — including more than half of the Fortune 1000 — use some or all of the following modules of the Kronos Workforce Central suite: time and attendance (T&A), scheduling, absence management, human resources (HR) and payroll, hiring, and labor analytics.

The conference’s official program started with an intriguing animated video with some startling statistics about what our working days and weeks have begun to look like. For example, 15 percent of people admit that they are addicted to e-mail – some confessed to checking their e-mail at the beach, weddings, and even at funerals. 

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