The Epicor Retail division of global business software solution provider Epicor Software Corporation provides solutions for retailers seeking to streamline processes, integrate channels, and leverage intelligence  in a variety of industries including apparel, footwear, discount, general merchandise, automotive aftermarket, lumber and building materials, nursery, and pharmacy. Epicor is the retail technology partner of choice for thousands of retailers—from Aeropostale, Aftermarket Auto Parts Alliance, and Build-A-Bear Workshop, to General Nutrition Centers, True Value Company, and Under Armour ( more details here).

New Epicor Retail Strategy
Early in 2013, Epicor unveiled a multi-year strategic plan to grow its market share and expand its global footprint in the retail technology space. While Epicor is recognized as the No.1 provider of point of sale (POS) software among the top 250 largest specialty soft goods and hard goods retailers by IHL Group, the multi-year strategic plan was designed to enable Epicor to maintain and grow its leadership position. Initially, Epicor has been focused on the following four strategic priorities: global expansion, cross-channel execution, and continuing investments in both POS and enterprise cloud technology.

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Kronos Incorporated and SuccessFactors, an SAP company, have partnered to combine SuccessFactors’ cloud and talent management technologies with Kronos’ workforce management capabilities.

Together Kronos and SuccessFactors will be able to support labor rules and pay policies stemming from Kronos Workforce Central, which focuses on time and labor tracking, advanced scheduling, analytics, and complex absence management. Also, talent management will be ensured by SuccessFactors’ extended capabilities for compensation, learning, onboarding, and performance and goals. Read the rest of this entry »

Siemens PLM Software has announced the release of the latest version of its widely used digital manufacturing solution for manufacturing engineering, Tecnomatix 11. The latest release offers a more advanced digital manufacturing solution that promises to deliver smart, fast, and lean manufacturing, including Manufacturing Process Management (MPM).

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Oracle has released new mobile functionality for PeopleSoft Campus Solutions addressing institutional expectations to brand, customize, and extend the smartphone application for its students. 

The mobile enhancements were developed using Oracle’s Continuous Delivery Model, which protects higher education institutions from disruptive major upgrades by delivering features packs that provide new functionality for immediate needs. Read the rest of this entry »

The HTML5 Moodle Mobile app is now available on Google Play (Android) and Apple iTunes (iOS). Based, on the iOS app “My Moodle,” the newly designed app has been developed to address security, working offline, speed, branding, and customization requirements.

The mobile app will not support all Moodle functions, as Moodle wants to take the time that is necessary to develop secure Web services, properly. Read the rest of this entry »

E2open, a provider of strategic cloud-based solutions for collaborative execution across global trading networks, seems to be on a roll of late. After its recent big wins at Yanfeng Visteon and HP, the company has announced that Konecranes, a provider of lifting solutions as well as services for lifting equipment and machine tools, has selected E2open as its collaborative execution platform, and that the program has gone live with Konecranes’ supply base.

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NetSuite continues to round out its exacting capabilities for retailers and distributors. Having acquired the Retail Anywhere cloud point of sales (POS) system in early 2013, on the eve of the SuiteWorld 2013 conference NetSuite has acquired OrderMotion Inc., a provider of order management solutions based in Burlington, Massachusetts, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of OrderMotion’s cloud-based Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Order Management capabilities adds to NetSuite’s own cloud-based order management system, furthering NetSuite’s focus on this increasingly important and complex business challenge and critical functionality—omnichannel order fulfillment.

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Similar to the Ariba LIVE conference last year, one of the main themes at the Ariba LIVE 2013 conference was again that Ariba, now an SAP company, is making it easier than ever for companies to connect to the Ariba Network and collaborate. Accordingly, Ariba and Dell Boomi announced that they are teaming up to deliver pre-packaged integration as a service offering for selling organizations.

Designed to simplify and speed up integration to the Ariba Network, the Ariba Integration Connector, powered by Dell Boomi Integration Packs, aims to enable companies to collaborate more efficiently. The first available connector, which integrates with Intuit QuickBooks, was officially unveiled at Ariba LIVE 2013. Additional connectors to enable sellers who own Microsoft Dynamics GP and Sage 50 (a.k.a., Sage Peachtree) to integrate with the Ariba Network are planned to be released later this year.

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I’m in the productivity business. At some level, we all are. We’d like to think that whatever solution we’re selling or service we’re providing will offer a benefit or make life better in some way.

So long as we’re in an organization with limited finances (which probably includes most for-profit and not-for-profit organizations these days) we need to measure “better” in two ways. One way of making things “better” means better for the organization itself, so it can do a better job of achieving its mission for its customers. The other way makes things better for the people who work in the organization. The tendency generally seems to be to focus on making things better for the organization (and therefore the bottom line), but unfortunately, as organizations go about making these types of “improvements”, it is easy to forget that “better for the people” often has a direct impact on “better for the organization”, ie. making tasks easier and faster for the individuals in a company generally leads to increasing the overall productivity of the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Abas-USA recently announced that Carolina Color Corporation has chosen abas Business Suite for its future planned growth and business. Carolina Color provides accurate matching services and eco-friendly, proprietary colorant solutions for unique customer applications.

Carolina Color reportedly started an enterprise resource planning (ERP) selection process in 2007 to replace a homegrown system. Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of recent tuck-in acquisitions, Dassault Systèmes has made yet another industry-specific acquisition, again for an undisclosed amount. This time it’s SIMPOE, a France-based provider of plastic injection molding manufacturing simulation software.

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SAP has announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, taking the logical but no less important step of taking its SAP HANA platform to the cloud, giving organizations a new deployment option for the in-memory platform.

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service will enable organizations to run mission-critical instances of SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and Netweaver Business Warehouse solutions in the cloud, powered by HANA.

SAP plans to deliver the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud through its partners within what SAP calls an “open + us” strategy, offering the capabilities from the partner data centers and/or SAP’s own data centers located worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a busy conference season and quarterly results reporting period. TEC is chugging down the coffee, keeping up with happenings in the supply chain space. Descartes has announced another acquisition this past week, and we share a few insights from our conversation with them. We also found ourselves on the phone recently with DCRA’s Jon Kirkegaard. TEC’s new Supply Chain Management (SCM) Market Survey Report is out, just before we head to AspenTech’s OPTIMIZE2013 this week. Lastly, the tragedy in Bangledesh should probably be a wake-up call to the importance of supply chain risk management. Where are you headed this week? What’s capturing your supply chain attention? Drop us a line.

Descartes

Descartes has announced the acquisition of KSD Software Norway AS, a vendor of electronic customs filing solutions for countries in the EU, as well as Switzerland, Norway, Israel, the United States, and Canada. Descartes’ Chris Jones indicates that this is one of the larger of the half-dozen or so acquisitions that it has made in the past 3 years. Descartes obviously covets the additional users to the Descartes Global Logistics Network (adding 1,300 onto the currently cited >8,000 figure), as well as the $10 million in additional recurring revenue. Descartes also believes that, with this acquisition, it become the largest supply chain vendor in Scandinavia, and one of the largest in Europe. (Descartes’ presence in Europe has grown from perhaps a couple of dozen people in 2009 to more than 300 people today.) Descartes will have more to say about this acquisition in its next quarterly call scheduled for May 30. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to help organizations tackle the new requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), ADP has launched a Health Care Reform section on ADP.com while Kronos has released an eBook, Navigating the Affordable Care Act: An Employer’s Guide to Managing Costs and Compliance in an ACA World.

New challenges presented by the ACA may affect the following: Read the rest of this entry »

E-learning vendor Relias Learning has announced the acquisition of Care2Learn from VectorLearning. Relias Learning specializes in developing e-learning solutions for the senior care industry in North America. Through the acquisition, Relias Learning is aiming to expand its Silverchair Learning Systems with Care2Learn’s capabilities to support learning needs for long-term and post-acute care providers and professionals.

Initiated by veteran caregivers, Care2Learn has been used by more than 500,000 healthcare professionals to develop their skills and renew their professional certifications.  Read the rest of this entry »