BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence - What to Analyze?

2011-01-19T03:54:00.001-08:00

Business intelligence or BI refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support business decision-making.

Several factors are analyzed in the process of making high quality decisions. Customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and forecasts, and internal operations data all play a part in the business intelligence dynamic.

Customers: By collecting customer data, either (POS) Point-of-Sale or surveys and polls owners and managers can use this data to make important business decisions in marketing, budgeting, inventory, demographic targeting, and much more.

Competition: Competitive analysis can help your business in two major ways. First, by analyzing your competitors, you can take the very best of their ideas, and if you're not doing them, add them to your business mix. In addition, knowing each competitor well, allows you to look for areas where you can make your business stand out from them.

Partners: Making sure to use a careful selection process in selecting partners, and that all of your partners deliver on a timely, professional basis and offer affordable prices are keys to making your business run smoothly. Your business is only as good as the company it keeps, so make sure careful pro-active analysis and ongoing assessment is done on partner performance and consistency.

Environment: The economic landscape and especially that of your own particular industry are very important areas of business intelligence to focus on. By analyzing the economic climate, and making your business flexible enough to change with the times to keep up, you can use business intelligence to stay ahead of your competitors who are not keeping up-to-date.

Internal Analysis: Internally, you should analyze your businesses weaknesses and strengths often.Assets, liabilities, credits and debits also need regularly monitoring. (KPI) Key Performance Indicators are one of the most common ways businesses today measure their progress. KPI analysis can be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, or yearly basis. Business intelligence can help you decide which schedule is right for your company. KPI gives businesses a way of analyzing data, and forming strategies based on that analysis.

Many businesses use outside IT consultants to help them develop a "digital dashboard" to monitor all of their business intelligence data from one central focus point. An outside IT expert can help you design and carry out a network approach, where all BI technologies are able to community with each other, both inside and outside the business. Companies need assurance that they have a sound business intelligence infrastructure in place first, though. A business intelligence consultant can also help your business with this step.

Without a good BI plan, you are doing business in an information vacuum. It is a crucial part of starting, operating and preparing your business for changes. In the years to come, it is those businesses that outwit their competitors through flexibility, competitive analysis, and quick retrieval of crucial data that will stand the test of time.

How Do I Implement Business Intelligence? (Part Two - Get to Know the Kitchen)

2011-01-19T03:53:00.002-08:00

Characterize the Environment

The following list outlines the items and issues to cover in attempting to characterize the environment within which your challenge is encapsulated.

Characterize the Environment
Organizational Scope
Project Sponsorship
Business Context
Business Objectives
Current Data Landscape
Solution Objectives
Technical Environment
Resources
Funding

The topics outlined above may not all be necessary for some smaller organizations and in any case, it is not recommended to take a heavy approach to most of these items. All that is required is that they be given some thought and be documented if there is any useful information to be captured.

Organizational Scope

It may be that you are launching a BI initiative that is intended to eventually serve the entire organization. Titles like 'Enterprise Data Warehouse' (EDW) and 'Corporate Information Factory' (CIF) have frequently been given to such initiatives.

On the other hand, it may be that only a subset of your organization is the intended user and customer of the product. A division of your company, or possibly even a single department.

An all-too-common practice has been the creation of Data Marts an a virtually ad-hoc basis, resulting in an unknown and uncontrolled proliferation of such entities. It was recently published that Hewlett Packard launched an offensive against such a proliferation when it was discovered that there were more than 750 Data Marts in existence across the organization. This is when Business Intelligence could start to lose its true intended purpose.

Capturing the details of the organizational scope of your BI Initiative will serve to define the limits of the project.

Project Sponsorship

Any project needs to have its sponsors well defined. It is a good strategy to encourage a vibrant relationship between the sponsors and the delivery team. Record who they are and work on that relationship. If you are the sponsor then be prepared to maintain close contact and involvement with the person or team implementing your BI solution.

Business Context

Within the organization that is sponsoring or requesting a BI facility, there may any number of business processes, databases, application systems and sub-organizations. Take time to make a record of those for which the solution is to relevant, either as data sources or expected areas of enhancement.

Business Objectives

Why do we need a BI solution? Someone in the organization came to the conclusion that this would be beneficial. Someone is aware that the solution will meet one or more needs. What are those needs? What does that person or group expect to achieve? In what way will their aspirations be met? They must have a reason, or many reasons, perhaps for going ahead. Those reasons will indicate and help crystallize the objectives of the BI Initiative.

Current Data Landscape

Now that we have organizational scope, project sponsors, a business context and objectives, we should try to define the data sources that need to be leveraged in order to provide the candidate information from which some intelligent business decisions can be derived.

At this level it is sufficient to speak of this in terms of databases or applications or functional areas covered by an application.

Additional information about the data sources should be collected. How easy will it be to learn about the data source? Is it well documented? Are there still people available who developed, maintained or supported the database that can contribute inside knowledge? Is the source 'out-of-bounds'? Can we only obtain data from it under some constraint, such as time, frequency, security policy, etc.?

Solution Objectives

The information gathered so far will help direct your efforts and maintain control over scope, cost and delivery aspects of the project. They may not, however, define everything we might be able to learn about the nature of the target solution. It is possible that corporate or IT policy may also impact the size and scope of the project.

It is possible that technical limitations exist or resource availability limitations exist. There may even be limits on funding that prevent all the business objectives from being pursued all at once.

Sometimes, it makes sense to extend the scope a little because the effort of visiting one or more data sources just to obtain the requested data me be wasting an opportunity to pull more useful (but not yet requested) data, This is a very important consideration because returning to the same source later is far more expensive than picking up data now that may even be in adjacent columns to that which we have come looking for. This is one area where an experienced Dimensional Modeler is able to point to 'easy gains' that could soon satisfy a growing appetite for analytic data.

Technical Environment

It will be much easier to estimate the size of the project if we know something about the challenges it may present. One such challenge is dealing with the issues surrounding the way the data is currently hosted. Is it all in the same kind of database? Is it all in the same location? Are there common standards in place governing naming conventions, data type usage, data structure designs, etc?

Data is not always sitting in a database, nor is it always easily accessible. Sometimes it is necessary to access data that has already been extracted from its original source and stored somewhere else. It may be necessary to reuse the data feed of such a transfer of data from the destination. This can introduce serious issues of data reliability and stability. if the second destination has itself transformed the data or if the data has been summarized to a higher level of granularity or even stored as a periodic snapshot instead of at an atomic level, there will be issues.

Resources

Besides the need for resources on the BI project, there is often the need to call on the help of others outside the project. The lack of such resources, or limitations on their availability can cause problems for the BI Initiative.

Funding

Large companies tend to be able to fund large projects. Conversely, small companies cannot. However, outside of this fact, there is a need to consider whether a large project is actually the most effective approach to BI. Many initiatives have come to grief because the challenges involved, compounded by the inherent difficulty of coordinating large scale projects, leading to massive over-runs and wasted time.

One of the key areas for devastating misjudgments is that in which organizations inexperienced in DW and BI take on projects that are too large and too complex for their relatively inexperienced team.

Regardless of whether funding is easily obtained or not, it is strongly recommended that some kind of 'pilot project' be initiated first, to gain experience and confidence in dealing with the new technologies involved. Then after an initial smaller success, the team (or individual, as is often the case) can move on to take more territory.

Key to success is knowing how much to attempt rather than how much to fund.

Establish a Roadmap

The mode under which the BI Initiative will be conducted is the most important consideration at the start of the project.

Historically, most software application development projects followed a phased plan that was essentially serial in nature. Often referred to as 'waterfall model' processes, these were so named because the product of the first phase 'poured' into the second phase, the second into the third and so on, regardless of the name or purpose of each phase.

Eventually, it became obvious that this approach could be responsible for many of the ills that plagued such projects. The fact that any given phase is dependent entirely on the quality, appropriateness and timeliness of the products of its predecessor meant that any single phase had the potential of setting the limit on the overall project success, of being the weakest link.

Furthermore, the very act of feeding one phase with the documented results of another could introduce defects due to the misunderstandings, ambiguities, lack of clarity, etc., resulting from this form of communication. Surprisingly, the creators of one phase's deliverable were often not available for consultation with the recipients of their efforts in the next phase. Many weaker processes did not mandate a review (or quality gate) at the end of each phase.

Yet another issue with Waterfall models is that the project is not finished until all phases are complete. As this could extend into years, it would be necessary to 'freeze' requirements until the project was complete. Business changes would have to go unattended to because interrupting this process was too disruptive to be tolerated. Also, any error in delivering against the original requirements may not come to light until the very end of the string of phases, when it is then the most expensive to repair.

Evolving the Solution

Avoiding all the above issues is not a trivial task. Splitting the project into 'waves' is sometimes attempted to reduce the work going through the sequence of phases and therefore reducing the time frame of each wave is one, often used approach for very large projects. However, this does not remove the problem-causing imperfections of waterfall models, only 'divides' in order to 'conquer' them.

The approach that often produces the most successful result is that of 'Iterative' development, or prototyping. The main aim in this method is to work as quickly as possible toward a reduced end-product but one which can still be used, or at least, demonstrated.

Its advantages are: a quicker end point at which the product can be evaluated; an opportunity to learn from mistakes, misunderstandings or unseen challenges and the availability of a version of the solution that the sponsors can try out to see if their ideas were sound or in need of refinement. Indeed, the all-round learning process afforded by the first iteration is one of the strongest arguments for the approach. This takes us away from the need to 'get everything absolutely correct, at the first and only attempt.

The virtual impossibility of such an outcome with the waterfall model is certainly what leads to the creation of a 'Phase II' on most projects. Phase II may include new features but it usually includes a lot more in the way of 'rework' of the initial release.

Establishing a road-map for the project involves the decision to use the appropriate style of process and determining what to deliver by way of a prototype.

Dividing the project into two or more iterations offers many advantages if that option is available.

..to be continued in Part Three of 'How do I Implement Business Intelligence?'.

MeasureGroup™ co-founder, president and CEO, Derek A. Ashton is a career professional with more than forty years of IT experience. He was the designer of the world's first ATM for TSB Bank (now Lloyds). Mr. Ashton has been a speaker to audiences at major venues on Software Process Improvement and worked directly on all of the company's Data Warehouse assignments, either in a leadership role or as the DW Architect.

The products offered by MeasureGroup™ are actually the result of developments made by the company, to r

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

2011-01-19T03:53:00.001-08:00

An integrated set of software and hardware that is designed to meet a specific use is what constitutes a data warehouse appliance. This generally is made up of many servers, data storage devices, operating systems etc being very affordable and effective has emerged as a vital part of the data warehousing market. This appliance can be used to optimize different areas of data processing. Many appliances use languages like the SQL for interacting with the appliance on a database request level. Generally a true appliance requires no indexing or fine tuning and like other ordinary household devices is very easy to use and maintain. This makes it possible to set up a big data center warehouse in just a short span of time.

A data warehouse tool draws power from Massive Parallel Processing nodes and can deploy countless query processing nodes in a single appliance package. An appliance is capable of giving performance advantage that is practically a hundred times faster than general-use data warehouses. This amounts to low costs and low maintenance and automatically lesser power and cooling requirements since processors are not made to handle voluminous data. Data warehouse appliances are advantageous because they allow big companies to staff their warehouses better and help smaller organizations to resolve business challenges. Data center warehouse is therefore largely responsible for the manner in which businesses operate today.

Business intelligence implies activities that a company undertakes to get data about their competitors covering areas like market analysis, industry analysis and competition analysis. Even industrial espionage, it is believed, is a part of business intelligence. Here either an organization hires an outside agency or builds its own intelligence group to get inside information about the company's performance and areas that need improvement. It may then go through records of other businesses in the same field and customer surveys and at times also employ a spy to discreetly gather data. Unlike classic information gathering techniques, business intelligence systems make use of advanced technologies in data mining. Here all segments are interconnected and help to inform each other about their insights to get the complete picture. Business agility grows with business intelligence allowing an organization to exploit constantly changing market conditions.

Business intelligence in Australia is highly developed with the country ranking amongst the top five IT nations in the world. It can boast of good broadband connectivity, great internet security and strong government backing. It services are found to be taking control over nearly all spheres of the economy here ranging from social services and education to business, engineering projects to media and computing applications.

Business Intelligence 2.0

2011-01-19T03:52:00.002-08:00

So you thought the beginning and end of BI is the setting up of a cutting edge Data Warehouse? Well, think again. The BI landscape has undergone a sea change. Trying to articulate its various aspects and how it is evolving would fill several books. In this article, we will skim the surface and talk about the various ways in which BI is being perceived and handled in the current IT landscape.

If Traditional BI = Data Warehouse + Reporting Tools

Then

BI 2.0 = (Past + Present) Data/Analytics + Future Business Analytics + Reporting Tools

I have used this simple equation by way of demonstration: BI v2.0 is all about studying and analyzing Past, Present and Future trends using archived and real-time data feeds and then turning this data into knowledge for stronger decision-making.

It is real-time or it is of no real use:

When it comes to Traditional BI tools, the data retrieved from them, in today's parlance, is considered outdated. Intelligence is gleaned after the fact-after significant time has elapsed between the actual activity and the time when it is analyzed in either an individual or aggregated fashion. In this Internet Age, even the lapse of a day could render that data obsolete.

BAM and CEP are real-time tools; data is analyzed as the transactions are being executed. It is this optimally effective decision-making in the moment that makes BI 2.0 so attractive to new age businesses.

Use Case:

Let us now look at a common use case: the Shopping Cart. Shopping on the web is one of the most common online transactional activities today, and it is increasing year over year. For high traffic sites like eBay and Amazon, business cannot be made truly agile without the use of real-time analytics. Traditional BI just will not suffice.

So let us consider the following example:

• Acme Mart is a medium-sized discount store with brick and mortar stores throughout the country.
• It also sells merchandise through its high traffic website acmediscountstore.com.
• The transaction volumes both at the stores and online is quite large-to the extent of several million per day.
• It has a mature, established SOA infrastructure and its entire order management process is service-enabled.

Acme Mart also uses BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) to monitor services. Custom dashboards have been built to monitor sales of specific item categories and even items through sophisticated dashboards.

Contrast this with a similar business that uses Traditional BI mechanisms. It is obvious that it will not be able to match the level of agility of Acme Mart. By the time the sales data is analyzed, the opportunity to respond proactively has passed. Acme Mart is clearly more capable of reducing costs and increasing revenues via its real-time BAM-enabled BI solutions.

While CEP (Complex Event Processing) is similar to BAM, it is more of a services agnostic technology. It is sort of a real-time message aggregator that can process messages from various different sources including web services. One example of this can be applied to the current use case, along with order information, if related stock price information for the companies that produce those products are also needed in a separate dashboard then this feed that would normally come from the likes of a Bloomberg or Reuters can be combined with this Order data and displayed.

BI Technology Trends: The Past

We need not go into the details of how BI functions were being performed or are still being approached using DW-driven technology. If Business needed insights into key trends then they would follow this well beaten path:

- Setup a de-normalized DW or Data Mart
- ETL information from transactional data stores into DW
- Use reporting tools like Cognos to generate the required MIS reports.

Therefore, this was the tried and trusted method and was considered business as usual. Traditional BI is very batch-oriented in nature and not real-time. However, while real-time mechanisms may look very compelling in terms of their value proposition and ROI, it may not be feasible to implement these quickly as they are dependent on a services-based infrastructure.

BI Technology Trends: The Present

As the competitive landscape becomes more intense, the need for real-time business intelligence is almost De Rigueur in certain types of industries, in order to gain business agility and competitive advantage. With the advent of technologies such as BAM and CEP, it is possible to perform real-time and even future what if business analytics.

BAM and CEP fall under a new category called Event Driven Architecture (EDA). These tools permit BI in both synchronous and asynchronous modes.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is associated mainly with Web Services. It is a dashboard driven toolset that is comprised of various design time components and a runtime component. It is used in conjunction with other runtime components of a typical SOA implementation, such as ESBs and BPEL engines.

CEP (Complex Event Processing) is similar to BAM with the difference that CEP is not tied to web services alone and is message agnostic. You can aggregate disparate messages from myriad sources and use them as part of one CEP application.CEP is usually event driven.

What is Business Intelligence? A Primer For Small and Medium Sized Businesses

2011-01-19T03:52:00.001-08:00

What you don't know will hurt you Imagine you're the owner of a successful wholesale company that's been growing really fast. Large and small retailers are beating a path to your door to buy your product. Things are looking great. You've predicted sales are going to grow by 50%, so you plan purchases of your supplies accordingly.

All of a sudden, a year goes by, you don't have any cash to pay next month's payroll and your warehouse is full of unsold items. This situation hits you like a ton of bricks, from left field (sorry, I can't think of anymore clichés to add to these two). What happened? You didn't realize that while sales were only growing 20%, your inventory was growing by 50%. You lost track of your numbers. A situation similar to this happened to a client of our friend Ken Kaufman of CFOWise.

Situations like this happen to hard-working entrepreneurs throughout the world. It's probably happened with your business, your labor of love. You've busted your tail to build your company from scratch. You've worked 10-15 hour days, surviving literally on fumes. Your company has gotten to where it is today based purely on the strengh of your will and your vision for the future.

But now that you've reached a certain level of success, you've plateaued. Cash flow and profitability still seem elusive. Customer service calls are on the increase. Your inventory is stacking up. Your kids are wondering when they'll be able to take that big vacation to Costa Rica you've been promising them "when we're successful." But you're still working as hard as ever.

The problem is, things are moving so fast that you don't know the basic numbers of your company. Despite the warnings from your accountant, you can't find the time to sit down and really figure out what the numbers are telling you. You've got another proposal to write, a negotiation with a new vendor, and a new marketing campaign to kick off. That's where Business Intelligence comes in.

You can't improve what you can't measure: the case for Business Intelligence The entrepreneur's dilemma is that the skills that got you where you are today are not the skills that will help you grow into a viable, sustainable business that doesn't need the "indispensable you" to operate it on a day-to-day basis.

What helped get you where you are today is your passion, hard work, salesmanship, marketing savvy and unshakable vision for your business, yourself and your family. What will help turn you into the next Inc. 500 company is to know what the numbers are on every aspect of your business so you can stop bad habits, improve good habits and institute new habits for growth. These numbers have to be at your and your employees' fingertips at all times. They've got to become part of your company culture.

Basic numbers such as:

1. Revenue.

Track revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, gross margin, revenue trends, sales per sales executive, top 10 products, sales by region, sales per customer, etc.

2. Expenses.

Track payroll, utilities, travel, actual expenses vs. budgeted expenses, expense trend analyses, expenses by cost center, expenses by type, etc.

3. Inventory.

Track inventory days left, inventory by product, fastest moving inventory items, slowest moving inventory items, overstocked items, etc.

4. Accounts receivable.

Track expected payment schedule, fast pays, slow pays, payment trends, etc.

5. Accounts payable.

Track past due payments, categorize vendors by payment terms, check payable trends, determine who to pay first and who you can delay payments to, etc.

6. CRM data.

Track details on sales reps, best customers, worst customers, customer complaints, customer loyalty, defections, referrals, etc.

7. Human resources.

Track vacation days, employee efficiency, employee complaints, employee retention, compliance, etc.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Here are more things that you can track in order to grow:

Technical support calls: time to resolution, issue tracking, common complaints, favorite features.
Route driver efficiency: miles driven, time taken for delivery, time per customer visit, on-site invoicing.
Product optimization: most popular products, least popular products, most profitable products, least profitable, product returns
In-store sales: most profitable days of the week, most popular specials, least effective specials, most effective point-of-purchase displays
Logistics: best delivery companies, slowest delivery companies, number of lost items during shipping, number of broken items
Medical: most expensive procedures, most profitable procedures, most complicated procedures, procedures requiring minimal skill
Software development: developers producing most bugs, most efficient developers, best development environments
*insert your urgent items needing measurement here*

Keeping it simple Have we lost you yet? Still here? Good. Now you know what you need to know to take your company to the next level.

But the big question is: who has time to analyze all this? Who has time to organize all these numbers into spreadsheets and try to figure out the best way to organize the data? Your accountant? Maybe...

What about a simple-to-use Business Intelligence tool?

The terms dashboards and analytics are often cavalierly tossed around as terms associated with Business Intelligence, but here for the first time a brief explanation:

Dashboards are tools to visually display data such as Performance Indicators and Key Performance Indicators via tables, charts, graphs, etc. Dashboards allow you to customize what is displayed or you can build them from scratch with the information you want to see. Dashboards also allow you to "drill-down" into the data, such as viewing revenue by region, department, product, and sales executives, for example.

Analytics is the practice of looking at historical data to gain insight and understand business performance. Through analytical capabilities, users can dissect business data to fully understand and answer the "how", "what", and "when" questions. You can in turn use this data to plan the best performing mix of products and special offers, for example, and predict with accuracy what the outcome will be.

Sounds complicated, right?

Here's the beauty of dashboards and analytics: they're now available in pre-built, easy to use visual displays. With simple point and clicks, you and your employees can actually see how your products or expenses are trending.

Click on certain interesting metrics to drill down and find out: which customers are really slow pays? Who are my top 5 hot-shot sales guys? What was my best retail sales day and why? What was the actual product that sold the most that day?

You want to see how things are different now than they were, say, 3 months ago? View a visual time-line to see how your expenses or inventory figures are trending. Want to urgently correct something that you didn't know was going downhill, fast? Start a project with your BI tool that will shoot off emails to your people to take immediate corrective action.

How to get the info into the tool Ok great, now I can see all my company's data visually, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to understand the numbers. I can see where I'm bleeding red ink and I can take action (you like taking action more than you like crunching numbers).

But how do all those numbers get there?

Glad you asked.

Most BI solutions today have simple tools to help you with that. There are Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools that can connect directly to your accounting system or CRM, providing a tunnel for your info to get from one place to another on a scheduled or manual basis. There are also excel templates so that when you export the information from your accounting system you can organize them into the right columns with the right column headers and then upload them into your BI tool.

It wasn't always that way. As little as 3-4 years ago these kinds of tasks required highly paid data analysts who were experts in databases, data integration tools, and DTS scripts to get the data from point A to point B. As a matter of fact, it used to require these gurus to build the reports and dashboards you needed to actually see the data that would be useful to you. Ugh!

You're actually lucky you're in business now. A lot of blood, sweat and tears have been shed to make these tools easy for small and growing businesses to use, and affordable. Cost of BI tools Sounds expensive, doesn't it? Well yes, it was.

Traditionally BI tools were reserved for the Fortune 500 and just below. They really needed tools to keep their upward growth trajectory (and some of them didn't do a very good job. Maybe they spent too much on their BI solution???). They were complex, the tools were expensive and unwieldy, and the implementation took a long time and sometimes cost more than the tools.

But now BI applications are essentially websites. You use websites to run your business. If you use Google Analytics, then you're using the simplest, most commonly used BI tool delivered on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. SaaS really means software that's a website.

The advantage of using BI tools, or any software for that matter, delivered as a SaaS, is that the cost can be broken down into easy to consume monthly payments. All the maintenance costs and hosting are absorbed by the software vendor. Literally for the daily price of a Latté you can have access to a web-delivered, powerful tool so you can measure all your company's key numbers and get a handle on your business. You can focus on growth, and empower your employees to check on important company metrics and take corrective action if necessary.

Business Intelligence Software - Much Needed Solution for Any Business to Succeed

2011-01-19T03:51:00.001-08:00

To keep the cost of delivering goods and services in line, companies must find ways to reduce waste and eliminate inefficiencies. You can lose control of your cost structure putting pressure on your gross margins without proper infrastructure. Restricted cash flows are forcing companies to analyze cost structures by delving into available information at their fingertips. They need to be sure their fingertips are able to touch the required information to make good business decisions. Are your fingertips in the pot?

Analysts point to a rising interest in business intelligence software. An integrated business intelligence solution that generates accurate and timely data puts you in a position to identify and quickly address inefficiencies. Dashboards can deliver immediate feedback. Use analytics to monitor operational defects, maintenance costs, general procedure inefficiencies, and then track progress to measure the baseline against future costs. You will need the ability to further investigate costs, seek areas to optimize systems and processes. Even if your gross margins are better than average, expenses may be high. Follow the leading companies that carefully manage expenses to deliver a consistent cash flow.

In today's business environment, an organization needs to address all outstanding issues, but you must first identify and prioritize existing problems and then focus your time & energy on the most crucial ones. No organization wants to wait until a department is significantly over budget before taking action. However, if you manually track project or program status, you risk not only wasting time and money on an ineffective approach, but also delay your ability to identify and then correct problems. All of these considerations continually confirm the need for consideration in technology investments. Streamline processes, reduce headcount in selective areas and invest in systems and infrastructure to improve customer management or market intelligence.

Business intelligence solutions help you identify issues that fall outside the norm and spot potential problems by generating timely and accurate business data. Once you identify the root cause of a problem, you can take corrective decision. These solutions help you monitor and track results and also alert if problems reappear.

A solution that enhances performance both at individual and the corporate level, supporting greater alignment and accountability is very much needed for any business to succeed. Transparent and integrated software solutions make employees trust the data, help them understand the importance of their daily actions and their affect on the business goals. By clearly mentioning their responsibility towards the goals and timelines, you can communicate explicit performance expectations among all the employees.

Dashboards integrated with software such as Microsoft office that you use everyday help you communicate metrics, track progress, and reward success. Dashboards give the immediate performance feedback; you get the information you need to take quick and decisive actions to correct behaviors, rather than having to wait for quarterly reports to decipher trends. Visualization tools help your employees and you focus quickly on high-impact issues. Your entire team can see where data comes from and how results are calculated and can interact with reports, instilling confidence in the numbers and encouraging individual and collaborative efforts that benefit the company

Tough economic conditions require companies to go beyond slashing costs. You need to build an efficient and high-performance organization based on a strong foundation of information. Take a global view of critical information to move from just reacting to economic pressures to making the most of your business information. Do you have the proper software tools and place to give you the dashboards, the depth of information, reporting, and analysis for proper direction of your company? A careful review of all of your software vendors and information providers will provide you with those answers. A general housecleaning and analysis of overall procedures should be conducted annually, with an in-depth analysis every other year. Fastrac Companies like Facebook and Social media, Amazon and shopping online, Google and Internet, companies that lead the pack are there for your assistance. Take a hard look at the wealth of information available to keep you on top of the game.

What Exactly is Business Intelligence?

2011-01-19T03:50:00.002-08:00

OLAP is that piece of the tool set that provides Dimensional Analysis, enabling huge volumes of data to be efficiently made available for exploration in a large variety of formats and arrangements.

The repository of high-volume data and the special methods for designing its storage was given the title of "Data Warehousing" (DW). Within the DW, a representation technique called "Dimensional Modeling" evolved, which is aimed at economic, context-based access (querying) of the immense tables held in the DW database.

Once the data has been captured and arranged in this way, through a process known as "Extract, Transformation and Load" (ETL), it can be passed through a further stage of processing that generates a "Cube".

The Cube, in this context is actually another highly optimized form of storage in which the Dimensionally Modelled data can be pre-aggregated and cross-mapped for efficient retrieval and presentation to the user, who can enjoy parsing data at many levels of summarization moving quickly between almost limitless varieties of analysis.

Activities such as setting up multi-dimensional charts of data summary (known as "slicing and dicing") or moving to lower levels of detail and back again to highly summarized versions (known as drill-down and drill-up), using tools to create graphical representations of the Cube data, with a great many formats from which to choose.

Employing yet other tools to perform sophisticated analyses, whereby trends and anomalies buried deep in the data may be discovered, understood and exploited (a technique called "Data Mining"). Data Mining models are created and refined to become sensitive to and resonant with the data patterns and can themselves be used to generate forecasts of future trends and movements within the tracked data. A veritable gold mine of such gems lies hidden and largely unexplored in the "exploding" mountains of data that have accumulated in companies since the price of storage came tumbling down.

It seems that IT organizations have been hanging onto data, keeping it in cold-storage, knowing that there will come a time when it will be of benefit. This is analogous to the hopefuls who upon departing this world, have their brain frozen, awaiting the emergence of technologies that can bring it back to life, perhaps with an artificial body. Business Intelligence is the technology that allows companies to unfreeze their data assets, bringing them back to a much more useful life than before. A New Era for Information Usage?

Early in the eighteenth century, inventors were making new discoveries about heat, energy and motion. There quickly evolved coal-fired, steam-driven locomotion (railways) and pumping engines (for the mines) and giant power plants for making every machine in a factory turn and churn incessantly. Spinning cotton, weaving cloth, cutting and shaping iron and then steel. The Industrial Revolution was born. Mills and factories sprung up all across the coal-rich fields of Northern England (this writer's birthplace - although a little later).

From their long heritage of back-breaking land work, people seeking to earn a regular (monetary) income flocked to grasp the many new (but equally back-breaking) factory jobs that emanated from the urban sprawl of gleaming red-bricked labyrinths, that housed these awesome machines. Industrial empires were spawning all over and wealthy (already) magnates-to-be, stepped up to invest, build and rule over them.

What did they think of Business Intelligence? Of course, it seems unlikely that the term would ever have been uttered back then but, business empires had to managed somehow. If you could see those monolithic structures and enjoy the experience of visiting them, still churning and clunking, you may notice that almost every square foot of factory space was given over to production or storage of raw materials and finished goods. No room for desks and filing cabinets and, of course, no information technology; not even a telephone!

In one corner of the giant mill, you will see a well appointed office (where the owner would be found most of the time) and one or two nearby, less auspicious areas, being the workplaces of a couple of clerks, whose job was to record all the transactions of the business. Keepers of great leather-bound volumes of hand-written fiscal matters, committed to parchment but rarely revisited. So where was the "Decision Support System"? Where were the "Executive Information Systems" and "Balanced Score Cards"?

It was all there; all that was needed in those horse-drawn days, where real business took place between the various well-heeled mill owners over a mug of coffee or a mulled ale at some local tavern, gentlemen's club or city-based mercantile gathering hall. The mill owner was kept informed of the production issues, inside his work-house, by visits from the foreman and kept his business knowledge up to scratch by his time spent over the tablecloths of his privileged meeting places. Intelligence was handled by "word of mouth". Business deals were a handshake, followed by a letter, days or weeks later.

After the initial gold rush of mechanization, little changed for a long time; at least in terms of administration methods. Only after a slow but gradual increase in the number of non-production workers and the (mostly) record-keeping tasks they performed, would another unannounced "giant leap forward" occur, to irreversibly revamp the business scene once again.

Hail, Data Processing Due to regulatory requirements, statutory accounting practices and other external demands, together with a burgeoning management's appetite for information, the ever-growing office spaces were becoming jammed with bursting-at-the- seems filing cabinets, filled with all manner of records of the company's actions, transactions and anything else that mattered. All typed-in-triplicate, carbon-copied and filed in strict order (ready to be retrieved and hand-altered or joined by an extension or superseding entry.

Hot, clattering, manufacturing machinery had ushered in the Industrial Age and hot, clattering data processing machinery would now usher in the Information Age. Tabulators, card punches, paper-tape punches and prattling line printers were among the first commercially successful data processing machines. Rapidly progressing into electronic mainframe computers, humming, or even whistling musically (but still quite hot) and requiring huge rooms for their banks of hand-threaded core-memories (as much as 8 Kilobytes per cabinet), and looms of backplane wiring to connect central processor's thousands of discreet components, soldered to hundreds of Bakelite circuit boards.

Strangely, this great revolution of number-crunching, heat-belching behemoths did little to shake up the world of business. Large corporations would quickly shell out millions for their first pride-and-joy, accompanied by the odd educational institution, here and there. However, vast swathes of less well endowed organizations held back, presumably seeing no threat of extinction as the consequence of not joining in the party for the second great era of industrialization.

Well maybe it is not so strange. The astute leaders of small to medium sized businesses (SMB's) not known for "leaping before they look", should be expected to play wall-flower, at least until the proposition looks sound, justifiable and absolutely necessary for survival. Today though, a mere sixty years on, it is hard to find any kind of business, of any shape, size or ethical standing, that does not have heavenly amounts of computing power, at every fingertip.

Bigger, faster, cheaper, more. So the years went by at the "speed of thought", everyone got onboard and computer systems became as common in the workplace as steam-pipe
leaks, machinery-induced deafness and finger blisters had become in the cotton mill.

Actually, the "Technology" part of "Information Technology" (the "T" in IT) has come an incredibly long way since the days of machines peering through holes in cardboard (which, incidentally, was first conceived of by Industrial Revolution luminary, Jacquard, the inventor of the all-important weaving loom that bears his name).

Some software of today is also astronomically more advanced than that of the mid-twentieth century. Lamentably, it is, however, the "I" in IT that has not kept pace with the advances of electronics and related cost-performance ratios.

With some exceptions, corporate use of computers has essentially become locked into the business of record keeping; frozen solid in the first great ice-age of non-progressive wheel-spinning, running faster to stand still, quagmire, where huge budgets evaporate, just trying to keep up with the avalanche of necessary upgrades and replacements.

Is that the Cavalry I hear?

Having painted a grim picture of stagnation and nil return on investment, we have paved the way for the trumpeters and knights in shining armor. So the cost of storage has come down dramatically, the data we are holding there has ballooned dramatically, now must be the time to do something with it, dramatically.

Instead of just "record keeping", let's use all this computing power and endless data in ways that can make us better at what we do. How about introducing software that performs large-scale, sophisticated analysis. How about using that sophisticated analysis to help us make better decisions. How about using improved decision making to choose a better direction to go in and better direction to improve marketing efforts, customer experience, product investment, vendor selection, volume prediction, price setting, etc.

Let's just call this whole new leap forward "Business Intelligence".

Get more intelligent about business by seeing more clearly what we have done and what has been happening around us; by predicting where trends are heading and do all this by exploiting data we already have, tools we already own and brains that have not yet been put into deep freeze.

This all sounds good. Lets get started, "as soon as the movement hits critical mass".

IS there anyone out there already using BI?

When the first great era of commercial computing began, there were early adopters and late adopters. The early adopters paid for all the R&D (as usual) and the tail-draggers paid with loss of market-share, employee job satisfaction and investor confidence. Well, not really; business and consumers were not so hurried, cost conscious or quick to change horses back then.

Today is a different story, however. Deals are canceled at contract signing, shoppers abandon their carts at the check-out, construction is halted on the first foreclosure and stock market indicators have not seen a flat line in years. Panic is the normal state-of-rest.

Businesses sink quickly and everyone is hoping that the next object that floats by will have an outboard motor, wings and booster rockets attached. One such vehicle is that broad set of capabilities currently flying under the banner of Business Intelligence.

Many companies have made a leap of faith and invested in a BI initiative. For some of those entities, valuable gains have been achieved. For others, the project has been fruitless, hard lessons learned and second attempts made from a different approach.

Compared to the early data processing efforts, today's BI ventures are light years more advanced and equally more challenging. The potential for success is there for all qualified entrants and many have proved the point. Eventually, the deployment of BI will be as ubiquitous as the first generation of applications.

Just as every organization has implemented "passive" record-keeping applications of some sort or another, there will be a time when most will also have "active", even "thinking" intelligent software that examines data, sniffs out issues, evaluates propositions, recommends actions and monitors results. If you detect a difference in those two scenarios, you are understanding the meaning of Business Intelligence.

There was a time when computers were depicted in entertainment media as futuristic and the stuff of science fiction. Now we can smile at all of that and, yes, there are differences between what novelists and screenwriters created and the more mundane, however clever, computers that support every aspect of our lives today.

Don't forget, however, that the likes of HAL, C3P0 and R2D2 are seen in laboratories where artificial intelligence and other far-out technologies are constantly making progress. In our business world, we are not looking to replace people with thinking software, but with BI we can get people thinking better (with software).

BI may not be required or mandated for every type of organization; nor is it for the faint-of-heart; nor is it for the uninitiated (i.e. Those not understanding the issues). The separate MeasureGroup™ publication "Who needs BI?" can help an organization decide if it should, or should not, be looking at a BI initiative.

A summary of Business Intelligence

The following panel contains a summary of Business Intelligence in the form of a bullet list of the most significant attributes generally being assigned to this new but not-so-new technology that is going to be recognized one day as the "second great era of computing in business".

Summary of the key aspects of Business Intelligence:

- Leveraging Data Assets to glean Insights otherwise unavailable
- Exploring Business Analytics in an almost endless variety of ways
- Gaining Competitive Advantage thru the Power of Knowledge
- Seizing Opportunities to improve Status and Profitability
- Enhancing Business Agility - First to Start - First to Finish
- Using Intelligent Questions to generate Intelligent Answers to generate Intelligent Questions...
- Enabling Proactive Management to replace Reactive Damage Control

In the early days of computers, many did not see a use for them. That was because they did not yet understand their capabilities. BI is at that same point now. BI is being enabled by a new set of software tools and technologies that are continuing to evolve.

MeasureGroup™ is an operating division of dacc limited a software house that has box-product software sales exceeding 40,000 units to date and provider of consulting services to many of the world's best known companies across Europe and the United States.

Co-founder, president and CEO, Derek A. Ashton is a career professional with more than forty years of IT experience. He was the designer of the world's first ATM for TSB Bank (now Lloyds). Also an acknowledged expert in Software Quality Engineering, Mr. Ashton has spoken to audiences at major venues on Software Process Improvement and is SEI (Software Engineering Institute) trained and certified as a CMM Assessor (Capability Maturity Model) and Software Process Designer. Derek worked directly on all of the company's Data Warehouse assignments, either in a leadership role or as the DW Architect, covering a span of over 10 years.

"Our focus today is entirely on Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence development" is the word from Mr. Ashton. "The economic climate of late dictates corporations pay much more attention to the messages hidden within the mountains of accumulated but unexploited data they possess. Their future may depend on it, so there is no time to lose. However, those companies who diligently pursue potentially massive cost savings with their BI initiative are the ones who will quickly come out on top."

5 Reasons Why SaaS Business Intelligence Tools Are Perfect For SMBs

2011-01-19T03:50:00.001-08:00

So why is Saas BI so suitable for smaller businesses?

1) Small and medium-sized businesses often cannot justify the large CapEx of traditional BI, do not have the IT resources to run an on premise database and server system and are not sure that they have the breadth or depth of data to warrant such a system. Often their needs change and evolve far faster than software is developed and installed. SaaS payment structures mean that you have no CapEx and only pay for the amount you use the product. If half your users find they they aren't deriving any value from the software, they can easily cancel their subscriptions at the end of the month, halving the cost.

2) Traditional BI demands technical expertise both to manage and use. Business users could not quickly perform analysis themselves; queries had to be made through the IT department and often involved long delays. As there is no software to install, there is no daily maintenance or routine tasks to be done, so nothing to require extra IT hands or expertise. This frees IT professionals to concentrate on strategic IT and growing the business.

3) With traditional BI having enough data to justify the BI spend is certainly a problem. The huge upfront costs and time investment often cannot be justified by the need for a couple of key decision makers to analyze a small number of records. SaaS BI gets rid of this problem as it provides fully functional BI suite available for just one person. SaaS applications can be rapidly scaled up or down as your business needs change.

4) Most SaaS products are lightweight and designed to complement the investment in data storage and manipulation that you already have. For example, most SaaS BI solutions plug directly in to online and traditional sources to extract data, then allows creation of visualizations and dashboards with a few clicks.

5) Access and sharing were the original drivers of the SaaS cloud computing model so applications make it easy to get useful visualizations to the right people quickly by inviting people to your dashboard's URL or embedding it in a website or blog.

BI products have traditionally required huge upfront costs, had long lead times and demanded technical expertise to use. SaaS allows powerful functionality without the need for any of these, making it a highly profitable investment for SMBs. This isn't to say that large enterprises cannot benefit from SaaS BI too. Within departments or teams, larger organizations are deploying SaaS BI more and more as they realize its potential.

The Executive MBA Program for Business Intelligence

2011-01-19T03:49:00.002-08:00

Investments in the Business Intelligence area grow above average in relation to other management areas, and this favors the increase in demand for professionals with specific training in this area within the digital economy.

This program will allow you together in a discipline that effectively integrates business strategy, technology and processes to transform scattered data into knowledge and effective processes. Without doubt, a unique opportunity to learn to minimize business risks and managing organizations to intelligently and innovatively.

The Executive Program for Business Intelligence is aimed at IT managers and operations, sales and marketing, financial and consulting managers who wish to pursue an innovative approach of using data and information in an analytical way. The program tries to show, through the study of actual experiences, a new way to solve management problems. This course is organized in collaboration with the company, Business & Intelligence

The Executive MBA program is aimed at working professionals with a minimum of five years of professional experience from very different industries and areas of professional dedication who wish to deepen and advance their knowledge, skills and management skills to successfully address the challenges and challenges presented with the professional environment.

Proper management of organizations, regardless of their size and scope of economic activity goes through the effective management of projects that generate and execute it. And moreover if these actions take place in an international setting, where in addition to cultural diversity may influence other factors such as generation, companies need to have professionals with the skills and adaptability required to address different situations.

The Executive Programs in Project Management provides participants with an overview of management and project management at the sect oral level from a global perspective and facilitates an understanding of the innovative techniques and technologies for the development of management skills.

This executive program prepares you to obtain PPM certification, and is a fundamental tool for managing developments in the financial and human resources management.

50 Business Intelligence Failures

2011-01-19T03:49:00.001-08:00

Inadequate integration knowledge on Business Intelligence and Decision Support System Level. Dashboards are not good solutions.
Not seeing complete Business Intelligence picture.
No vision of what is final goal of BI tool. What are final outcomes and how will they be used for company prosperity and competitive advantage.
Demands are created faster than Management Information Systems can absorb, implement and stabilize = Generating to big cumulated requests.
No or little relation between financial statements and non financial key performance indicators.
Lack of integrative systems in Legacy level.
No or inadequate Mater Data Management solutions.
No or inadequate Data Quality processes.
Minimizing data quality issues by customer.
Too high expectations from Business Intelligence. It is not an Expert System.
Business Intelligence solutions are specialised. Can not cover everything.
Out of the box solutions cover minor part of your current process and required functionalities. Be prepared to change processes more then to customize out of the box solution.
Too dynamic complex market, like telecommunications.
No internal technical knowledge on management and on expert level
No internal dedicated team of experts to cooperate with vendors.
No internal resources to handle knowledge generation.
No internal structure to handle development of Business Intelligence layer.
Wrong project lead.
Too many internal enemies.
Too ambitious management.
Too naive management and project lead.
Wicked management. Political games can destroy any project.
Political games on management level. It is easy to declare "not needed any more".
Lack or inadequate internal marketing.
Wrong scheduling of modules. What comes first, next and at the end matters.
Too long implementation time. Many other projects with significant impact happen during implementation time. Each impact could mean new code writing and starting from beginning in certain segments.
Wrong vendor selection.
Selection of wrong software solutions.
Not enough resources to finish project. Especially in cases of additional costs that can double or triple initial investment.
Lack of data definition or poor methodology.
Too little integration with comptrolling. Comptrollers stay in their world with separated solutions.
Internally made solution, more likely to fail than vendors solution.
There is no one stop shop vendor solution. Each solution should be compared with leader in particular segment.
Business Intelligence project should evolve.
Can outsource the whole thing. Company must avoid the temptation of outsourcing everything and only things that are not core competences.
Just give me the dashboard. Companies must have a solid and stable BI infrastructure before implementing dashboards.
Information chasm between financial and non financial systems is too big.
Inadequate consultancy.
Trusting consultants too much.
Start with internal development without asking users what they need.
Mega requesting appetite. Data Warehouse/BI must cover all requests without any exemptions.
Include all departments and business units, especially call on workshops as many people as possible. Nobody should say later that was not informed. Some call it spam with project but don't believe to gossips.
Jumping into BI and Data Warehouse project without own IT administrators. Why should you have them since it is out of the box solution.
Leave all operative work to consultants.
Believing without any doubt to presented models and presentations of vendors.
Scheduling and starting in parallel major upgrades of legacy systems.
Not giving up from processes and not willing to change them.
Modifying project scope and making false promises just to enter into company.
Insufficient customer specification and lack of vendors notification about it.
Staying too tight to signed specification. Not allowing single change.

Accelerating (and Fast-Starting) the SME Business at Oracle (and SAP) – Part 3

2010-06-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

Oracle Accelerate is not only a partner program but also Oracle’s go-to-market approach to provide business software solutions to midsize organizations. Part 1 described the main constituent parts of the approach, while Part 2 talked about the program’s current state of affairs. Part 3 of this blog series will analyze the program’s latest partner-enablement developments as well as the inevitable room for improvements.

Oracle Accelerate Partners-Enabling Portal

To further enable its Accelerate partners, Oracle launched a new portal in late September 2009, called Midsize.Oracle.com. This is a resource focused on midsize customers and partners to search for geographic- and industry-specific solutions, as well as a platform for collaboration.

The new online storefront is where prospective midsize customers can quickly find solutions to fit their needs based on location, industry, and business requirements. The new Web presence, which features all available Oracle Accelerate solutions in the Oracle Accelerate Marketplace section, houses in-depth information on partners and their products, including user demonstrations, customer testimonials, and pricing.

The marketplace also allows prospective customers to contact Oracle Accelerate solutions providers directly. The abovementioned partner marketplace section is an online marketing portal for Oracle partners to highlight their Oracle Accelerate solutions. The section is tied to the Midsize.Oracle.com main page and to the new Oracle Business Accelerators (OBA) pages to aid in awareness and demand generation activities. Partners are able to promote their company, expertise, and related Oracle Accelerate solutions.

Oracle envisions the portal as the go to place for anyone looking for Oracle applications for midsize companies, and thus the lead generation tool. Partners can have any of their own branded marketing assets (i.e., they do not necessarily need to be Oracle branded) on their dedicated partner and solutions pages.

The Midsize.Oracle.com portal currently supports the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese. Available Oracle Accelerate solutions and partners can be filtered by country, and then further either by industry or product functionality (process flows). Accompanying featured marketing articles, white papers, and customer success stories are updated monthly.

To prevent (or at least mitigate) redundancy and competition between Oracle Consulting and Accelerate partners, Oracle has imposed a so-called “no fly zone” for its direct sales teams for United States (US) companies that have less than US$100 million in revenues. That limit is US$250 million in Europe, and these demarcation lines vary by region elsewhere.

In summary, the Midsize.Oracle.com portal simplifies and intensifies Oracle’s message to midsize organizations about available regional applications, OBA’s, and solutions. The idea is to deliver more leads to the right partners faster. Future improvements will aim to include more industry- and geography-specific content, more solutions’ granularity, a Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) capabilities, and even more contextualized customer references.

The Intelligence of Social Media (Part 2)

2010-05-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

In the first part of this blog, I mentioned that sentiment analysis measures the polarity of opinion—positive, negative, or neutral—regarding a subject, a product, a service, etc.

Two main approaches can be used to perform sentiment analysis or text mining: a knowledge-based approach, which uses linguistic models to classify sentiments; and a learning-based approach, which uses machine learning techniques to classify text. The concept of sentiment analysis opens a great number of possibilities and opportunities for introducing BI strategies to analyze the enormous amount of data flowing through the Web.

In fact, some software solutions have been designed to address this type of analysis. These tools are called “social Web analytics.” According to the definition provided by The Social Web Analytics eBook (2008), by Philip Sheldrake, social Web analytics are “the application of search, indexing, semantic analysis and business intelligence technologies to the task of identifying, tracking, listening to and participating in the distributed conversations about a particular brand, product or issue, with emphasis on quantifying the trend in each conversation’s sentiment and influence.”

Many organizations are aware of the importance of measuring this information and analyzing it. Currently, sentiment analysis has a strong potential to be used jointly with BI applications making it possible to apply traditional BI techniques to visualize what a sentiment-based tool has discovered on the Web. Some vendors are already offering analytics services (radian6, Sysomos, BuzzLogic, and Attentio) to measure and analyze social media content.

Now, there is also an existing trend regarding traditional BI providers to address these tasks:

Workforce Analytics – A Blend of Business Intelligence and Human Resources

2010-05-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

If you are a HR manager in a company that employs thousands of people, one of your main concerns should be reporting and analytics. Workforce analytics can help your organization determine how efficient its recruiting processes are. It can also help during the hiring process—recruiting the right people at the right costs.

Workforce analytics can give your company a general overview of the activity of the HR department. Depending on the product being used, you can drill down to the next level of detail, build interactive graphs, and export the data to different file formats.

By understanding the demand and supply in HR—as well as the gaps between the two—HR professionals can create and implement better internal procedures for talent management, retention, succession, etc.

This is done by gathering information on your workforce and putting it into a single repository. This information comes from your HR system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, or other business software (e.g. time and attendance, project management, accounting software, etc.).

By using this data, your company can create forecasts and what-if scenarios in order to understand how a change in the activity of the company can impact its HR department and vice-versa. For instance, if you decide to launch a new product line, you can estimate how many people you’ll need and how much it will cost you.

Most of the vendors in this area (HR, BI, or workforce analytics) offer pre-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) that your company can use to measure the efficiency of its workforce, but they can also help build new ones and even implement best practices to improve the way people work.

Quote-to-Order: An Overlooked Software Application

2010-05-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Last year, I met an analyst from another firm, and asked him what he thought about quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions, given the relevance between Q2O and the conference that I was attending. Not quite surprisingly, the answer I got was, “this kind of application doesn’t have a future.” The conversation didn’t go any further due to limited time but I could imagine that his reasoning might have sounded like this: even though activities from quoting to ordering may be taken care of by multiple systems, there’s no need to have another system (if there’s good integration in place), which makes the already complicated enterprise information landscape even more complicated. Certainly, this statement can be true if there is good integration in place. However, the truth is that today’s integration amongst various information systems is far from perfection. Let’s take a look at the reality of many companies’ Q2O process.

In a real working environment, sales professionals may have existing tools (independently or as a part of a customer relationship management [CRM] system) to support their quoting activities. These tools may be quite handy in generating a beautiful quotation document. However, what really counts in the quality of a quotation is the accuracy of the information provided to potential clients. More specifically, a good quotation has to present the correct product/service configuration based on a client’s requirements and what a company is willing to offer. Most of the time, product information is mainly produced by another group of people (usually called a product development department or something similar) using different systems. Given today’s fast-paced product development, relying on printed handbook, spreadsheet, or even batched update as the source of product information risks the inaccuracy in quoting.

Inaccurate product information is not the only problem in the Q2O process. Even though a quotation presents what is “technically perfect” (i.e., correct product configuration), it may not present what is commercially and operationally feasible to be delivered. In theory, production, purchasing, and inventory information should all play a role in generating a deliverable quotation. However, in practice, delivery terms are often determined based on experience or rule of thumb. As a matter of fact, in many organizations, only a few individuals know the so-called “tribal knowledge” of all the rules, constraints, etc., about what can or cannot be manufactured and delivered with what difficulties.

Disconnected data flow between quoting and ordering is another issue in the Q2O process. When quoting and ordering are handled by different groups of people, a finalized quotation often has to be re-entered (or in a better case, imported) to systems that control production and delivery. This non-value-added activity not only consumes resources but also opens the door for errors.

In the case that companies sell via distributors and resellers, the situation can only become more complicated.

Undoubtedly, integrating one system to another pair by pair (e.g., product lifecycle management [PLM] and CRM, CRM and enterprise resource planning [ERP], and PLM and ERP) is a method to address the above mentioned issues. However, there is a small group of software applications (titled Q2O or configure, price, quote [CPQ] solutions) taking a more focused approach (click here to see the list of Q2O solutions). Q2O solutions use the Q2O process as a main thread to integrate all relevant activities and needed information in one place. In addition, some solutions also provide functionality such as quotation documentation, product information management (PIM) (also called master data management [MDM] for product information), and e-commerce capabilities (e.g., shopping carts, checkouts, save for later, etc.) that are often not the case associated with ERP or CRM systems.

5 Things You Should Not Confuse Business Performance Management With

2009-12-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

Apr
24
5 Things You Should Not Confuse Business Performance Management With
Filed Under (BI and Performance Management) by TEC Team (see bio) , Gabriel Gheorghiu and Aleksey Osintev

If you search for business performance management (BPM) on Google, you’ll get around 700,000 results. Out of this huge number of results, you will presumably refer to a popular source—Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, BPM is “a set of processes that help organizations optimize their business performance.” The same source affirms that some people see it as the next generation of business intelligence (BI). Both of these explanations—unfortunately—lack clarity.

Going back to the Google search, there are a few near-synonyms for BPM that one can choose from: business intelligence performance management, performance management scorecard, key performance indicators, and business performance metrics. Similarly, Wikipedia has four synonyms for BPM as well, including corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise performance management (EPM), operational performance management (OPM), and business performance optimization (BPO).

Confused? Is it BI, a set of processes, scorecards, performance indicators, metrics, or are all these equally valid parts of BPM? Since we intend to write a series of articles on BPM, we thought we might start this thread a bit differently and first try to explain what BPM should not be confused with.

1. Business Performance Management (BPM)
There is always a kind of confusion when using the same acronym (BPM) for different software packages (i.e., business performance management and business process management). In spite of the undoubted links between these two application types, they differ greatly for the majority of software users and IT professionals. Broadly speaking, a generic business process management system allows analysts and business managers to design and model business processes in a graphical and descriptive view, then execute them, monitor the processes, and finally, modify or optimize them.

There are similarities between business process management systems and enterprise application integration software and workflow automation solutions. By the way, notice yet another BPM abbreviation here: business process modeling, which is a substantial element of business process management. This is basically a business process capturing, visualizing, and description technique (or set of techniques) that provides companies a clear view on processes and helps them to analyze these processes in order to improve them.

2. Business Intelligence (BI)
Is BI part of BPM? Definitely! You can make any kind of business decision based on accurate information, and the efficient way to get that information is through a BI tool. Still, BI is not enough. The best BI tool in the world can give you the greatest dashboards, graphs, ad hoc reports, and so on, but they are completely useless unless you have a good idea of what to do with them.

It is safe to say that BI is the framework or the tool that will help you improve your business, but it will not complete this task for you. This is where BPM comes into play. A BPM provider should be able to support you in defining your business processes and objectives, as well as the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to follow. Furthermore, your BPM provider will assist you in building the tools you need in order to extract the right data from the right place and then interpret it according to the already defined objectives.

3. Balanced Scorecard, Business Process Measurement, and Key Performance Indicators
When talking about business performance management, we should clearly understand that it is possible to successfully manage “something” as long as that “something” can be measured. In other words, in order to estimate how well your business is doing, some formal methodologies, criteria, and metrics are required.

However, it is not enough to estimate your company’s achievements using financial criteria only. There are other important activities which (while difficult to quantify and evaluate) are necessary to compare and evaluate in order to have a more complete picture. Balanced scorecard, business process measurement, and KPIs were developed as a systematic approach to help managers of all levels effectively control the company or departments within the company and to be able to quickly react to market and environmental changes and challenges.

These three concepts are really closely related to each other, but represent different views of the same process. Balanced scorecard is used mostly by the top management level of a company to monitor overall business performance towards strategic goals of the company. Mid-level and operation management usually use business process measurement parameters to visually examine routine and day-to-day processes towards short-time or current goals of the department or organization. Both of these methods utilize KPIs as a metric to count and analyze countable and often uncountable criteria. Those indicators usually look like set of diagrams and graphs that fluctuate dynamically depending on how the numbers change. Sometimes these sets of diagrams are called dashboards (using the analogy of a car or plane dashboard with a number of gauges on them).

4. Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Six Sigma
At a first glance, these mechanisms, methodologies, and concepts can be referred to as different types of business process management. They reflect different views of the same core business processes improvement and talk about product, process, customer satisfaction, quality, and practical techniques to plan, organize, and control this process. They all consider business processes improvement as a global strategic goal and, as a result, companies achieve better financial numbers.

Certainly they are not the same things. While there are plenty of books, articles, and Web sites available to help readers understand the concepts, at the same time the non-dedicated reader who isn’t a professional in these concepts can easily become confused in this ocean of information.

Generally speaking, total quality management, lean, and six sigma as methodologies are much wider and deeper in substance than business performance management—which is a very useful and helpful way to estimate the current business and financial situation of an organization, as well as providing food for thought for managers at all levels to assist them in optimal decision making.

5. Reporting and Analytics
An in-depth explanation of the difference between BI versus reporting and analytics exceeds the scope of this post. So we’ll make this part short but sweet: analytics is complex reporting, while BI is a sophisticated reporting and analytics tool.

Most accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM), solutions offer reports, and most of them even allow you to do analysis on sales, purchases, productivity, and more. As our jobs are becoming very information-intensive, reporting, analytics, and BI are essential to today’s workforce.

Reporting and analytics tools do not always provide data in a format that can be used by a BPM product. Oftentimes, information comes from a variety of sources and—just to make things worse—different tools are used to extract it. A BPM tool should be able to gather all the required data from all available sources and convert it into a format that can be used in the decision process.

To Be Continued…
Five years ago, the BPM Standards Group was created by IBM, SAP AG, Hyperion Solutions Corp., IDC, Meta Group, The Data Warehousing Institute, and BPM Partners Inc. One of its goals was to properly define BPM and to create standards for it.

Vendor Rating and Certification Updates: BI and ERP

2009-12-04T02:10:00.001-08:00

It’s mid-November and time to tell you about some of the new product ratings and certifications that we’re covering in our research. TEC analysts recently completed certifying products from BatchMaster and Targit.

Each vendor successfully demonstrated how its product addressed a script of functionality as identified by TEC analysts. (Look for products proudly wearing the TEC certification badge in our evaluation centers and vendor showcase.)

* The Targit BI Suite, with its “few click” approach is covered in our BI Evaluation Center.
* The BatchMaster Enterprise solution focuses on the requirements of companies in the process manufacturing industry, as covered in our ERP Evaluation Center.

In addition to those TEC certified products, we also published new data about the following products.

* Newly revised data on the OpenAir professional services automation suite.
* Webcom joined our Business Process Management (BPM) Evaluation Center with the submission of its ResponsAbility product.
* Software development and QA company, Technosoft, joined our outsourcing evaluation center.

Straight Up on Leads Management

2009-12-04T02:08:00.002-08:00

No, I’m not about to launch into a Paula Abdul cover (I won’t even dignify that with a link).

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.

There are a couple of factors that are spurring the need for effective leads management tools. The biggest factor is that consumers are becoming more savvy, and are not easily compelled by traditional marketing. Companies are seeking to effectively target their core market by catering to their target’s specific needs.

The following white paper by BLUEROADS (original caps), outlines a some of rules that vendors should adhere to when managing leads distribution. Some recommendations include

* Using clear terminology for each stage of the lead pipeline
* Using partners that are relevant and experienced in a particular area.
* Having realistic expectations.
* Using lead pull methodology.

Given this, enterprises need to find software that is appropriate to their needs. In his excellent blog, Brian Carroll points readers to a Forrester Marketing blog by Laura Ramos which highlights four key buckets of leads generation technology, aimed at improving the efficacy of leads generation. I’ll repeat them here (but I do encourage you to visit both sites)

1) web analytics
2) database services
3) marketing automation
4) pure play leads management

Needless to say this involves a lot of technology and integration with existing CRM and SFA systems. On its own, a leads management system will not be a panacea for a business’s slumping sales. On this, Carroll reflects

“Software will not spontaneously generate collaboration between sales and marketing…I regularly encounter organizations that invest in expensive software before they fully understand the fundamental operational processes that it will be supporting.”

In other words, enterprises do not appreciate the type of information they need and who will be using it within the company. (He also writes how his company spent over a million dollars and nearly a decade to almost perfect their current leads management system. Brian, if you’re reading this, I invite you to try TEC’s tool…) A good leads management system is one that is used. There must be management buy-in, and the sales and marketing teams must be diligent in imputing and extracting information. For stakeholders to use the system, it must offer tools that they need. Failing this, money and resources are wasted housing dirty data—data which has no form or function outside of confounding business.

Enterprises should use a decision support system to help them map out their needs and measure their priorities. The decision process itself can be long and arduous if it is not managed correctly (It’s detailed here as a part of TEC’s software evaluation and selection methodology)

For different vendor’s take on leads management issues, visit our white paper site.

Business Solutions of the Future

2009-12-04T02:08:00.001-08:00

The future is tomorrow’s present. Many have tried to predict it using silly or scientific methods, from chiromancy (palm reading), aleuromancy (fortune cookies), and other -mancies, to the three Ps (possible, probable, and preferable futures) and a W (or wildcard—low-probability events with a high impact on the future) used in futurology.

Without trying to create a “CRMorology” or “ERPmancy”, I aim to write a series of articles about the future of business software. Since this concerns everyone—and because I’m not Nostradamus or Hari Seldon (Asimov’s famous psychohistorian)—I would like to involve you, our readers, as well as business professionals and decision makers from the enterprise software industry. From students with little knowledge (but extraordinary imagination), to analysts who know everything about the market and vendors who know for sure what will NOT happen in the near future, I need you to let me know how you see the future of business applications.

How Is It Going to Be?

A future in which business applications will not be needed is too far-off to foresee, so that will not be discussed here. So, if we can’t live without these applications, how will they evolve? Will there be one huge, global business software provider, employing armies of programmers and customer support people? Or maybe myriads of open source products that will work together and be as easy to assemble as the pieces of a puzzle?

I guess we could let our imagination wander indefinitely, but let’s get a bit organized here: what we’ll aim for is seeing what could possibly happen in the next ten, fifty, and one hundred years.

Ten Years in the Future

A decade is not such a long time, so it should be easier to foresee the major trends in the business software industry that may happen during this time span. Still, even in the short term, this is quite a challenge. Look at meteorology: the weather changes so fast and unexpectedly that we can only know for sure what it is after it has happened.

Speaking of meteorology, I see some clouds gathering above the world of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Is there going to be a storm? No, they say cloud computing is the alternative to the traditional storage of information—instead of storing the data on a server in your company, you can put it on data centers anywhere in the world. Some don’t believe it will work, but it was not so long ago that people used to keep their money under the mattress because they did not trust banks.

We don’t trust banks today either, but we do use e-banking and credit cards. The same thing will happen with the clouds: their utility and efficiency will eventually be stronger than the fear of losing data. They already exist and the biggest in the world has 150 locations and will store 150 million gigabytes (GBs) every year, or 100 GBs every four minutes.

We will probably have sufficient space for the data, but what about its security? According to a study from Oracle, twenty percent of IT managers think that data security breaches will happen at their organizations in the next year. And the main threats are not from viruses and hackers, but mostly from inside the company. Do we need an occurrence of massive, worldwide data loss to learn from our mistakes (as we supposedly do now), during the economic downturn?

Let’s say we store and secure the data—how do we access it? It doesn’t look like a problem now, but it will surely become one—maybe sooner than we think. According to an IDC report, we created 281 billion GBs of data in 2007, and by 2011, that number will increase to 1,800 billion GBs.

While we do have more sophisticated tools to extract and manipulate data, one of the challenges of the future will be to have structured data. This involves the existence of workflows for data creation and administration, data cleansing, and data deduplication (removal of duplicate records).

Business data is created by users through an interface to a database. Despite the fact that all enterprise software vendors pretend to offer “intuitive” and “user-friendly” solutions, the complexity of these tools keeps on growing. Since the trend seems to be grouping several solutions in the same suite—most of the time, from different providers acquired by the same vendor—integration seems more important than innovation.

Some vendors offer a platform as a service (PaaS) (also known as cloudware), which is aimed at helping customers easily design, develop, and test their own applications. Large companies can benefit from PaaS, as it will allow them to create applications tailored to their complex needs, thus reducing costs. On the other hand, once you choose to use a PaaS platform, transition to another platform becomes very difficult, and potentially impossible. Will the emerging open platform as a service (OPaaS) address this problem by letting programmers use whatever tools and languages they need?

The way we work will also change. According to a study conducted by Accenture, by 2013, seventy percent of mobile phones in developed nations will support Internet browsers. The same report reveals that the millennial generation (people born in the last decade of the twentieth century) will change the face of the workforce.

Hooking ERP Up with MES: Good, But Not Sufficient Yet

2009-11-06T03:02:00.001-08:00

Without such a tight and near real-time integration, there is much anxiety and frustration within any enterprise that is in search of a more competitive, profitable, safe, and agile factory. How can any manufacturing company reduce non value-adding administration and empower their workforce to take immediate remedial actions?

Namely, the typical current state of affairs from the perspective of a senior vice president (SVP) of operations could be summarized as follows:

1. On one hand, the ever more pressured manufacturing environment demands acceleration of the stock-keeping units (SKU) mix and shorter lead times, all due to ever more demanding and fickle customers; but
2. On the other hand, the real world situation is of little overall enterprise and/or SKU-level profit visibility, and the company has to rely on (suboptimal) average key performance indicators (KPIs), with emergency scheduling (constant firefighting) on paper or Excel documents.

In such “clueless” environments, there are “blind spots” everywhere in terms of determining yields and losses, hidden capacity opportunity, and masked process routing and constraints by reactive work practices. Also, there are increased risks of quality non-compliance leading to manual quality assurance (QA) processes, whereas continuous improvement efforts are floundering and remain unmeasured. In a nutshell, the hands-on plant people do not seem involved and are ironically not accountable for what they should be.

The future state should logically be the inverse of the above, and the usual “first remedial step conclusion” is to gather the glut of data from data historians and MES databases, and then decide what to do. But, without smart and intuitive plant applications that have visualization and contextual business intelligence (BI) capabilities (and that are thus accepted by the plant staff), this will all be yet another exercise in futility.

The reality check reveals an “inconvenient truth” that many MES investments fail to deliver hoped for performance management outcomes due to people issues. Namely, after 18 months or so, the embattled company in case might have an overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) dashboard that the plant engineers occasionally look at (and which might have cool colors on it), but without a pervasive effect (actionable info) and acceptance across the plant (and entire enterprise).

Curbing MESsy Shop Floor State of Affairs – Part I

2009-11-06T03:01:00.002-08:00

Those that follow manufacturing-oriented enterprise applications have likely noticed for some time an uptick of conversations about the need to better integrate high-speed manufacturing operations (the real-time world of the plant) with the planning and engineering departments (the transactional and design world of enterprise systems). The nirvana (or utopia) hoped for thus far has been to provide a single point of operation and control for manufacturers to: Plan, Define, Control, Execute, and Analyze Production.

Why do we need integrated manufacturing operations, or manufacturing execution systems (MES) linked to transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, likely via some plant-level integration hub and visualization & intelligence layer?

Well, it is not a major revelation to say that, for instance, in the discrete manufacturing sector, fabrication and assembly processes are being run and managed by isolated applications, such as “Post-it” notes, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, Microsoft Access databases, and a plethora of niche vendor’s plant applications (point solutions like data historians). This creates an overwhelming number of individual silos (or islands) of manufacturing data and operations.

These silos are typically not connected to enterprise-level (“ivory tower”) systems like ERP, Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and so on. This lack of integration and real-time connection then all too often results in huge operational inefficiencies, lost productivity, wasted time and materials, sub-par products, and so on.

Consequently, major decisions in the offices are based on theory and hunch rather than on actual and actionable data. But instead of traditionally managing operations “in the dark”, companies should rather strive to capitalize on all of the operational opportunities coming from the following sources: people, processes, and the plant equipment.

ERP Does It… Not!

Some might logically wonder whether ERP systems can take care of this (and why not, if that is the case). Well, at best, the core ERP systems’ functional scope only provides a financial and inventory snapshot of how a manufacturer is performing. Core ERP systems cannot tell users what is happening on the manufacturing floor right now (at this instant). Ironically however, what is happening at this moment impacts the financial performance later.

To be more illustrative, ERP is good at producing a forecasted demand plan by decision makers, and giving answers to sales, purchasing, and manufacturing orders’ inquiries like “What?”, “When?”, “For whom?”, and “At what cost?” Conversely, MES is good at providing the record of production that is supplied by plant operators (e.g., engineers, supervisors, machinists, etc.), who thereby inadvertently turn into mere data collectors.

The execution system is able to provide answers to the questions like “What are the schedule changes?”, “What is the product build history?”, “When will it be done?”, “How is the product quality?”, and “Where is the batch?”, but without any awareness of the customer (the particular order for that customer) or the particular order costs. In a nutshell, MES systems are devoid of any customer- and order-related information.

Curbing MESsy Shop Floor State of Affairs – Part II

2009-11-06T03:01:00.001-08:00

MES solutions that integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise applications thus connect manufacturing to the enterprise in order to:

* Reduce costs and improve profits by collecting and communicating real-time manufacturing data throughout the product lifecycle; and
* Closely control and continuously improve operations, quality, and visibility across facilities worldwide.

By standardizing the best practices of lean manufacturing, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), and continuous process improvement (CPI), such solutions should provide a real-time framework that would unite capabilities like finite factory scheduling (constraints-based), operations, quality, safety, performance management (via analytics), and enterprise asset maintenance (EAM).

Plant-level execution systems have thus far largely been adopted by big companies in a big way. The historic condition in this highly fragmented market was that offerings were too niche-oriented and offered by many small software companies. A large enterprise would have to purchase many offerings and stitch them together to get a full solution. Today, however, comprehensive packaged factory solutions that are repeatable, scaleable, and transferable are changing that dynamic.

Some Shining Examples

Some good examples in this regard would be a rare few ERP vendors with native MES capabilities, starting with IQMS and its EnterpriseIQ suite [evaluate this product]. Mid-2008, IQMS launched a new Automation Group to expand the interface capabilities of its EnterpriseIQ ERP system with manufacturing equipment on the shop floor.

Look for a separate article on IQMS down the track. In the meantime, you can find more information about the vendor here and in TEC’s earlier article entitled “Manufacturer’s Nirvana — Real-Time Actionable Information.” Also, there is an informative Enterprise Systems Spectator’s blog post on IQMS here.

Solarsoft (formerly CMS Software [evaluate this product]) would be another good ERP-MES example following the acquisition of Mattec a couple of years ago. The upcoming Epicor 9 product, which represents a complete rewrite and convergence, on the basis of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0, of the selected best-of-breed functional concepts from the respective individual products (like Epicor Vantage [evaluate this product], Epicor Enterprise [evaluate this product], Epicor iScala [evaluate this product], and so on) will feature the native MES module. Of course, some functionality within Epicor 9 will be brand new, while some modules will represent embedded third-party products (unbeknownst to the customer).

Curbing MESsy Shop Floor State of Affairs – Part III

2009-11-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

As for the user interface (UI), it is extremely critical that it match the worker’s job. There is a saying that “the worker works the way the worker wants to work,” and in any plant-level system the role-tailored and industry-specific UI is incredibly important to streamline, or “lean out,” the tasks that are required.

This is why ERP systems have customarily been so poor at handling manufacturing execution: not necessarily that the functionalities don’t exist in some ERP manufacturing offerings, but that it is too difficult for workers to input the necessary information. I fully agree with AMR Research’s 2007 alert entitled “CDC Software Delivers Operations Excellence in Plain English” that states:

“…Knowledge workers on the shop floor can’t waste time—downtime or overtime—filling out forms or navigating complex screens and menus to accomplish their goals…

…Role-based workflows, stored procedures, and no-nonsense user interfaces are designed to guide operations personnel through common scenarios. The UI is also designed to work with touch-screen interfaces, supporting simplified and rapid data-entry scenarios. This is a far cry from the historically cumbersome multi-page, multi-tab interfaces offered by traditional ERP systems.”

Such intuitive and engaging technologies might even help to overcome traditional cultural barriers between the enterprise and the plant, which are well depicted in the recent Optimal Solutions’ article:

“…Many plants, particularly those over a decade old, began as quasi-independent entities. As these plants evolved, a culture of isolationism often took hold.

Inside manufacturing plants, engineering, operations and information technology (IT) established fiefdoms. Over time, plant engineers, plant managers, process control operators and machinists learned to execute their respective functions while respecting each other’s turf. Overly intrusive corporate oversight was often kept at bay by hitting production numbers and keeping costs under control…”

AMR Research’s Manufacturing Peer Forum members say that unlocking the potential of plant operations personnel and letting them take ownership of the continuous improvement process (CIP) has been highly successful in operations.

Enter CDC Factory

This brings us to CDC Software’s CDC Factory, which is a packaged manufacturing execution and operations intelligence management system that transforms manufacturing performance by enabling operations people to take immediate action. The suite is aimed at, either in tandem with the sibling Ross ERP suite [evaluate this product] or any other ERP product for that matter, catering to the needs of midsize manufacturers in the food and beverage (F&B), pharmaceutical, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industries.

Although CDC Factory is ERP-agnostic, future developments are meant to leverage the capabilities from Ross ERP and vice versa. Accordingly, the end of 2008 saw the Ross Factory module extending and expanding value for Ross ERP customers.

Along similar lines, in early 2009 CDC Factory should feature Trace Express, the Ross ERP system’s ability to trace orders and materials forward from suppliers and backward from customers with audit trails. In late 2008, the Ross BPM (Business Performance Management) 6.3 product was launched with a new UI, Microsoft SharePoint portal, and document management integration, which will be extended to CDC Factory at a later stage.

The CDC Factory users’ empowerment and involvement is encouraged via a factory floor UI for capturing all real-time inputs, outputs, information, alerts, decision-making process and actions. Different plant roles (e.g., executives, managers, supervisors and operators) will have somewhat differently tailored screens serving the respective knowledge-worker. But in all cases, the UI features the Microsoft Office familiarity combined with consumer-style screens like automatic teller machine (ATM) or restaurant/retail shop point of sale (POS) terminals.

For example, a supervisor will see the following: many pertinent key performance indicators (KPIs) and other analytical information such as plant dashboards; the end of the shift summary; the end of the production run summary; top downtime reasons; quality adherence; tactical analysis, and so on.

Many best practices were built into the product as a natural extension of daily activities to facilitate managers and shop-floor workers to suggest and/or leverage common-sense CIP techniques. These best practices can be in terms of working practices (e.g., standard operating procedures [SOPs] or good manufacturing practices, role accountability, etc.), key comparative metrics, comparable manufacturing processes, standard definitions, standard data (e.g., coding, failure codes, etc.), and so on.

Also incorporated are the business performance management (BPM), analysis, and workflow capabilities normally associated with total productive maintenance (TPM), total quality management (TQM), Six Sigma, and other lean manufacturing toolsets. All this without necessarily requiring the operators’ intimate knowledge of this trendy academic terminology (which might sound like Greek to many plant folks).

For example, comparative factory KPIs would be: the factory’s overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) trends, manufactured units per man-hour across plants, cost per unit (by product and/or product type), and on-time delivery. For its part, plant performance KPIs would be: performance by shift/product, plan attainment, downtime percentage, labor variance, and waste percentage. Finally, operation intelligence and analysis could provide KPIs like the categorization of downtime, reasons for yield loss, or reasons for slow running.

Open Source and Business Intelligence: The Common Thread

2009-11-06T02:59:00.000-08:00

"Open source applications" is the term that describes systems built using open source software in the form of frameworks or libraries. Although copyleft licenses do not permit organizations to resell software developed using open software, mechanisms such as dual-license models have arisen, whereby commercial vendors can deliver their software under a community license that follows the open source license regulations and offers a commercial license with an attached fee. Vendors may charge users for services such as support, training, consulting, and advanced features.

In the past two years, commercial open source vendors have been working actively towards establishing a long-term position in the enterprise applications space. In February 2007, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) was formed to bring together commercial open source software businesses; its main purpose is to broaden the horizon of open source applications and most importantly, foster interoperability between them. JasperSoft, one of the pioneers of open source BI is among the founding members of this alliance. Pentaho, another open source BI vendor, has set itself apart by leading and sponsoring all of its core projects, implementing open industry standards and establishing partnerships with vendors of data warehouse technology, such as InfoBright and ParAccel.

BI has some of the most challenging technology problems among all enterprise software applications. These challenges include the design of very large databases; complex data integration between disparate and multiple data sources; the ability to search across a surfeit of information; and some of the most stringent performance and latency requirements. Even with proprietary solutions, organizations need a team of experienced professionals—including database administrators, business analysts, and programmers—to implement and support a data warehouse and BI environment.

Open source BI goes one step further: it encourages organizations to use and modify the software as needed and share advances with the rest of the community. It seems only natural that open source and BI technologies have converged. A crucial factor to consider when adopting an open source BI solution is that underlying technologies are often, if not always, open source themselves; although not mandatory, it is prudent to have technical teams acquire the necessary skills. For instance, most open source BI software is built on the LAMP stack. In order to adopt and maintain the applications, technical teams need to have development and administration skills using the LAMP stack.

Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) Back in the News Again

2009-11-06T02:58:00.000-08:00

Visiting the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) web site, I came across this 143-page PDF file, which deals with XBRL. As a gung-ho proponent of automation, I’m calling attention to it here to show that the head of the SEC (Mr. Christopher Cox) and I are on the same wavelength when it comes to promoting cost saving automations. Here is some interesting stuff from the PDF, together with my comments.

The Christopher Cox modernization commission proposes that companies provide their financial statements to the Commission and on their corporate Web sites in interactive data format using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). A statement on Page 29 of the PDF states that the decision about this request becoming compulsory was to have been decided on December 15th, 2008.

XBRL was derived from the XML standard. It was developed and continues to be supported by XBRL International, a collaborative consortium of approximately 550 organizations representing many elements of the financial reporting community worldwide in more than 20 jurisdictions, national and regional.

The proposal is a significant one for Mr. Cox as he is a proponent of modernization and the use of current technology to reduce business and government expenses. His legacy will be the promotion of “interactive data” and modernization of SEC filings through the use of XBRL.

Mr Cox has decided to retire at the end of President Bush’s term. During Mr. Cox’s tenure, the regulator has convinced over 8,000 companies to use XBRL in various types of filings. Large international organizations such as Proctor and Gamble and Pepsi file with GAAP and IFRS, are using XBRL, and are on the very pro XBRL bandwagon.

Sterling Software Sees the Light with Eureka:Intelligence

2009-11-06T02:55:00.000-08:00

MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Sterling Software, Inc. (NYSE: SSW) announced general availability today of its new EUREKA:Intelligence product. EUREKA:Intelligence is a Web-Based Integrated, Query, Analysis and Reporting tool that allows users to easily query, manipulate and format data for personal or shared use. It integrates the most commonly used business intelligence capabilities into a single tool, making it valuable for the majority of business users. EUREKA:Intelligence is ideally suited for large, distributed organizations that require general purpose analyses reporting requirements for a large portion of business users. The 100% Java tool also satisfies the unique requirements of business-to-business e-commerce companies.

EUREKA:Intelligence is the latest product to be added to the integrated EUREKA:Suite. The suite also contains products for web-based production reporting, analysis of very large databases, and advanced ad-hoc analysis. In addition, EUREKA:Portal provides a single point of entry and is a common platform of services for all EUREKA:Suite products. Since EUREKA:Intelligence is 100% Java, it provides cross-platform support. The client code is maintained and deployed automatically by the EUREKA:Intelligence server, so there is no need to install or update client code. The product has multiple analytical view modes including chart, pivot, table, and report document. There is also a scheduling capability to allow users to monitor performance over time. Time-series groupings of similar archived reports can be used to generate historical information.

Analysis of SAS Institute and IBM Intelligence Alliance

2009-10-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

"At IBM's PartnerWorld 2000 in San Diego this Monday (24Jan00), SAS Institute and IBM will announce a new business intelligence relationship that will include the formation of consulting practices focused on SAS solutions, and further development of e-business intelligence solutions that integrate IBM's DB2 database product family and SAS software.

The announcement between the two business intelligence leaders is the latest in a select group of key strategic relationships forged by IBM as it refocuses its partnering efforts to provide world-class e-business applications. Recent announcements have included partnerships with other leading software providers such as Siebel Systems and SAP AG.

The agreement between IBM and SAS Institute and the planned joint development efforts will result in:

* Creation of a consulting practice in IBM Global Services specializing in SAS solutions. These consultants will work with joint customers to integrate the powerful decision support capabilities of SAS solutions with existing transaction systems and other e-business applications.

* Closer integration of SAS solutions and DB2 Universal Database to enhance performance for all IBM server platforms, including Netfinity, AS/400, RS/6000, NUMA-Q and S/390.

* IBM Global Services' access to a wide range of SAS Institute solutions for business intelligence, data warehousing, and decision support.

The relationship will initially focus on three primary areas where IBM and SAS Institute will offer end-to-end solutions to enterprise customers. IBM Global Services will provide the analytical services, systems integration and industry-specific consulting expertise. SAS Institute will provide software solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). IBM and SAS Institute plan to more tightly integrate and thus enhance performance of DB2 Universal Database and SAS software."
The existing customer base for IBM DB2 Universal Database should be strongly interested in this development. The ability to access solutions for customer relationship management and extended supply chain solutions should be especially intriguing. We believe that the combination of SAS's strong business intelligence solutions and IBM's global sales and consulting forces will make a powerful combination. The question for customers will be whether this is just a marketing alliance or an actual combination of powerful products at the code level, allowing customers to seamlessly integrate the products.

Using Predictive Analytics within Business Intelligence: A Primer

2009-10-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Predictive analytics has helped drive business intelligence (BI) towards business performance management (BPM). Traditionally, predictive analytics and models have been used to identify patterns in consumer oriented businesses, such as identifying potential credit risk when issuing credit cards, or analyzing the buying habits of retail consumers. The BI industry has shifted from identifying and comparing data patterns over time (based on batch processing of monthly or weekly data) to providing performance management solutions with right-time data loads in order to allow accurate decision making in real time. Thus, the emergence of predictive analytics within BI has become an extension of general performance management functionality. For organizations to compete in the market place, taking a forward-looking approach is essential. BI can provide the framework for organizations focused on driving their business based on predictive models and other aspects of performance management.

We'll define predictive analytics and identify its different applications inside and outside BI. We'll also look at the components of predictive analytics and its evolution from data mining, and at how they interrelate. Finally, we'll examine the use of predictive analytics and how they can be leveraged to drive performance management.

Overview of Analytics and Their General Business Application

Analytical tools enable greater transparency within an organization, and can identify and analyze past and present trends, as well as discover the hidden nature of data. However, past and present trend analysis and identification alone are not enough to gain competitive advantage. Organizations need to identify future patterns, trends, and customer behavior to better understand and anticipate their markets.

Traditional analytical tools claim to have a 360-degree view of the organization, but they actually only analyze historical data, which may be stale, incomplete, or corrupted. Traditional analytics can help gain insight based on past decision making, which can be beneficial; however, predictive analytics allows organizations to take a forward-looking approach to the same types of analytical capabilities.

Credit card providers offer a first-rate example of the application of analytics (specifically, predictive analytics) in their identification of credit card risk, customer retention, and loyalty programs. Credit card companies attempt to retain their existing customers through loyalty programs, and need to take into account the factors that cause customers to choose other credit card providers. The challenge is predicting customer loss. In this case, a model which uses three predictors can be used to help predict customer loyalty: frequency of use, personal financial situations, and lower annual percentage rate (APR) offered by competitors. The combination of these predictors can be used to create a predictive model. The predictive model can then be applied and customers can be put into categories based on the resulting data. Any changes in user classification will flag the customer. That customer will then be targeted for the loyalty program. Financial institutions, on the other hand, use predictive analytics to identify the lifetime value of their customers. Whether this translates into increased benefits, lower interest rates, or other benefits for the customer, classifying and applying patterns to different customer segmentations allows the financial institutions to best benefit from (and provide benefit to) their customers.
Data mining can be defined as an analytical tool set that searches for data patterns automatically and identifies specific patterns within large datasets across disparate organizational systems. Data mining, text mining, and Web mining are types of pattern identification. Organizations can use these forms of pattern recognition to identify customers' buying patterns or the relationship between a person's financial records and their credit risk. Predictive analytics moves one step further and applies these patterns to make forward-looking predictions. Instead of just identifying a potential credit risk, an organization can identify the lifetime value of a customer by developing predictive decision models and applying these models to the identified patterns. These types of pattern identification and forward-looking model structures can equally be applied to BI and performance management solutions within an organization.

Predictive analytics is used to determine the probable future outcome of an event, or the likelihood of a situation occurring. It is the branch of data mining concerned with the prediction of future probabilities and trends. Predictive analytics is used to analyze automatically large amounts of data with different variables, including clustering, decision trees, market basket analysis, regression modeling, neural nets, genetic algorithms, text mining, hypothesis testing, decision analytics, and so on.

The core element of predictive analytics is the predictor, a variable that can be measured for an individual or entity to predict future behavior. These predictors are based on models that are created to use the analytical capabilities within the generated predictive models. Descriptive models classify relationships by identifying customers or prospective customers, and placing them in groups based on identified criteria. Decision models consider business and economic drivers and constraints that surpass the general functionality of a predictive model. In a sense, statistical analysis helps to drive this process as well. The predictors are the factors that help identify the outcomes of the actual model. For example, a financial institution may want to identify the factors that make a valuable lifetime customer.

Multiple predictors can be combined into a predictive model, which, when subjected to analysis, can be used to forecast future probabilities with an acceptable level of reliability. In predictive modeling, data is collected, a statistical model is formulated, predictions are made, and the model is validated (or revised) as additional data becomes available. One of the main differences between data mining and predictive analytics is that data mining can be a fully automated process, whereas predictive analytics requires an analyst to identify the predictors and apply them to the defined models.

A decision tree is a variable within predictive analytics that allows the user to visualize the mapping of observations about an item and compare it to conclusions about the item's target value. Basically, decision trees are built by creating a hierarchy of predictor attributes. The highest level represents the outcome, and each sub-level identifies another factor in that conclusion. This can be compared to if-else statements, which identify a result based on whether certain factors meet specified criteria. For example, in order to assess potential bad debt based on credit history, salary, demographics, and so on, a financial institution may wish to identify multiple scenarios, each of which is likely to meet bad debt customer criteria, and use combinations of those scenarios to identify which customers are most likely to become bad debt accounts.

Regression analysis is another component of predictive analytics that allows users to model relationships between three or more variables in order to predict the value of one variable in comparison to the values of the others. It can be used to identify buying patterns based on multiple demographic qualifiers such as age and gender which can be beneficial to identify where to sell specific products. Within BI, this is beneficial when used with scorecards that focus on geography and sales.
Practical applications of all of these analytical models allow organizations to forecast results to predict financial outcomes, hopefully increasing revenues in the process. Within BI, aside from financial outcomes, predictive analytics can be used to develop corporate strategies throughout the organization. What-if analyses can be performed to leverage the capabilities of predictive analytics to build various scenarios, allowing organizations to map out a series of outcomes of strategic and tactical plans. This way, organizations can implement the best strategy based on the scenario creation.

How Predictive Analytics Are Used within BI, and How They Drive an Organization's BPM

Data mining, predictive analytics, and statistical engines are examples of tools that have been embedded in BI software packages to leverage the benefits of performance management. If BI is backward looking, and data mining identifies the here and now, predictive analytics and their use within performance management is the looking glass into the future. This forward-looking view helps organizations drive their decision making. BI is known for its consolidation of data from disparate business units, and for its analysis capabilities based on that consolidated data. Performance management goes one step further by leveraging the BI framework (such as the data warehousing structure and extract, transform, and load [ETL] capabilities) to monitor performance, identify trends, and allow decision makers the ability to set appropriate metrics and monitor results on an ongoing basis.

With predictive analytics embedded within the above processes, the metrics set and business rules identified by organizations can be used to identify the predictors that need to be evaluated. These predictors can then be used to shift towards a forward-looking approach in decision making by using the strengths from the areas identified above. Scorecards are one example of a performance management tool that can leverage predictive analytics. The identification of sales performance by region, product type, and demographics can be used to define what new products should be introduced into the market, and where. In general, scorecards can graphically reflect the selected sales information and create what-if scenarios based on the data identified to verify the right combinations of new product distribution.

What-if scenarios can be used within the different visualization tools to create business models that anticipate what might happen within an organization based on changes in defined variables. What-if analysis gives organizations the tools to identify how profits will be affected based on changes in inflation and pricing patterns as well as the impact of increasing the number of employees throughout the organization. Online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes can be created to identify dimensional data, and patterns within changing dimensions can be compared over time to contrast scenarios using a cube structure to automatically view the outcome of the what-if scenarios.

Marketing and Intelligence, Together at Last

2009-10-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Angara offers an ASP-based service for targeting web site content to unidentified visitors (see article, "Getting Strangers to Take Your Candy"). The company buys online profile data from other websites. These are data that users agree to provide in exchange for receiving newsletters or other offers or are captured from clickstreams by online advertising networks such as MatchLogic.

By arrangement with the websites Angara gets to drop a cookie - but not any data that might identify the user as an individual. When the user later visits an Angara customer, Angara can provide segmentation information such as age, sex, or geographic region. The customer's website uses the segmentation information to serve targeted content to the visitor.

In the case of data from ad agencies, Angara is given access to the cookies dropped by the agencies. In both cases the data only identify broad characteristics of the user, such as sex, interests and responses to categories of advertising. The goal is to make first time visitors more likely to make purchases or return to the site.

Net Perceptions specializes in analysis of existing customers. The company sifts through data on the viewing and purchasing behavior of shoppers and uses its conclusions to make recommendations for personalized offers and targeted ads. Net Perceptions has chosen Angara to complement its own offerings in its new ASP offering, called the Net Perceptions Personalization Network.

The Personalization Network will offer four "channels," each driven from databases compiled by the network:

* The Intelligence Channel provides analytic tools to let companies understand their website visitors.

* The Recommendation Channel makes recommendations for cross-sells and up-sells based on the behavior of previous visitors.

* The Customer Acquisition Channel uses Angara's Converter product to target content to first-time visitors.

* The E-Mail Channel, a strategic partnership with Xchange, Inc., provides clients with the ability to design and target consumer emails.

The move by eCRM firms to embrace ASP offerings is accelerating. In Angara's case an ASP model is a necessity because of the dependence of their solution upon the data they collect. Net Perceptions is one of the very first to move an existing, successful suite to an ASP model. We expect that this will encourage the expansion of the market.

One thing that could hurt this market in the future is a privacy scare. Angara has a good privacy model in that they never get to see information that identifies individuals. One might argue that opting in to receive promotions does not necessarily mean that you want to be identified to a service that tells websites how to serve content to you, but given that the Web is supported by advertising this seems to us like a minimal intrusion, if it is one at all.

Net Perceptions takes no responsibility for the use its customers make of their data; its official policy is "Net Perceptions encourages all of its customers to adopt privacy standards of their own and make those standards freely accessible." We haven't yet seen a privacy policy for the ASP service. We believe that it should contain provisions that each ASP customer's data will be kept isolated from all the other customers, and that data collected through Net Perceptions' applications not become part of the Angara database.

We don't see data merging of this type to be a priori improper - that would depend on the mechanics - but we feel certain that it would ignite the concerns of privacy advocates and the public. Angara assures us that there are in fact no plans for any such data merging.

Enterprise Resource Planning Vendor Gains Connectivity through Acquisition of Plant Intelligence Provider

2009-10-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

The acquisition of Lighthammer Software Development Corporation (www.lighthammer.com), a privately-held supplier of enterprise manufacturing intelligence and collaborative manufacturing software, by SAP might indicate that manufacturing operations management (MOM) software systems are becoming mature for consolidation. MOM software is the Web-based collaborative software layer (with the traits of both the integration and analytic applications) for monitoring plant-level trends, establishing operational context, and disseminating plant-level information to the other enterprise-wide constituencies. It is also referred to as enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI), manufacturing performance service (MPS), or whichever other acronym some analyst has come up with to make the traditionally not very user-friendly space that includes manufacturing execution systems (MES), plant automation systems, and other plant-centric technologies seem more attractive.

For background information on this acquisition, see The Importance of Plant Level Systems, Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver, and Enterprise Resource Planning Giants Eye the Shop Floor.

In fact, there have been numerous examples of other large plant-centric vendors (including the likes of ABB, Rockwell Automation, General Electric [GE], and Siemens) acquiring an array of companies and products (such as the former Skyva, Systems Modeling, IndX, and Datasweep), thus enabling them to build a broader, integrated, single-source MES scope. SAP's acquisition of Lighthammer might suggest that such manufacturing floor ventures of enterprise applications vendors are more than merely the knee-jerk reaction of a long overdue and much anticipated spending increase in the plant-level software market (see Do Chinese Enterprises Really Need MES and WMS? and The Challenges of Integrating Enterprise Resource Planning and Manufacturing Execution Systems).

Plant floor applications are generally very different from each other, though even their vendors deliver somewhat generic solutions, since continuous flows, discrete piece production rates, temperatures, pressures, and other manufacturing process parameters are common across many manufacturing applications. Still, owing to a dearth of standardized plant-level processes, bundled with a raft of manufacturing styles and industry-specific regulatory compliance (and consequently quality assurance) requirements, user organizations have typically implemented applications on a system-by-system basis. This is in part a response to firefighting requirements defined by department managers, manufacturing engineers, and equipment or process vendors.

This diversity of applications affects one of the major roles of the plant execution system, which is to collect and pool data from the real time processes for delivery to planning level enterprise applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems. This is because, while mainstream ERP vendors have invested in making their products more attractive to specific vertical markets, they cannot really afford to deliver specialized functionality unless there is a large market.
As with its earlier appetizing acquisitions, such as those of TopTier, TopManage, and A2i (see SAP Acquires TopTier to Further Broaden Its Horizons and SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities; Part Four: SAP and A2i), the Lighthammer deal should provide SAP with several benefits. For one, the two parties have quite close product DNAs, since Lighthammer has long been a strategic marketing and development partner, with a manufacturing-centric product, which is now delivered as an SAP xApp-like composite application.

Lighthammer, formerly an SAP partner, had worked to create technology integration between its products and the SAP architecture, so reconfiguring Lighthammer as an SAP composite application running on SAP NetWeaver should present no special difficulty. With the acquisition of Lighthammer, SAP gains workflow-based connectivity to virtually any source on the plant floor and analytical functionality with Lighthammer's products for plant intelligence. This meshes well with SAP's recent business intelligence (BI) dashboard forays (see Business Intelligence Corporate Performance Management Market Landscape).

Furthermore, a high percentage (over 85 percent) of Lighthammer's approximately 150 clients are also SAP clients, a fact which should help SAP manage these clients' expectations. In addition, the improved plant-level functionality should make SAP more competitive in non-SAP environments as well. In particular, SAP's existing non-Lighthammer manufacturing clients should benefit, because they should gain greater flexibility in integrating multiple plant floor solutions with SAP. On the flip side of the coin, the vendor has pledged to support existing Lighthammer-only customers for a period of time. However, logically, the value of operating in this mode would decrease if customers are not going to pursue an SAP-centric strategy in the long term.
We concur with AMR Research's finding in the SAP Plus Lighthammer Equals xMII November 2005 report that there are ample opportunities for vendors to amplify xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (xMII) in terms of data historians or operational data stores, industry-based manufacturing models and KPIs, data mining add-ons to enable proactive, model-based decision making, etc. xMII performance management product functionality is moving in the direction of enhanced alert and event management, knowledge management, real time economics, and directed workflows, which will be key to encapsulating information and capabilities that are needed to make better and faster decisions at multiple levels within manufacturing. Over time, xMII will leverage selected SAP technologies such as the new SAP Visual Composer, which reduces the effort required to develop user interfaces (UI), but will present a challenge to users who have to adapt to the change.

Another weak area that SAP acknowledges is their inability to structurally improve manufacturing processes themselves. This is due to the fact that it is incredibly difficult to map what is happening on the shop floor in detail to, for example, the business systems or the costing systems. It is even more difficult across multiple plants, as the vendor has to provide customers with the ability not only to get the workflows right, but to assemble the data needed to do structural improvements. For this, one would need a plant-level analytic server that could unify data from multiple process control systems into a single contextual database in order to capture, process, and transform real time raw data into intelligible monitoring, counting, and measuring information that could be used by planning and other systems.

The Lighthammer acquisition may compound the above problem. So far, Lighthammer's raison d'�tre has been mostly to provide visibility into disparate plant systems for root cause and analysis, or, to put it another way, merely to take raw data and distill it on the screen. Unfortunately, SAP has never owned the complex data models or analytical tools for process discovery that, somewhat ironically, might provide other vendors that sell plant-focused applications at many levels of solutions for manufacturing and value networks with many opportunities and even allow them to use Lighthammer as the integration toolkit and interface to SAP. These vendors may include Invensys/Wonderware, Rockwell/Datasweep, Camstar, Accumence (formerly Visibility Systems), Visiprise, PEC Info, DSM, Activplant, Informance, OSIsoft, Pavilion Technologies, CIMNET, GE Fanuc, Citect, Siemens, Yokagawa, and PSI-BT, to name only a few.

A further challenge for SAP will be establishing themselves as a trustworthy partner to independent software vendors (ISV) that are afraid of being acquired in order to build the necessary ISV ecosystem (see SAP NetWeaver Background, Direction, and User Recommendations). SAP also has to clarify for potential plant-level ISV partners how to use xMII as an underlying platform for delivering preconfigured industry templates and systems.

Another uncharted area is the proliferation of Lighthammer to the discrete manufacturing industries, since despite having over a hundred joint customers, the focus of this relationship has been predominantly in process manufacturing (e.g., chemicals or life sciences) environments. It makes sense for SAP to have started with the process industries because there was more apparent opportunity. Nonetheless, although the acquisition restricts Lighthammer competitors from further penetrating SAP process manufacturing accounts, the next challenge is for both merging parties to respond to the unique needs of discrete manufacturers for standards-based interoperability and plant-level requirements within the automotive, aerospace, high technology, and other discrete manufacturing industries. In the end, the vendor hopes to achieve the maximum commonality between the two sectors, but that is going to be neither quick nor easy.
Even in light of the acquisition of Lighthammer, and given the natural question of what the acquisition means for other plant-level SAP software partners, SAP maintains that it will remain fully committed to strongly supporting and growing these partner relationships, and that it does not expect that this acquisition will interfere with that. Indeed, SAP may have an industry-wide ethical responsibility to stick to this agreement. Exemplifying this, a group of leading manufacturing companies and software vendors endorsed the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society's (ISA) ISA-95 Enterprise-to-Control System Integration standards and World Batch Forum's (WBF) business to manufacturing markup language (B2MML) at a recent plant-to-business (P2B) interoperability workshop hosted by SAP and ARC Research. Workshop attendees also discussed the establishment of an open vendor and user consortium to share knowledge and best practices for plant floor to business integration and to provide compliance certification for use of B2MML and related standards. In addition to SAP and ARC, participants included representatives from Apriso, Arla Foods, Datasweep, Dow Corning Corporation, DuPont Engineering, Eli Lilly, Emerson Process Management, Empresas Polar S.A., GE Fanuc, General Mills, Invensys-Wonderware, LightHammer, MPDV, MPR de Venezuela, OSIsoft, Procter and Gamble, PSI Soft, Rockwell Automation, Rohm and Haas, SAB Miller, Siemens, and Yokogawa, as well as representatives from ISA and WBF. Ever since this endorsement, the progress in terms of leveraging ISA-95 as a standard and the WBF's B2MML as an appropriate schema for the process industries has been remarkable.

Similarly, two years ago or so, in response to growing customer need, SAP announced the industry wide "manufacturing interoperability" initiative, the aim of which was to dramatically reduce enterprise-to-production systems integration costs using available industry standards. For more details see Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver.

SAP is not to blame for having planning solutions that, in some cases, may extend deep into the plant floor, since the lack of integration is in part because the involved parties in the software industry have tacitly agreed to divide the software world into disjointed sets of vendors—the automation vendors, the MES vendors, and the ERP or enterprise applications vendors. Viewing things with this old and outgoing mindset has brought many endeavors to a halt, due to the question of where the line between MES and ERP is. As discussed in The Challenges of Integrating Enterprise Resource Planning and Manufacturing Execution Systems, the answer is often that there is no one clear line.

For example, due to the notion of "plant-centric ERP" in the 1990s, vendors, such as the former Marcam in process manufacturing and Baan in discrete manufacturing, had deep manufacturing models that challenged the artificial boundaries between ERP and MES. Along the same lines, Oracle plans to add more built-in plant-level functionality in the upcoming Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12, precluding the need for the typically extensive and painful customization outside of Oracle's toolset. Even smaller ERP vendors have been adding industry-specific functionality, for example Ross Systems (now part of CDC Software) for pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, IQMS for plastic processors, and Plexus Systems for automotive customers.

When it comes to SAP, it has a lot of customers that use SAP functionality to tie directly into low-level shop floor systems. However, there are also SAP customers that at the same time—at another site or division—use SAP in conjunction with an MES system. In the end, SAP will likely compete in the marketplace where it feels its functionality is competitive enough compared to other solutions. But the vendor acknowledges that customers have, for good reasons, installed other solutions, and will continue to do so. Thus, in order to be a trusted platform provider, it will want to be able to integrate with those systems.

Has SAP Nailed Plant Level Leadership with Lighthammer

2009-10-20T07:45:00.001-07:00

At the end of June, SAP announced that it was delivering enhanced connectivity between the plant floor and the enterprise by acquiring Lighthammer Software Development Corporation (www.lighthammer.com), a privately-held supplier of enterprise manufacturing intelligence and collaborative manufacturing software, based in Exton, Pennsylvania (US). Lighthammer and SAP shared a vision of adaptive business networks (ABN), as illustrated by their longstanding partnership, during which Lighthammer was a premier "SAP Powered by NetWeaver" and SAP xApps partner. The company's approximately sixty employees have reportedly remained in their current facilities, and have become a part of SAP America and SAP Labs. Mufson Howe Hunter & Company LLC, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US)-based investment bank, served as financial advisor to Lighthammer on this transaction.

At the time of the announcement, the two merging parties and formerly close partners believed that the acquisition would deliver value through improved manufacturing performance with more rapid time-to-value for SAP's installed base of more than 12,000 manufacturing customers. Lighthammer's Collaborative Manufacturing Suite (CMS), currently used by hundreds of companies worldwide, including more than 100 Fortune 500 manufacturing companies, was to be delivered as an SAP xApps composite application on the SAP NetWeaver platform, so as to provide enterprises with what SAP refers to as adaptive manufacturing (i.e., the ability of a manufacturer to profitably replenish the supply chain while dynamically adapting to unpredictable change). For background information on this acquisition, see The Importance of Plant Level Systems, Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver, and Enterprise Resource Planning Giants Eye the Shop Floor.

Lighthammer CMS has been re-branded as SAP xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP xMII). Built on a modern, service oriented architecture (SOA)-based foundation, the former Lighthammer CMS provided a broad set of services that were required to relatively quickly assemble operational excellence applications in the areas of performance management, continuous improvement, and operational synchronization. The initial version of xMII is basically the former Lighthammer software, re-released in accordance with SAP software production methodology. Moving forward, the xMII team charter will be to help SAP manufacturing customers achieve better business performance through the synchronization of operations with business functions and continuous improvement. This translates into packaged manufacturing integration and intelligence solutions targeted for real time performance measurement. On the integration front, xMII will maintain a considerable degree of autonomy, but will also be closely associated with SAP NetWeaver, running on the SAP NetWeaver Web Application Server (WAS). This is because autonomy is required to match the unique product needs of manufacturing operations that are non-SAP shops or are driven by limited on-site information technology (IT) resources and skills, both of which can be an obstacle to leveraging the complex NetWeaver stack.

The SAP xMII solution will provide near real time visibility to manufacturing exceptions and performance variances, including root causes and business impacts. This will enable manufacturers and their production personnel to better adapt to change and to more rapidly respond to unforeseen demand and supply events. In addition, this combination reportedly will permit SAP to deliver real time transactional integration between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and plant floor systems. Another potential benefit will be the ability to provide unified, real time analytics and visualization, often referred to as manufacturing intelligence or plant intelligence, out-of-the box to manufacturing customers. Moreover, with the xMII solution, SAP is also aiming to enable user companies to leverage their current investments at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). For more information, see Plant Intelligence as Glue for Dispersed Data?.

Using the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation (ISA)-95 standards for process manufacturing interoperability (an emerging standard for interfacing low level industrial control level [ICL] code to business applications, which aims to further reduce the complexity of building custom connections to shop floor systems and thereby accelerate the time-to-value for the end customer), the Lighthammer and SAP manufacturing solution will exchange data and render them through SAP manufacturing intelligence dashboards, in order to deliver actionable intelligence in the form of alerts, reports, key performance indicators (KPI), and decision support to production personnel for right-time decision making (see Manufacturer's Nirvana—Real Time Actionable Information and SAP NetWeaver Background, Direction, and User Recommendations). The combined solution will thus allow production personnel to identify deviations in real time, provide drill-downs so as to understand the business and financial impact of the exceptions to be managed, and display the workflows so as to resolve them relatively rapidly and cost-effectively. The aim, of course, is improved productivity.
One idea that has been gaining in popularity lately is the inclusion of a value-adding process layer that can fairly easily link to scattered data sources, retrieve specific data, perform process logic, and deliver a meaningful output. Companies are applying manufacturing (plant) intelligence systems, such as the one supplied by Lighthammer, to aggregate appropriate information from plant-focused data sources into a meaningful context for presentation and analysis. These systems are a combination of integration or middleware platforms and business intelligence (BI) applications, since portals can aggregate and process manufacturing data for specific user communities, and then can share scheduling information across collaborative value chains. On the other hand, manufacturing intelligence systems can collect specific data from plant-focused devices and systems, and then analyze and present the information in dashboards and other KPI tracking systems. For more information, see Plant Intelligence as Glue for Dispersed Data?.

Integral to Lighthammer is the concept of non-intrusive connectivity, allowing legacy data sources to be integrated into the overall enterprise decision support scheme with minimal effort and no disruption to operations. The product's connectivity is not limited to data sources, as it can deliver information to a broad range of Web devices, including all major browsers, handheld or palmtop devices, Web phones, and enterprise applications. The visualization functionality includes a variety of charting components, support for wireless devices, and a set of wizards for automatic generation of Web page content for users with little or no technical expertise. There is also an animation editor in the Lighthammer technology that enables users to animate objects. For instance, one might want to be able to see a vessel actually filling up and see the level changing.

A comprehensive reporting module allows content from multiple data sources to be aggregated and correlated in a single report, which can be either "live" or static, and displayed in a browser, printed, or disseminated via e-mail. For some time, the product also has provided an "enterprise" option for multi-site views of production and manufacturing operations. This option enables multiple Illuminator (a core component of the former Lighthammer CMS suite that features solid extract, transform, and load [ETL] capabilities) servers throughout the business to provide a single, unified view of enterprise information. This allows, for example, a corporate process engineer to assist plants with process problems, or a production executive to view real time manufacturing results at a number of sites from a single web browser.

The Lighthammer technology connects to the three areas that users need connection to.

1. It connects to the main SAP modules.
2. It connects to the dashboard, so that users have KPIs coming out of both the SAP environment and the manufacturing systems.
3. It connects to a BI platform, which is useful as the data warehouse (i.e., SAP BW) environment is an important source of information. For example, a customer might want to capture information about reason codes for failure, so that when things are not made as they are supposed to be, all that information is captured in a data warehouse.

The problem is that, while information comes from production operations, goes to a data warehouse, and is viewed by the business, the very people who fed the information in typically do not see the data. In fact, because of a ripple-up effect of failures into the business down on the shop floor, sharing information through the manufacturing intelligence dashboards out of the BI layer can be as valuable in some cases as getting the information from the production level. For this reason, Lighthammer touts its ability to enable manufacturing in an adaptive environment by providing the business context for manufacturing data on an event-based integration in order to close this loop between the business and production levels.
At some SAP events, the two formerly independent partner vendors related a scenario-based example that was modeled around a paint process, which had both process industry characteristics (e.g., using reactors and vessels that handle liquids and fluids) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry characteristics (in that material is packaged and ultimately put in a warehouse or on a shelf).

The process that the SAP and Lighthammer teams have developed starts with material being added to a mixing and reaction process, whereby the product is extracted from the reaction, and then filtered, dried, and placed as an intermediate in cans. This particular process is also applicable to the pharmaceutical industry. The product is then packaged, palletized, labeled, and shipped to a distribution center, where quality tests are performed and the ISA-95 integration standard is employed to exchange schedule and performance data between the ERP and plant-level applications. To eliminate any latency or lack of synchronization, the production plan update and associated master data are automatically transmitted to the plant floor via SAP XI using the ISA-95 integration standard. The production plan synchronizes the plant systems, so that performance data, including status costs and quality information, are fed back into SAP in real time.

To be precise, the production schedule is sent from mySAP ERP to Lighthammer CMS (now SAP xMII), transmitted to the automated system, and then displayed on the manufacturing dashboard. After the batch is executed, Lighthammer aggregates production performance data and automatically updates the mySAP ERP inventory. Needless to say, the solution also tracks how things are developing throughout the batch, capturing not only the start and end points of a batch, but it also the intermediate ones. Thus, based on the sensitive data its captures as the batches are being manufactured and on some Six Sigma control analysis, Lighthammer technology detects quality problems, generates alerts, and quarantines the batches in mySAP ERP.

Quarantining a batch based on an anomaly in the process is the epitome of a closed-loop behavior. Production quality alerts appear in the dashboard, and the production supervisor can then drill down into the alert to perform a rapid root cause analysis. At this point, it is important to have not only the visibility to stop or change the process, but an understanding of why this problem has occurred so as to prevent it from reoccurring. The final stage would thus be the production supervisor initiating a corrective action to fix the problem, resolving the exception before it becomes a customer issue in an effort to have a continuous improvement environment.

Another often presented scenario leverages radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. In this scenario, one might have paint cans containing a certain color or a certain blend that are moving more quickly than others. RFID-enabled business processes would indicate the pattern of these cans on the floor. In addition, the notification of material available for shipping would occur automatically and immediately. What one would like to be able to do is to respond at the manufacturing level to this change on "now what?" basis. For example, the sales department might want to rapidly capitalize on this opportunity. In this scenario, the production plan can be re-aligned in real time, based on the actual capability to deliver or the capability to promise (CTP), and the transient opportunity can be successfully realized since one has the ability to respond.

With the above scenario, we are talking once again about a closed-loop application, whereby Lighthammer receives the schedule and master data from SAP, and Lighthammer in turn uses SAP XI to deliver real time alerts and KPIs to the SAP dashboard. The dashboard itself is a composite application consisting of the XI views, the KPIs, and any accompanying alerts. There might be alerts coming out of the SAP environment and out of the external plant level systems as well. In which case, Lighthammer would be monitoring conditions, calculating KPIs, and further applying execution logic.

The possible value of this for customers could be multifold. First of all, it is a closed-loop system with real time synchronization—when a plant manager is looking at data from Lighthammer on his or her dashboard, it is live data. Moreover, users have control over how often the data is sent to the screen, which is done automatically in the background. The business implications of quality performance and delivery issues on the shop floor are thereby quantified and made visible, while proactive exception detection is supported to minimize the overall supply chain impact. In addition, production personnel are empowered with a productivity tool that enables them to access all the relevant documentation on one single dashboard or system, in order to manage by exception, leverage the dashboard as a decision support environment, perform tasks assisted by automated workflows, and initiate improvements and monitor their impact with the KPI dashboard.
In May 2005, almost immediately before the acquisition, Lighthammer unveiled CMS 11.0, which was a major upgrade of the flagship product, featuring enhanced scalability, multisite metrics, security, and traceability for regulatory compliance of the composite platform for building manufacturing intelligence applications. The new release also added features that extended the development environment's existing performance management, continuous improvement, and operational synchronization capabilities, which were SOA-based. Importantly, the new capabilities aimed at helping developers to more easily build and deploy applications that can be accessed across the distributed manufacturing enterprise. At least 60 percent of the code in version 11, which had been under development for about a year, had reportedly been rewritten. For end users, this might mean about 15 percent more functionality and a complete upward compatibility with existing applications.

Among the most significant enhancements to version 11.0 was the Security Manager service, which added unified user management and single sign-on capabilities for run-time applications. This means users will be able to access any CMS-built application regardless of the platform on which it runs. Therefore, CMS, which previously operated only on Microsoft Windows-based systems, can now run on other operating environments, such as Linux, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. The service also allows integration with a wide range of third-party authentication systems, including SAP, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) using Active Directory, security assertion markup language (SAML), Windows Domains, Kerberos from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and others. These features should allow customers to manage user roles, memberships, and attributes better, as well as to define authentication or authorization services either from existing enterprise user management directories or through the Lighthammer application. This service should thus provide the ability to implement a security strategy that could fit virtually any existing enterprise architecture and should extend "single sign-on" into the domain of plant applications, improving compliance.

Additional compliance and traceability features that were added include an electronic signature service and a multilevel confirmation or challenge capability, which securely controls and documents user actions for regulatory compliance with 21 Code of Federal Regulations Part 11 (21 CFR 11), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and other regulations. The enterprise application integration (EAI) capabilities have also been enhanced, with the addition of new business logic capabilities that take advantage of Web services in SAP NetWeaver to simplify data integration between plant systems and enterprise systems. Last but not least, the generally available CMS version 11.0 laid the groundwork for another upgrade set. Currently, the product is built mostly on Java, but the logic engine is based on Microsoft .NET. The next release, however, will be 100 percent Java-based, which should give customers a much broader choice of development platform.

Lighthammer's process manufacturing industry expertise and foresight in developing intelligent manufacturing middleware was helped by its early commitment to open technologies like the ISA-95 standard, Java, extensible markup language (XML), and SOA. Even earlier releases featured Lighthammer's leadership in the deployment of these open technologies as enablers for acquisition, analysis, distribution, and presentation of information from manufacturing systems. Lighthammer CMS functionality has long included built-in transformation of data into any standard XML message structure, such as Microsoft BizTalk, RosettaNet, and others, as well as the ability to interface with peer plant-level or enterprise-level systems using XML as the default data format for both incoming and outgoing data. Back in 2001, Illuminator 8.5 introduced a breakthrough Intelligent Agent subsystem, which could be used to enable inter-application messaging upon detection of production events or exceptions; automated calculation of KPI metrics; automatic transfer of information between XML, database, and e-mail sources; the gathering and conversion of data from external Web sources; and much more.

Microsoft’s Underlying Platform Parts for Enterprise Applications: Somewhat Explained

2009-10-02T06:39:00.001-07:00

What About Visualization and User Interface (UI) Technologies?

However, what has somewhat intrigued me is Microsoft’s not-so-vocal touting and promoting of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), although it is an intrinsic part of the .NET Framework. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the tool has not yet been used within the Dynamics set in earnest, although Lawson Software and Verticent would be the two independent software vendors (ISV) that I am aware of deploying it.

Both vendors tout WPF’s rich UIs that support virtually infinite customizations and business process compositions using Microsoft applications. Other Microsoft-centric ISVs either support only a limited number of specific and prescriptive business scenarios, or use a combination of technology products (for example, Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBAs), Visual Studio.NET, and proprietary interfaces and UI tools) to come up with similar custom scenarios. Again, Microsoft currently uses WPF very selectively in Dynamics UIs, for example, in the Dynamics AX graphical view of the organization structure of the business.

With its Smart Office offering, Lawson is not the first to leverage Microsoft Office to deliver not only manager and employee self-service, but much more as well. In fact, I could think of the joint SAP and Microsoft Duet product, Epicor Productivity Pyramid, QAD .NET UI, SYSPRO Office Integration [SOI]), IFS Business Analytics, and so on.

However, by leveraging WPF, Lawson embeds manager and employee self-service functionality more directly into Microsoft Outlook than Duet (which is more of an add-on launched from Outlook as an integrated pane) and most other vendors’ OBA solutions. Fore more details on Lawson Smart Office, see my earlier blog post on the vendor’s CUE 2008 conference and the Gartner Dataquest Insight report by Bob Anderson entitled “Lawson Raises the Bar With Differentiating ERP User Interface.”

Curiously, Lawson has deployed another non-mainstream Microsoft technology, Microsoft Office Groove. It is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration platform, providing an outstanding base for collaboration (document exchange) scenarios that involve teams with sometimes disconnected participants. Microsoft claims that future product releases will improve the alignment for collaboration between Groove and SharePoint.

Lawson’s technology decision was likely owing to Groove’s concept of “shared workspaces” and Lawson’s view that individuals live in a “space” where they do most of their work. For example, a manager really “lives in” Microsoft Outlook, and should be able to do all his/her work from there. An accountant lives in Microsoft Excel and should be able to work from there. A mobile technician lives in the cell phone/personal data assistant (PDA) metaphor, where the Apple iPhone or Palm Treo similarity of UI can come in handy.

Some Other Vendors’ UI Approaches

Still, although WPF provides a visually appealing, familiar and intuitive UI, it comes with some trade-offs, specifically in memory utilization (being hardware intensive), the need to be hooked to the network, and a much greater dependency on Microsoft software. For instance, IFS doesn’t use WPF today for IFS Applications’ UI simply because of hardware needs: running WPF requires quite a hefty PC in terms of memory, and preferably the (possibly still unstable) Windows Vista platform.

We are talking here about IFS’ upcoming next-generation UI, which had for some time been called Aurora, but is now called IFS Enterprise Explorer (IEE). Namely, to prevent any confusion about Aurora being a separate product from IFS Applications, IFS has recently clarified its naming conventions.

Aurora is now a development project that will yield several enhancements to IFS Applications, all with a focus on ease-of-use and user productivity. The first deliverable as part of the Aurora project is IEE, the new graphical user interface (GUI) for IFS Applications. It is important to note that after IEE is released, the Aurora project will continue, yielding future enhancements.

In any case, IEE is interesting, to say the least, for leveraging Microsoft UI technology to create a look (albeit not yet the multi-touch touch screen, handgestures, etc. feel) of Apple iPhone (on top of Oracle database and Java-based application servers on the back end: some mix of technologies from adversaries, indeed). It is becoming quite obvious that the iPod and iPhone generation is our future workforce, who require well designed tools that they “love” to interact with. At the same time, they accept no excuses for “Why can’t I…?” questions, such as, for instance, “Why can’t I search in the enterprise application in the same way that I search on Google?”

At the end of the day, the design goal is to achieve more with fewer staff members, who thus have broader responsibilities, are able to handle the unexpected, collaborate with colleagues, and be more productive. In other words, the market drivers are the new and engaging design and user productivity. Consumer information technology (IT) and the web are leading the way, and are also becoming quite important for business applications.

To that end, prior to the IEE undertaking, IFS developed a pervasive enterprise search engine that attempts to think the way people think (e.g., “I need that fault report about the fire alarm not working”), and not the way enterprise systems think (i.e., “I want go into the preventive maintenance module where, in the service request folder, I will start the fault report screen, in which I shall then make a query on the description field containing any words followed by the words ‘fire alarm’ followed by any other words again”).

With built-in security (users can be limited in search authorizations as required), the enterprise search capability vouches for better results and value without additional costs. For more information, see the TEC’s article entitled “Why Enterprise Application Search Is Crucial to Your ERP System.”

Show Me, Don’t Sell Me

2009-10-02T06:37:00.002-07:00

Show me, don’t sell me

Clearly, the easiest way for a vendor to allay my fears is to marry their feature list to my to-do list, and show me how to use their software for some of the things that I do every day.

And because I’m an inveterate YouTube addict (as are many of us office folk, I think) the best way to show me is to make some videos. Short ones that get right to the point so I can watch them while I’m eating lunch and still make my 1:00 meeting.

Looking around for videos such as these can be frustrating. Many vendor websites don’t have any. Some sites have them, but force you to register if you want to watch them (as if I needed any more email). Still other sites bury their videos so far down that you’re ten clicks away from finding out that they even exist. Ugh.

Hope is not lost

On the other hand, there are some vendors who, at least partly, get it, and the two that stood out in my quick survey were Microsoft and SAP.

The Microsoft Dynamics site’s introductory series of videos presents the Dynamics product line from the point of view of five “typical” department heads and their cartoon staff. It’s an overt marketing piece but if you hang on through the first minute of each manager’s spiel, you do get a few nuggets of valuable information.

For example, you can see how different Dynamics products integrate with other Microsoft Office products in the context of actual tasks, like tracking orders, generating reports, setting up marketing campaigns, etc. More to the point, you can see the products’ interfaces, which goes along way towards forming your gut feeling about each product.

Dig deeper into the Dynamics site and you’ll find demo videos for each of the products. These tend to be a strange mixture of Powerpoint-ish presentations and actual walkthroughs. But again, if you can hang on through the benefit statements (and you’re not put off by images of trains, factory floors, and guys in suits shaking hands and sharing laptops), you’ll get genuine task-oriented information that will give you some idea of what it’s like to work with the products.

SAP has a similarly extensive video library for its Business One product. While the videos aren’t quite as easy to find as Microsoft’s are, I thought they did a better job of connecting the dots. For each demo, SAP lists a few capabilities. When you click through to the video, you’ll notice that it explains each of those capabilities in terms of day-to-day tasks.

You still have to put up with “typical user” personas, dull stock photography, and a few marketing-y bullets, but the SAP videos are pretty well focused on the end user. Which is nice. It’s one thing to know that a piece of software “manages customer interactions, from contact data and history to calendaring and tasks.” It’s another thing to see how a real customer service call might be handled using that software. Especially if you work in customer service.

It’s not that hard

“Of course,” you’re saying, “Microsoft and SAP have the money to do that sort of thing.” But the truth is, it’s not that hard. Just search YouTube for any popular software—Photoshop, for example—and you’ll find a wealth of video tutorials produced by lone users in their spare time. Any corporate marketing department worth its budget should be able to do at least that much. And while Microsoft and SAP might have the resources to polish their videos to within an inch of their lives, for the average end user, good content trumps good presentation any day.

And it’s worth it

Making it easy to find nuts & bolts information about day-to-day software use has important benefits for both buyers and vendors of enterprise software.

If you’re in the market for new enterprise software, and you’re following TEC’s sage advice, one of the things you’ll do in the early stages of your selection project is to ask end users exactly what they do with your current software, and what might help them do it better.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to ask them individually. Instead, make sure that your selection team includes a few people who know, or can find the answers to those questions, and help you turn early-stage user feedback into criteria that you can weigh and analyze relative to all of your other requirements.

When they pass their feedback up the chain to the selection team, users who have seen various solutions in action can point to concrete examples of functionality they’d like to have in the new system. Instead of having to fully explain a complete workflow or a missing feature, they can say “I want something that works like that.” The end-user advocates on the selection team can translate “that” into more quantifiable feature lists and requirements.

As the beleaguered user, what’s in it for me is the feeling that my voice has been heard, which means I’ll be more likely to adopt the new system and less likely to turn into the office jerk.

What vendor wouldn’t want that kind of bottom-up support from their potential customers?

Now I know that end users rarely make the final decision, and that software selection projects tend to be fraught with political considerations that can pull a company in one direction or another. But smart companies—the ones that carefully consider the everyday needs of their employees before making a rational selection—are going to get more bang for their enterprise software buck.

Smart vendors are going to do everything they can to get those employees on their side.

Microsoft’s Underlying Platform Parts for Enterprise Applications: Somewhat Explained – Part 4 » booklet-p12-1-small-display1.png

2009-10-02T06:37:00.001-07:00

Meridian Systems’ “Catch Up” Challenge in the Capital Infrastructure Industry

2009-10-02T06:36:00.001-07:00

Meridian, which promotes its business as the Plan-Build-Operate (PBO) technology solutions leader for Project-Based Organizations (another PBO acronym, and thus the “PBO squared” mantra), offers an end-to-end solution for building owners, construction and engineering firms, and public agencies in three flavors. These offerings respectively cater to high-end (Tier One), mid-market, and small market organizations that manage capital building programs and facility assets.

Meridian’s overall focus is to improve customers’ revenue and profit growth by optimizing facilities, and by reducing construction and facility costs. To that end, Proliance, which is a full-fledged infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) suite on a native Web services-based platform, is aimed at Tier One high-end PBOs with over US$ 1 billion in revenues and over 500 full-time employees. In this market segment, where the competition comes largely from SAP and Oracle, and with the deals valued from $750,000 to $10 million, Meridian typically wins owing to its OBA strategy, ready BIM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integrations, Web services-based platform, distinct PBO product breadth, and well-attuned business analytics (BI) tools for PBOs.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

This part will focus more on Meridian’s forerunner Prolog product for smaller organizations, and on the vendor’s upcoming fourth quarter of 2008 (Q408) release of Prolog Connect for the mid-market.

Prolog was originally introduced in 1993 on a client/server platform, and is in use today by more than 4,000 companies that have revenues from $10 million to $500 million, and from 10 to 100 employees. With typical contract values of less than $150,000, the product grew rapidly across small organizations in the architecture, engineering & construction (A/E/C) sector because of Meridian’s micro-vertical expertise and rich understanding of this space, a usable and intuitive user interface (UI), and easy customization by business users (versus information technology [IT] staff).

Prolog is best suited for the “Build” phase of Meridian’s PBO solution set, and includes more than 400 packaged reports. It manages a wide breadth of activities including purchasing/bid management, budgets and cost management, contract and change management, correspondence management, design collaboration management, daily journal entries, jobsite tracking, and safety and quality programs. Usual-suspect competitors are Primavera [evaluate this product] and Autodesk Constructware (and occasionally e-Builder).

To modernize Prolog, and also appeal to larger mid-market companies, Meridian is releasing in late 2008 a new mid-market product, Prolog Connect, which provides Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) layer atop the Prolog’s Project Portfolio Management (PPM) oriented product set. Featuring OBA strategy, secure collaboration with internal users and external supply chains, and flexible integration, Prolog Connect is targeted to companies in the $500 million to $1 billion revenue range or between 100 and 500 full-time employees (FTEs). When sold together, Prolog and Prolog Connect’s typical contract price is expected to be up to $750,000.

Current State of Affairs at Meridian

Lately, Meridian continues to win with its PBO value proposition for ILM with deals across a broad segment of public and private organizations. Keynote recent deals were:

* In the federal government sector – The United States General Services Administration (US GSA), two contracts valued at $2.5 million and $10 million respectively, beating or replacing Skire and Primavera;
* In the energy sector – Ontario Power Generation (OPG), contract valued at $2.2 million, beating or replacing Primavera;
* In the transportation sector – The Illinois Tollway, contract valued at $2.2 million, beating or replacing CapitalSoft;
* In the A/E/C sector, Ryan Companies and DMJM H&N/AECOM, contracts respectively valued at $2 million and $432,000, beating or replacing Oracle and own Prolog product; and
* In the real estate sector – CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), contract valued at $3.9 million, beating or replacing Bricsnet.

Other notable deals for Meridian include the State of Connecticut, Los Angeles World Airports, and the City of Seattle. Also of interest is that the company uses primarily a direct sales and support model for its upper-range Proliance product, and sells largely indirectly through system integrators (SIs) and value added resellers (VARs) in the small and mid-markets.

Meridian does not want to be in the ERP game, rather it wants to “connect in.” Within the Prolog and Prolog Connect solutions the vendor has pre-built hard connections into major project-based ERP leaders including Deltek Systems. Proliance was built on Web services and in Extensible Markup Language (XML) to allow for multiple points of integration with other applications, including ERP, financials/accounting, document management, etc. Proliance includes its own asset management modules, but can also be integrated with other (more powerful) enterprise asset management (EAM) systems as required.

It is also interesting to note that from the beginning both ProjectTalk (the on-demand version of Prolog) and Proliance OnDemand were multi-tenant offerings (i.e., keeping many customers in one environment rather than dedicating one environment per each customer). Meridian determined early on that this was a much more economical way to achieve the economies of scale needed to reach profitability with its offerings. As for customers, there are many using both systems. Haskell, Hathaway Dinwiddie and many others are on ProjectTalk, while ISTHA and CBRE use on Proliance OnDemand

Market Opportunity (and Challenges)

While Meridian is based out of the US, it works with a wide partner network, including customers that are turning into VARs, and partners that are looking to sell to emerging markets. A new Morgan Stanley report entitled “Emerging Markets Infrastructure: Just Getting Started” and published in April 2008 identifies that a sizable boom in infrastructure building is underway. This PBO surge spans the realms of power and water, property, ports, airports, and is across both the government/public and private sector.

Morgan Stanley forecasts US $21.7 trillion in infrastructure spending in emerging markets over the next decade (at least before the onset of the global credit crunch). The report identifies a surge in market listings of owners, operators and contractors to build infrastructure/assets in emerging markets, and states the number of listed infrastructure-related entities therein is up from 230 to 354 (54 percent increase) over the last five years. Morgan Stanley sees huge market capitalization — increasing from $146 billion to $1.1 trillion over this same 10 year period.

But what about the big enterprise software competitors who also play in these markets, and who indisputably own the IT departments’ mind share? Meridian’s President and Co-Founder John Bodrozic, quoted in Part 1 of this series, boldly says “bring it on” when queried about competitive consolidation, such as Oracle’s recent acquisition of Primavera.

“Oracle now has two products that do the same thing: Oracle Projects and Primavera, and the real question for installed users will be, “which one lives and which one dies” or will it continue its six year history of letting multiple products do the same thing (e.g., JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, etc.) but that have zero interoperability? Oracle’s published Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document on the acquisition states that Oracle plans on integrating Primavera PPM to “Oracle ERP,” but never states which one of Oracle’s ERP products. With nearly 50 acquisitions in a few years, one wonders how any buyers or sellers can make sense of which products can and should work well together in which instances.”

While I can understand the Meridian CEO’s confidence in his holistic ILM/BIM offering, I certainly would not dismiss the Primavera acquisition. At least, I agree with Vinnie Mirchandani’s liking of the deal and Oracle’s vertical industry-based acquisition strategy, backed by a coherent Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) strategy. Also, Brian Sommer has an impressive blog post on the PPM software space, besides what the deal might mean for Oracle and for Primavera customers.

In addition to its relatively small size and best-kept secret status when it comes to brand recognition, Meridian’s major challenge could be the fact that, since the ILM space is still new/evolving, there is a steep learning curve to explain it to customers. This is why the market is still often defaulting to more simplistic solutions that don’t do the job as well as Meridian does. It is akin to customers’ silly practice of switching light bulbs to save money on energy when you have no insulation in the walls.

There are so many inefficiencies and even adversarial relationships in the industry that unneeded costs and poor practices are built in and accepted. The challenge for Meridian is to build a greater understanding of the big picture impact of a complete PBO product line so that the market doesn’t continue to default to less complete ILM solutions like Primavera, Oracle, Skire, Tririga, etc.

Also, since the BIM/ILM connection is enabled via the partnership with Horizontal LLC, its competitors can emulate that over time (i.e., they can strike partnerships too). Thus, are there any other frontiers that Meridian could tackle next, in order to be ahead of the curve and continue to challenge the market with the “Catch us if you can” mantra? To that end, other potential areas are things like building new automated solutions for pulling data out of Meridian solutions to make the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certifications turnkey, and exploring the latest construction delivery methods (e.g., private-public partnerships such as lease-leaseback for school districts).

Final Thoughts

In summary, Meridian offers a well-thought-out approach for small to large companies, with the right technical foundation for the future with a native SOA/Web services platform already in the market for the past five years. Additionally, it has integrated business functionality for managing ILM in the complete PBO spectrum. This scope includes the combination that both the market leaders and market pundits are missing: PPM, Scheduling, Facilities Management, and BI. If you are a project-based organization engaged in holistic capital infrastructure lifecycle management, this is one solution you should certainly consider.

Is One Country Good Enough to Handle Your Outsourcing Business

2009-10-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

The concept of “portfolio” is very prominent in the finance world. “In finance, a portfolio is an appropriate mix of or collection of investments held by an institution or a private individual.” (Wikipedia) The practices of portfolio management now have many different models; some have become very complicated and need tremendous analysis. Simply speaking, the purpose of investing in different assets instead of betting all the money on one arises because different assets have different return potentials and different risk exposures. If you can build your portfolio appropriately, the diversity of your assets may help you to offset individual risks while maintaining an acceptable return.

Let’s take a look at this extremely simplified example: If you have the opportunity to buy a bond (low return but risk free) and a stock (high return but associated with high risk), what is your investment decision? The absolutely risk-averse people will only buy the bond and the opposite (extreme risk-takers) will only buy the stock. However, most of people are more likely to take some risks (but not too many or too high) while having higher return expectations than what the bond can yield. Thus, a mix of the two assets makes sense, and the proportion of each depends on what your return expectation is, or in other words, how much risk you are willing to take.

In the investment area, a “hedge” is a widely used method to manage risks. The main idea of hedge is to include two different types of assets in one portfolio. There should be a relationship between the two – when one tends to go down, the other goes up and vice versa. Hence, no matter what the economic and market situation are, the risk of your investment portfolio will be manageable.

Having provided the two examples above, I hope the idea of vendor portfolios becomes easier to understand. First of all, let’s take a look at risks that are associated with software outsourcing. Besides quality, delivery, support and such issues as are more related to individual vendors, there are also risks from the macro-environment:

* Physical risks: natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes) that will cease or temporarily impede your vendors’ development activities

* Regulatory risks: regulations (e.g. import/export tariffs, taxes, and employee compensation requirements) that will impact your vendors’ business costs and as a result, your cost

* Economic risks: such as exchange rates, employment levels, and vendor domestic market demands that will influence vendors’ pricing policies

* Societal and political risks: caused by political events, strikes, and culture shifts that will directly or indirectly change your vendors’ ability to provide service.

The vendor-specific risks (or, let’s call them micro risks) vary from vendor to vendor, but the macro risks are more related to the macro-environment in which vendors operate. In many cases, it is convenient to examine these risks at a country level.

If we agree that macro risks exist and that many of them vary from country to country, we may draw a conclusion that too much reliance on one single country is like investing all your money in one stock.

By building a portfolio that includes vendors from different countries, a company should be in a better position to manage macro risks. If there are complementary elements amongst those countries, you may expect a hedging situation. For example, when you discover that outsourcing to a certain country becomes unprofitable due to increased programmer wages, you may find that in another country wages are going down due to the surplus of programmers.

Microsoft’s Underlying Platform Parts for Enterprise Applications: Somewhat Explained

2009-10-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

Shedding Some “Northern Star” Light on IEE

For IEE IFS uses Microsoft ClickOnce, which is a technology designed to perform web-based deployment of rich applications. Basically the authorized user clicks on a link and the application loads straight from the web server without needing to be installed and distributed via CDs (like traditional client/server applications). It works similar to the counterpart Java Web Start or Adobe Flash technologies.

ClickOnce can be used for all Microsoft .NET UI application styles including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Silverlight. Basically, it is the deployment technology for Windows applications. IFS decided not to use WPF as the technology for building UI initially but plans to do so for its next major update due in a couple of years, when it also expects the availability of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0, which the vendor believes will serve its needs well. It is also currently possible to mix WPF and Windows Forms in the same application, since the interoperability apparently works very well.

In any case, the current set of tools used by IFS has helped the ergonomic design and easy navigational technologies, such as: adaptable links panel, contextual breadcrumb navigation, and rich media. Adaptable links panel is a panel at the screen that shows all places “where a user can go from here.” For example, when viewing a customer order the Link panel will show links to customer information, price agreement, service level agreement (SLA) contract, and other “related” information (see figure below).

Contextual breadcrumb is a context-sensitive navigation menu that helps users visually navigate (and return to the start page, in association with the classic fable about Hansel and Gretel) to other application areas/pages that are “near” his/her current “path” in the application. You have a similar thing in Windows Vista for folder navigation. Similar to this is the Visual Recent Screens capability, which is a visual navigation history, showing all pages in the application visited since a user logged on (see figure below). It is also similar to the feature in Internet Explorer (IE) that shows all open tabs.

A good example of breadcrumb navigation could be found in the use of Webcom’s WebSource CPQ product catalog and configurator. The product is written in Java and AJAX UI technologies, just note that this navigation mode is technology-agnostic.

A Webcom’s user can be a seller of categories like: Software, Hardware, and Services. If a potential buyer clicks on Hardware, then the system will open up the subcategories like Servers and Printers. By further clicking on Servers, then the options can be Web Servers, Storage Servers, File Servers, and so on.

While the user is navigating, the system creates at the top of the screen “breadcrumbs”, so that the user knows how he/she has come to this place and how to go back. The breadcrumbs path might look like:

“Home > Top Level Catalog > Hardware > Servers > …> Current location”

Making it Stick

As for rich media features, they would comprise everything that is not a static HyperText Markup Language (HTML) page, such as RealVideo, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Mediaplayer, Microsoft Silverlight, and so on. Previously, these gadgets could only show videos and play music and animation, but now users can write applications over them.

In IFS’ case, the most visible way to use rich media is to use the Sticky Notes feature. Basically the user can put a sticky (”Post it”) note (only logically, not really physically, duh!) onto any record in the system (e.g., customers, projects, orders, invoices etc.). The note “sticks” to the record and will be visible to all other authorized users who look at that same record. Inside the note users can put any content they can put in a regular “rich text” field in Windows.

This content includes, for example, pictures, hyperlinks, video clips, Objects Linking & Embedding (OLE) objects (or any embeddable document type), etc. The sticky note is to enable data to be kept that is not part of the normal system database (as a sticky note would be on a physical desktop),but that can be searched along with the data in the database. This serves the purpose of capturing knowledge in the organization and not just with an individual (see figure below). Could this capability also be a first date between user communities and enterprise applications?

Silver Lining in Silverlight?

But unless Microsoft Silverlight is used, Windows users are tied to the desktop, which means less reach and portability than in browser-based applications. Silverlight (formerly called WPF Everywhere [WPF/E]) provides a runtime browser-based deployment environment for WPF applications written in Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). Silverlight is a subset of WPF and is designed to run cross-platform to enable Rich Internet Applications (RIA); WPF has some additional capabilities but assumes it is running on a “Windows box.”

Silverlight and WPF have had their share of many broad platform announcements at the recent Microsoft PDC (Professional Development Conference) 2008 conference. Relative to business applications-oriented UI design controls, there has been a panoply of new capabilities within the Silverlight toolkit, such as Charting, TreeView, DockPanel, WrapPanel, ViewBox, Expander, AutoComplete, NumericUpDown, and so on.

These controls should all also be available for WPF, which on its part has received the controls like DataGrid, DatePicker, Ribbon, Calendar and VisualState Manager. These controls are already also included in the Silverlight 2.0 announcement, albeit the Ribbon control from WPF is not in Silverlight yet.

These capabilities are in great part what the Dynamics team has been waiting for before jumping in broadly on the Silverlight/WPF bandwagon. In addition, Microsoft Developer Division is open-sourcing the Silverlight controls, so we can expect to see lots of advanced controls added by ISV’s down the track. Thus, Microsoft admits that visualization is a key area of investment for Microsoft Dynamics products, and as Silverlight capabilities around data expand, Dynamics products will add Silverlight experiences to their common controls.

This is not to neglect the work Microsoft has done around introducing role-tailored user experience (UX) across the Dynamics products, embedding role-specific and contextual analytics directly in the application UX, and introducing both breadcrumb bar navigation and action panes (the Office ribbon-style interface). Independent of what “plumbing” the company uses, these have been pretty dramatic UX changes, and similar to the abovementioned navigation gadgets in some of the other vendors’ products.

Bottom Line: Win-Win for Microsoft

Coming back to the second issue from the beginning of this blog series, i.e., Microsoft Business Division’s (MBD) Profit & Loss (P&L) statement, at the Convergence 2008 user conference, the giant stated the following stats for Microsoft Dynamics:

* A 26 percent revenue growth in Q2 2008;
* Nearly 300,000 customers worldwide;
* Nearly 10,000 business partners worldwide;
* About 1,700 Dynamics solutions in Solution Finder; and
* Over 14,000 customers and over 625,000 users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Now, some nitpickers might say that Microsoft Dynamics is not a profit generator for Microsoft, if not even bleeding money due to all the ongoing product investment. Well, guess what, Microsoft is certainly not in dire need of cash to squeeze it out of Dynamics’ operations.

As some of you might know, now that Dynamics is part of MBD, which contains Microsoft Office, Dynamics, Exchange, Office Live and Unified Communications, the parent company doesn’t report the Dynamics business separately any longer in terms of revenue and operating income. However, Microsoft still discloses Dynamics customer billings figures every quarter, and here are the three data points it has publicly disclosed:

1. In fiscal 2006, the last time Dynamics was an external P&L entity, it achieved profitability in Q4, and was profitable for the full year;
2. In fiscal 2007, Dynamics crossed an important internal milestone of becoming an over US$ 1 billion business; and
3. For fiscal 2007 and 2008, Dynamics has reported a 21 percent growth in billings in each of those years.

But the thing that represents Dynamics’ “extra” contribution is the sale of all those Microsoft platform components to all of the customers of Dynamics. That is to say that Dynamics creates a “pull” for other Microsoft technologies.

Money for the Caviar

Plus, let’s not forget about all the revenue and profits coming from related sales of SQL Server, SharePoint, Office, Exchange, and so on to an army of ISV’s (many of which are even fierce Dynamics competitors).

Microsoft has also touted and recruited many ISVs for Office Business Applications (OBAs) as a way in which line-of-business (LoB) systems can be seamlessly integrated with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office productivity tools. Business applications are made possible by key platform capabilities, called OBA Services, in the Microsoft Office 2007 system that cater to the following features: workflow; search; the Business Data Catalog (BDC); a new, extensible UI; Microsoft Office Open XML Formats; and the Web Site and Security Framework.

Another example (staying on the IFS theme) is IFS Business Analytics, the first product from the vendor’s Intelligent Desktop initiative. This product is a business intelligence (BI) solution that extends Microsoft Excel from a desktop productivity tool to a full-fledged, enterprise-scale client for planning, reporting and analysis. In other words, users hereby benefit from using IFS Applications (and its embedded security and authorizations) within an already familiar Excel environment.

TARGIT BI Product Certified

2009-10-02T06:32:00.000-07:00

Recently, I met over the Web with TARGIT’s Ruben Knudsen and Ulrik Pedersen, along with some TEC cohorts to verify TARGIT’S BI product. TARGIT had completed a TEC-designed RFI containing a list of BI capabilities that every BI vendor could support “out of the box.” The RFI is a common list of BI capabilities that we send to all BI vendors, and from the long list of TARGIT responses, we chose 172 entries for them to demonstrate. Without missing a beat, TARGIT demonstrated all the 172 selected entries from a total of 1900 criteria we chose using a “live meeting” and telephone sessions. TARGIT passed with 100 percent verification – no omissions.
TARGIT is a Danish company. Specializing in business intelligence, TARGIT works through a world-wide distribution channel that includes distributors (VARs), OEM partner relationships, and direct sales to the customer. Their product has both a real-time interface and a batch system interface. TARGIT standard data marts and OLAP facilities allow for drill downs to detailed information, desktop and Web reporting, as well as drill through analysis via SQL functions. TARGIT indicated that the majority of their implementations are done via resellers.

I asked Ruben and Ulrik about TARGIT as a company and I liked what I heard. Many of their 75 employees and 80+ distributors have been with the company since it was founded, 22 years ago. Major clients include municipalities. They do most of their sales via distributors such as Fujitsu, and retailers. Their product is very robust, efficiently coded, and geared to the tier-2 and tier-3 companies (from 50 employees to 500, and companies with $500 million in earnings or below).

From a technical perspective, there are several BI business areas for which they provide out-of-the-box analytical solutions that interface to several different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: Microsoft Dynamics AX, NAV, GP, Oracle, SAP. The business areas covered include supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), finance, sales, and projects.

TARGIT is strong in the area of activity-based costing analytics. From the user interface, TARGIT provides scorecards, bubble charts, dashboards, hierarchical org charts (not the chart itself though) and alerts. If the client wants to, he can build reports using the usual statistical distributions and the associated functions for regression and correlation analysis, calculations of the mean, variance, standard deviation, and other statistical measures.

The Whitelisting of America: Security for IT

2009-10-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time around 1995, the well-known American agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), decided that there was no computer operating system that was adequately secure for their needs. In analyzing the risks, they found that while UNIX was the most secure, they needed additional protection. They looked at the industry of anti-virus protection, at problems with Trojan software, at the problem of keeping up with virus authors, and at the requirement for government level security to prevent a corrupted module from secretly penetrating their operating or business system environment. Their conclusion was that “anti-virus blacklisting” is ineffective and isn’t worth a pinch of dung.

Eight years ago, in 2000, the NSA produced a kernel extension called Selinux for UNIX and also for Linux. What this extension did was to manage a catalog of permissions for files and processes. The way it generally works is as follows:

An operating system-owned rule database consisting of a set of permissions (i.e., a “whitelist”) is generated, and every executable (be it operating system or user program) is assigned permissions according to its functionality. A module not in the permissions database is not allowed to execute. Modules with matching rules in the database are limited to permissions determined by the rules. The restrictions may include other then execution privileges such as not being allowed to do things that the module was not designed to do. For example, a video driver is not allowed to write to a file. A second example is that of a “user program” rule which allows the module to write to a subset of of all public data directories. Digital signatures are used to certify each module and to ensure that a replacement module is blocked from execution until a new certification rules/signature for it is registered.

Selinux has been a great success, and as a result, it is used in many Unix versions and in Red Hat Linux since 2000 and in SUSE Linux since 2005. Whitelisting is proven.

More recently (2008), this capability is still not present in Microsoft operating systems. As a result, third-party vendors are looking at the Linux successes and asking “Why not?” Several competing vendors have recognized that if Linux systems can do it, then so can they do it for the Microsoft platforms. Several companies have brought their whitelist product to market. Each has developed its own whitelisting facility, sold to compliment the traditional anti-virus software for Microsoft platforms. Whitelisting for other platforms works in a similar manner to Selinux. Rather then block bad applications that it recognizes by signature, it allows execution of those applications and processes that match the security rules and internal certificates. Again, for example, a video driver is only allowed to be a video driver, and nothing else. In the same vein, a program may be allowed to write to a file, but not to use video, or be allowed to trap keystrokes. In effect, like Selinux, whitelisting builds good fences around all modules, and makes for a very secure system.

Where whitelisting comes into play big time is in the protection of database systems. All database systems are in need of protection from module replacement or from modules that misbehave. Whitelisting builds and manages the permission “fences.”

A reasonably good article about whitelisting, for Microsoft Platforms, written by Jason Brooks “Toward A More Idiotproof Internet”, was published in eWeek on October 1st, 2008. Selinux information is available from the National Security Agency (NSA).

Job Scheduling Maze in Distributed IT Landscapes

2009-10-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

We certainly learn new things every day, and sometimes out of pure serendipity. Namely, when I was recently asked by one of my industry contacts (working for a PR agency) whether I would like to have a briefing with and about his client, whose name included the word “batch” as a part, I agreed, thinking it was a process enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor or maybe a manufacturing execution system (MES) vendor.

To my chagrin, as soon as the Web conference meeting and demo started, I realized that I was in the quite unfamiliar territory of enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, especially when it comes to highly diverse and distributed information technology (IT) environments. Many of these jobs are still run in a batch mode without human interaction and intervention (at least preferably).

Some batch job examples would be: database/data warehouse updates, payroll runs, file copying and archiving, systems rebooting, disks de-fragmenting, reports printing, processing insurance claims, billing statements, and/or enrollments, file transfer protocols (FTP), and so on. Thus came the ActiveBatch product name, I guess.

For someone who is not that technically proficient, the knee-jerk reaction was to say: “Sorry, this was a misunderstanding”, but I was drawn in by a good discussion and the product’s apparent usefulness. In fact, the briefing made me think about how often we take things for granted, and how unaware we are of the legwork that IT staff, especially within large corporations, is conducting behind the scenes. We are usually aware of the IT folks only when our PC is not working or the email server is down, and when we “need help now!”

The conversation made me realize that this vendor truly understands mission-critical business that requires high-performance systems. ActiveBatch originators know what it means to meet both deadlines and service level response times. Conversely, while the commonly used enterprise applications, databases, platforms (e.g., Microsoft Windows with Task Scheduler or UNIX with Cron) contain limited scheduling functions, these address only basic requirements within the confines of the individual system.

In fact, from my erstwhile experiences as a Baan (now Infor ERP LN) and SAP R/3 functional consultant, I vaguely recall some task scheduling functions (e.g., setting overnight or weekend material requirements planning [MRP] runs, or performing a trial balance and general ledger [G/L] updates at a certain time). The technical consultants would set up these batch jobs within the Baan Tools or SAP Basis administrative capabilities.

Overcoming Individual Systems’ “Autism”

However, the problem is that as the number of systems, applications, databases, and whatnot platforms increases, the IT business community requires automation among and across these various systems in an end-to-end manner to provide a single point of workload automation. In addition to the ability to integrate all the pieces of a heterogeneous environment, such a system should be able to schedule jobs based on events and associated built-in business logic, as opposed to merely on a set date/time, and in a single-path manner within a silo (as is the case with inwardly-oriented “autistic” enterprise systems).

To that end, ActiveBatch provides a central point of scheduling that allows each of these disparate systems to be automated and integrated into coherent workflows. The essence of ActiveBatch, Intelligent Automation, is to provide the level of integration for applications, platforms, databases, and specific functions without the need for costly and tedious code scripting (and reliance on programmers).

What prospective customers look to ActiveBatch to accomplish is the following:

* Improve IT service levels;
* Integrate workflows and business processes between diverse applications and platforms;
* Reduce the number of manual errors (which otherwise come with the territory of relying on humans);
* Implement a centralized view of jobs that span across the vast platforms’ landscape; and
* Eliminate an “artificial” wait or idle time that has to be built into existing workflows (to accommodate all imperfections).

In a nutshell, this is about ultimately reducing the cost of IT operations. Some customers cite the fact that often in the past the original enterprise job scheduler (typically made in-house in a heavily customized manner) would allow some jobs to fail without notifying anyone, and the company wouldn’t know anything about it until someone belatedly complained about not getting the output of the job (e.g., a report). Tracing and fixing these instances would often take more time and resources than the job scheduler was supposed to save in the first place.

ActiveBatch and Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI)

But let me backtrack and talk about the ActiveBatch’s genesis. The company that owns ActiveBatch is privately held Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI), with headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey (NJ), United States (US). It was founded in 1981 as a system software engineering and consulting company focused on the development of products for former Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) OpenVMS operating system (OS) product (meanwhile of course, DEC was acquired by COMPAQ, and now both are part of Hewlett-Packard [HP]).

ASCI’s first product, INTACT, was a transaction processing system for OpenVMS to allow customers to use OpenVMS systems in commercial applications. INTACT was licensed to major financial organizations around the world. In late 1986/early 1987, DEC exclusively licensed INTACT from ASCI, and renamed it DECIntact, as a solution incorporated as part of its erstwhile Enterprise Application Strategy. DEC’s decision at the time was based on the need to compete with IBM and its transaction processing system, Complex Instruction Computer Set (CICS), with a counterpart competitive solution. INTACT and DECIntact are both still in use in many organizations around the world.

ASCI has also developed other layered product solutions for the OpenVMS market including:

* SHADOW – the first shadowing/data replication system for OpenVMS;
* WATCH – for help desk and other similar functions that allow one user to watch other terminal sessions;
* Performance Simulation System (PSS) – the automated regression and application testing system for the OpenVMS applications; and
* VIRTUOSO – a virtual container technology that enables the development of virtual disks to be used as random access memory (RAM) and cached disks for performance improvements, encrypted disks for security, and more.

In 1991, ASCI enhanced SHADOW with a new family of products including FileSHADOW and RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS. RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS has since been installed in over 1,000 customer environments to reduce the time of data recovery in the event of a system or site loss. For instance, in 2001, during the dreadful 9/11 attacks, RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS was used by many financial organizations, including Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DSW) Bank, to recover their data and get their business functioning again within hours at an alternate site.

In 1996, ASCI broadened its OS focus from exclusively OpenVMS to include UNIX and Microsoft Windows. One of the UNIX-based products that is still in use is DeviceShare. For its part, XLNT (Extended Language for NT), a command and scripting language for Windows (not only Windows NT, as the name would imply), was introduced to offer system administrators a scripting alternative to managing systems and developing workflow scripts. Over 100,000 XLNT licenses are currently in use around the world.

Enter ActiveBatch

In 1998, XLNT users needed a batch system to automate and run their XLNT scripts on a schedule. ASCI thus introduced Batch Queue Management System (BQMS) to assist XLNT users to automate their scripts on and across Windows servers. In 2000, BQMS was renamed and re-introduced as ActiveBatch V3, a heterogeneous job scheduling solution for Windows, UNIX , Linux, and OpenVMS systems.

ASCI proudly claims to be self-funded, and that its development, quality assurance (QA), and support teams are its own (and not outsourced or off-shored). The company has licensed ActiveBatch to over 1,400 customers in 34 countries around the world.

With its Intelligent Automation capabilities and performance, and having been tested across 2,000 servers, performing over 1,3 million jobs per day, ActiveBatch is fast becoming the Workload Automation and Enterprise Job Scheduling solution of choice. Additionally, ASCI has licensed nearly 4,000 clients in 34 countries around the globe for the full range of its products. Its clients include many of the Fortune 1000 companies with a mix of medium to large enterprises.

ASCI competes with several powerful and renowned application providers in the Workload Automation and Job Scheduling market including Computer Associates (CA) Unicenter AutoSys, BMC CONTROL-M, and IBM Tivoli. Many of these vendors’ products were originally developed for the mainframe, not necessarily for today’s heterogeneous, horizontal server environments. As a result, they have customarily been adapted (retrofitted) to today’s distributed server environments.

More modern job scheduling vendors’ products like Tidal Software, UC4, Redwood Software (especially in SAP environments), Quartz (open source), and of course ActiveBatch, understand the distributed server environments, and have targeted their solutions to address this requirement. Part 2 of this blog series will analyze the ActiveBatch architecture and evolution in terms of functional and technical capabilities.

Job Scheduling Maze in Distributed IT Landscapes

2009-10-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

ActiveBatch Architecture

The ActiveBatch architecture has always been a multi-tier approach (enabling centralized job scheduling with distributed job execution) consisting of the following elements:

* ActiveBatch Job Scheduler — This Microsoft Windows-based layer consists of the ActiveBatch automation intelligence and logic to understand the requirements presented in operating a real-time, event-driven system;
* ActiveBatch Backend – This database tier is where the “job” definitions and templates are maintained along with how the “jobs” are to be triggered (i.e., date/time-based, event-based, data-based, or on-demand). This layer also determines which resources are required (e.g., servers) to run the defined jobs, and what to do upon a job’s success or failure, or based on other information. This layer uses either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database;
* ActiveBatch Client – This client layer is the interface in which the user, developer, or operator interacts with the ActiveBatch system. Workflow design, programmatic connections, or simply review of jobs’ status (success or failure) can be monitored or reviewed. There is a raft of possible client-side technologies, such as Microsoft Common Object Model (COM), Web Services/Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for cross-platform environments, Windows-based applications, Command Line Interface (CLI), Web Server interfaces, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) gadgets, SmartPhone devices, and wireless BlackBerry handheld devices; and
* ActiveBatch Execution Agents – This tier represents the physical or virtual hardware and software systems, which execute the “jobs,” applications, processes, etc., as directed by the abovementioned ActiveBatch Job Scheduler. Execution agents can run on a number of operating system (OS) platforms like Microsoft Windows (including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000), UNIX, Linux, OpenVMS (including the Alpha and Itanium brands), and IBM z/OS (for the ActiveBatch Job Library feature that will be explored later on).

A fully operational ActiveBatch instance requires each of the basic architecture layers, i.e., Job Scheduler, Database, Client/User Interface (UI), and a minimum of one ActiveBatch Execution Agent. Most ActiveBatch shops have Windows systems. But even some like, for example, LiveWire Mobile that have over 90 Linux servers and only a few Windows systems, still strongly support ActiveBatch as a key approach to integrating applications, databases, and platforms into coherent workflows.

Panoply of Job Types and User Views

As mentioned in Part 1, ActiveBatch attempts to provide “Intelligent Automation” for its users with an approach that can minimize or eliminate scripting. Up through Release 6, the product has offered the following five types of jobs (by comparison, most of other counterpart job scheduling products only support one or two job types):

1. Process Job — lets users run user-written scripts and/or executable program files. For example, I could un the Windows Internet Explorer executable (IEXPLORE.exe) and pass TEC’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) as a parameter to open the TEC’s home page. Worth noting here is the “Copy Script to execution machine” option for running scripts as a process, as well as the ability to allow pre- and post-job steps;
2. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Job — can initiate a series of FTP and/or Secure FTP commands in a heterogeneous fashion, using the following secure protocols: Secure Socket Layer (SSL) v3 and v2, Private Communications Technology (PCT), Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Shell (SSH), or without embedded security;
3. File System Job — lets users perform operations such as Copy, Delete, Rename or Move Files, or Create New or Delete a Directory, without regard to the specific platform they are on, and what Command shell they might need to use.
4. Email Job – lets users compose e-mails, whereby email servers and/or clients that leverage Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) can be utilized (not necessarily only Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange Server). A notable capability is the use of variables to create alerts/triggers (e.g., when a certain stock symbol reaches certain value); and
5. Script Job — where the script (rather than an executable file, e.g., a Visual Basic Script [VBS] piece of code) is placed into an ActiveBatch job so that it can be executed on any system rather than being limited to the system where the file resides. Scripts using virtually any script language can be used, and if ActiveBatch does not provide an extension the designer can simply add it to the list. However, the server running the script must be able to associate with the relevant file extension.

Various Views to Monitor Jobs

Furthermore, ActiveBatch comes with a number of different ways of viewing and monitoring ongoing enterprise jobs. To that end, the Run Book view shows operators’ job schedules in a calendar view (à la Microsoft Outlook), whereas the Daily View shows daily job executions in a detailed list. Both views can be used by operators to monitor the status of jobs that have been run, are still running, or are scheduled to run (past, present, and future). Jobs can be filtered by days or execution status (i.e., “Show me only jobs that have failed, aborted, not run, or are still executing!”).

The Gantt View can be used by job designers as well as administrators and operations staff to identify load levels (to balance loads) or quiet periods for system’s planned maintenance, etc. Finally, the Administrators View helps administrators with setting policies, defaults, etc. Part 3 will unveil the latest enhancements and options offered within Release 7.

ActiveBatch Evolution

ASCI continues with ActiveBatch’s ongoing development with a cycle of 18 months between versions. This allows the vendor to offer existing and new customers the ability to take advantage of new features and approaches in technology by applying them for improved performance and usability.

In the ActiveBatch V4 product release, the ActiveBatch Backend layer was changed from a proprietary database to the much more standard Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. This has enabled the vendor to take advantage of the database programming power that the “stored procedure” capabilities could deliver. Also, these two database systems were the primary databases used by the ASCI’s target marketplace as part of their IT infrastructure, thereby reducing the learning and training costs for users.

Moreover, ActiveBatch V4 added support for additional OS platforms such as IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Linux to the previously supported Windows, Sun Solaris, HP Tru64 UNIX, and OpenVMS environments. The client interface was updated with a new graphical user interface (GUI) for drag-and-drop operations to simplify the design of workflows. Finally, the High Availability capability was added, remote management access was provided for Internet access, and remote management was made possible using BlackBerry devices.

In the ActiveBatch V5 release, performance became paramount as ASCI took advantage of the power of the supported databases. The vendor was able to test actual performance of up to 2,000 disparate server connections (i.e., execution agents), and over 1,300,000 jobs triggered in a 24 hour period. Moreover, ASCI says that there are no architectural limits in this regard.

As for managing workflows and all ActiveBatch objects such as Jobs, Schedules, Calendars, Users, Servers, Alerts, and more, the product was now able to put these objects into a one container called a Job Plan. Finally, while ActiveBatch had always fully exposed its Microsoft COM interface for programmatic access to its objects, methods, and properties, this release added a Web Services programmatic access for users who were not Windows-based, for true cross-platform capabilities.

ActiveBatch V6 – The Game-changing Begins?

The ActiveBatch V6 release had many major enhancements. For one, it introduced the framework for the abovementioned Job Library, containing templates to applications and key functions used by IT departments in support of the customer’s business. The goal was to reduce code scripting, so that users could simply add key information (e.g., select options in a wizard-like style), and ActiveBatch would be able to run jobs behind the scenes.

These templates include a variety of jobs, such as follows: Structural Query language (SQL) routines, Data Transformation Service (DTS) packages, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Crystal Reports creation, etc. The library also caters to functions like Secure FTP, file archiving, ZIP file operations (compressions), email jobs, etc. The use of ready-made job libraries within ActiveBatch eliminates both errors through reusability and the hassles of creating scripts. In layman terms, complex workflows can be composed by selecting options from a library of routines rather than via pesky coding of scripts.

The V6 release also featured a much improved audit system for compliance and control with both internal policies as well as governmental regulations. In addition, there is the capability for dynamic policy auditing using the Audit Variable feature. Also, policies can be mandatory or optional, and users can also conduct policy version comparisons.

The release offered HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM, formerly Microsoft Operations Manager [MOM]) to fully manage and monitor objects in the ActiveBatch system around the clock. V6 also introduced the ActiveBatch Mobile capability for Smartphones and PDA’s (beyond BlackBerry devices).

Furthermore, ActiveBatch Windows execution agents now fully support 64-bit systems as well as 32-bit ones as appropriate. Other general changes for improved IT service levels entailed the following:

* setting expected start times for event-based jobs;
* alerting for delayed and late running jobs;
* Windows PowerShell; and
* setting the maximum dispatch time.

As another major enhancement, ActiveBatch 6 introduced the concept of Virtual Root to allow for its job scheduler to be made available as a multi-tenant utility within or outside of the enterprise. Each organization’s unit will see its “Job Plans” populated with its ActiveBatch objects, but, if so required, will not be able to see or access other users’ plans and objects. In other words, each user/tenant is isolated, secured, and “blind” or transparent to the other. Each unit’s plans are published as directory references for secure access.

Last but not least, event management capabilities were enhanced for non-Windows-based systems. The options range from file triggers, centralized logging (log files can be made directly to the UI/client regardless of platform type), and silent (push) installations. The system also features integration of jobs to be executed on a mainframe system, or for a mainframe job to trigger other workflows on Windows, Linux, UNIX or OpenVMS systems.

Excellent Value in the ETO Landscape: How Global Shop Solutions Excels for ETO Industry Challenges

2009-10-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

The needs of the changing business, economic, and technology landscapes have given organizations that manufacture precision and complex products an added incentive to see how they can manage to contain rising costs, and stay competitive against global competition and market volatility. The findings were quite unlike those experienced by tradiditional discrete manufacturers, since discrete manufacturers do not deal with the same intricacies of mass customization as ETO manufacturers. It was with this as a backdrop that I and fellow TEC analyst Leslie Satenstein engaged in conversation with Global Shop Solutions ERP engineer Marc Atnipp in order to review their product One-System as part of a recent TEC Certification exercise.

A Word About the Vendor

Over three decades ago, from deep in the heart of Texas, Global Shop Solutions founder Dick Alexander was a proponent of such core manufacturing principles as continuous improvement and just-in-time manufacturing. In these approaches the goal is always to reduce and eliminate non-value-added activities which contribute to delays in production and ultimately drive costs upwards through excessive machine set-up costs and improperly managed inventory among other things. Through the core principles which underlay the development of this software, the product struck an eager and responsive chord among its initial customers in the small to medium sized manufacturing space within the “custom job-shop” and engineer-to-order segments of the market. The initial market acceptance of these principles and a vendor that could deliver on the promise propelled the organization though its growth and development. Now, three decades later, Global Shop Solutions is truly a global enterprise solution, with customers not only in the US and Canada but also in South America and down-under in Australia.

What We Liked About the Software

Global Shop Solutions has developed a fully integrated manufacturing and accounting ERP package for custom ETO shops spanning a range of industries, including aerospace and electronic and precision machine and fastener manufacturing. Among the neat features was the GUI icon display menu configuration, the product’s embedded BI application to capture KPI scorecard information at a glance. It also had a rich and comprehensive tool featuring web-enabled scheduling and graphic scheduling tools which can at a glance look at current capacity or constraints across the shop floor, or drill down to specific work center or machinery. The ETO offering supports a “Product Configurator” tool which is mission-critical for any company whose business model is dependent upon the ability to integrate design and engineering changes, estimates, and quotes in short order on a daily basis. The ETO ERP application offers standard CRM functionality, which means it can be a one-stop single solution for those firms looking for a value proposition between functionality, budget, and feature. The system had its own built-in report generator, permitting the user to easily create reports on the fly. This can be useful for organizations that have inventory at multiple locations and need to either reconcile physical inventory counts or transfer semi-finished materials between plants and company warehouse locations.

Lawson Standing Vertically in a Flat Economy

2009-10-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

What About Food and Beverage?

As someone smart once said, “People have to eat and drink in both good and bad times”, so the F&B sector should not be that badly affected by the downturn. Sure, the premium brand manufacturers will likely suffer, but the low-price and private label items might even flourish.

In late October, Lawson made two announcements at the InterBev 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada (NV), United States (US). This was the validation of Lawson’s vertical strategy that was professed at its CUE 2008 user conference, and was soon delivered with the Lawson Tracer product. These industry-specific modules all have features that are unique to the F&B industry or are solving that industry’s specific business requirements.

Industry-specific Analytics

The Lawson M3 Analytics for Food & Beverage module helps F&B companies access meaningful business intelligence (BI) to improve decision-making without having to painstakingly develop analytics tools in-house. In fact, industry-specific BI solutions that can be up and running to provide value within days and weeks are Lawson’s attempt to mitigate the current economic crisis for its customers.

Thus the Lawson M3 Analytics for Food & Beverage application includes 70 pre-configured key performance indicators (KPIs) and 50 pre-built scorecard reports commonly used by F&B companies. Sample KPIs include day sales outstanding (DSO), inventory turnover, delivery performance, and gross margin percentage. Sample scorecards highlight critical data such as sales vs. budget, supplier performance, production variances, and customer debt.

This selection of metrics is engineered to meet the specific needs of an F&B company management. It includes what the executives and middle managers need, and does not include KPIs that are meaningless (which is of course the case with a more generic, “one size fits all” approach). The analytics set also includes KPIs not seen in other industries, like yield. Such a comprehensive approach to business evaluation has been essentially beyond the reach of all but the largest F&B companies until now.

Lawson Analytics for Food & Beverage helps F&B companies benchmark, measure, and improve performance in the following five key areas: sales, finance, procurement, production and the warehouse. With virtually all manufacturers currently concerned with burning cash, they need their existing systems to deliver more value faster, specifically in terms of improving cash flow and slashing costs. Lawson’s industry-specific analytics should help provide answers to those critical questions such as “what and where are our inefficiencies?”, “where are we losing cash?”, or “which processes are slow?”

The application enables tracking of multiple performance metrics by individual products, customers, and account managers to help decision-makers identify underperforming operational areas in time to take appropriate action. It also helps F&B companies eliminate unnecessary reports so decision-makers receive only the right information at the right time.

Industry-specific Planning Tools

In a related announcement, Lawson also announced the availability of Lawson Stock Build Optimizer and Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage. These new applications aim to help F&B manufacturers improve long- and mid-range production planning to ensure that the right amount of the right products are available at the right time to meet seasonal and promotional peaks in demand. F&B companies traditionally have to choose the lesser of two evils:

1. Losing sales if they don’t produce enough products to meet demand spikes, or
2. Writing off perishable products if they produce too much.

Lawson Stock Build Optimizer helps companies visualize their overall plan for building and maintaining an inventory of finished products. The F&B industry has two relatively unique requirements: it is deal- or promotion-driven with both customers and F&B manufacturers having a history of impacting the timing of transactions based upon promotions. This module allows the supply chain to be leveled to eliminate problems in timing. Stocks need to be built up in advance of the promotion period, stock-outs need to be eliminated, and inventory investments minimized.

Lawson Stock Build Optimizer then offers tools that allow manufacturers to perform multiple “what if” scenarios to simulate the consequences of different long-range planning decisions. These models, which can account for a wide range of variables from production capacity to ingredient costs, help planners refine master production schedules (MPS) across multiple manufacturing sites. For example, planners can use these models to evaluate the benefits of building stock in advance to support demand spikes, versus using overtime or subcontractors to meet seasonal demand for products such as holiday chocolate assortments.

For its part, Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage should help F&B manufacturers improve mid-range planning decisions as they balance changes in demand and supply availability during production. Companies can visualize their total coverage days for each product to guide production planning decisions for the next few weeks or months.

The application then captures and provides a full view of production variables, such as changes in customer orders, delivery schedules, employee shifts, and aging inventory. This allows planners to conduct “what if” modeling before deciding how to prioritize production for specific products and orders to help avoid stock-outs, inventory write-offs, or the need to temporarily open additional production lines.

Both Lawson Stock Build Optimizer and Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage are configurable to users’ specific needs. Both applications also offer simplified installation and support through integration with the Lawson M3 Enterprise Management System [evaluate this product].

Dear readers, what do you think? Is this a well thought-out value proposition from a vendor to help its F&B customers during bleak times or merely a vendor’s repackaging exercise to cash in on the current economic crisis? Should virtually all vendors try to come up with similar industry-specific initiatives and thus justify their existence and customers’ investment and trust?

What are your opinions about whether these new products will help F&B manufacturers analyze an increasingly complex set of supply chain variables to help them optimize production plans, lower inventory costs, and enhance customer service? What steps are you taking in these regards?

Ramco OnDemand ERP Certification

2009-10-02T06:22:00.001-07:00

First Impressions
The forms layouts and many of the detail screens allow for data field relocations and reconfigurations via drag and drop. The default color schemes are easy on the eyes, and screen layouts are ergonomically designed. A user can take more frequently used fields and bunch them together; fields that are not used can be squeezed to insignificant size.

The product handles everything from the sales quotation to the final shipment, including all financial, inventory, and manufacturing aspects. We noted good functionality in the sales and purchasing areas.

Inventory management is thorough and supports multiple locations (such as warehouses, and even multiple aisle and bin locations for a product).

In the fulfilling of a production order, Ramco demonstrated that material would be drawn from the nearer warehouse and bin location according to first in, first out (FIFO); last in, first out (LIFO); and other rules. Full lot and serial number support were included.

Choosing an ERP Product
If your organization is making the transition from a small start-up operation to a medium sized organization, then Ramco’s SaaS product offering might be a smart choice since it includes standard accounting functionality, such as A/R, A/P, costing, and sales. More functional purchasing, HR, and CRM interfaces, as well as an advanced planning tool, are currently under development and should be available soon.

The manufacturing scheduling functionality is work area–based, where mixed types of the same machines can be pooled together to add to capacity. Work center reports are available to show how much of the work center capacity is remaining. The product’s material requirements planning (MRP) and master production scheduling (MPS) interfaces are easy to use, intuitive, and what other vendors will have to compete against for the same class of product.

Being a SaaS product, all of Ramco OnDemand ERP’s functionality is global. Accepted customizations become global on demand enhancements. These enhancements, patches, etc. when implemented, become effective immediately.

Where Does On Demand Fit?

The Ramco on demand SaaS product appears as an excellent entry point for emerging businesses such as light manufacturing. For light manufacturing or small shops, SaaS is a money saver, and coupled with Ramco’s virtual machine access facility, provides an economic ERP solution. For the aerospace or automobile industries, where deeply nested multi-level bills of material (BOMs) are the norm, the product is usable, though in these industries, reporting by machine within a work-center obligates more data capture and more drill-down reporting.

Ramco OnDemand ERP cannot be used by manufacturing organizations that require the ability to track global efficiencies by work center, since this functionality is not yet available in the product. However, for companies looking for a robust scheduling and work order planning tool, which allocates materials to specific work orders, Ramco’s SaaS ERP product offering can satisfy such requirements effectively.

Because the product is SaaS-based, the client is saved from performing backups and system maintenance, and from up-front licensing fees. At this time, costs are per seat, and an amount is charged for data storage and by quantity of business transactions.

Ramco OnDemand ERP is configured to your business requirements and typically takes less than a week to deploy. As your business grows, the solution can be scaled up to accommodate multiple locations, currencies, and business units. The application stays tuned to your business all the time.

Ramco OnDemand ERP integrates multiple functions and systems into one solution and gives you total visibility and control of operations. In the process, it helps you focus on growing your business.

As a virtual machine application, no separate processor is dedicated to running the on demand application. Contrarily, the virtual machine solution is termed evergreen, in that multiple virtual machines share a real computer on an on demand basis, and allow for lower operating costs. These lower operating cost benefits are passed on to the clients.

For more information, please visit TEC’s vendor showcase. Please click here to understand the application’s support concepts, and here for product details, where a demo can be viewed.

IBM & ILOG Matrimony: Good for BPM, Uncertain for SCM

2009-10-02T06:19:00.000-07:00

Also, more than 500 independent software vendors (ISV’s) rely on embedding ILOG’s business rule management systems (BRMS), optimization, and visualization software components into their products. These ISV customers, some of which are leaders in their respective markets, embed ILOG’s software engines to create their own differentiating products and services and improve their competitive edge.

To be more precise, ILOG provides various tools within the realm of BRMS (for managing business change), optimization (for making complex decisions), and visualization (to create diagrams, charts, maps, etc.) for other ISVs to embed in an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) fashion, whereas its more nascent supply chain management (SCM) applications are aimed at end-users (companies).

One day before the acquisition, ILOG, which is listed on NASDAQ & Euronext, reported its fiscal 2008 results, in which 2008 fiscal year revenues of US$181.0 million were up 12 percent compared to US$161.5 million in fiscal 2007. Still, the ILOG executives acknowledged a challenging environment and slowing down of its many businesses, especially in the embattled financial sector.

What’s ILOG’s Dowry?

The deal, valued at approximately US$340 million, is expected to close by year-end 2008. By acquiring ILOG for Euro 10 per share, at a premium of 37 percent over the ILOG’s market capitalization at the time, I believe that IBM has gotten a good deal for a member of the Cape Horn Strategies Sustained Success Honor Roll.

This esteemed membership is comprised of all software companies that are listed on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ stock exchanges that have six (or more) consecutive years of measured profitable growth. ILOG is recognized as belonging to the group of only 23 out of 482 public software companies with seven consecutive years of profitable growth.

In fact, ILOG, with over 850 employees in the following nine countries: US, France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom (UK), China, Japan, Singapore, and Australia, has a stable recurring revenue stream from several hundreds of ISV’s royalty arrangements to embed its products. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think of how many vendors involved in some optimization or intelligence area are not leveraging ILOG’s optimization, visualization and rules engines (and thereby not reinventing the wheel themselves).

Most importantly, IBM has had partner and OEM agreements with ILOG for over a decade (since 1996). The giant incorporates ILOG’s network visualization technology into its Tivoli Netcool and WebSphere Business Events products, and it also uses ILOG’s manufacturing optimization products at its semiconductor wafer plant in Fishkill, New York, US.

Moreover, ILOG’s business rules capability is embedded within IBM WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Application Server. It is interesting to note here that IBM also partners with ILOG’s foes Fair Isaac Corporation and Corticon Techologies for their BPM and rules management capabilities. Last but not least, ILOG BRMS engine also runs IBM’s InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) Server and IBM FileNet enterprise content management (ECM) offering [evaluate this product].

As another marquee partnership, SAP uses ILOG’s optimization engine embedded within SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (SAP APO) and possibly within other SAP SCM suite’s applications [evaluate this product].

Former Manugistics (now part of JDA Software) has also embedded ILOG algorithms in several products, most notably in the strategic network design product. i2 Technologies (ironically, also soon to be part of JDA Software) did as well dating back to the Intertrans Logistics Solutions Limited (ITLS) acquisition 10 years ago. However, for some of the most complex SCM products (i.e., inventory optimization and manufacturing scheduling/sequencing), both Manugistics and i2 have developed proprietary algorithms (oftentimes heuristic-based ones).

BPM Is in Play Here, Duh!

Software tools, rather than enterprise applications, are primary targets of IBM purchases. It is thus not a big revelation here that IBM has acquired ILOG primarily for its market-leading business rules generation capabilities. Business rules engines are at the core of any service oriented architecture (SOA), complex event processing (CEP), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and/or BPM infrastructure, because they enable change of the underlying logic of business applications to nimbly adapt to new business conditions (environment), risk management policies, or local regulations.

IBM plans to much more tightly combine (than it has been done so far via ILOG extensions) its BPM, business optimization, and SOA technologies with ILOG’s BRMS software. When completed, the acquisition should strengthen IBM’s BPM and SOA positions by providing customers with a full set of rule management tools for complete and near-real-time business information and application lifecycle management (ALM). The unified business process modeling & design, process execution, BAM & analysis, and human interaction & collaboration capabilities will be able to work across a variety of platforms, including IBM’s WebSphere application development and management platform.

With more than 6,550 client engagements worldwide, IBM is a worldwide leader in the SOA and BPM markets. This leadership is further illustrated by a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 150 universities incorporating IBM’s SOA and BPM curricula, and more than 6,000 IBM Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices.

A Gentlerќ Giants Success in Reaching Out to the Little Guysќ

2009-08-18T04:57:00.000-07:00

For a connected time, the articles of Oracle, the world's bigger action software company, accept been admired as the goldenќ technology accepted (in acceding of security, scalability, and availability) a allotment of the bigger accumulated clients. In added words, the vendors ability has consistently been the affairs of enterprise-class software (i.e., high-performance, admitting with a ample bulk tag) to enterprises. Additionally, the behemothic has not been accepted for demography abundant of a touchy-feelyќ admission against customers; its amalgamation action has not been too caressible either (except for those ally that bout Oracle in admeasurement and might).

Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) is a all-around business arrangement of added than 19,500 companies that bear avant-garde software solutions based on Oracle software. For an anniversary fee of $1,995.00 (USD) and by acceptance admission to Oracles arch products, education, abstruse services, marketing, and sales support, the OPN affairs provides acceptable ally with the assets they charge to be acknowledged in todays all-around economy. But alone ally that are able to authenticate aloft artefact knowledge, abstruse expertise, and a charge to accomplishing business with Oracle, authorize for the Certified Accomplice levels.

Given its bulk of acquisitions over the endure few years, Oracle has become an even beyond cash-making apparatus than it was. Because of this, abounding assemblage accept accepted this ever-mightier assertive to become even beneath attainable and added difficult to plan with. Afterwards all, Oracles flagship database artefact still has a aloft allotment of the relational database software market, and the bell-ringer is aggressive arch to arch with SAP to be the arch supplier of action applications to ample accumulated customers.

Such success can calmly go to anyones head, but lately, Oracle has been authoritative concerted efforts to admission the baby to average business (SMB) bazaar articulation and to become added partner-friendly.

Even admitting a cogent admeasurement of its barter accept 500 advisers or beneath (which the aggregation commendations as midsize businesses), Oracle, admitting its abiding of about 20,000 admission partners, has not fared as able-bodied in affairs to businesses with beneath than 100 employees. Oracle commendations such businesses as small”a bazaar breadth Microsoft SQL Server database, Microsoft Appointment desktop and business intelligence (BI) applications, and .NET Framework- and Microsoft Windows“based appliance servers reign. It is the lower end of the SMB bazaar (the Sќ part) that Oracle is now aggravating to penetrate.

While the new baby business“oriented programs awning Oracle technology articles alone (their basal platforms and infrastructures), the bell-ringer is aswell targeting SMBs with its appliance software through the Oracle Accelerate program. This affairs was appear at the Oracle OpenWorld appointment in backward 2006. Beneath this initiative, admission ally are able to accumulate vertical solutions appliance pre-integrated bulk appliance bundles from Oracle's E-Business Apartment (EBS), PeopleSoft, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and Siebel artefact lines. Admission ally can do this with accompanying workflow and best-practice arrangement acceding templates, alleged Oracle Business Accelerators, amid the applications.

Thus far, this aggressive affairs has been successful: the regions or industries for which Oracle Accelerate solutions are already accessible accept been assuming college acquirement advance compared to those that abide to plan with a acceptable admission (meaning diffuse implementations”from scratch).

Appealing to the Little Guy (and Ally Too)

To breach into the SMB market, Oracle afresh formed the Technology Admission Sales Affairs Office. Its allotment is committed to accretion Oracle's technology authorization revenue, margin, and all-embracing allotment in the accepted business market. The appointment has been accustomed to drive new programs, with the ambition to admission customers and partners admission to Oracle 1-Click Ordering Programs and to lower transaction costs.

Creation of this appointment has appear afterwards a connected action of admission investment by the vendor, starting aback in 2004 with the absolution of Oracle Database Accepted Edition (SE) and Oracle Database Accepted Edition One (SE One), and with establishing Dell as a all-around reseller. Shortly after, Oracle launched the preinstalled Oracle Database SE One, accessible on two-processor servers and with shrink-wrapќ licensing for the database through partners; CDW Corporation was accustomed as its all-around reseller in 2005.

2006 saw the absolution of Oracle Appliance Server SE and Oracle Appliance Server SE One, as able-bodied as the accession of Ingram Micro and Tech Data as all-around distributors. Later on, Oracle alien its cellophane SMB Technology apartment bulk anniversary and launched the new OPN Solutions Catalog. In 2007, above-mentioned to the enactment of the Technology Admission Sales Affairs Office, the aggregation launched several technology centers in the Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) arena and associated technology newsletters, while Ingram Micro and Tech Data calm recruited over 400 new resellers to Oracle.

For any action IT bell-ringer gluttonous to ability abate customers, accomplished bounded ally are an accessible antecedent of advice and an admission to accompany (see The Cha[lle]nging World of Value-added Resellers). Thus, in mid-2007, the Oracle revamped its accomplice affairs to accomplish it added cost-effective and businesslike for abate ally to get on lath and ramp upќ (build up) their business. Oracle's achievement is that the arrival of such ally will could cause the aboriginal barter to aswell see Oracles entry-level technology articles as achievable solutions for their businesses.

After abundant anticipation and self-examination, Oracle articular a bulk of hurdles to the acceptance of its technology by abate barter and ally alike. To get about these obstacles, the bell-ringer has boarded on a mission to advance its ample enterprise-oriented programs, abridge its circuitous systems, and clarify its business practices accordingly. Proper packaging of solutions, bigger pricing, added adjustable licensing, and connected able-bodied software capabilities accept fabricated Oracles mission a success. Furthermore, beheading of baby business programs has appear from the alignment of Oracles go-to-market strategies, bigger cast recognition, and acquaintance in the segment, arranged with targeted attack vehicles.

Put in added accurate terms, Oracle has articular the articulation point for its database deals at about $6,000.00 (USD), a bulk aloft which the bell-ringer wins the all-inclusive majority of deals. However, Oracle concedes Microsoft has had a college win bulk in database deals beneath $6,000.00 (USD). Indeed, database sales opportunities of $5,000.00 (USD) or beneath accept been abundant beneath assisting for Oracle so far. Since abounding such sales go through the channel, Oracle has begin that its aloft hurdle to sales in this breadth comes from the ample fee a baby accomplice accept to pay to accompany OPN in adjustment to complete a individual transaction.

Previously, a admission accomplice detached with Oracle but absorbed in affairs an Oracle database band-aid anniversary several thousand dollars would accept to accompany the accomplice affairs (with its prohibitive fee), assurance a diffuse acknowledged acceding (with assorted pages, accomplished print, and footnotes) with Oracle, and assurance a agnate acknowledged acceding with a distributor. This OPN anniversary creation, accomplice acceding and notification, and analysis and activation, would about yield 5 to 30 business canicule to complete. Add to this an added three canicule to several weeks for the action of adjustment booking and fulfillment.

Conversely, the aforementioned accomplice searching to advertise a Microsoft SQL Server or .NET-based server band-aid would artlessly address transaction to Microsoft, afterwards paying any fee, and with allotment and accomplishment completed in a individual day”much to Oracles agitation and black acknowledgement.

More recently, Oracle accomplished the average OPN QuickStart affairs that, for an anniversary fee of $300.00 (USD), allows band-aid providers to resell a bound array of Oracle 1-Click Ordering Programs and to accept bound OPN benefits. Also, the QuickStart affairs is accessible alone in North America via accustomed value-added distributors (VADs). But even these choleric requirements are too abundant for those band-aid providers that charge to bound admission and resell Oracle artefact licenses to baby businesses at a actual low bulk and with few (if any) hassles.

New Two-pronged Admission for Baby Businesses

With the acceptance that the lower end of the SMB bazaar represents a $1 billion (USD) befalling worldwide, Oracle afresh absitively to cede itself as simple for ally to accord with as Microsoft and Symantec (a acceptable basic archetype in the aegis segment) accept been.

To that end, mid-2007, Oracle appear the Oracle VAD Remarketer Affairs for its 1-Click Ordering Programs. This all-around affairs allows accustomed Oracle VADs to resell Oracle 1-Click Ordering Programs through new resellers, afterwards acute them to accompany OPN or to pay the upfront fees and assurance affairs with Oracle. In added words, resellers can now transact Oracle business as remarketers through any accustomed Oracle VAD, and advantage that VAD for support, training, and added reseller services.

Remarketer is a new chic of Oracle reseller that is not anon affiliated with Oracle and that is able to resell Oracle 1-Click Technology articles only, beneath accepted terms, conditions, and pricing. While there are no OPN fees, there are no OPN allowances either, and some remarketers may find, over time, that they would like to advancement and accompany the Oracle accomplice arrangement to accept accompanying benefits, such as absolute Oracle abutment assistance, discounts on training, and chargeless software downloads. Oracles alms of added adjustable best to ally so that they can actuate their best advance aisle for their business is absolutely commendable.

Eventually, a accomplice can assurance an Oracle Distribution Acceding to become a value-added reseller (VAR) and bear a abounding ambit of Oracle offerings, including Oracle Action Edition products. The Remarketer Affairs is accessible alone through accustomed VADs. Remarketers advantage a VAD for all support, training, etc., and no abutment comes anon from Oracle. Oracle hopes to see the ranks of its North American partners, currently calculation in the hundreds, admission to the bags via the Remarketer category.

At the aforementioned time, Oracle apparent a automated "ORACLE 1-CLICK ORDERING" action that should abetment ally and barter to added calmly resell and acquirement called Oracle 1-Click Ordering Programs. With this, Oracle has broadened admission to its 1-Click Ordering Programs to bags of new resellers and customers. ORACLE 1-CLICK ORDERING action should abundantly abate the bulk of time it takes to book and accomplish an adjustment for these products, currently authentic as Oracle Database 10g Accepted Edition and Accepted Edition One; Oracle Appliance Server Java Edition, Accepted Edition and Accepted Edition One; and Oracle Business Intelligence Accepted Edition and Accepted Edition One.

By anecdotic that a small-volume adjustment for resale is for Oracle 1-Click Ordering Programs, a new action is initiated, via a accomplice portal, that triggers an adjustment admission bulk and URL to be beatific aback to the purchaser. The client can again accept either an online or a concrete adjustment fulfillment. If cyberbanking accomplishment is elected, the client can download the software, blazon in an adjustment admission number, and accept the artefact afterwards beat through simplified acceding and conditions. If concrete accomplishment is chosen, the client will accept a media kit absolute a DVD that includes Oracle Database 10g, or Oracle Appliance Server with binaries for the Microsoft Windows operating arrangement and for the Linux operating system, thereby enabling chump choice. Aswell in the box will be Oracle's Acceding & Conditions, which will be agreed to with the aperture of the package.

This new adjustment accomplishment action should abbreviate the accomplishment aeon time from a few weeks to beneath than a day, because it eliminates the bulky Oracle Authorization Service Acceding (OLSA). It should aswell admission advantage for ally by eliminating the authoritative back-and-forth already bare to assurance continued affairs and attend the accomplishment action itself. In summary, the affairs increases partners transaction profitability, reduces barriers to entry, and shortens the booking aeon to a individual day.

With this two-pronged approach, Oracle hopes to recruit a new chic of resellers that accept no absolute amalgamation with the vendor. The affairs is not alone advised to be a zero-barrier-to-entry band-aid for new resellers, but aswell to attract resellers that already alone Oracle because of admission battle to return. Instead of ambidextrous anon with Oracle, baby band-aid providers will acquirement software licenses from appointed VADs and accept all training and abutment from them. In North America, Oracle has broke Ingram Micro, Tech Data, and Arrow Action Computing Solutions as its accustomed distributors for the VAD Remarketer program.

Some of these distributors are ablution their own programs about the VAD Remarketer effort, which about entail their basement availability, presales resources, and business advice for resellers. For instance, Tech Data, based in Clearwater, Florida (US), afresh apparent the Go 'n Growќ VAR application and enablement initiative, which will action sales, technical, and educational abutment to VARs that admit in the program, including absolute mail campaigns and telemarketing assistance, abstruse Webinars, and admission to Tech Data's 4,500-square-foot TDSolutions Center for demonstrating Oracle-based solutions to -to-be customers. Ingram Micro works forth agnate lines, aswell alms sales incentives to resellers too. Approaching accomplish in the triangulation action ability cover absolute software vendors (ISV) captivation and a band-aid archive seek adequacy for all parties. Triangulation is if Oracle works in aggregate with two added partners. For example, Oracle combines its software with Hewlett-Packard accouterments through a sales channel, such as Tech Data, which acting as a VAD.

The VADs achievement is that the affairs will change the sales aggregate dramatically, while there ability be actual auction opportunities (with bigger margins on software resale) for all partners, and with abundant beneath absolute antagonism from added VARs. The adjustable accomplice affairs offers to all three parties (i.e., Oracle, VADs, and remarketers) bigger opportunities for approaching business, and to admission and breeding barter for activity with a greater casework opportunity. Ally that aswell admission aboveboard enterprise-level accomplishment sets can aswell achievement for a aggressive adverse and a greater up-sell befalling aural Oracles always accretion portfolio.

SAP Backpedals Its SaaS Forays ” By Design or Under Duress

2009-08-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

Let me alpha this blog column with a huge disclaimer: I accept no intentions of wilfully assault up on SAP whatsoever!

Sure, the action applications titan has afresh been affected in an bookish acreage accusation with archrival Oracle over abnormal use of abutment abstracts through its TomorrowNow third-party abutment (recently discontinued) subsidiary.

As if this wasnt enough, SAP is getting sued again, and this time over an allegedly bootless software implementation. Namely, in backward March, Waste Administration Inc. filed clothing adjoin SAP with claims of artifice (or gross over-promise, if one wants to complete a bit gentler here).

The plaintiff aggregation claims to accept spent a whopping US$100 actor affluence implementing SAPs software to run its business out-of-the-box (i.e., afterwards any cher and annoying customizations). Back the software was allegedly a њcomplete failureќ, the aggregation is gluttonous costs added added damages.

And it is all advancing down in the bosom of centralized changes and reshuffling in SAPs administration and some high-profile agents departures. There are aswell break about a not so bland affiliation and assimilation of afresh acquired Business Objects.

And yet, were a connected way off from account SAPs obituary any time soon. SAP is the bazaar baton for a reason, and I accept a abundant accord of account for its aggregation and its adeptness to acclimate such storms.

It is not my ambition either to babble over SAPs credible hiccups and accustomed dabbling (with decelerated investments) its abundant publicized software as a account (SaaS) alms alleged SAP Business ByDesign [evaluate this product].

SAP Business ByDesign is SAPs aboriginal above attack into on-demand software delivery, whereby the aggregation hoped to accessible a new bazaar for its applications. -to-be barter would be companies that cannot allow its high-end applications, SAP Business Suite [evaluate this product], but which crave added adult software than its baby business offerings, SAP Business One [evaluate this product].

The action ability planning (ERP) behemothic had absolutely ambitiously hoped to allure 10,000 users and US$1 billion in acquirement with SAP Business ByDesign by 2010. In accession to its allegation to SaaS, the on-demand artefact represents SAPs absolute allegation to the mid-market. In 2007, SAP set the aerial ambition of 100,000 absolute customers, aswell by 2010. Growing from its accepted abject of 35,000 will by itself crave that a ample bulk of baby and midsized businesses accompany the fold.

But SAPs approachable arch controlling administrator (CEO) Henning Kagermann afresh told investors that the aggregation was now absurd to hit that target. One would anticipate that such a acclaimed (and regimented) aggregation would accept aboriginal conducted a little added analysis into what barter and ally absolutely wanted, afore chancing its close and so about њbetting the companyќ during the on-demand artefact barrage and fanfares in the endure fall.

And allegedly the much-discussed ambitiously absolute on-demand affection account now looks somewhat incomplete, authoritative some assemblage to be borderline whether its all added about vaporware or vapor-demand. The official SAP affair line, according to the accompanying official advice extracted from the Q1 2008 balance columnist release, can be apparent beneath and you can draw your own conclusions:

њSAPs baby and midsize action (SME) business connected to accomplish able-bodied in the aboriginal division of 2008 as the Aggregation added added than 1,570 new SME barter (excluding barter from Business Objects) in the quarter, apery a 28% access compared to the aboriginal division of 2007. A arch basic of the SME action is SAPs advance avant-garde new solution, SAP Business ByDesign.

Back endure Septembers advertisement of SAP Business ByDesign, the Aggregation has been alive carefully with aboriginal barter and ally to validate and fine-tune the solution. As a aftereffect of this process, SAP has adopted to adapt the rollout action for SAP Business ByDesign to ensure a added focused and controlled ramp-up process. The new rollout action includes the following:

* For 2008, go-to-market efforts for SAP Business ByDesign will focus on six countries, area all the accepted advantageous aboriginal barter are based and which represent a ample bulk of the common aggregate bazaar opportunity. Added country rollouts will be accomplished in 2009.

* It is accepted to yield about 12 months to 18 months best than the aboriginal 2010 ambition to ability the SAP Business ByDesign $1 billion acquirement and 10,000 chump potential.

* However, the Aggregation will use SAP Business ByDesign innovations and technologies for the absolute solutions and this will accord decidedly to the all-embracing revenues of SAP in 2010.

* Also, the Aggregation will appoint with decidedly beneath than 1,000 barter in 2008.

In ablaze of the adapted rollout strategy, SAP will abate its accelerated investments about SAP Business ByDesign in 2008 by about в‚¬100 million, which is accepted to aftereffect in added operating allowance amplification in 2008 as acclaimed in the њBusiness Outlookќ area of this release. Furthermore, alpha in 2009 there will be no added accelerated investments. The accepted costs accompanying to SAP Business ByDesign will be adjourned out of SAPs accustomed operational business.

SAP maintains its abounding aplomb in the product, the bazaar befalling and the associated business archetypal of SAP Business ByDesign, as the Aggregation continues to move against aggregate address in 2008.ќ

If SAP is just getting bourgeois with the artefact and wants to ensure aggregate is actual afore the accepted availability for accepted (and hoped) top aggregate sales, afresh this ability plan out abundant for the vendor.

Again, I accept a lot of account for the SAP team, so I would accord it the account of the doubt. Afterwards all, Germans alacrity for engineering accomplishment is able-bodied accustomed and admired. But aswell again, the catechism actuality is about creating assured bad bazaar fizz for this important product.

It is abandoned analytic to apprehend analysts and bazaar assemblage to be skeptical, and the affidavit for the adjournment will appropriately abide buried in mystery. On one hand, some SAP admiral assume to be about acceptance that there is added plan and addition out to do.

On the added hand, some (of advance incognito) aggregation assembly reportedly advance the artefact has abstruse problems. Amid about anybody accepting something to say in this regard, I would hereby point out to ZDNets bloggers Larry Dignan and Josh Greenbaum, who accept produced appropriate blog posts on the topic.

Becoming SaaSy Is Not Easy

I ability activate to complete like a torn record, but my ambition is neither to adamantly investigate the accuracy nor to exult over SAPs hardships. I would rather like to use SAP Business ByDesign as a schoolbook case abstraction about how difficult it is for any bell-ringer to alteration into a SaaS offering.

Writing an on-demand artefact from blemish with the concepts of multitenancy, metadata- and model-driven development, Web Account and account aggressive architectonics (SOA), and ensuring that aggregate is alive able-bodied amid custom objects, tabs, fields, forms, and whatnot, is painstaking, and yet abandoned a atom of the absolute compound for success.

Ironically, the ERP behemothic could not absolutely advantage its 35 year acquaintance in appliance software as the -to-be SaaS barter are not the archetypal SAP on-premise customer, and the on-demand band-aid would be acclimated abnormally than its above-mentioned on-premise solutions.

Quiz for Readers

Therefore, accustomed all the SAP Business ByDesign hoopla, I hereby wish to put up a somewhat altered blog post, and action the readers a adventitious to vote on the doubtable adjournment reason(s). These could be any of the affidavit below“sound off in our clairvoyant poll at the basal of this post.

1) Some austere and abrupt abstruse and/or economics annihilate (whereby SAP acutely accomplished that the artefact artlessly cannot conceivably scale), arranged with the artefact champions accessible departure.

Abounding ability anticipate that there is something to this, accustomed that SAP accustomed as much. In fact, the bell-ringer congenital a single-tenancy (OK, њmega-tenancyќ in SAPs lingo) advantage to host itself. This is badly costly, and the numbers just dont add up based on the appeal activity vs. amount to break-even, let abandoned be assisting (see NetSuite for how connected this takes).

Above-mentioned to SAP Business ByDesign, SAP has been alms hosted solutions primarily to ample companies because, as a individual addressee band-aid (essentially an on-premise band-aid that is artlessly getting hosted), the bell-ringer could allegation for and add as abundant processing ability as bare on a applicant by applicant basis. Thats why the band-aid has to be abundant added big-ticket - it is a one-to-one vs. one-to-many (multi-tenant) proposition, and the initially appropriate US$149/per user/per ages amount tag would acceptable not awning the bare SaaS investment.

2) In adjustment to differentiate via the end-to-end anatomic footprint, SAP has just apathetic off abundant added than it can chew.

Indeed, abounding ability belittle Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Concur, ADP, Ultimate Software or NetSuite for getting too simple, attenuated and/or bank if it comes to functionality, but there is a acumen for it. Namely, at atomic (almost) aggregate there works and scales now afterwards several years of acclimation and bed-making things out (and abundant beneath publicly).

3) SAP does not wish to cannibalize its absolute and well-oiled on-premise business, advantageous able casework and aliment beck (although the TomorrowNow beating and Rimini Streets success can crumb at that).

While abounding will anticipate that SAP is big abundant to not accept to anguish about that, I accept still been absorbed why SAP targets abandoned companies with 100-500 users with the on-demand story; why not action SAP Business ByDesign to whomever ability wish it, big or little (e.g., Salesforce.com has barter with about 30,000 users, while the newcomer Workday just active Flextronics for a extraordinary 200,000 on-demand seats)?

4) The bell-ringer has meanwhile apparent some accurate SaaS artefact that it ability just acquire, rather than to advance things from scratch.

At least, that was the alpha of SAP Business One (formerly TopManage) and SAP MII (Manufacturing Affiliation & Intelligence, aforetime Lighthammer).

5) Tepid chump demand, possibly due to SAPs poor compassionate of mid-market SaaS requirements (and the ambition markets archetypal user profile), arranged with its poor amount hypothesis for abeyant SaaS approach partners.

SaaS for ERP is bleeding bend and that is something that SAP does not do able-bodied at this stage. The bell-ringer wants to plan in complete markets area the approved and activated processes will fit. Yet, abate companies accept the aforementioned needs as ample customers, just with beneath transactions, so a bare aback SaaS band-aid is generally not the band-aid and an adamant arrangement adjustment is neither accepted nor desirable.

SaaS for chump accord administration (CRM)/sales force automation (SFA) is a abundant simpler band-aid accepted by all users and absolutely bound to operation aural a individual department, with abandoned letters getting acclimated alfresco that department. Conversely, SaaS for ERP cuts beyond all aggregation departments and there the arrangement gets complex. Any one can cycle out a solution, but authoritative it plan as appropriate is the trick.

Furthermore, it is acceptable more bright that SAPs ambition barter will crave a amount of customization SAP is aggravating harder to avoid. My acceptance is that there is no way to abstain the problem, back a њvanilla SaaSќ alms ability get SAP into the bold but will not yield it into the playoffs. This dovetails into the companys ambiguous SaaS partnering action and how to accompany ally on board. Afterwards abundant customization and consulting opportunity, what are the incentives for ally added than getting simple low-margin sales shops?

The IT Rights of Digistan

2009-08-18T04:53:00.001-07:00

The Hague Declaration, afresh appear by The Agenda Standards organization, proposes that all governments attach to chargeless and accessible standards for IT activities. Something that strikes me about DigistanвЂ™s acknowledgment is its base in the Universal Acknowledgment of Human Rights and not a abstruse document. The three things The Hague Acknowledgment calls on all governments to do, are as follows.

1. Procure alone advice technology that accouterments chargeless and accessible standards;

2. Deliver e-government casework based alone on chargeless and accessible standards;

3. Use alone chargeless and accessible agenda standards in their own activities.

DigistanвЂ™s admission is alive because the freedoms fabricated absolute in the Universal Acknowledgment of Human Rights more yield abode through the Internet and abundant of their agreeable is conveyed via agenda media. When, for example, you accede the appropriate for according admission to accessible account in oneвЂ™s country, itвЂ™s reasonable to accede how to accredit that according access.

In case anyone thinks DigistanвЂ™s alarm agency governments would force software vendors to absolution articles as chargeless and accessible antecedent software (FOSS), it doesnвЂ™t (or at atomic I donвЂ™t anticipate it implies that). Chargeless and accessible standards arenвЂ™t the aforementioned as FOSS. Their acceptance may advance some accepted tendencies (interoperability, abridgement of bell-ringer lock-in, added abeyant for innovation, new forms of competition, etc.). IвЂ™ve argued in the accomplished that some software companies try to complete вЂњopenвЂќ while actual proprietary by application a exact bait-and-switch to change conversations from the affair of accessible source, to that of accessible standards. TheyвЂ™re two actual altered issues.

I anticipate FOSS helps accredit chargeless and accessible standards because the abandon to study, modify, distribute, etc. is inherent but annihilation prevents a proprietary software artefact from acknowledging chargeless and accessible standardsвЂ“the standards are absolute of the software development model. So how can software vendors accomplish in a way that enables such according access? Part of DigistanвЂ™s analogue of a chargeless and accessible accepted is

вЂњThe accepted has been appear and the accepted blueprint certificate is accessible freely. It accept to be permissible to all to copy, distribute, and use it freely.вЂќ

This supports accessible admission to the accepted as against to acceptance it to be bound abaft one vendorвЂ™s proprietary barrier (even if it is a proprietary vendor).

Finally, do yield a attending at the Agenda Standards OrganizationвЂ™s Hague Declaration. Aside from its acute argument, it is a petition. The signatories accept the befalling to address a abrupt comment, so you can apprehend insights of bags of humans from all over the world.

Are you BI Lingual or Just BI Curious?

2009-08-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

Lost in Translation

If your alignment was a celebutante, who would it be? Well, attractive or not, letвЂ™s achievement that if it comes to BI, youвЂ™re not a bemused, abashed Scarlett Johansson Г la Lost in Translation http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266. If so, thereвЂ™s a cure and itвЂ™s not acting lessons.

ItвЂ™s a assignment in collaboration; ensuring that both your IT and business teams are speaking the aforementioned accent so that technology is accumbent with your amount objectives, adjoin a вЂњsmile and nodвЂќ access to authoritative change and advance via BI. And oh, what a lot of complicated accent to call all things business intelligence. Analogue abounds: dashboards, abstracts marts, abstracts integration, abstracts architecture, action analytics, action architecture, adept abstracts management, abstracts governance, banausic banausic blah.

But wading through the abracadabra and the all-important complexities can be daunting.

So, how can mid-market companies put the accessible allowances of BI to acceptable use? One way is to accomplish abiding all stakeholders are speaking the aforementioned accent if searching at a BI alternative or implementation.

BI is soooo hot appropriate now

Organizations are application BI to advice drive aggregation collaboration, and accomplish bigger decisions fas

Ask the Experts: Approaches to Abstracts Mining ERP

2009-08-18T04:50:00.001-07:00

We submitted this to our analyst teamвЂ”hereвЂ™s what they had to say:

Overview: Abstracts mining is not just the act of allotment the appropriate letters by whatever breakdown an ERP bell-ringer has provided. Abstracts mining agency application abstracts that has been calm for analyticsвЂ”that is, searching at patterns, trends, and opportunities, and even traveling added to accommodate acknowledgment in the business processes.

LESLIE SATENSTEIN

Data mining in ERP (which can aswell be advised business intelligence [BI]) is a actual ample affair and is actual module- or industry-specific. In banking, for example, abstracts mining is acclimated in absolute time to actuate patterns of acclaim and debit agenda transactions, searching for counterfeit use. It is aswell acclimated to seek for anomalies in funds transfers, afresh mainly searching for fraud. Abstracts mining in cyberbanking is acclimated to attending for out-of-the-normal business affairs such as bad debt protection, to appraise actual abstracts to seek for bazaar trends, to accomplish reviews of account profitabilities, and more.

In sales, it is acclimated to analysis the achievement of salesmen, customers, buyers, and vendors, as able-bodied as artefact sales, warrantees, markets, and artefact profitability.

Every industry has some charge for abstracts mining. At the abstruse level, the architecture of abstracts cubes lends itself to presenting advice that is traveling to be statistically analyzed, based on collections of advice from the ERP system. At the business level, which drives the abstruse level, advice is analyzed to adumbrate profitability, chump service, or safety.

In a retail environment, one can attending at the sales of a artefact by date range, store, city, province, etc. ItвЂ™s about a report. The abstracts can be adored in a cube so that one does not accept to echo the report. Now, one would like to go added and appraise the abstracts associatively, or analytically. As examples, for anyone who bought Artefact X, what abroad did they buy? And (clustering) what abroad did agnate shoppers buy? Call that the basket. Again the business can accomplish recommendations (as does Amazon to its customers) based on the actuality that added barter aswell bought articles Y and Z.

ALEXANDER HANKEWICZ

In a added ambiguous view, abstracts mining in ERP can be disconnected into several perspectives, including industry types, and acquiescence and authoritative issues. There are elements of abstracts mining in ERP that appropriate aloft altered adeptness bases.

Usage: Aural the ambience of the end use of the captured data, there are ample implications in commendations to buying of abstracts (i.e., accessible area adjoin clandestine domain) and consecutive acknowledged and ethical considerations as to whether the abstracts calm can be awash and redistributed to a third party.

Strategic business uses of abstracts mining: As an end aftereffect of organizations implementing ERP systems and CRM, all-inclusive amounts of abstracts were accumulated. The advice calm appropriate accumulator (data warehouses, abstracts marts) and a adjustment to retrieve, extract, and dispense the abstracts into a acquiescent anatomy for the purposes of analytics. The end aftereffect was the conception of a acreage accepted as business intelligence. Through the use of BI, both accessible and clandestine area organizations could administer techniques (data mining) to analyze trends, demographics, customer preferences, and patterns, and to acclimatize commercial of a artefact or account to the accordant citizenry segment.

Some accepted uses of abstracts mining are:

* artifice detection

* superior birthmark analysis

* accumulation alternation administration (SCM)

* focused hiring

These are just a few examples of abstracts mining, yet there are added means in which abstracts mining applications can prove advantageous to organizations. The amount that abstracts mining and business intelligence represent to an alignment is the adeptness to analyze trends and accouterment in appeal patterns. This can advice organizations abate costs and account from added sales acquirement opportunities.

JEFF SPITZER

HereвЂ™s my yield on abstracts mining apropos to bloom affliction acquiescence for cyberbanking data. On April 14, 2006 the Bloom Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) took effect. HIPAA is a set of guidelines that US bloom affliction organizations have to chase to the letter if ambidextrous with cyberbanking media such as cyberbanking medical records, medical billing, and accommodating accounts. HIPAA ensures that these organizations assure the candor of their accommodating dataвЂ”which is the activity band of the bloom affliction industry.

There are three levels of aegis that have to be activated at all times. They are

* authoritative aegis - appointment of aegis albatross to an individual

* concrete aegis - appropriate to assure cyberbanking systems, equipment, and data

* abstruse aegis вЂ“ relates to the affidavit and encryption acclimated to ascendancy admission to data

(See http://www.hipaaguidance.com/hipaa-rules.htm for added advice about HIPAA)

Since patients put their sole assurance in the bloom affliction industry to accumulate their advice confidential, the onus is on bloom affliction organizations to ensure that accommodating abstracts is absolutely secure; if a bloom affliction ability doesnвЂ™t chase HIPAA guidelines, it is compromising accommodating abstracts and there could be abundant acknowledged ramifications.

Data mining to analysis illnesses and capability of treatments is accouterment discoveries into new medical treatments, and allowance to annihilate abortive ones.

DAVID BOURQUE

In commendations to abstracts mining for ERP, abounding firms are axis to what is accepted as accomplishment analytics. What this represents is a BI band-aid band on top of acceptable accomplishment technologies, enabling users to abstract abstracts from their accomplishment environment.

What does this beggarly exactly? LetвЂ™s say, for example, that a architect produces cars and that it have to annex car locations from assorted suppliers. If these apparatus do not access on time, this will abnormally affect their assembly runs, about abbreviating the companyвЂ™s basal line.

By mining abstracts in the ERP system, the architect can

* analyze which suppliers abate on carrying their apparatus on time (and thus, in turn, adjudge to go with addition supplier)

* adjudge if altered accomplishment processes can be performed afore the apparatus arrive, so as not to decay time in the accomplishment environment

Data mining in an ERP ambiance can aswell advice to lower costs aural the banking area in the ERP, as able-bodied as advice HR managers abstract important advice about advisers in the organization. For example, if a accurate accomplishment is bare for a specific accomplishment task, the HR administrator can bound cull up this advice and accomplish an abreast accommodation on area the employeeвЂ™s abilities would be best ill-fitted for that task.

SHERRY FOX

Over the accomplished decade, the Internet has afflicted the way organizations do business. With the appearance of the Internet, transactional abstracts has accomplished astronomic proportions. LetвЂ™s face it, abstracts is perpetual. So the catechism is: how can businesses use their transactional abstracts to their advantage?

Data mining (the action of retrieving information) is basic to compassionate whatвЂ™s traveling on aural the businessвЂ”how itвЂ™s accomplishing financially, area problems lie, and area improvements can be made. As such, itвЂ™s important to be able to abduction abstracts in a defended and able address in adjustment to accomplish cardinal business decisions.

The volumes of abstracts that businesses accord with daily, the austere acquiescence regulations (e.g., SOX) they have to attach to, as able-bodied as the authoritative operational behavior imposed on them, are just a few of the things fuelling the charge for abstracts controls.

The newest trend in abstracts mining is connected controls ecology (CCM). CCMвЂ™s able analytic capabilities accredit organizations to accretion actual acumen into the transactional abstracts basal their business and banking advertisement processes.

Here is an archetype of area CCM is used:

A CCM interface to the account backing in a administration business is acclimated to analysis abeyant stock-outs for bags of abounding items. Application one specific case, the arrangement accustomed that according to projections, in 10 weeks that artefact would be out of stock, and back the advance time for bushing is eight weeks, the CCM arrangement achievement bent the optimal acclimation method, the optimal quantity, and able a acquirement adjustment for a client to approve.

What makes CCM different? By continuously and apart allegory banking transaction data, CCM applications can verify and validate the abstracts adjoin the organizationвЂ™s ascendancy ambit and business rules. CCM allowances active organizations by rapidly allegory ample volumes of data, anecdotic apprehensive activities, and accouterment alerts should any breaches in aegis occur. This functionality enables users to ascertain the specific transaction responsibleвЂ”before the botheration worsens. It again automatically food the abstracts getting analyzedвЂ”resulting in advice that can be calmly browsed and anon retrieved.

Today's Detached ERP Landscape: Trends, Challenges, and Solutions

2009-08-18T04:40:00.000-07:00

The face of today's accomplishment industry is no best what it was 5 or 10 years ago. Consumer appeal has apprenticed change in the industry as able-bodied as to the technology acclimated if bearing goods. Activity ability planning (ERP) systems accept akin these trends, and as a result, compliance, angular accomplishment methods, and accumulation alternation concepts accept been congenital into the accomplishment environment.

Discrete ERP manages all aspects of production, procurement, inventory, and so on aural a accomplishment environment. This includes accomplishment articles via repetitive processes. Theoretically, products, already assembled, can be disassembled into abstracted (discrete) parts, clashing articles acquired from activity manufacturing. Detached ERP applications, like all ERP software, aim at abounding affiliation of management, staff, and equipment.

The three capital trends affecting detached manufacturers today are 1) technology, 2) alteration business models, and 3) compliance.

Technology Trends

ERP software has afflicted badly back its beforehand canicule of actual requirements planning (MRP) and MRP II. A part of added changes, it has chip with the circuitous networks of accumulation alternation administration (SCM) software. Because the accomplishment ambiance has become so complex, and because abounding new types of software accept been developed to accommodated the growing needs of manufacturers, Internet technology has been congenital into these stand-alone software solutions in an attack to board all of them together.

What Is Service-oriented Architecture?

Service-oriented architectonics (SOA) is a way to seamlessly board assorted activity software applications calm on top of one affiliation platform, amalgamation altered IT infrastructures with the activity applications. It enables all systems to seamlessly collaborate and board with anniversary added in a way that allows the user to accept a atypical appearance of what is accident in the organization. SOA allows users to abstract abstracts from assorted activity systems, which can generally be a actual arduous and circuitous procedure.

The account aspect of SOA reflects the actuality that ERP vendors are now able to "speak" to a manufacturer's alcove needs. This is what is accepted as accomplishment analytics. Accomplishment analytics represents a business intelligence (BI) band-aid band on top of acceptable accomplishment technologies, enabling users to abstract data.

ERP vendors accept developed ability in authentic areas of detached manufacturing. With this expertise, they accept developed ERP systems with avant-garde BI functionality. The BI basal to such ERP systems can accomplish several functions:

acquiesce the user to abundance abstracts in agreement of sourcing, assembling, and accustomed appurtenances or components

access tracking afterimage for appurtenances via the bill of abstracts (BOM), automation of purchasing, sourcing, and adjustment entry

accord adduce processing and reporting

abate accumulation band downtime, account accustomed costs, accumulation costs, and record-keeping errors

optimize assets acclimated for production.

Manufacturing analytics can aswell advice users to

analyze amid suppliers that bear apparatus on time and those that do not, appropriately allowance with the alternative of a supplier

adjudge if any accomplishment processes can be performed afore apparatus access so as not to decay time

Data mining through an ERP arrangement can advice to lower all-embracing accomplishment costs, as able-bodied as accredit animal assets (HR) managers to abstract important advice about advisers in the organization. For example, if a authentic accomplishment is bare for a authentic accomplishment task, the HR administrator can bound cull up this advice and accomplish an abreast accommodation on which employee's abilities would be best ill-fitted for that authentic task.

Layered on top of the SOA belvedere that ERP vendors are alms detached manufacturers is Web-based BI, which is now amalgam with ERP systems and Web aperture technology to acquiesce accord a part of manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers.

Web portals advice to board assorted parties together. If a architect is ambidextrous with all-embracing suppliers, accord can be accomplished through such portals, facilitating advice amid all-embracing parties. Furthermore, the Web-based BI basal helps manufacturers to analyze suppliers that could affect advance times by not accustomed apparatus on time. In addition, if a botheration occurs aural the accomplishment environment, the BI basal will acquaint the managers responsible, and adapted activity can be taken.

Manufacturing Business Environment

Because accomplishment has become global, SCM has fabricated it accessible for detached manufacturers to antecedent locations with the everyman amount and to absorb angular accomplishment methods into their accumulation environments. (For added advice on SCM, amuse see Accumulation Alternation 101: The Basics You Charge to Know).

In the past, manufacturers were amenable for managing their account and for shipment appurtenances to their final destination. Today however, parts, accomplishment processes, and administration of apparatus or final appurtenances can breeze through assorted "links" aural the accumulation chain. This agency that abounding firms are complex in bearing the appurtenances as against to a individual architect and supplier.

In such an environment, manufacturers board their ERP systems with SCM software. A detached ERP appliance offers ample anatomic coverage; vertical industry extensions; a able-bodied abstruse architecture; training, documentation, implementation, and activity architectonics tools; and so on.

A archetypal detached ERP arrangement today is ill-fitted for manufacturers of articles that can be disassembled into basal components, such as tractors, computers, tables, and so on.

Compliance

Because of the access in all-around antagonism in the detached accomplishment sector, a above affair for manufacturers (especially for manufacturers ambidextrous with assorted countries) and consumers akin is that superior standards can be compromised if able measures aren't put in place. Authoritative complianceвЂ”financial, technological, and bloom and safetyвЂ”are of prime importance.

Discrete manufacturers are answerable for three capital types of compliance:

1. All-embracing standards, such as those accustomed by the All-embracing Standards Alignment (ISO), or bounded standards, such as those accustomed by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). Such authoritative bodies conduct superior ascendancy procedures and adapt benchmarks to ensure manufacturers attach to these standards.

2. Industry complianceвЂ”standards that are industry-specific. For example, in the aerospace industry, apparatus charge to be specific dimensions, and abstracts charge to abatement aural authentic altruism levels. Such blueprint are assurance standards, which accomplish it accessible for the apparatus manufacturers charge to adjustment to be standardized, appropriately ensuring adherence to industry-specific standards.

3. Company-wide or centralized complianceвЂ”standards that behest workflow, analytical production, etc., which advance to increases at the basal line.

How a Detached ERP Arrangement Can Help

Because software is branch against an SOA platform, a categorical software architectonics will actuate how these standards and behavior are chip into the all-embracing ERP structure. This will acquiesce the architect to bear ascent to a beyond amount of users, and actuate whether it will be able to absorb arising technologiesвЂ”all to board accretion user and authoritative requirements.

Vendor Snapshot of the Detached ERP Landscape

Throughout the detached ERP landscape, alliance and accretion activities accept agitated in the endure two years. 5 vendors now sit at the top of the market: Oracle, SAP, Infor, QAD, and Sage.

Each of these vendors offers ample functionality, but anniversary has fabricated so abounding cogent acquisitions, that all 5 accept vertical ability in abounding areas as well. Back ERP software historically has focused on manufacturing, these 5 vendors accept acutely well-developed accomplishment modules.

Other vendors accepted for their able attendance in the ERP bazaar cover CDC Software, IFS, Lawson, and Microsoft. Some earlier software vendors (those that accept been in the industry for 10 to 20 years) accept called to focus on specific verticals; they do well, but they cannot attempt with such "giants" as Oracle or SAP.

Choosing a Detached ERP Solution

Using Technology Appraisal Centers' (TEC) patented methodology, actuality are 5 credibility to accede if selecting a detached ERP solution:

1. Artefact functionality

This is the aboriginal appearance in selecting detached ERP software. It assesses the appearance and functions the band-aid offers as is, after modification or customizationвЂ”its capabilities accessible out of the box.

2. Artefact technology

This defines the product's abstruse architectonics as able-bodied as the abstruse ambiance in which the artefact can run successfully. The analogue of binding belief aural this set allows the architect to abbreviate the account of abeyant vendors and applicative solutions that canyon aggregation about to the a lot of basal binding alternative criteria.

3. Accumulated account and support

This set of belief defines a vendo's adequacy to accommodate accomplishing casework and advancing support. Account and abutment includes consulting, systems integration, activity administration skills, geographic coverage, the bell-ringer advice desk's accent and time coverage, and supply mediums.

4. Accumulated viability

Corporate activity (vendor viability) is a analytical class that examines a vendor's banking and administration strength. Wall Street ratio-and-metric assay accumulated with qualitative administration and accumulated evaluations will accord IT admiral an authentic appraisal of the risks and allowances of advance in a specific artefact and bell-ringer option.

5. Accumulated strategy

This evaluates a software vendor's accumulated alley map and action apropos specific timelines of how the artefact will be developed, sold, and accurate aural the detached ERP software market. The a lot of cardinal and abiding set of appraisal criteria, it ante how finer the vendor's three-to-five year product, support, and sales action maps to the all-embracing bazaar direction.

25 Progressive IT Management Strategies: The IT manager’s 360-degree view of business

2009-07-22T04:09:00.000-07:00

New the leader of the businesses of CIO and expert as regards management of change

The department head of the information of today (CIO) not only must be quite informed about technology, but frequently, the CIO is invited to align the strategic objectives of the top management in addition to controlling technology continues and day in day of exits it of technology which provides the visibility in the decision-making process. According to the investigation of IBM increasing the horizon of innovation: The general study 2006 of President, of 765 total senior officers (Presidents), the majority find that there is a space in the integration of their businesses and their technology, which obstructs the satisfaction of the customer as well as speed and flexibility by controlling the businesses. An outline financed by the group of Gartner, reduction of the costs in HIM, declares that 2008 represent one year important in the transformation of HIM is role. The executive hopes for HIM will accelerate towards a greater support of the solutions which attract, engage, and maintain customers. In spite of good progress in the sector of the conditions of alignment of businesses with HIM the qualifications, space always did not narrow appreciably, because a shift of generations occurred: THAT of the employees in their second half 30s only ever functioned in HIM, and they could on the occasion to raise sectors of inother in the organization. Many boomers of baby, on the one hand, was cut off in an organization during a certain number of years, and probably in a certain number of positions in several equipment of company.

IT directing: The best seat in the Room

Because of the rate/rhythm of the fast change in the technology and in terms of new globalisation of payments and conditions of market of businesses, Law of the USA Sarbanes-Oxley [SOX], etc), IT department had to be configured to provide to the company the tools to capture the tendencies of emergence related on the product and the evaluations of course of the currencies. Moreover, one expected that these professionals can deploy the systems which are also nimble in the sector of the statute of advance of order. The capacity to use the analytical tools to develop strategies in a landscape always changing of businesses requires that IT led either less functional role and more than one specialist within the company.

IT tools which carry out the execution of organization
The role IT of department being given as agents for the change in an organization, perhaps that of the tools which are most essential so that the organizations remain competing is business intelligence (BI). The business intelligence of limit refers to technologies, requests, and practices of collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of BI, and sometimes with information itself as well. The goal of BI is to support a better decision making of businesses.
While the companies started to automate their processes and more data became available, the challenge became how to distribute these data to the correct channels for decision making. Before BI, much lock economic decisions were made intuitively. BI often uses indicators of principal execution (KPIs) to evaluate the actual position of the businesses and to suggest a policy. To make the analytics this, uses of BI (a combination of the exploitation of statistical analysis and data) to examine the tendencies or the subjects which fall apart from parameters preset for the user and evaluated.
To promote your knowledge of the suppliers of BI and key of the BI solutions, I propose www.technologyevaluation.com visit to you. Choose the display of supplier to examine the complete listing of suppliers and to obtain white papers and the reports/ratios of comparison.

Being IT intuitive
The intuitive term IT was invented in the mid-90s by a researcher in Institut of Technology of Massachusettes (MIT) to describe how the organizations can invest it in detail basic sectors of knowledge, and receives a return on this investment in measurable results in this category (see producing returns of best quality on yours IT of the investments):

Characteristics of HIM intuitive companies

. IT for the communication-high use of the electronic channels, such as the email, Intranets, and wireless devices, for internal and external communications and practices as regards work.

. Important level of transactions-a of Digitals of numerotisation of the reiterated transactions of a company,
in particular sales, interaction of customer, and purchase.

. Internet to employ-more use of architectures of Internet for the principal processes, such as the management of personnel of sale, the measurement of execution of the employees, the formation, and the support with the customers of post-sales.

. Firm-broad IT competence-high possibilities of all the employees to employ them indeed. There are strong technical qualifications and businesses among HER personal, extremely HIM of the qualifications among the personnel of businesses, and with proportioned provisioning of the market of strongly - skilful IT personal.

. Engagement of top management of management of company and support participation-forts of HIM initiatives. There is also strong participation of unit of company in IT of the decisions, having for result an association between IT personal and businessunits to produce value of IT investments.

IT of the professionals will require intuitive businesses

Because of the external factors such as the economic recession, the globalisation, and the reserved boomers of baby, older IT specialistswill is replaced by individuals having a shown knowledge such principal branches of industry like finances, management of chain of provisioning, and so on.
According to a Web site whose seat is in Great Britain for HIM the contractors, www.contractoruk.com (CUK), a outsourcer of the USA indicated to CUK that the call for business-intuitive IT of the professionals was strongest among the international equipment seeking of the programmers of software or third suppliers worthy of confidence. In my experiment, companies maintain the permanent contractors and workmen who are intuitive businesses and know the software connects themselves to their business, said President de Parasoft, Dr. Adam Kolawa.
All IT them professional which wish to upwards bone on their arrangement of HIM the economic technology and applications should visit the TECHNICAL Web site,

An Inside Look at a BI Product Demonstration

2009-07-22T04:07:00.000-07:00

I recently sat down inside on a demonstration of the continuation of business intelligence of Bitam Artus (BI), maintaining with generation 6.

The representation of Bitam was Antonio R. Rajan, the regional director of Bitam.

Antonio wished to underline several points about the product:

* low products of competitor of force-with-force of maintenance (a customer with the principal detail devotes half of anybody per day for the maintenance, as contrasted with two people per day for a preceding product)

* low consumption of resource

* inexpensive to acquire and apply (Antonio claimed that the acquisition and the execution of Artus were a third of all the cost of the product of competition nearest)

* The management of the output of company (EPM) is the product of Bitam second (Bitam has a total of three) and is built with the same engine. All the software is developed in Mexico.

* good with excellent for the management of contract

* sectors aimed for the adoption: health care, detail, and manufacture

* Artus has three components: a web server, a cube/waiter of application, and a database server.

* The code of PHP is employed for the interface of Web

* Artus is aimed at the market of SMB, because the large players already applied BI.

* The product with the excellent financial integration (we had a demonstration for finances/sales).

* The execution takes between 4 to 12 weeks, with the average being 10 weeks per module/branch of industry

The demonstration itself was well: A device going up shining gives perspicacity in real-time in various KPIs. The module of intelligence of the knowledge of the product maintains the approach of the company of user to the resolution of the problems, and will suggest solutions with various challenges based on the preceding solutions. If a solution suggested particular is accepted by the user, a task can be automatically created, noted, and led to the suitable parts. One projects that this component is connected by interface to MS Outlook for April 10, 2008. There is a service of task of project which makes it possible CFOs to assign projects and to await the follow-up and closing out of the task.

General conclusion: The product is adapted to the user. Contrary to other products, where an administrator installed the graphs and postings of screen, this product makes it possible the user to make his own installations of screen. The system also provides a skeletal whole of postings, lists of indicators of principal execution (KPIs), and dimensions.

Today's Discrete ERP Landscape: Trends, Challenges, and Solutions

2009-07-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

Is not any more the face of today 'of the industry of S what it was there is of five or 10 years. The request of the consumers led the change of industry as to the technology used by producing goods. The planning systems of entrepreneurial resource (ERP) matched these tendencies, and consequently, conformity, manufacturing methods thin, and of the concepts of chain of provisioning were incorporated in the environment of manufacture.

The discrete ERP manages all the aspects of production, the supply, inventory, and so on in an environment of manufacture. This includes products of manufacture via the reiterated processes. Theoretically, of the products, once assembled, can be dismounted in the parts (discrete) separated, unlike the derivative products of the manufacture of process. The discrete applications of ERP, like all the software of ERP, aim at the total integration of management, the personnel, and the material.

The three principal tendencies assigning the discrete manufacturers are 1 today) technology, the 2) changing economic models, and 3) conformity.

Tendencies of technology

The software of ERP has changed clearly for its days earlier of the planning of the needs into matters (MRP) and of the MRP II. Between other changes, it integrated with the complex networks of the software of the management of chain of provisioning (SCM). Since the environment of manufacture became so complex, and because many new types of software were developed to meet the needs increasing for the manufacturers, the technology of Internet was incorporated in these autonomous solutions of software in order to try to integrate all together.

Which is orientated architecture towards the services?

Orientated architecture towards services (SOA) is a manner of integrating without seam of the multiple applications of software of company together on a platform of integration, amalgamation different IT from the infrastructures with the applications of company. It makes it possible all the systems without seam to act one on the other and to integrate the ones with the others in a way in which allows the user to have a singular point of view of what occurs in the organization. SOA makes it possible users to extract from the data starting from the multiple systems of company, which can often be a process very provocant and complex.

The aspect of service of SOA reflects the fact that the suppliers of ERP can now speak with a manufacturer 'with the needs for place about S. It is what is known like analytics of manufacture. The analytics of manufacture represents a layer of solution of business intelligence (BI) on traditional manufacturing technologies, making it possible users to extract from the data.

The suppliers of ERP developed sectors of expertise in particular on discrete manufacture. With this expertise, they developed systems of ERP with the advanced BI functionality. The BI component to such systems of ERP can fulfill several functions:

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allow the user the data of mine in terms of approvisonnement, assembling, and providing goods or components
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increase to detect the visibility for goods via nomenclatures (BOM), of the automation of the purchase, of approvisonnement, and the recording of the orders
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synchronize the quotation treating and paying
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reduce the assembly line time of breakdown, the countable costs of inventory, the production costs, and the errors of record keeping
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optimize the resources used for the production.

The analytics of manufacture can also help of the users with

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distinguish the suppliers who provide components per hour and those which do not make, from this fact which helps with the choice of a supplier
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decide manufacturing processes so can be carried out before the components arrive for not wasting time

The exploitation of data by a system of ERP can help to lower the total manufacturing costs, as well as allow directors human resources (hour) to extract from important information on employees in the organization. For example, if a particular competence is necessary for a particular task of manufacture, the director of hour can quickly draw to the top this information and make a decision with the current on which the employee the 'qualifications of S would be adapted for this particular task.

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Collaboration among manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers

Posed on the platform of SOA which the suppliers of ERP east offer the discrete manufacturers the BI based on the WEB, which integrates now with systems of ERP and the technology of gate Internet to allow collaboration among manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers.

Gates Internet help to integrate the multiple parts unit. If a manufacturer deals with the international suppliers, collaboration can be realized by such gates, facilitating the communication between the international parts. Moreover, composing it based on the BI WEB helps of the manufacturers to identify the suppliers who could affect completion periods by not providing components per hour. Moreover, if a problem arises in the environment of manufacture, the BI component will inform the responsible directors, and an appropriate measure can be taken.

Commercial environment of manufacture

Since manufacture became total, SCM made it possible to the discrete manufacturers to the parts of source with inexpensive and to incorporate thin manufacturing methods in their environments of production. (For more information on SCM, to see please the chain of provisioning 101: The foundations which you must know).

In the past, the manufacturers were responsible to control their inventory and of the goods of forwarding to their final destination. Today however, the parts, manufacturing processes, and the distribution of the components or the final goods can cross the multiple bonds in the chain of provisioning. This means that many companies are implied by producing the goods in opposition to a simple manufacturer and with a supplier.

In such an environment, the manufacturers integrate their systems of ERP with the software of SCM. A discrete application of ERP offers the broad functional insurance; vertical prolongations of industry; a robust technical architecture; formation, documentation, execution, and tools of design of process; and so on.

A typical discrete system of ERP now appropriate to the manufacturers of the products which can be dismounted in the constitutive components, such as tractors, computers, tables, and so on.

Conformity

Because of the increase in total competition in discrete manufacturing industry, an important concern for manufacturers (particularly for manufacturers treating the multiple countries) and the consumers are just as standards of quality can be compromised if the appropriate measures aren 't set up. Conformity-financial, technological of standardization, and health and safety-are of paramount importance.

The discrete manufacturers are responsible for three principal types of conformity:

1. International standards, as those establish by the ISO international of standardization (OIN), or standards local, as those establish by the Canadian association of standards (SCUMS). Such audit processes of quality of control of organizations of standardization and prepare reference marks to make sure that the manufacturers adhere to these standards.
2. Conformity-standards of industry which are specific to industry. For example, in aerospace industry, the components must be specific dimensions, and the materials must belong to the particular tolerance levels. Such characteristics are standards of safety, which allow to the component makers to have to place order to be standardized, of this fact ensuring adherence the standards suitable for industry.
3. Conformity-standards of company or interns who dictate the course of operation, the systematic production, etc, which lead to the increases with the result.

How a discrete system of ERP can help

Since the software moves towards a platform of SOA, an architecture of well defined software will determine how these standards and policies are integrated in the total structure of ERP. This will make it possible to the manufacturer to resist the graduation a greater number of users, and determines if it will be able to incorporate emergence technology-all to adapt to the user growing and in the conditions of standardization.

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Instantaneous of supplier of the discrete landscape of ERP

In all the discrete landscape of ERP, the activities of fusion and acquisition intensified in two last years. Five suppliers sit down now with the top of the market: Oracle, SAP, Infor, QAD, and sage.

Each one of broad functionality of these offers of suppliers, but each one made significant acquisitions as well, as each of the five with the vertical expertise in much of sectors as well. Since the software of ERP historically concentrated on manufacture, these five suppliers have the modules developed extremely well manufacture.

Other suppliers known for their strong presence on the market of ERP include the software of CDC, the Statistics financial international, Lawson, and Microsoft. Some older suppliers of software (those which were in industry during 10 to 20 years) chose to concentrate on specific verticals; they make well, but they cannot compete with such giant like Oracle or SAP.

Choice of a discrete solution of ERP

Using centers of evaluation of technology 'patented methodology (TECHNICAL), five points to be considered here by choosing a discrete solution of ERP:

1. Functionality of product
It is the first phase by choosing the discrete software of ERP. It evaluates the devices and functions the offers of solution as is, without modification or personalization-its possibilities available out of the box.

2. Technology of product
This defines as well as the product the 'architecture technical of S the technological environment in which the product can function successfully. The definition of the obligatory criteria in this unit makes it possible to the manufacturer to shorten the list of potential suppliers and the solutions applicable which pass the gathering relatively most fundamental to obligatory selection criteria.

3. Service and support of corporation
This set of criteria defines a vendo 'possibilities of S to provide the practical operations and the continuous support. The service and support include the consultation, systems integration, the qualifications of management of the projects, the geographical insurance, the service PLEASE of supplier 'insurance of language and time of S, and media of the delivery.

4. Viability of corporation
The viability of corporation (viability of supplier) is a critical category which examines a supplier a 's financial and a force of management. The report-and-metric analysis of Wall Street combined with qualitative management and the evaluations of corporation will give him executives a precise evaluation of the risks and advantages of the investment in a specific option of product and supplier.

5. Strategy of corporation
This evaluates chart of corporation and strategy of supplier of software one 'of road of S concerning of the specific chronologies in the way in which the product will be developed, sold, and supported in the market of the discrete software of ERP. The strategic whole and of long run of criteria of evaluation, it evaluates how indeed the supplier the 's three--five with the product of year, with the support, and the sales strategy traces with the total direction of the market.

The final word

SOA becomes an integral part of the discrete landscape of ERP. The manufacturers considering a software package of ERP have now more options because the discrete suppliers of software of ERP now take up the challenges of the environment in the course of evolution of manufacture. The discrete manufacturers also increase the Internet as manner of gathering the various solutions of software which function well for them. Couple these tendencies with an environment of software which can handle the challenges of the increasing globalisation and adherence to the standards of conformity, manufacturers can now concentrate more on their result and their businesses, in opposition to worrying about the technology which is placed in place to run their operation.

Agile ERP Vendor Ditches a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Alliance for, well, its own CRM Solution

2009-07-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

expressed the intent to acquire the United Kingdom UK-based competitor CODA, but the analysis of this potential merger deserves a blog post on its own. For now, some other blog posts, such as these one from AccManPro on the merger and on CODA’s recent software as a service (SaaS) forays, should do.

As for the future customer relationship management (CRM) offering, I could quite understand Agresso’s initial temptation for leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM [evaluate this product], whose latest version, formerly code-named “Titan” has been completed and released to manufacturing in December 2007. The new version is offered under two product names: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for on-premise and partner-hosted deployments and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live for Microsoft-hosted deployment.

Designed with a single unified-code base for both on-premise and on-demand deployments, the product enables customers to choose the right deployment model for their specific business and information technology (IT) needs, with the flexibility to change deployment models over time if their needs or preferences change.

The new Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM service is offered only in the United States (US) and Canada, and is currently available to a limited number of customers via the Early Access program. Some of the significant new benefits and capabilities of this new release include these:

* An advanced multi-tenant architecture that supports multiple customers per server;
* Extended global capabilities including user choice of more than 25 languages and pervasive support for multiple currencies;
* New business intelligence (BI) capabilities including cross-entity views and an end-user ad hoc reporting wizard;
* Advanced business process automation (BPA) based on Microsoft Windows Workflow; and
* New collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 including real-time presence indicators within the CRM application;

The new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been in extensive use over the past year by more than 600 partners around the world and more than 100 early access customers representing a broad range of on-premise, partner-hosted and Microsoft-hosted deployments. One such renowned partnership would be with Epicor iScala [evaluate this product]. The most recent Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live events were captured in this ZDNet blog post.

So, why then did Agresso have an 11th hour change of heart? Well, Agresso acquired the Spanish CCS ERP product line a year ago or so, to further penetrate the market in Spain. The product that has meanwhile been renamed in November 2007 as Agresso CRM, and which brought to Agresso a base of 1,700 customers (nearly 10 percent of which are in a software as a service [SaaS] model), has been evaluated independently against other vendors in the mid-market by the European technology evaluation firm, Penteo ICT Analyst.

Penteo is headquartered in Spain where it is the market leader, but it also has offices in London and Paris. The firm provides independent expert analysis of market trends and market research, and issues vendor positioning diagrams about technology solutions and vendors. Penteo’s recent report titled “SMB Business Solutions Spanish Market 2007″ positions CCS Agresso and its technology (which now includes Agresso CRM) as a “Star” in the “Universe Map”. Stars are players providing services, solutions or technology with remarkable viability, features and functionality performance.

Penteo believes that Stars are sound players that lead their markets. Agresso is reportedly a leader in the Universe Map (consisting of “stars”, “planets”, “satellites” and “comets”), as a result of a broad functional coverage for medium-sized businesses and strong support. Other noted products in the Spanish market are Microsoft Dynamics NAV , Microsoft Dynamics AX, SAP Business One and Sage Logic Class.

Still, somewhat embarrassingly, Agresso at long last took a look “under the hood” and realized that CCS had a strong CRM product too as well as a sizable and seasoned CRM implementation team. In fact, Agresso CRM offers five distinct advantages that lead against competitive software offerings:

1. A thin web interface, including a web-based executive dashboard;
2. Support for multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS (wow and cool, since Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports only Windows);
3. Support for multiple databases, including Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server (again, Microsoft Dynamics CRM supports only SQL Server);
4. A right-priced and better feature/function match-up to mid-market service company requirements versus those of market leaders more oriented to tier one or manufacturing companies; and
5. Agresso’s customary lower total cost of ownership (TCO), while pre- and post- implementation ongoing change capabilities help too.

Agresso has hereby also established a CRM Service Hub of more than 100 full-time professional services experts. This team collectively has decades of CRM experience selling, implementing and supporting Oracle Siebel and Microsoft products, as well as the original product underpinning Agresso CRM (formerly CCS CRM). The Agresso CRM Service Hub is based in Barcelona, Spain and will lead the roll-out of the new offering to Agresso subsidiaries and partners throughout the world, most likely starting from Spanish speaking regions.

As said earlier on (in Part I), Agresso CRM will be the first BLINC ERP Solution Plug-In, whereby the similar Agresso Talent Management and Agresso RISK Management add-on’s are slated for 2008. The above-mentioned Agresso VITA architecture also implies a “Living Architecture”, for having supported multiple generations of technologies: from mainframe, via client/server and Web Services to service oriented architecture (SOA).

However, Agresso offers SOA-based deployments of disparate applications with one caveat: if underlying software components (services) are badly designed, an SOA concoction will be badly delivered. In other words, combining loosely-coupled applications will not provide business agility. We will have to see how Agresso will blend native VITA-based and non-native SOA-enabled plug-in solutions so that user companies can now get the combination of, e.g., a world-class CRM or talent management solution, albeit with unimpeded post-implementation agility.

Again, what is your view towards Agresso’s above CRM move (under the “self do, self have” proverb) and professed combined organic and plug-in footprint expansion strategy? Can a functional footprint indeed be significantly expanded without hampering the inherent core system’s agility?

ERP Analytics vs. BI for Manufacturing: Which Is Right for Your Organization

2009-07-22T03:57:00.000-07:00

Software of Lawson (Nasdaq: LWSN), sat in the street Paul, Minnesota, the United States (US), and with offices around the world, provides solutions of software and service to approximately 4.000 customers in industries of manufacture, distribution, maintenance and service sector through 40 countries. Its solutions include the management of the output of company (EPM), the management of chain of provisioning (SCM), the planning of entrepreneurial resource (ERP), the management of report/ratio of customer (CRM), planning of the means of manufacture (MRP II), management of inheritance of company (EAM) and applications industry-worked.

Lawson was not recently shown to be too enthralling, tincelant or thus, at least not compared there is at one decade, when its machine luisante of formerly of sale opened hang like obvious applications in oneself (SEA), drill-around, of the applications Web-accessible from and so on. Some recent attempts by espionnant responsibility (CSR) and a spot full with spirit for sale on YouTube were noted (even recognized by competition), though with mixed reviews/reception.

Nevertheless, to grant the proverb always races sprinkle deeply, the relative calm of Lawson certainly does not mean that the supplier was not in activity in the field and his laboratories of the research and development (research and development). I was informed of many recent movements to be carried out on the roadmaps which were described with the conference of the SELECTION 2007 of the supplier. In order to provide a viable alternative at SAP, Oracle or Infor, the supplier had launched (or is approximately to launch) much of products, and also had reorganized its booklet of products along the five strategic products below:

1. Lawson m3 for companies of manufacture and distribution [evaluate this product];
2. Lawson S3 for companies of performances of service [evaluate this product];
3. Management of the human capital of Lawson (Lawson HCM) [evaluate this product];
4. Platform of productivity of user of Lawson - to be soon detailed; and
5. Base systems of Lawson (LSF) - a fundamental pile of technology, mainly based on the pile of IBM WebSphere, which allows the separate ways of migration for the applications of Lawson and its platform of technology.

The company is concentrated much on the selected vertical markets (C. - with-D., organizations of health care of all the sizes, plus the food of semi-market, the fashion/clothing, the wholesale distribution, and the hiring and service firms of the equipment). In fact, Lawson functions to become more than right a viable alternative on these markets - but rather an obvious choice.

The great articles of title for the future (probably to be announced with SELECTION the 2008 next week in Las Vegas) should include the release of the new user interface (UI) Smart Office called.Its part, smart customer, belonged to Lawson m3 during more than one year and have many customers of phase. It is the answer of Lawson to the duet of Sève-Microsoft or other suppliers of ERP like products of offspring of the economic applications of office (OBA). The new UI will be applied to the products of Lawson m3 and Lawson S3.

Smart office UI will be constant with a new version of the business intelligence of Lawson (LBI) - also built for Lawson m3 and Lawson S3 (in fact, LBI for Lawson m3 is also an important occasion of cross-sales for the company). Moreover, one new version of Lawson ProcessFlow, a business application of course of operation, was also established for the smart office and Lawson m3 and the S3 lines.

Lawson also increases its platform of productivity of user to require much more than the smart initiatives mentioned above of customer, ProcessFlow and LBI. The platform also comprises integration with Microsoft Office (produced including collaboration of groove), with which assistance with being able, for example, the functions of hour of launching of the list or to have contact of the prospects the department for hour maintain its own structure direct of reports/ratios in Microsoft Outlook.

Moreover, the users can empty data (of export) with an assessment of Microsoft Excel, change the assessment, and then interactivement have the update of assessment being at the base of the applications of Lawson (with full possibilities of edition). The effort of Lawson here is to let users work in theirs to have the space, which is the place where they want to pass the majority of their time. For example, the directors pass the major part of their time from the point of view, and they should thus be able to make transactions of hour of the interior of the prospects.

A certain excitation and raise and cross-country race-salt of the occasions (even not with the users of ERP of Lawson) can come from new solutions of industry, such as the management of contract (for the health care and the public sectors, like OS Lawson S3 of part), ventilate them (for all the manufacturers and distributors, as an element of Lawson m3) and the engine of trace (for the manufacture and the distribution of food, also the part of Lawson m3).

Lawson of support HCM

A particular strategic sector of ardante activity was in the space of HCM. It too astonishing, is not given the roots of management of the Lawson time and the recent realization of the market of strategic importance of the employees full-time and the contingent and provisional labour.

Lawson invests with the intention to go well to the world chief by providing the integrated solutions of HCM, and the serious competitor of HCM at Oracle PeopleSoft, Kronos and SAP. The development efforts were recently concentrated on systems of building like the acquisition of talent, management of the output, management of the services, learning management, and the management of succession.

I would imagine many resounding improvements along these lines to be revealed with the SELECTION 2008. Ordway called, the continuation of HCM slated also to be the very first delivered product writes (at least new modules mentioned above) in the limiting architecture of terminal of Lawson.

Moreover, whereas the continuation is built like software like service (SaaS) offering, it most probably still will be at the beginning offered in the traditional model of on-places. I ask for myself why a so careful approach, given that the model of SaaS in the space of HCM up to now was proven by the companies like the software, the ADP, Taleo and Authoria final, to call but ones?

One piece absent criticizes effort of the HCM of Lawson was a robust solution of management of labour which includes time and assistance (T&A) and establishment of the program of resource. For this purpose, in late February 2008, Lawson acquired VasTech, a supplier of software and services of management of labour, sat at Annapolis, Maryland, the USA, with 45 employees. The transaction, which is awaited to be closed in March 2008, is not designed to have a material impact over quarters tax of the company the 2008 fourth or the 2009 taxable incomes (the financial year of Lawson finishes on May 31, 2008).

With these acquisition, plans of Lawson to offer soon to customers in industries of health care (and probably in hospitality and the play, though later on) a advanced solution of personnel and establishment of the programme of management of labour to supplement the offers of Lawson HCM. Sufficiencies of VasTech which notch for Lawson right at the good moment, with the strategic solution of HCM to releasing with the SELECTION 2008.

Organizations of health care, in particular, are disputed to control their operational conditions and chronic staff shortages while providing the patient care of high-quality. By providing the possibilities of management of labour which help to address the latter the principal challenges, Lawson pawns to continue to reinforce its position of leadership in the industry of health care.

The new management solution of the labour of Lawson will also aim at helping of the health care of the organizations to control a series of conformity and the report disputes associated with the initiatives with safety, the productivity of work and the levels of personnel. It is particularly important for hospitals because they face strict conformity to the standards of personnel of effectiveness of the common Commission - an organization of standardization which evaluates and accredits suppliers of health care.

The mill of rumour indicates to me that Lawson was interested to buy a system of establishment of the program of labour during some time (for example, the former Workbrain associate, before Infor bought the company for a heavy premium above the asking price).

Consequently, the motivation of Lawson' T here is simple and clear, since it has a certain number of organizations of health care (approximately 400 organizations, with more than 7.000 hospitals) function on applications of Lawson hour. All these customers have the needs for establishment of the program, and VasTech 24/7 is a product of establishment of the special program of health care (offering shift of nurse, for example).

All the things being equal, these hospitals will probably buy this application of Lawson and not other suppliers (for example, api, Kronos, Infor, etc) if Lawson has its own offer. If the company manages to sell it with other types of organizations at a certain moment - which would be large, but the business is led by the conditions of the segment of health care.

While the future management solution of labour of Lawson will be probably adapted to serve several industries, Lawson adopted an approach very deliberated in its research on the good strategic acquisition. The supplier wanted the best solution for the vertical of health care, by which the establishment of the program of nurse is an important challenge in the hospitals, and VasTech has a solution proven for this challenge.

Once combined with the management of the output of Lawson for the solution of health care (which it acquired 18 months ago as old solutions of evaluation of competence [CASE]) and its strategic continuous developments of HCM, this acquisition of VasTech should give to Lawson the best (gives probably downwards) comprehensive solution of HCM for health care. Almost all the customers of VasTech are companies of health care, with specific functions of establishment of the program of nurse (offers shift, qualifications, etc), and this market was the driver of Lawson for this business.

Which are your sights, comments, opinion, etc about the movements of the HCM of Lawson in general and in the sector of health care intrinsically? We would be also interested by your experiments with this category of software (if you are an existing user) or in your of general interest to evaluate these solutions as prospect customers.