ERP - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Customise your ERP or adapt to it? What's your strategy?

  If your enterprise has customised your mission-critical ERP systems over the years, your future upgrades will likely be more troublesome and terrifying because the changes can conflict with the patches. On the other hand, if you are running out-of-the-box ERP with little customisation, maybe you're not getting all the important features your business needs.
  So what's a CIO to do? And how do you figure out what to do next if upgrades or replacement are looming in your future?

• Economy still hampering ERP upgrades

  ERP (enterprise resource planning) software investments aren't on this year's agenda for three-quarters of IT decision-makers who responded to a recent Forrester Research study, indicating that the global economic downturn's effects are still lingering.

• How SaaS will impact six key software categories

  As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.

• SAP's not-so-secret weapon: Its own CIO

  Before Oliver Bussmann took the job of CIO of SAP in September 2009, he Googled the terms "SAP" and "CIO" in hopes of finding out about the top tech role as it existed then.

• The trouble with supply-chain best practices

  Best Practices: It's an often overused term that can apply to literally any decision-making process: parenting quandaries, personal finance questions, buying a house, getting a job, or selecting a puppy breed.

• Why SMBs are saying no to ERP rollouts

  At what point in a fledgling company's existence does purchasing an ERP system make financial, operational and technological sense?
  It's a perplexing question that many small and midsize executives who dream of growing their companies face. It often occurs to them when they experience unprecedented growth or a regulatory disaster, and they soon realize that Excel spreadsheets and QuickBooks simply don't cut it for their businesses anymore.

• CMOs and CIOs: Can this relationship be saved?

  A new report from the CMO Council and Accenture on the strategic relations between CIOs and CMOs offers a grim outlook: "Marketing and IT executives do not believe they are highly effective partners, as they struggle to achieve common goals in the race to adopt and keep pace with rapidly evolving digital marketing capabilities," notes the report.

• ERP sticker shock: Maintenance, upgrades, customisations

  "ERP financials" usually refers to the software package that businesses use to manage their general ledger, invoices, purchase orders and the like: Nothing that's terribly exciting, yet those applications are crucial to running any going concern.
  The "financials of ERP," on the other hand, is a topic that can make any CFO (or CEO and CIO) very excitable. The cause? ERP sticker shock.

• The integration challenge

  There are a number of reasons why CIOs don’t realise the maximum benefit or ROI from their ERP systems. These often include reports that the software is difficult to use, only a small number of people in the organisation work with the system, that the implementation takes a lot longer than planned or is more costly than expected.
  However, one of the main challenges that CIOs face with enterprise software today, is the integration challenge. As the number of applications CIOs want to add to their existing ERP system increases, the integration between them becomes ever more complex.

• Companies are wasting less money on ERP

  ERP investments have long held a stranglehold on corporate IT investments. The Great Recession, however, has pushed boards and budgeting committees to examine IT spending like never before. Not surprisingly, ERP's juicy slice of the corporate spending pie has come under closer scrutiny.
  Now, Panorama Consulting Group's 2010 ERP Report, when compared to its 2008 data set, provides some evidence that companies have seen the errors of their ways in managing ERP systems and have taken small, but important corrective actions for the future. (Panorama's data comes from survey respondents at 1,600 organisations that implemented ERP during the past four years.)

• Tips for enterprise software licensing negotiations

  For any business today, purchasing enterprise software ( ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain apps) is probably unlike any other corporate activity.
  "Of all the assets that an enterprise acquires, enterprise software brings with it the most unusual, onerous and restrictive set of constraints," notes Forrester Research VP and principal analyst Ray Wang, in a brand-new report on software licensing best practices.

• How to Win CFO Friends and Influence Business People

  Conventional wisdom and decades' worth of IT project failures and less-than-desirable outcomes tell us that every tech-related investment-from a massive SAP ERP rollout to a small Salesforce.com SaaS CRM deployment-comes with some amount of risk.

• IT investment critical for business growth in economic slowdown

  Results from the latest SAP/EMA Innovation for Growth survey suggest a significant percentage of local firms believe IT has helped their business.
  Sixty-five per cent of respondents say IT is an investment that actively supports their business success, while fifty-three per cent described IT as essential for the smooth functioning of their business. Twenty-nine per cent see it as essential to gaining and maintaining sustainable competitive advantage, while 22 per cent regard it as a primary plank in their growth strategy.

• SaaS ERP suites not quite ready for prime time

  A recent report from Gartner throws a big bucket of cold water on software-as-a-service ERP hype, especially for larger enterprises. Gartner analyst Denise Ganly writes in the SaaS Impact on ERP report that enterprises' dire need for a suite of integrated ERP solutions is not something that SaaS vendors can reliably deliver right now.
  "Because of the complexity of ERP suites, SaaS offerings for administrative and operational functions typically have provided functionality that is confined to one domain, such as sales force automation, or one business process, such as payroll," Ganly writes. "Thus, ERP SaaS suite offerings are still immature."

• Losing the fear factor around open source ERP

  Can open source software find a home in mission critical systems? Based on momentum in the open source ERP market, it's starting to look that way, particularly for IT leaders at midmarket and smaller enterprises.