Deming wrote, “Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.” By this he meant that business leaders should engage employees positively in continuous improvement. But when it comes to business leaders themselves, fear can be a powerful motivator. And, nowhere is a healthy fear more needed than in ERP implementation.
When implementing new enterprise systems, business process improvement should be done in parallel. Doing all of one before the other—whether process improvement first, or system implementation first—will result in failure. This post explains why.
FinancialForce continues to show strong momentum in the cloud ERP market, and it is building out its product capabilities in interesting ways. In this post, we provide an update on FinancialForce, based on interviews we conducted with its executives at Dreamforce, the annual conference for users of Salesforce.com. We also provide recommendations for buyers considering FinancialForce.
Rootstock Software is an up-and-coming manufacturing cloud ERP provider, built on the Salesforce.com platform. This post provides an update on Rootstock’s progress over the past year in building out its capabilities, including a new initiative for its own native financial applications. We conclude with recommendations for buyers considering Rootstock.
Salesforce.com is proving to be a popular platform for developing ERP systems. In this post, we review the latest developments with Kenandy, one of five ERP providers building on the Salesforce platform. Kenandy stands out as taking a different strategy for selling into large companies, while continuing to target the SMB market as a complete ERP solution. We also provide recommendations for where Kenandy is a good fit for ERP buyers.
Although a requirements template may appear to be a time-saving way to get to a requirements specification, this approach can actually make the project longer and cost more than it should. Moreover, they can actually lead to the wrong ERP system being selected. In this post, we identify the problems with the the use ERP requirements templates and outline a better way for specifying requirements for new ERP systems.
Infor is doing interesting work in its CloudSuite initiative to offer industry-specific solutions deployed on the cloud. But it faces two challenges. First, it must convince a greater share of its 70,000 customers to upgrade to its latest versions. Then, if it does convince them, Infor will need to have the implementation resources trained and available to support those customer migrations. This post sums up the status of these initiatives with recommendations for Infor customers.
With all the talk about smart devices as a new trend, there is one industry where smart devices are very old news: manufacturing. Production machinery has been computerized, not for months, not for years, but for decades. Yet, for the most part, today’s ERP systems do not leverage those smart devices on the factory floor. This post traces the history of connected factory machinery and how they offer a solution to untimely and incorrect transaction data entry in manufacturing systems.
Salesforce.com is not only the industry’s most well-known cloud CRM system. It is also a platform for a variety of other software providers. This post outlines the latest developments with the four ERP providers building on the Salesforce platform: Kenandy, FinancialForce, Rootstock, and AscentERP. We conclude with a caveat for buyers.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that Workday’s ambitions go beyond human capital management and financial management systems. This post, based on briefings at a recent Workday analyst summit, discusses how Workday may become the first Tier I cloud ERP provider.