About Us
December 2010 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns (180 Systems) and Ian Mise (LeadingEdge Payroll Group) – “Ever wondered how your organization stacks up against others in your sector? Here is your chance. At CAmagazine we are conducting our first-ever benchmarking survey — an initiative that should benefit organizations of all kinds and sizes… Benchmarking is a way of comparing your organization’s performance with that of other organizations to expose possible problems and targets for improvement…”
We have just released the Business Process Benchmarking tool. It will allow you to compare efficiency and effectiveness metrics by industry, company size, region and complexity for the following areas in your business.
- General ledger
- Financial reporting
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Accounts payable
- Accounts receivable
- Purchasing
- Order processing
- Inventory control
- Professional services
- HR recruiting
- HR compensation
- Payroll processing
- Payroll compliance
- Workforce management – time and attendance
We don’t have much data collected yet, but by completing the survey, you will be entitled to free detailed analysis as soon as it is available. We will then send you email to let you know when it’s ready.
April 2008 from the Supply Chain Management Review – “…Another important reality is that benchmarking brings a necessary level of objectivity to performance evaluation. The subjective notion that “We think we’re pretty good” isn’t really good enough. That was the trap we fell into at Compaq when it came to order cycle time until the benchmarking told us otherwise. The reality is that self-opinion doesn’t truly matter to customers, who are comparing you against other suppliers…
The biggest hurdle to benchmarking is coming up with standard ways to compare one company’s operations with another’s in order to make “like-for-like” comparisons…”
180 View – Although the article is old, we only just became aware of it. It is an extension of our theme of benchmarking for this month. The article makes a distinction between qualitative and quantitative benchmarking. In qualitative benchmarking, managers compare their techniques to those of similar organizations. They then analyze the differences, looking for opportunities to improve certain processes. Quantitative benchmarking refers to comparing internal key performance indicators (KPIs) to those of similar organizations. The goal is to identify any performance differences and note which processes need to be improved and by how much.
September 20, 2010 from The Enterprise System Spectator – “Over at Computer Economics, we’ve been running a survey for customers of Oracle Applications. We’ve received nearly 100 responses so far, which is enough for us to begin to see some patterns taking shape.
Service and support. There is a lot of dissatisfaction among Oracle customers concerning the quality and cost of Oracle maintenance and support. For example, 48% of E-Business Suite users and 41% of PeopleSoft users express dissatisfaction.
But what really bothers customers is the cost of support: a whopping 63% of EBS users and about half of the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards users say Oracle support costs too much…”
180 View – I have heard similar complaints through the grape vine but thought that what we had heard was just an anomaly. It does not make sense that Oracle or any other vendor would allow their clients to become unsatisfied with service and support. Maybe they don’t know. Or maybe they think their clients will never leave them no matter what.
November 16, 2010 from InfoWorld – “ERP projects are among the most critical efforts IT ever undertakes, as they touch almost every part of essential business operations and are complex technically. Not surprisingly, some fail — spectacularly. Although ERP has been an enterprise focus for a decade, many companies are still embarking on such efforts, and even more are dealing with ERP redos because of mergers and business changes. Here’s what you can learn from the failures of others and put to use on your own ERP projects…”
180 View – The article does not deliver on its title. There are often many reasons for failures as the article says with the following – “John F. Kennedy once said, “Victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.” In the world of ERP projects, the reverse is almost always true: Failure has a thousand causes.” The article is too brief to get into the details and the details are unlikely to be ever revealed.
My view is that it’s not the technology that is the root cause. If I had to boil it down, I would say that it’s the incompetence of the internal team and/or the vendor. The internal team may be hard working and intelligent, but are sometimes way out of their league – they have never done this before and don’t know what they don’t know.
Some vendors think they can apply so called best practice to every situation even when they don’t know enough about the client. This strategy can blow up when best practice does not apply. Other vendors choose short term gains when closing a deal without adequate knowledge of requirements. They then need to scramble to satisfy the client but the costs escalate and projects are delayed. It gets even worse when customizations are required that inevitably break other parts of the system.
October 13, 2010 from The Enterprise System Spectator – “As we all know, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been one of the bright spots in the enterprise systems marketplace these days. The advantages are becoming more widely recognized: lower total cost, faster time-to-benefit, little to no capital expenditure, and less pain in system upgrades…”
180 View – The article talks about the success of SaaS in CRM and HR and that it’s making inroads with ERP. A number of ERP products are mentioned – Plex, NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign, WorkDay, Syteline and Epicor Express. The article suggests that SaaS functionality is catching up to the traditional on-premise products.
December 6, 2010 from Forbes – “Chatter is Benioff’s strategy for getting inside the walls of a company, and spreading beyond the sales group. Easy to use, it’s designed to reach anyone in a company who can profit by talking online to someone else inside. “Your business is tweeting you,” Benioff argues. “A deal just closed: Tweet. Your customer is very upset with you that you have a bug in this product: Tweet. This person just came to your website: Tweet…”
180 View – I am sure there are reasons why some people would want to be tweeted but I would rather not be interrupted with minor details. If it’s important, I would expect to see it in email or get a telephone call. I think some people have too much time on their hands. They also have trouble focusing on one thing at a time.
October 18, 2010 from the Financial Post ·- “…The cloud is simply a way to let people access critical applications to run their business through a Web browser from anywhere,” he says. “There is no reason small businesses can’t have the same tools as larger organizations.”
Running servers and applications can be an expensive proposition for many businesses, he adds. “What cloud does is remove the burden of IT and maintaining applications so businesses can service clients and make money.”
Cloud services can also relieve the security headaches that come with managing in-house infrastructure. “It can be more secure than having an in-house infrastructure, because cloud services are professionally managed and hosted,” … “Providers end up putting a tremendous amount of security that businesses simply couldn’t afford on their own, including biometric lockdowns, fire suppression systems and full replication of data at multiple data centres…”
180 View – It’s true that cloud computing has made it easier for small companies to compete with larger companies. But it does not mean that larger companies don’t want to take advantages of cloud computing. They can do this with a private cloud.
You need the slide show mode to hear the music…
We don’t recommend doing this at home or work.
