Collaboration is the key

August 2008 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – "Have you ever watched a teenager carry on multiple conversations on Facebook? The younger generation seems to instinctively know the value of pooling resources. They tend to share information more easily than their elders do.

At a corporate level, working together toward a common goal is called collaboration. The concept is gaining ground among successful companies, who see it as the cornerstone to improving business process and attaining business goals. Those goals could be anything from completing an annual budget to building an airplane.”

SAP Imposes Single-Tier ERP Support Program

July 16, 2008 from eWeek – “SAP is taking a one-size-fits-all approach to product maintenance, in which customers of all sizes will be switched to an Enterprise Support program regardless of their size or IT budgets.

SAP will start transitioning current customers into Enterprise Support this month at no additional cost, but it will start phasing in pricing for this level of service at the rate of 8 percent per year over the next four years starting in 2009, until it reaches the standard cost of 22 percent of product license fees…

SAP contends that the cost of Enterprise Support is below the average maintenance fees charged by other software companies. Cordrey said that the phased-in price increases will help make Enterprise Support affordable for customers of all sizes.

Enterprise support provides a 24/7 service-level agreement, continuous quality checks, produce support advisories, and advanced support for implementing ERP application enhancements and support packages.”

180 View – We anticipate a backlash on 22% product maintenance from SAP customers. We think that maintenance fees will become one of the more important criteria in selecting a new system. Organizations in the selection process should be evaluating NPV (Net Present Value) over 5 years to make a cost comparison between systems. But make sure that vendors have disclosed all maintenance and support fees, which are sometime charged separately.

What is your ERP solution NOT doing for your organization?

2008 White Paper from Exact Software – “Most organizations have already implemented Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to streamline manufacturing, distribution, and financial processes. However, existing ERP technology has left them frustrated in their efforts to extend the same level of efficiency throughout the entire organization. Valuable information about customers, employees, vendor relationships, andmore is typically locked within silos—fromindividual databases to file cabinets to employees’ desktops. Moreover, traditional ERP systems don’t encompass interactions with outside parties such as customers, suppliers, and business partners. While ERP does a fine job of tracking manufacturing, distribution and accounting processes, businesses need to understand the context behind these transactions to truly maximize efficiency and effectiveness…”

180 View – Although the Exact White Paper does indirectly promote their system, it also contains useful information about ERP trends.

The New Brood of Best-of-Breed

July 1, 2008 from Business Finance – “Today's Best-of-Breed software market offers more to dazzle CFOs than ever before. The pace of innovation is fierce, slackening only when vendors pause to digest their gains after the waves of consolidation that periodically sweep over each sector.

The governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) category, for example, continues to attract new entrants and to generate a bewildering variety of applications for mandates ranging from email retention management to enterprise risk management. John E. Van Decker, research vice president with Gartner Inc., points to a burst of innovation around reconciliations management: “Financial governance software is starting to bring together process-management-type solutions for all of the activities that you need to do before you close the books. These may or may not be managed in larger systems, but you need some type of process to line up these activities and ensure that these things are done...”

Plus, a best-of-breed package can be an attractive option for companies that don't want to take on a mammoth project at this point. Many organizations are “looking for something that can provide incremental steps to value,” Van Decker notes. “We're also starting to see more use of software-as-a-service, where companies may want to do something on a 3-year basis, but with the understanding that by the end of that period they will have implemented a much larger set of applications.”

180 View – You will also find lists of products in this article for Corporate Performance Management (they call it Business Performance Management), Business Process Management, Spend Management, Cash Management, Receivables and Collection Management, Fixed Assets Management, Tax Management, Expense Management, GRC (Governance, Risk Compliance) Management and Project Portfolio Management.

We have also seen that some companies try to save time and costs by taking a best of breed product. This is can be a good strategy as long as there is not excessive integration required.

Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference

July-August, 2008 from Harvard Business Review – “…The mid-1990s marked a clear discontinuity in competitive dynamics and the start of a period of innovation in corporate IT, when the internet and enterprise software applications—like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise content management (ECM)—became practical tools for business. Corporate investments in IT surged during this time—from about $3,500 spent per worker in 1994 to about $8,000 in 2005, according the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). At the same time, annual productivity growth in U.S. companies roughly doubled, after plodding along at about 1.4% for nearly 20 years. Much attention has been paid to the connection between productivity growth and the increase in IT investment. But hardly any has been directed to the nature of the link between IT and competitiveness. That’s why, with help from Harvard Business School researcher Michael Sorell and Feng Zhu, who’s now an assistant professor at USC, we set out two years ago to compare the increase in IT spending with various measures of competition, focusing on three quantifiable indicators: concentration, turbulence, and performance spread…

While it’s true that the tool kit of corporate IT has expanded a great deal in recent years, we believe that an overabundance of new technologies is not the fundamental driver of the change in dynamics we’ve documented. Instead, our field research suggests that businesses entered a new era of increased competitiveness in the mid-1990s not because they had so many IT innovations to choose from but because some of these new technologies enabled improvements to companies’ operating models and then made it possible to replicate those improvements much more widely.

CVS offers a great example. There’s no shortage of people looking to fill prescriptions—or of outlets ready to handle those orders. So CVS works hard to maintain a high level of customer service. Imagine senior management’s concern, then, when surveys conducted in 2002 revealed that customer satisfaction was declining. Further analysis uncovered a key problem: Some 17% of the prescription orders were being delayed during the insurance check, which was often performed after customers had already left the store. The team decided to move the insurance check forward in the prescription fulfillment process, before the drug safety review, so all customers would still be around to answer common questions such as, “Have you changed jobs?” This two-step process change was embedded in the information systems that supported pharmacy operations, thereby ensuring 100% compliance.

180 View – Implementing a new system is a great opportunity to improve business process. The CSV experience is a great example of identifying a problem with the existing system and leveraging the new system to fix the problem. Sometimes the solution is right out of the box or just requires a little tweaking.

A users’ guide to CRM software

July 4, 2008 from ComputerWorld Canada – “Mobility and software as a service are changing customer relationship management and sales force software. Upstart Salesforce.com has made a significant dent in the market, and established vendors of licensed software are playing catchup. SAP AG’s recent alliance with Research in Motion Inc. is the latest development as CRM vendors try to meet customer growing demand for mobility. And user interfaces are evolving to meet the expectations of people who have grown up with the Web…”

180 View – There are a lot more CRM systems than listed in the article. Check out our CRM portal . We only recently launched this site and would appreciate your comments and suggestions in adding additional product and/or VARs.

Sloppy Spreadsheets: Readers Speak Out

June 18, 2008 from CFO.com – One example is “The worst practice that I see every day is sending spreadsheets out to people and not setting up the sheet to print. I received a simple spreadsheet today that, when printed, came out as a three-page portrait, when it should have been a one-page landscape. So after printing the garbage, I had to take time to re-format the entire print function.

I require that my staff format every spreadsheet before it's sent out. I tell them to assume I am forwarding it to the president, and he will just print it.”

180 View – There are a lot more examples of sloppy spreadsheets in the article.

Why Budgeting Fails

2004 reprint from Harvard Business School – “When Jack Welch described the budgeting process as the “bane of corporate America,” he was articulating the frustration of many senior executives and academics who recognize that this annual exercise is rarely justified in today’s fast-changing, highly competitive environment…”

180 View – This older article still applies today. The article describes problems with the budgetinig process and suggests ways to improve it.

Exorcise the Demons That Come Preinstalled

July 24, 2008 from The New York Times – “CALL it junkware. Or call it bloatware or demoware or adware. Computer users denounce it as crapware. It’s the software preinstalled on new Windows computers. (Bloatware is entirely a Windows issue; Macs don’t have such software.) It is there, usually in a trial version, to entice users to try a particular service or buy the full-featured program.

It might be a trial version of security programs from McAfee and Norton, graphics programs from Corel, multimedia applications from Roxio, or offers from Internet service providers like Earthlink or Internet phone service providers like Vonage. Even Microsoft has stripped-down versions of its software, like Office, offered up on the desktop of a new PC.

In other words, marketers are using the computer you just bought as a billboard. The bloatware is there because software makers or service providers pay the manufacturers to install it. Most PC makers, locked in a fierce price war, want the cash to bolster their thin profit margins.

“This stuff is just a headache for consumers. When new buyers turn on their PCs, they’re not expecting to see these buttons and icons, and they become confused,” said Michael Redmond, director of software for the NPD Group, a marketing consulting firm in Port Washington, N.Y. “On the other hand, manufacturers don’t want to turn away that free money.”

180 View – One of these products from Roxio caused me a huge amount of time to get Vista working last year. Getting rid of these programs should also speed up boot-times.

"Star Search"—Talent Management Made Simple

180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – In this article, author Sherry Fox talks about ‘talent management’, the process of attracting, hiring and retaining highly skilled employees for your business.

While the term talent management may be new to you, the problem it addresses is surely not. In fact, as the article points out, a 2007 survey of 500 executives of small and medium-sized companies revealed that talent management is their greatest business concern after revenue.

And from where I sit, it should be. As the article states, “And whether companies are willing to admit it, at the end of the day, it’s their people that are going to make the difference to their bottom line”.

It never ceases to amaze me how much money companies invest in inventory, plant and equipment, and technology, yet how little they invest in human resource management. Over the years, I’ve heard more than one entrepreneur tell me “why should I spend money training my employees on this new software when eventually they’re going to quit and go work for my competitor?” And then they wonder why they don’t see the benefits they expected, and should have gotten, from their new computer system!

A word of caution-some of what this article talks about, like an ITM solution, may be overkill for some companies. But there is plenty of good advice in this article that should be heeded by companies of all types and sizes – for example “companies that tolerate employees who continually underperform-especially in the area of management-can pay the highest price of all”.
And the last paragraph of the article that talks about your “star performers” couldn’t be truer –“letting them walk out the door is like shooting yourself in the corporate foot”.