Inforum 2012 – Specialized by Industry, Engineered for Speed

Inforum is back and bigger than ever ! Inforum 2012 is the only Infor conference and promises to be the must-attend event of the year, with more than 700 educational sessions available. At the conference, April 22 to 25 in Denver, you will be able to:

  • Discover the excitement and momentum of the new Infor
  • Explore the innovations driving the newest products like Infor10, ION, Workspace, CloudSuite, Motion, and InForce Everywhere
  • Test drive the newest products for ERP, SCM, PLM, EAM, Financials, Performance Management, BI, CRM, HCM, and more

Register today to take advantage of early bird rates!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feburary 1, 2012 2:00pm ET Live Webinar: What EPAK can do for you !

Are you interested in lowering employee training costs, reducing support requests, and promoting consistency across your organization? If so than Infor EPAK is the answer for you.

Infor EPAK gives you all the tools they need to build your employee skill sets and make them more productive—before, during and after implementation. EPAK gives you a single platform for managing your software and achieving key business benefits:

  • Increased user acceptance and productivity
  • Smoother, faster implementations
  • Reduced support requests
  • Lower training costs per employee
  • Easier documentation of compliance programs

Reserve your spot today for the live webinar February 1, 2012 at 2:00pm ET to find out how EPAK can efficiently solve your business’s issues.

Don’t miss out, click here to reserve your spot today!

 

Tips on Choosing Consultants When Selecting an ERP System

I speak with a lot of people in the manufacturing industry every day, and I wanted to address one of the common themes I hear from these folks: Their frustration level with manufacturing software system implementations.

The people I speak with have been directly involved with the purchase and implementation of manufacturing ERP software. Many of them tell me stories about near failures—and, in some cases, total failures—when it comes to these implementations. This is when the finger pointing begins and the relationship between vendor, consultant, and client begins to deteriorate. Not a good scene.

So why can these implementations be so frustrating and risky? One of the main reasons I see is the effectiveness and fit of vendors’ consultants who are deployed on the project

Read full article >

Infor10 ERP Enterprise (LN)

ERP Enterprise is the most powerful and comprehensive system available for managing the demands of complex manufacturing, distribution, and service industries. Its deep functionality gives you unparalleled control over the complexities of your global operations, with over 30 modules …

Read more about ERP Enterprise (LN) >

Does a shift to subscription mean better ERP?

I’ve been scratching my head over Forrester’s The State of ERP in 2011: Customers Have More Options in Spite of Market Consolidation report. Larry Dignan focuses on the key finding that:

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) market is heating up in 2011, but despite more on-demand offerings from SAP and Oracle’s Fusion upgrades, two-thirds of companies say they will stick with the status quo for their business applications.

There are problems with Forrester’s analysis from both a buyer and seller perspective. Simply shifting from one business model (license plus maintenance to subscriptions) does not sound like any fundamental change in the market. In fact the more one reads the report, the more it sounds like ’same old, same old.’ That’s curious in a market where the leading vendors tout ‘innovation’ as their current watchword.

Read full article >

How resilient is your cloud service provider?

Recent outages from Amazon and Google have got me thinking about resliency in the cloud. When you use a cloud service, whether you are consuming an application (backup, CRM, email, etc), or just using raw compute or storage, how is that data being protected? A lot of companies assume that the provider is doing regular backups, storing data in geographically redundant locations or even have a hot site somewhere with a copy of your data. Here’s a hint: ASSUME NOTHING. Your cloud provider isn’t in charge of your disaster recovery plan, YOU ARE!

Yes, several cloud providers are offering a fair amount of resiliency built in, but not all of them, so it’s important to ask. Even within a single provider, there are different policies depending on the service, for example, Amazon Web Services  which has different policies for EC2 (users are responsible for their own failover between zones) and S3 (data is automatically replicated betwen zones in the same geo). Here is a short list of questions I would ask your provider about their resiliency:

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The New World: Protecting Your Supply Chain From Terrorism

Remember when your only supply chain worries were mechanical malfunctions, unreliable suppliers, and natural disasters? Not that any of those couldn’t cause serious problems, particularly natural disasters (see my recent blog), but at least unknown parties weren’t actively out to sabotage deliveries and hurt citizens.

In a world of increasing uncertainty and chaos, you need to manage complexity and make your supply chain more resilient. The US government is working on a holistic, government-...

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Natural disasters drive change in automotive supply chains

Japan’s March 2011 tsunami and other recent natural disasters got me thinking about supply chain planning—specifically, how automotive companies need to proactively plan for such disasters. But how can you proactively plan for a natural disaster, when you don’t have any idea what it will be, or when or where it will take place?

You need to think seriously about multi-sourcing vs. single sourcing, a lesson learned from the Japan tsunami and the succeeding shutdown of a Hitachi plant that pr...

Read full article >

Tips on Choosing Consultants When Selecting an ERP System

I speak with a lot of people in the manufacturing industry every day, and I wanted to address one of the common themes I hear from these folks: Their frustration level with manufacturing software system implementations.

The people I speak with have been directly involved with the purchase and implementation of manufacturing ERP software. Many of them tell me stories about near failures—and, in some cases, total failures—when it comes to these implementations. This is when the finger pointin...

Read full article >

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