Process Management

Business Intelligence Vendors

2010-07-31T05:40:00.001-07:00

The demand for accurate, timely information across disparate systems in an enterprise has been answered by vendors touting some or near total corporate performance management (CPM) capabilities. Yet, while there are plenty of vendors to choose from, there is no overall CPM market leader. Attempting to gain a competitive advantage in the crowded business intelligence (BI) and CPM market, some enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are resorting to prudent BI and enterprise process management (EPM) acquisitions.

Geac Goes the Acquisition Route

Geac Computers' 2003 acquisition of former financial analytics provider Comshare has resulted in Geac MPC. Geac MPC is a single, integrated CPM offering that supports dynamic planning and analysis for CFOs, and improves visibility throughout the organization with the aim of a single version of the truth, and no surprises. Although Hyperion and Cognos are the undisputed leaders in financial planning and budgeting, with Oracle (including the former PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management product) and SAP also having a sizeable market share, Geac, is still worth mentioning. While not a market leader per se, it is still notable because it has been reinventing itself within the realm of BI.

Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series.

Geac MPC is a centrally-maintained, Web-based application that provides the enterprise's strategy formulation, planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and reporting and analysis functionality that users need to run their business efficiently and effectively. It is a unified, comprehensive solution that enables management to set strategic goals and translate them into action plans, track results, and take corrective action as needed—all based on a continuous flow of near real-time performance data. In other words, with the solution, organizations should be able to model business plans to develop effective strategies, link these strategies to budgets for better resource allocation, automate global financial consolidation to see accurate results faster, generate statistically accurate budgets and plans, and report and analyze data in the most meaningful ways. All this should reduce the time spent performing manual tasks, and free managers to spend more time analyzing results, evaluating alternatives, and implementing business decisions.

Although integration should be one of the cornerstones of CPM offerings, unfortunately, solutions offered by most vendors are not often integrated. Instead, the solutions are made up of multiple diverse (acquired) applications and administration tools that focus on making interfaces, audits, and reconciliations more efficient. This requires companies to have separate IT and finance department support for each of these applications, with the result being that both the financial and IT staff spend most of their time trying to ensure that each system has the same data, and that the users are accessing the correct, most recent data. Needless to say, these types of solutions could be unnecessarily expensive, may require multiple implementations, and are difficult to administer and maintain, and as a result, they struggle to promote collaboration and do not maximize return on investment (ROI).

To remedy this problem, Geac MPC stores business information on a single platform, using a single business model. Data is contributed only once, which eliminates the need to re-key or link data, copy and distribute templates, and guess which version of the data is correct, as is often the case with error-prone spreadsheet-based management systems. Enterprises should benefit from data integrity, one version of the truth creating confidence in the produced numbers and figures, and a clearer line of sight into operational performance. Furthermore, business professionals, with proper user security, can access data immediately via a Web browser, MS Excel, and a personal digital assistant (PDA), which all should in turn lead to improved productivity. When modifications to structures, business rules, calculations, or the application are necessary, they need to only be made once and are automatically reflected throughout the application. Geac MPC can do this all by leveraging the data stored in existing underlying transactional systems which will allow everyone across the enterprise to work with the same version of accurate, up-to-date information.

In May, Geac launched a major new release, Geac MPC 7, which should offer Global 2000 companies multiple benefits, including improved enterprise-wide planning and alignment, streamlined reporting, and simplified compliance. The product, which has already been delivered to early adopter customers, will be generally available worldwide this summer, and should further advance how enterprise-wide strategic and operational business planning is done. Rather than just periodically updating a scorecard with operational results, Geac MPC 7 will help organizations transform and communicate their strategic plans into quantifiable objectives, tactics, and supporting activities with assigned ownership at the correct responsibility level throughout the enterprise. Consequently, the result will be a collaborative environment for planning, tracking, and predicting progress toward key management objectives.

To that end, Geac Planning is an enhanced planning application that is geared toward making the planning process easier, from a single planner creating "what-if" operational plans to multiple teams of collaborative planners around the world. The application is driven through a fairly easy-to-use Excel interface, whereby a planner may, for example, set a high-level target needed to achieve a desired profitability percentage and then let the system adjust ("spread") the values of the chosen plan variables to achieve the goal. Planners may also add, delete, or change business assumptions and structures at will and in near real time, leveraging Excel's strong and flexible data gathering, reporting, and formatting capabilities. This should create a much more nimble planning environment that should also drive changes in operational plans and budgets for the enterprise. As a result, alignment throughout the organization should occur more quickly and efficiently, and communication should be quite enhanced. Because the application is built with centralized controls on the Geac MPC financial application foundation, business users can collaborate on the same plan without having to keep track of how the changes made through the planning process will be driven into the "system of record". Geac Planning also organizes and manages the sharing of structures and data across the planning environment, allowing the information to be used to seed the budget, measure operational plans, or build long-range strategic planning models.

Further, meeting the need for sophisticated formalized reporting, Geac MPC 7 offers a new management reporting capability featuring a creation wizard, which streamlines initial report design and shortens the time to create and deliver critical enterprise reporting. Excel power users often want to do highly personalized analysis and reporting from their performance management systems, and, to that end, the product extends the current Excel Services functionality to deliver Excel cell-based reporting capabilities. Users can leverage the data in the centralized application without giving up any of the flexibility they need and can create virtually any layout they choose without the need for pre-built views, templates, or formatting requirements. In addition, Geac offers a production reporting module that integrates Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, broadening the range of reporting options available to Geac MPC customers.

Last but not least, Geac MPC OpenLink is a Web-based mapping tool that simplifies the process of accurately moving data from multiple ERP and other transactional source systems to the Geac MPC application. The tool helps to relatively quickly define the mapping profile using either a basic or advanced pattern-matching syntax for one or more data sources; processes the mapping profile, loads the information into the application, and provides an audit trail of the mapping process. OpenLink is designed to work with the most popular and widely deployed ERP and general ledgers on the market. Along these lines, Geac MPC Fast-Track is a set of packaged application integrations between the Geac MPC performance management software and several Geac ERP offerings, such as Geac E Series, Geac M Series, Geac SmartStream, and Geac System21.

Yet, as seen with Geac MPC, financial reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and planning are at the heart of a CPM solution, however, without these features, true CPM cannot be achieved (see Financial Reporting, Planning, and Budgeting as Necessary Pieces of EPM). Moreover, although CPM starts with strong financial management, it will eventually extend beyond financial planning to almost all areas of corporate activity. Therefore, organizations choosing BI suites should consider both their financial management tools and future integration with key business-area solutions, such as, product lifecycle management (PLM), customer resource management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), etc. Thus, eventually, more organizations will turn away from best-of-breed BI point solutions to pursue integrated CPM suites, possibly with the idea of having a corporate-wide BI/CPM standard, as they seek to source components from a single vendor rather than integrate disparate product sets themselves.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-intelligence-vendors-18058/

Intentia Prepares for Merger

2010-07-31T05:39:00.000-07:00

Not waiting for the merger transaction with Lawson Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: LWSN) to close, Intentia International AB (XSSE: INT B) announced the release of Intentia Application Suite (IAS) 5.1. IAS is a full integration of Intentia's entire application portfolio that, like Lawson's upcoming Landmark product, uses service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create business processes and develop applications flexibly, while enabling Web services and a faster return on investment (ROI). For details on the merger announcement, see "New" Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended-ERP Intentions. IAS is a solution aimed specifically at companies in the manufacturing, distribution, and maintenance industries. Particular focus is placed on those companies in food and beverage, fashion, wholesale distribution, and asset and maintenance intensive industries that include enterprise asset management (EAM) and product service management (PSM). It consists of eight Intentia application areas, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise management (ENM), supplier relationship management (SRM), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise process management (EPM), workplace management (WPM), value chain collaboration (VCC), and foundation and tools (FTO).

Part two of the "New" Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended-ERP Intentions series.

Intentia points out that the product is further evidence of the company's ongoing commitment to SOA (for more of pertinent information, see SOA-based Applications and Infrastructure--The Next Frontier?). Intentia invested early in Java technology and currently has over 250 live customer implementations, and it already delivers a fully Web services-enabled application suite.

The latest release boasts many new features within the CRM, SCM, and FTO applications. Within the CRM applications, the Intentia e-Sales product has a new advanced channel, category, and market analysis functionality, which is provided through Cognos ReportNet. It is designed to improve a user company's ability to implement sales strategies in order to increase revenue and profit. In addition, new capabilities should help fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies improve category, space, and promotion management. Information from both the sales and order fulfillment processes is now available in the field sales solution, which should enable salespeople to improve individual efficiency during customer visits, and ultimately, create opportunities to increase sales.

This is Part Two of a four-part note. Part One detailed the merger. Part Three will analyze the market impact. Part Four will cover challenges and make user recommendations.

Supply Chain Management

Within the supply chain planning (SCP) realm of the SCM applications, Intentia has introduced sales quotas, transport rules, and purchase agreements functionality. These constraints aim at increasing planning efficiency and optimizing profit by controlling what, how much, when, and to whom products are purchased, processed, moved, and sold. Lastly, Movex Adaptation Kit (MAK), a tool within FTO, has new features that reduce the time, effort, and cost involved in supporting and maintaining IAS. These new features include validation wizards, improved language editing, and one-click analyses.

As to further vertically differentiate its functional scope, mid-July, Intentia also released a stock build optimization solution that strives to maximize food and beverage manufacturers' stock mixes and reduce the surplus of finished goods inventory by up to 20 percent to avoid stockouts and product waste. In other words, the solution tackles one of the major issues facing the food and beverage industry—the need to build stock to meet seasonal peaks and promotional spikes. According to reports from the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers of America, product waste is estimated to have cost food manufacturers $2.57 billion (USD) in 2004, and $6 billion (USD) in lost retail sales from stockouts, which run as high as 13 percent during promotion periods.

To that end, the Intentia solution processes a wide spectrum of business variables that impact stock exposure risk. Today, manufacturers still rely heavily on spreadsheets to calculate stock builds, which becomes unmanageable given the number of products and factors that must be navigated. These include changes to capacity, shelf life and cost constraints, margins, new products, and recipe and manufacturing process changes. In fact, according to a measurement formula created by Intentia, the level of stock build complexity increases exponentially with the number of production lines and products planned. For example, increasing the number of products from two to four over a twelve week planning period increases data complexity by a factor of 100, and from two products to six by a factor of 10,000.

To calculate the optimum target stock per period, by product stock keeping unit (SKU) and to meet peaks based on demand forecast, available production capacity, existing inventory, and costs, the stock build optimization solution creates a time-phased stock plan—reportedly in a matter of minutes. This plan optimizes customer service levels and profit margins, thus eliminating over-stocking and the risk of product waste. The solution also incorporates the shelf life of each product, regardless of whether the products are stored under room temperature, chilled, or frozen conditions.

During the stock build optimization process, the solution evaluates the cost impact of alternative manufacturing processes, production costs, and stock holding costs to ensure that all possibilities are explored. Maximum and minimum stock levels and the days' coverage of stock are taken into account during the stock build process. In addition to managing these complex variables, Intentia's stock build optimization solution provides manufacturers with the opportunity to collaborate with retailers by creating promotional scenarios and proposals that can utilize spare capacity and inventory. The solution might have the added advantage of requiring little or no alteration to current business processes, as it runs on a personal computer (PC) with Windows XP, and takes approximately 15 to 20 days to install, while using only limited resources from the user company.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/intentia-prepares-for-merger-with-lawson-18237/

Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) in ProcessPart 3: Process PLM Requirements

2010-07-31T05:38:00.002-07:00

In Part One of this series, we discussed Product Life Cycle Management as a proven concept in the discrete industries and as a growing concept in process. In Part Two we examined the motivations for a process company to undertake a PLM project. In this part, we explore the requirements for PLM in the process enterprises.

In Part Two of this series, we stated that a comprehensive approach was required in order to meet the time-to-market requirement. Key to that comprehensive approach is a central repository that completely defines the information needed for the life cycle of the product. This repository must store the information to support the entire cycle, from idea, through R&D, through commercialization and into the many revisions and eventual retirement of the product.

Some of the data stored in the repository is common with the needs of discrete PLM systems but much is unique to the process industry. Common data includes project information such as workflow, basic project management information, approval information, and high-level product concepts. The data unique to the process industry includes product information such as formula (ingredients only) and recipe (formula plus processing procedures), packaging specifications, processing steps, test procedures, and plant independent production requirements.

A comprehensive approach also means that many organizations and individuals must collaborate in the process. Because this collaboration spans different levels of the organizations, the solution requires seamless integration between the project information and the product information in order to allow for a coordinated, collaborative business process. The organizations and individuals are both internal (marketing, legal, advertising R&D, production, etc.) and external (testing labs, outsourced production, ad agencies, etc.).

Specific Process PLM Requirements include:

* Web-Based Deployment

* Process Specific Tools

* Global Standards

* Centralized, Integrated Project and Product Information

* Product Portfolio Management

Web-Based Deployment

In today's environment, these internal and external entities are often combined into ever changing virtual teams to meet the requirements of a specific product or project. Today, this is very true in discrete manufacturing and a growing trend in process. . Therefore, the PLM system must accommodate rapid, global deployment of the system. This need drives a requirement for web-based deployment in order to minimize both the start-up and the long-term cost of ownership of the system.

Process Specific Tools

The productivity of the various collaborators must be addressed with a variety of tools. R&D personnel require process specific tools to build and search material specifications to enable them to locate candidates that are similar to existing products or ingredients. A variety of formula analysis and balancing tools will speed the calculation intensive process of formula development, leading to both greater productivity and the ability to evaluate more alternatives. Some of these tools are specific to an industry, like nutritional analysis and label development in the food industry.

To speed the product commercialization phase, the data repository must provide support for production scale up and tools to enable the knowledge transfer to production facilities. Since these facilities are increasingly outsourced locations, a plant independent and ideally standards based (SP88) approach must be supported. To select production facilities that allow for the maximization of profit across the extended enterprise (including outsourced location) tools must be available to intelligently match production requirements with the available capacity.

Global Standards

To continually drive out cost, the PLM system should contribute to the global standardization of recipes to reduce redundancy and global standardization of ingredients to increase the impact of the buying power of the enterprise and drive down the investment in redundant inventory.

Centralized, Integrated Project and Product Information

Since the development of a new product or the revision of an existing product is conducted as a project, the PLM system must provide project management capabilities designed for the needs of PLM, for example automating the stage-gate processes common in product development processes. Much of the benefits of a PLM system come from synchronizing the business process that companies use across departments and enterprises. This synchronization needs to include both project and product information, for example the automated routing of new recipes for approval across multiple departments. This drives the need for centralized, integrated project and product information.

Product Portfolio Management

Another key area of integration is portfolio management. The management of the product portfolio represents an additional level of requirements. The above requirements deal with individual projects or products. Portfolio management manages the conflicting objectives of many projects and products. Portfolio management must allow a managerial view of all products and projects in order to achieve balance with the company's strategic objectives. For a valuable comparison of often disparate project to be made, it is very important that the data used for decision making is strongly tied to the reality of the project, allowing key decision makers to drill down into the necessary details of the projects as required.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-life-cycle-management-plm-in-processpart-3-process-plm-requirements-16837/

Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) in Process Part 2 Process PLM Motivation

2010-07-31T05:38:00.001-07:00

In Part One of this series, we discussed Product Life Cycle Management as a proven concept in the discrete industries and as a growing concept in process. In this part, we explore the business motivations for PLM in process enterprises by reviewing business strategies. In part three, we will look at requirements for Process PLM decisions.

The business strategies reviewed are:

* Accelerating Time-to-Market

* Increasing the success rate of new products

* Increasing the profitability of products

* Increasing return on assets

Accelerating Time-to-Market

Time-To-Market is the delay between an idea, from the marketing department or a customer, to the general availability of the product. The compression of this time leads to greater responsiveness to market demand, greater market share and greater profitability. Time-To-Market can be broken into two periods, idea to final product design and the decision to commercialize the product to its availability on the market. Speeding Time-To-Market encompasses both time periods.

Time-To-Market is not only important for new products. The Director of R&D of a leading food company tells us that 50% of her R&D efforts are for new products. The remaining 50% are on changes to existing products. These changes are demanded from a variety of reasons including cost reduction programs and reacting to changes in raw material supply.

To speed Time-To-Market, a comprehensive approach is required. The business processes involved include many internal and external organizations. Internal organizations often include marketing, R&D, production, quality and others. External organizations may include third party R&D, testing facilities, customers, suppliers, outsourced manufacturing and others. These many organizations must be managed as a single entity sharing in a single process with a single view of the product and project (with the appropriate security concerns.)

Speeding Time-To-Market requires providing the creative team with appropriate productivity tools. Providing the chemist, flavorist, food engineer, nutritionist, and others with the right tools increases productivity and speeds Time-To-Market. These tools include the ability to identify existing materials or products with appropriate or similar characteristics, formula analysis and balancing tools that help to more efficiently develop the optimal formula, label generation tools to comply with regulatory labeling requirements, and more. In addition, the integration of administrative functions into the processes can minimize unproductive administrative workloads.

Once the final product is approved for commercialization, the task of transferring the product from R&D to full commercial viability is required. Much of this task is a transfer of technology. The product and processes must be transferred to the appropriate system or organization, be they internal or external. The appropriate plant or plants must be selected for production and the product data and processes transferred and implemented. This includes plant and corporate level systems like ERP, SCP, quality, MES and others. Automating the technology transfer is a key weapon in speeding Time-To-Market.

Increasing the Success Rate of New Products

In some markets, like CPG and food, the failure rate of new product introduction is very high, one source places it a 70%. A major motivation for Process PLM is decreasing the rate of failure or increasing the rate of success.

The most obvious way to increase the success rate is to not bring the failures to market. Actually, killing off products or projects that are doomed to failure as early as possible is a key to many objectives. This requires a management approach that looks at all projects and products as a portfolio to be managed together. It requires tools to evaluate the competing projects and products objectively.

These management tools must address the development process itself. Which projects are behind schedule? What are the steps to be initiated once a particular step in the process is approved and who approves. These management processes must be automated thought workflow approaches to define and ensure best practice, reduce handoff times and to allow for clear accountability and continuous improvement.

To be successful, a product must meet the needs of the customer. The marketing organization or customer defines these needs as a set of requirements. These requirements can include final product cost, physical or chemical specifications, customer perceptions and others. These requirements must be used continually to project the success of the product. A key is the early identification of "losers" to maximize the attention spent on the eventual "winners."

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-life-cycle-management-plm-in-process-part-2-process-plm-motivation-16822/

How Project Portfolio Management Can Deal a Winning Hand to the SMB Project Manager

2010-07-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

As organizations fight tenaciously for every inch of market share, IT departments have had to deploy technology that assists these dynamic organizations to remain competitive. One of these technologies is project portfolio management (PPM): a set of processes to analyze, recommend, authorize, activate, expedite, and monitor projects to meet organization improvement goals. Figure 1 provides a visual of these processes and how they flow during a project.
According to The AMA Handbook of Project Management (2nd edition), PPM, when used to its full potential, can assist organizations to realize the following goals:

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an estimated 20–30 percent reduction in the time it takes to develop new products
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significant improvement in completing projects on time and on budget
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improvements in research and development (R&D) productivity

How Organizations Should Support PPM

To support a PPM system, organizations must have an internal process for each of the following:

1. Governance—the executive role in the decision-making process, usually conducted by a C-level executive who determines

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what projects to approve or reject, as priorities are determined
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when to activate projects, and establishes their completion dates
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what resources are required (both capital and human), and sets the project budget

2. Management—the process that monitors a project to ensure it is fulfilling its stated goals and that it is running on time and on budget. Such monitoring is usually the responsibility of the project manager (PM) and the project management office.

3. Administration—the management and updating of project portfolios according to their deliverables and resources (planned and used) in order to document the project status, note key milestones, and ensure adherence to the schedule for project deliverables. Usually the mandate of the PM.

The Democratization of PPM

Long before the digital age, British novelist G.K. Chesterton wrote: "You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy to start a revolution."

This paradox holds true when you consider the modern business landscape, which has seen the decision-making process transform from being the responsibility of a mere handful of top-level executives, to include a greater number of people across many departments and levels within the organization. To a large degree, this transformation has occurred because of the ever-increasing number of methods corporate data is collected and processed to allow greater visibility for management and to support the business process.

The average small to medium business (SMB) has many of the same strategic needs as Fortune 500 organizations have for processing data into information. Consider an SMB's need to integrate technologies to support its manufacturing and supply chain issues, which affect the organization's ability to generate revenues. These SMBs may sell to larger organizations, which demands greater integration with these organizations' business processes and systems. The requirements have an impact on everything from product design to engineering, to sourcing and procurement, to sales and distribution, coupled with greater compliance issues and regulatory concerns.

The mid-market has limped along with rigid systems and processes that were developed on platforms and architecture now about 20 years old. As a result, organizations have had to create a variety of ad hoc reports by using spreadsheets, replete with the constraints of inaccurate and static data. When managing projects, spreadsheets are a poor way to track changes, as they leave no audit trails, and they are an inadequate medium for interpreting data.

Until recently, PPM was viewed as a solution only larger organizations could benefit from, the logic being that PPM was time-consuming and costly to deploy. For SMBs, the cost of software licensing, hardware, and consulting services, as well as disruption to a business's day-to-day operations during implementation of PPM, were simply too high.

So what alternatives to using spreadsheets, with all their inherent flaws that risk the loss of valuable revenues to increasing global competition, do SMBs have?

The Hosted PPM Alternative

Many PPM vendors that originally sold on-premise solutions have made a transition into the on-demand marketplace. The primary reason for this change is that they have realized the potential value of this untapped market space, as software as a service (SaaS) offers a number of advantages to the client in the SMB market:

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No software needs to be installed.
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No infrastructure is required to support the application.
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The SaaS vendor manages all network issues and all software version updates.
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SaaS applications result in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). On-premise software can cost a substantial amount in implementation fees and user support.
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SaaS applications allow scalability. Many of the features designed for an on-premise PPM system may be too robust for the small business user. But users can derive the benefits of a PPM system with an on-demand application, even if at first they are using only the parts of the software they require. Features and functionality can be added later, as users become more familiar with the application.

A Snapshot of Some PPM Solution Providers in the SaaS Space

1. Genius Inside

Established in 1997 and headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, Genius Inside creates and sells enterprise project management solutions, known as Genius Project.

With over 70,000 North American users and close to 400 installs worldwide, Genius Inside also has a vast network of resellers, and the company is a certified IBM Business Partner. The software is designed for the Lotus Domino Collaboration server, and has won numerous awards, such as the 2008 Lotus award for Best Mid-Market Solution. The product is a comprehensive set of integrated applications across ten modules.

Genius Project: Features and Benefits

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User-friendly software with a customizable user interface.
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Numerous standard templates, such as Project Management Institute (PMI), PRINCE2, and Six Sigma, which easily integrate to an organization's existing processes within its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as procurement, accounting, etc.
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A complete project management solution, including portfolio management, project tracking, cost and budget tracking, planning tools, etc.
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A resource management system, with user-friendly and customizable time- and tracking-sheets, advanced reporting, process and workflow support, a document management system, and the ability to use rich collaboration.
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A cross-industry solution that can be used in both process and discrete manufacturing environments, and that is scalable to both large global locations and small offices having two or three users.
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Reports that can be exported to MS Project, and vice versa.
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Project information work breakdown schedule (WBS) that can be displayed in Gantt chart format.
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Multi-project milestones and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be displayed and that support rich analytics using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools through a business intelligence (BI) interface.

For more information on this vendor, please visit www.geniusinside.com.

2. Innotas

In 2000, this Silicon Valley, California (US)-based vendor was acquired by venture capital firm Com Ventures, and formed a joint venture with Arrow Path Venture and Cedar Circle. This venture provided the seed capital to launch the Innotas solution, which made its market debut in 2006. The success of this product was recently documented by Gartner in its June 16, 2008 edition of Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management, a notable achievement for an organization in its early stages. As stated in Gartner's report,

PPM prospects small and large (based on the number of potential PPM end users) increasingly are considering SaaS/on-demand as an alternative option for deploying PPM technologies, which will lead to more market consolidation and more competitive pricing.

Innotas's main thrust is in the area of managing IT project portfolios, which can differ in some respects from non-IT-based PPM. SaaS model PPM isn't usually the most obvious choice for outsourcing, given the complexities of managing large-scale projects. However, Innotas, with its product known initially for being a tool to manage projects within the IT sphere, has recently announced that its new application's management capabilities will permit the vendor to broaden its industry and customer base.

Innotas Features and Benefits

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Three core modules that fall under the portfolio management umbrella.
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Project Portfolio Management permits organizations to select and indicate the priority of various project portfolios, to align themselves with strategic business goals.
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Application Portfolio Management helps firms determine what the costs are according to budget and resource allocation in order to support critical processes and work flows and which applications not supported further beyond strategic objectives.
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Project Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management include flexible and structured hierarchy-based portfolios that permit users to integrate their business process change scenarios according to customer-driven KPI metrics or relationships.
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Resource Management gives a global, macro, and micro view into overall resource capacity for staffing projects and applications, both at the project development stage and while the project is in progress.

For more information on this vendor, please visit www.innotas.com.

3. Meridian Systems

Meridian, based in Folsom, California (US), provides software solutions for construction projects and to facilitate physical infrastructure improvements. Meridian has been ranked as the market leader for project management software within the construction industry by Constructech magazine, which also ranked the vendor's solutions as top products in March 2008.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/how-project-portfolio-management-can-deal-a-winning-hand-to-the-smb-project-manager-19410/

Supplier Logistics Management (SLM) Part 3

2010-07-31T05:33:00.000-07:00

Supply chain executives are in the hot seat given the flat economy and a slowdown in revenue growth. They are challenged by senior executives to find new and innovative ways to reduce cost, while still meeting customer needs. However, in today's customer-centric environment, meeting customer's expectations is not a competitive advantage, but a fundamental necessity of existence. Delivering products on time, at a higher level of service, is now a standard expectation, leaving limited room to leverage performance as a sustainable competitive advantage.

To reduce costs and gain a competitive advantage, supply chain executives need to focus on supplier management inefficiencies in their supply chain. Ignoring upstream supply chain activities can be costly. For instance, it has been estimated that the food and beverage industry loses $7 to $12 Billion per year through incorrect data flows between suppliers and retailers. Additionally, when European consumer goods and food retailers lost more than $17 billion in inventory last year, they could only explain about 41% of these losses. Results like this point to the strategic advantage supply chain executives can obtain by focusing on improving their fragmented and complex supplier logistics networks. Through improved supplier logistics management, supply chain executives can provide senior management the silver bullet they are looking for to minimize operational inefficiencies, reduce costs and gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

This is Part Three of three-part note.

Part One covered how Technology Enables Supplier Logistics Management.

Part Two covers the Seven Fundamental Issues Targeted by Supplier Logistics Management.

(1) Kraft In Sync with Shaw's Supermarkets' Consumer Goods Technology, Ralph Bernstein, June 2001
(2) Unexplainable Losses', Traffic World, John Parker, June 4, 2001

Supplier Logistics Management Targets Seven Fundamental Issues

With the Internet as the road and Net-Native applications the vehicle, supply chain executives have the opportunity to drive significant efficiency improvements and cost reductions through Supplier Logistics Management (SLM). SLM enables companies and their suppliers to successfully synchronize information; thereby, allowing companies to extend supply chain optimization and process flows to their supplier base. With SLM in place, companies can target seven fundamental supply chain issues facing the management of successful supplier fulfillment:

1. Order Visibility and Event Management
(see Part Two of this article)
2. Inbound Planning and Optimization
(see Part Two of this article)
3. Information Synchronization
(see Part Two of this article)
4. Supplier Management and Compliance
5. Available-to-Promise
6. Forecasting and Capacity Management
7. Resource Scheduling

Supplier Management and Compliance

Historically, supplier management and compliance have been an administrative and labor-intensive headache for both companies and their suppliers. Companies typically devote teams of individuals to ensure suppliers comply with corporate routing guides, ordering instructions and appointment scheduling. Suppliers, on the other hand, are flooded with frequently updated paper based routing guides from multiple customers. (For example, one large retailer sends its' suppliers routing guide updates as frequently as every two weeks.) In addition, long hours are spent on the phone waiting to schedule appointments. SLM brings efficiencies to both suppliers and their customers by reducing overhead for both entities. By leveraging a customized on-line, inbound routing guide, paper correspondence is rendered obsolete and inbound carrier selection and shipment tendering is completely automated.

Through appointment scheduling automation, suppliers and carriers, can schedule pickup and delivery appointments without human intervention. On average, shippers and consignees spend upwards of 40% of their time on the phone scheduling and managing appointments(3). (As an example, one large grocery chain frequently keeps suppliers on hold for upwards of an hour to schedule an appointment, while one large retailer does not answer appointment requests of suppliers until the next day).

By adopting technologies such as integrated voice response and PDAs, carriers have the opportunity to reschedule appointments when they anticipate pickup or delivery problems due to weather, traffic or other operational problems. Mutual benefits exist as companies become more flexible to free dock space. In addition, for carriers, excessive wait time due to late pickups or deliveries is eliminated. Companies enjoy improved labor management at facilities as well as strengthened relationships with carriers.

Automating routing and appointment scheduling processes allow companies to successfully measure and monitor supplier and carrier routing guide and appointment compliance. By proactively identifying and addressing potential weak points, these types of metrics enable companies to keep a pulse on their supply chain. Taking full advantage of the compliance benefits that SLM offers enables companies to redirect employees from tactical operations, such as appointment scheduling and vendor compliance, to more strategic operations such as process improvements and customer care.

(3) Overdriveonline, Martin Labbe Associates Study for Truckload Carriers Association, August 1999

Available-To-Promise (ATP) Commitments

The goal of ATP is to ensure that companies make real-time service commitments to customers through a quick evaluation of supply chain constraints.

Too often companies commit to order delivery dates without considering all supplier constraints. Transportation service restrictions are typically not considered when committing to delivery dates. This overlook results in a trickle-down effect that communicates unrealistic delivery dates and creates a disruption in the flow of goods; sending ripple effects down the supply chain.

SLM circumvents this issue by factoring supplier sourcing locations and transportation transit and service restrictions to determine accurate delivery dates. By providing accurate transit and service requirements, companies can produce an achievable plan with compliant supplier dates and attainable customer commitments.

SOURCE:-

http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/supplier-logistics-management-slm-part-3-16574/

SOA From a Management Perspective: Part One

2010-07-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

We have been hearing about service-oriented architecture (SOA) for some time. Now, major software players are starting to lay out their plans and strategies. Some are even willing to assign delivery dates. As a company, you cannot ignore SOA, since we are constantly told that, from a software perspective, it is the best thing since sliced bread or, to use an updated analogy, the TV remote control. Regardless of your views, chief information officers (CIOs) need to outline their plans and be prepared to respond to executive management's question: "What are we doing?" This note sounds the alert, raises the flag, or fires the warning flare as to why converting to SOA does not appear to be an easy transition and cannot be accomplished with smoke and mirrors. Accordingly, we will look at the basics of SOA; the rollout plans of major software vendors; the benefits of SOA; concerns about SOA; and why the implementation of SOA won't be easy.

This is Part One of a two-part research note. Part Two addresses concerns about SOA and how your organization can migrate to an SOA environment.

What is SOA?

SOA is a collection of services or groups of components that perform business processes such as credit verification, currency conversion, or inventory availability. SOA employs an architectural style for building applications by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services. By being loosely coupled, an application does not have to understand or even know the technical details of a service to call it. As a result, SOA attempts to deliver platform independence, and is not tied to a specific technology.

Examples of SOA can be found in our everyday lives. A common example is a DVD player. The player offers the service of playing a DVD. You can play multiple DVDs in the player. You can even play the same DVD in another player, but the sound quality may not be the same. SOA, however, should not be confused with object-oriented programming (OOP). Following our DVD example, in OOP the DVD would come with its own player, not to be separated. This diminishes one of the primary advantages of SOA, namely reusability. To understand the evolution of SOA, see research note Architecture Evolution: From Mainframes to Service-oriented Architecture.

Being loosely coupled also helps to screen some of the technical complexity of programming, a potentially big boost for productivity. For example, you do not need to know how a credit check is performed to complete a customer's order. You just need to know what information, such as customer ID and order amount, the credit checking service needs to return an approval or rejection. The process is similar to when televisions were built with individual electronic components and repair meant replacing a component and not the entire set.

With SOA comes new terms and concepts, or old concepts with a new lexicon, both of which mean some difficult decisions lie ahead. With the use of services you can expect a lot of messaging traffic. Accordingly, you will need technology to manage this traffic and its flow on the information highway. An enterprise service bus (ESB) facilitates the connection of legacy systems to services. It also transforms and routes traffic. ESBs are particularly effective for long-running processes, invoking multiple services such as purchasing, which can encompass item look-up, pricing, discount terms, and more. After being developed and tested, services must live somewhere. Typically, services are published in registries or directories while being stored in repositories. This combined infrastructure controls secured access, specifies the input parameters, and enforces run-time performance parameters. Relative to performance and after services enjoy wider and wider acceptance, reporting and alerts are needed to ensure that applications are taking full advantage of SOA. Other difficult choices such as development platform, integration with web services, and testing and debugging protocols remain, and must coexist with your current technology and network topology.

Major vendors are starting to lay out their visions for SOA. Based on its NetWeaver development and integration platform (see research note Multipurpose SAP NetWeaver), SAP's approach is to deliver narrowly defined models or packages rather than release large-scale updates of closely interlinked components. By providing business process models, SAP provides the means of getting you up and running quickly, assuming that the models can fit within the constraints of your business.

Attempting to merge the software code resulting from its recent acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle's Project Fusion endeavors to provide a more open environment. Accordingly, Oracle's approach is to provide tools to model your business processes. These tools include a business process development platform and middleware and database components, which are open to third party vendors. This business process management (BPM) approach can deliver a more open framework, resulting in components tailored to your environment. So, while SAP's approach could simplify and accelerate the overall process of implementing SOA, Oracle's plan may provide greater adaptability of the unique aspects that make a company successful.

Referring to the "real approach" to SOA, Microsoft advocates a more incremental method, using advancements in .Net Framework, SharePoint, 2007 Microsoft Office System, Exchange Server, and Vista (see research note Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement). Unlike the enterprise infrastructure-centric approach, Microsoft touts a wave approach to deliver SOA interoperability gradually to the Microsoft Dynamics product lines. Microsoft Dynamics, formerly known as Microsoft Business Solutions, includes Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon. In so doing, some features will be available now instead of waiting for the full rollout. Originally known as Project Green, Microsoft has committed to an initial phase called Wave 1, which is nearing completion. It is expected to achieve a common look and feel throughout Microsoft Dynamics. Obviously, this is where Office 2007 and Vista will set the tone. Expect to see left-pane navigation bars for easy access, top-page trails for traversing back to a previous point of reference, and user ribbons, which will replace the traditional menus and toolbars with a set of tabs of common and most relevant commands. Wave 2 is expected for release in 2008 or 2009 as product lines continue to move away from coding to model-based development using Visual Studio .Net tools and languages. Once this transition is complete, Microsoft can consider merging product lines. Microsoft shares two potential obstacles with Oracle. First is seamlessly integrating acquired software packages to present a consistent and familiar theme. Second is adopting a model building capability as opposed to delivering the models, potentially sacrificing delivery speed for the sake of flexibility. While Microsoft's architecture vision appears to be clearer due to our familiarity with and the release of Office and Vista, the starting point for merging product lines is vague, particularly when compared to SAP and Oracle.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/soa-from-a-management-perspective-part-one-18864/

TEC Vendor Note: Lectra, A Focused PLM Player

2010-07-31T05:27:00.002-07:00

Thirty years ago, Michael Porter introduced three best generic strategies—cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation (or focus)—in his 1980 book Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors. Since then, these three strategies have helped explain numerous success stories in the business world. While looking at Lectra with Porter’s theory in mind, I had to accredit market segmentation as a winning strategy for the company’s success.

Headquartered in Paris, France, Lectra provides software, hardware, consulting, and related services to its global customers. Its software ranges from design to pattern-making, 3D prototyping, marker-making, and product development collaboration. Its hardware is high-performance automated knife and laser cutters for fabrics, leather, industrial fabrics and composites. Fashion is the major industry that Lectra targets, however the company also serves the automotive, furniture, aeronautical and marine, wind power, and personal protective equipment industries. With that being said, Lectra looks quite diverse in terms of the product lines and industries it serves. However, when examined for the purpose of using Lectra products and services, the company’s focus is clear—Lectra helps companies develop and, to a certain degree, manufacture specific types of products that use soft materials. The commonalities amongst these products allow Lectra to service multiple industries and business functions and remain focused.

A Brief History of Lectra
Founded in 1973, and offering its first computer-aided design (CAD) systems for apparel pattern-making and grading in 1976, Lectra has maintained its key target customers with reasonable expansions.

1) Vertical expansion: Starting from pattern-making and grading systems, Lectra has been able to support more business activities within the fashion industry throughout its 37 years of evolution, for example, computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), textile and fashion design, product development collaboration and management, 3D virtual prototyping, etc.

2) Horizontal expansion: Realizing that its expertise and products can benefit some adjacent business needs outside the fashion domain, Lectra expanded its services and technologies to address the needs of developing and manufacturing products that require significant use of soft materials, for example, upholsteries for the furniture industry and seats, interiors, and airbags for the automotive industry.

3) Geographical expansion: Lectra established most of its global reach during the 1990s. Nowadays, the company generates 89 percent of its revenues outside France—93 percent directly with customers through its network of 31 sales and services subsidiaries, five International Call Centers, and five International Advanced Technology Centers.

There were ups and downs in Lectra’s history, but the dedication of the company and the leadership demonstrated by the management team saved the company whenever there was an internal or external hardship. Although Lectra has had vertical, horizontal, and significant geographical expansions, the company’s move has always been built upon its core competency: the fashion industry. Today, after its expansion in other industries, about 60 percent of its revenues still come from the fashion sector.

Lectra Product Portfolio

As discussed previously, Lectra’s vertical product development allows the company to cover its customers’ product development and production cycle with necessary specializations for each industry. In short, Lectra’s offerings fall into the following categories:

1) Collection Development Collaboration and Life Cycle Management

Lectra Fashion PLM: A comprehensive, modular, and scalable product lifecycle management (PLM) solution designed specifically for fashion brands, retailers, and manufacturers to create, develop, produce, and manage fashion collections from the designer idea to the final end-product.

2) Product / Collection Design and Development Tools

Kaledo®: Lectra’s fashion CAD solution that allows the digital design of fashion concepts (story boards), styles, prints, knits, and woven fabrics.

Modaris®: The CAD pattern-making and grading solutions, covering the apparel product-engineering process, that not only accelerate the pattern-making process but also simulate the “look and fit” results using 3D virtual prototyping.

Diamino®: Automated or interactive creation of cut-ready markers that prompt material savings and productivity gains.

Romans Cad®©: Specialized CAD for footwear and leather goods, covering 3D design, 2D pattern-making, model specification, and technical data management.

DesignConcept: Specialized design solutions for automotive, aeronautical, and marine interiors, furniture, industrial fabrics, and composite and furniture materials.

3) Digital Manufacturing and Cutting Room Solutions

Optiplan®: The solution that simulates, optimizes, and automates the material cutting process—a critical step in apparel manufacturing.

Progress® Brio: Automated spreaders functioning for continuous production during the cutting process.

Vector®: Automated cutters catering for various production volumes and material types.

ProSpin®: Single-ply cutter specifically for prototyping and small runs.

Leather cutting (MFC and CLS): Designed for automated leather cutting for the furniture industry (MFC) and the automotive industry (CLS).

FocusAirbag®: Lectra’s laser cutter specialized for producing vehicle airbags.

Where Is Lectra Standing Now

With €153 million ($214 million [US]) in revenues in 2009, Lectra holds a large market share in the fashion CAD/CAM and PLM market. Hit by the economic downturn—like many other software vendors—Lectra had noticeable decrease in revenues in the past couple of years mainly due to the decrease of new systems sales. However, Lectra was able to bring some exhilarating news by posting €43 million Q1 2010 revenues, up 15 percent relative to Q1 2009. More importantly, revenues from new systems sales (€17.9 million) were up 31 percent.

The in-depth knowledge that Lectra has accumulated through its long-time practice serving the fashion industry is the most significant competitive advantage it holds. From the artistic optimizations of the fabric cutters and cutting processes to the know-how and libraries embedded in the fashion collaborative solutions, fashion-specific expertise is a critical differentiator between Lectra and many of its competitors with shorter presence in the fashion PLM market. As a software and equipment provider purely dealing with soft materials, Lectra may not be quite effective at managing both soft-line and hard-line products at the same time if a customer needs to do so. However, soft-line along should give Lectra enough opportunity to grow.

Organic integration between CAD/CAM and its collaborative platform is a winning factor for Lectra. This factor becomes an even greater advantage when domestic fashion brands in emerging markets start to boom. Due to fashion manufacturers in North America and Europe outsourcing their production to lower-labor-cost countries, manufacturing process management (MPM) hasn’t been a big concern within many global fashion players’ PLM adoption plans. However, to these domestic brands in emerging markets, they need not only to design and distribute products, but also to manage the manufacturing process directly. In emerging markets, Lectra has already secured its ground on CAD/CAM products and has started marketing its fashion PLM.

Looking into the Future

Based on recent interactions with Lectra, my understanding of Lectra’s future growth is that the company will keep focusing on serving its current target market with greater breadth and depth in its product and service offerings.

Rooted in point solutions such as pattern making and fabric cutting, Lectra’s moves to product data management (PDM) and then PLM indicate the vendor’s growing interest in helping customers manage their business processes. As Lectra’s capability keeps expanding to supply chain collaboration, business performance management (BPM), and enterprise integration, the vendor’s future offerings may trigger another time of discussion on whether enterprise resource planning (ERP) or PLM should be the backbone for a company’s entire information environment, a topic that has been on and off during the past decade.

On the depth side, I’ll expect Lectra to support product design, development, and manufacturing process in a more granular manner. Enhancements in collaborative concept development, line planning, order management (for prototypes and samples), and vendor management will probably be seen in the near future.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/tec-vendor-note-lectra-a-focused-plm-player-21273/

Glossary of Enterprise Applications Terminology Part Two: Just-in-Time to Extensible Markup Language

2010-07-31T05:27:00.001-07:00

ERP (enterprise resources planning) was an important step in an ongoing evolution of computer tools that began in the 1960s. Each evolutionary step is built on the fundamentals and principles developed within the previous one. As systems developed over time, a continuous stream of new terminology surfaced.

This is a glossary of those terms.

Part One of this glossary covers the terms from accounts payable through Internet.

For terms not covered here see The Lexicon of CRM Part 1: From A to I , Part 2: From J to Q , and Part 3: From R to Z.

Just-in-Time through Order Entry

just-in-time (JIT): A philosophy of manufacturing based on planned elimination of all waste and continuous improvement of productivity. It encompasses the successful execution of all manufacturing activities required to produce final product, from design engineering to delivery and including all stages of conversion from raw material onward.

lead time:

1) A span of time required to perform a process (or series of operations).

2) In a logistics context, the time between recognition of the need for an order and the receipt of goods. Individual components of lead time can include order preparation time, queue time, processing time, move or transportation time, and receiving and inspection time.

lean production: A philosophy of production that emphasizes the minimization of the amount of all the resources (including time) used in the various activities of the enterprise. It involves identifying and eliminating non-value-adding activities in design, production, supply chain management, and dealing with the customers. Lean producers employ teams of multi-skilled workers at all levels of the organization and use highly flexible, increasingly automated machines to produce volumes of products in potentially enormous variety. It contains a set of principles and practices to reduce cost through the relentless removal of waste and through the simplification of all manufacturing and support processes.

mass customization: The creation of a high-volume product with large variety so that a customer may specify his or her exact model out of a large volume of possible end items while manufacturing cost is low because of the large volume. An example is a personal computer order in which the customer may specify processor speed, memory size, hard disk size and speed, removable storage device characteristics, and many other options when PCs are assembled on one line and at low cost.

mass production: High-quantity production characterized by specialization of equipment and labor.

master production schedule (MPS): The anticipated build schedule for those items assigned to the master scheduler. It is a set of planning numbers that drives material requirements planning (MRP). It represents what the company plans to produce expressed in specific configurations, quantities, and dates.

material requirements planning (MRP): A set of techniques that uses bill of material data, inventory data, and master production schedule to calculate requirements for materials. It makes recommendations to release replenishment orders for materials. Further, because it is time-phased, it makes recommendations to reschedule open orders when due dates and need dates are not in phase.

manufacturing resource planning (MRP II): A method for the effective planning of all resources of a manufacturing company. Ideally, it addresses operational planning in units, financial planning in dollars, and has a simulation capability to answer what-if questions. It is made up of a variety of processes, each linked together: business planning, production planning (sales and operations planning), master production scheduling, material requirements planning, capacity requirements planning, and the execution support systems for capacity and material. Output from these systems is integrated with financial reports such as the business plan, purchase commitment report, shipping budget, and inventory projections in dollars. Manufacturing resource planning is a direct outgrowth and extension of closed-loop MRP.

manufacturing execution system (MES): A factory floor information and communication system with several functional capabilities. It includes functions such as resource allocation and status, operation/detailed scheduling, dispatching production units, document control, data collection and acquisition, labor management, quality management, process management, maintenance management, product tracking and genealogy, and performance analysis. It can provide feedback from the factory floor on a real-time basis. It interfaces with and complements ERP systems.

online analytical processing (OLAP): A category of software tools that provides analysis of data stored in a database. OLAP tools enable users to analyze different dimensions of multidimensional data. For example, it provides time series and trend analysis views. The chief component of OLAP is the OLAP server, which sits between a client and a database management systems (DBMS), and which understands how data is organized in the database and has special functions for analyzing the data. There are OLAP servers available for nearly all the major database systems.

order entry: The process of accepting and translating what a customer wants into terms used by the manufacturer or distributor. The commitment should be based on the available-to-promise line (ATP) in the master schedule. This can be as simple as creating shipping documents for finished goods in a make-to-stock environment, or it might be a more complicated series of activities, including design efforts for make-to-order (MTO) products.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/glossary-of-enterprise-applications-terminology-part-two-just-in-time-to-extensible-markup-language-17687/

Business Intelligence Corporate Performance Management Market Landscape

2010-07-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

The vendor landscape remains diverse, with every vendor touting some or near total corporate performance management (CPM) capabilities. The abundance of astute vendors will prevent any single vendor from achieving leadership any time soon, while growth for all will be, in part, hampered by increasing pricing pressures. Thus, the "arms race" to marshal the most complete CPM platform has been intensified among major vendors, and many have a comprehensive set of business intelligence (BI) functionality, including online analytical processing (OLAP) analytics, ad hoc query, end user reporting, enterprise reporting, planning, and some type of analytic dashboards or balanced scorecards.

Part Five of the Business Intelligence Report Status Quo series. Parts One to Three were published June 27June 29

While 2003 saw a major onslaught of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the market involving large BI vendors like Cognos, Business Objects, SAS, Actuate, and Hyperion (see Has the BI Market Consolidation Been Crystal-Clearly Actuated?), 2004 and 2005 have also had their smaller share of M&A, with IBM acquiring AlphaBlox and Ascential, and Cognos acquiring Frango and Optima Analytic Solutions.

The pressure for these pure-play BI players also comes from large enterprise applications vendors like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, or Siebel and their resources and business motivation to invest in their own BI solutions. This includes the underlying technology and the analytical applications, with their install base as the primary target.

This is Part Four of a seven-part note.

Part One detailed history and current status.

Part Two looked at contemporary BI tools.

Part Three described what is available.

Part Five will discuss Geac and Point Solutions vendors.

Part Six will compare direct access to a data warehouse for the mid-market.

Part Seven will make recommendations.

SAP Analytics

For example, SAP is changing the positioning of its business information warehouse, SAP BW, to become a part of SAP NetWeaver, a platform aimed at delivering infrastructural functionality like collaboration, portal, business process management (BPM), application integration, and BI across the entire enterprise applications landscape. (For more details, see SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities). It opted for this route instead of delivering a packaged standalone data warehouse (DW), as was initially marketed after its launch in 1998.

Building on the successes of SAP NetWeaver BI, and the Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) suite, SAP, during its European SAPPHIRE '05 user conference, unveiled more than 100 industry-specific analytic applications built on the SAP NetWeaver platform. These applications should empower users with new ways to drive core processes and business decisions based on actionable business insight. Accordingly, SAP Analytics are a new breed of model-driven, composite applications across more than twenty-five industries. SAP Analytics aim at merging data from SAP and non-SAP applications with BI queries, to eliminate disparate islands of data. They will also combine transactional, analytic, and collaborative steps across multiple business functions, departments, and even organizational boundaries.

Unlike traditional after-the-fact reporting tools, SAP Analytics applications will aim at pulling all relevant information—whether historical or current—from across a wide variety of enterprise systems to deliver clear and broad business insight that should help users drive current processes and take the wisest possible steps. These will reportedly deliver data in the business context of the specific process—letting a business manager know, for example, not only the day's sales figures but also whether these figures are on target compared against past performance and the current year's revenue goals.

Reportedly, each SAP Analytics application will be designed to easily be combined and extended with other analytics applications, and will play a specific role across areas such as SCM, CRM, and product lifecycle management (PLM). Some examples include

* SAP Analytics for retail will help store managers better understand and predict the performance of core activities, such as trade-promotions, in order to make adjustments to processes and strategies while there is time to impact outcomes.

* SAP Analytics for credit management will allow financial service companies to display customers' credit information, buying behavior, past purchases, and credit lines in the historical context of data stored in SAP and non-SAP systems or syndicated data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet. From inside the same application, users can then increase or stop access to credit lines for a given customer or partner and even block or authorize individual purchases.

* SAP Analytics for tax management will complement the SAP for Public Sector solution. It will allow organizations to better monitor and understand the tax basis, where contributions are coming from in the context of historical tax collection, and take steps to reclaim amounts due using the same application.

* SAP Analytics for high-tech manufacturing will allow managers and other employees at production plants and warehouses to gain an insight into order status, plant utilization, order backlog and restock levels. Some SAP partners have consequently built SAP Analytics applications that unify manufacturing execution system (MES) data with order supply chain and production data from SAP systems in order to provide highly granular views down to individual machines' uptime status and throughput capacity.

* SAP Analytics for CRM will continue to complement the mySAP CRM solution by providing visualization across marketing, lead generation, pipeline visibility, sales effectiveness, and individual customer views. By unifying sales data with financial data, fulfillment data, and manufacturing inventory data, SAP Analytics for CRM will empower sales executives and corporate offices with a complete view of customer buying patterns and profitability allowing them to detect hidden opportunities for future business growth.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-intelligence-corporate-performance-management-market-landscape-18056/

Why Service Matters: Enterprise Solutions, Market Differentiation, and IQMS

2010-07-31T05:25:00.000-07:00

IQMS (www.iqms.com), a privately-held company located in Paso Robles, California (US), has experienced a period of growth over the past few years when other companies have experienced decline. Its flagship product, EnterpriseIQ is one of the industry's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for repetitive manufacturing environments, particularly suited for injection plastics molding/extruding and rubber industries. With its products, the company experienced a 12 percent growth globally in 2003 when 700 new licensed users reportedly joined its client base. Closing the year with a 15 percent increase in revenue, IQMS responded to this increase by expanded its US Midwest office, offering additional training and sales support to clients.

Part Two of IQMS Prospers by Helping Enterprises Work Smarter series

At first glance, IQMS resembles many of its peers from the lower-end of the enterprise applications market, not only in terms of its budding global presence, annual revenues, and install size figures, but also in terms of its industry-specific software that reduces implementation and training costs. For example, an average EnterpriseIQ implementation typically only takes between three and six months. However, despite the like corporate profile and product similarity, IQMS has a comprehensive, one-source delivery and service where all of its product development, training, implementation, and support are provided by its own employees, rather than third party providers. These employees are American Production & Inventory Control Society (APICS) certified and have extensive implementation and proven project management experience. They also have strong manufacturing and accounting backgrounds. This, in addition to its implementation methodology that balances on-site consulting, classroom training, and Internet-based training, are notable differentiating traits.

IQMS also has an upfront nature that makes it stand-out from its peers. Its maintenance contracts include all product upgrades and technical support, without any hidden costs. This, combined with IQMS' great reputation for customer support, highlights the company's open lines of communication. Customers are almost never put on hold or have to go through an annoyingly long automated process. Rather, calls are answered by a knowledgeable person, not a recording. The vendor happily lets anyone talk to any of its satisfied customers within selected industries of focus and that have had similar issues as the prospective customer. IQMS also proclaims its confidence by offering a one-year, money-back guarantee.

Still, although indisputably impressive, one could dig up similar value propositions from other players in the market. Also, on the surface, the product has many pedestrian functional and technological capabilities. For example, it has a Microsoft Windows-based platform for the client side and networks features familiar user-friendly interface with familiar navigation that involves easy jumps between tightly integrated modules and drill-down capabilities. The database resides on the server that performs operations on that data at the request of clients. Data is then transmitted over the network and users access the information from clients/workstations; ultimately, its a process that uses very little code. Furthermore, the front-end Delphi graphical interface allows users to manipulate or search for data, while Microsoft Terminal Server (MTS) and Citrix Metaframe clients are used for wide-area network (WAN) links.

Part Two of the six part IQMS Prospers by Helping Enterprises Work Smarter series

Part One presented the company background.

Part Three will continue a discussion of product differentiation.

Part Four will review IQMS' Single Database Solution and quality management.

Part Five will cover integrated EDI and miscellaneous utilities.

Part Six will present challenges and make user recommendations.

EnerpriseIQ Modularity

The EnterpriseIQ system is also modular, with a broad core package, and many optional modules that extend the product's functional scope. Consequently, the IQ Accounting & Financial Management modules include the "usual suspects" like general ledger (GL); accounts payable (AP); accounts receivable (AR); cash management (including disbursements, receipts, and cash analysis); budgeting; multiple currency capability; bank maintenance; customer and supplier status; standard costing; auto-invoicing; cost variance analysis; bank reconciliation; employee maintenance; tax code tracking; and so on. Another common feature is FRx Reporter, a powerful financial reporting system from FRx, a Microsoft company. The product, which has recently been re-branded as Microsoft Business Solutions Analytics (MBSA)—FRx, reads directly from EnterpriseIQ GL. With this feature, it is fairly easy to create and use customized financial reports, since the product was designed by accounting professionals for their peers. It has customizable formatting similar to Microsoft Excel, linking data from multiple sources with a drill-down viewer capability—from the summary level to underlying account and transactional detail. For more extensive information on the product, see FRx Poised To Permeate Many More General Ledgers.

Moving onto the IQ Sales & Distribution suite, one will also find many typical modules and capabilities, such as inventory availability, capable-to-promise (CTP), order entry, order tracking, shipping schedules, pick tickets, advanced shipping notices (ASN), bills of lading (BOL), packing slips, return material authorizations (RMAS), consignment inventory, freight maintenance, rework tracking, commissions, sales analysis, distribution centers, release management, customer specific sales pricing, tiered pricing, forecasting, and so on.

Linked with this suite is a native IQ CRM system, which also tackles some basic supplier relationship management (SRM) functions, and that features the Internet and a personal digital assistant-enabled contact management system. The product was devised to improve customer and supplier relations by tracking sales and marketing/procurement efforts and customer and supplier issues through, for example, notes, activities, follow up, alerts, etc. As a result, the product is workflow-enabled and provides customized alerts and scheduling, while its true integration with other EnterpriseIQ modules ensures centralized data management.

Likewise, the IQ Purchasing suite also seem to offer common capabilities like purchase orders, requisitions, material exceptions list, purchasing approvals, receiving, supplier management, supplier RMAS, 1099 contractors management, purchasing history, receiving inspection tracking, alternate purchase pricing, supplier performance analysis, supplier consignment inventory, and so on.

Differentiating IQMS' product from its peers' offerings, however, is the native IQWorkforce HR module. It enables employee benefit management and tracking, training and skill set management, application process management, and review and termination tracking. As with native CRM capabilities, the benefit of this module comes from consolidating information in a single database. The result is more reliable tracking of training in accordance with quality management standards; improved employee communications; centralized employee activity; and reduced management tracking activities. Moreover, the system also features a native payroll system that also centralizes employee activity. Automatic tax code updates, direct deposit, and electronic bank transactions are also supported.

All the reports and forms throughout EnterpriseIQ use Business Objects' Crystal Reports, which are relatively affordable, easy to use, and fully customizable. Further, in addition to financial reports by FRx, IQMS' partnership with CorVu provides the following analysis and executive information systems (EIS):

* CorManage—automates the user's balanced scorecard, Six Sigma, total quality management (TQM) systems, and economic value added (EVA), which is the financial performance measure that comes closer than most other to capturing the true economic profit of an enterprise. It is most directly linked to the creation of shareholder wealth over time.

* CorBusiness—provides business intelligence (BI) management with end user online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis, interactive reporting, database queries, executive dashboards, and key performance indicator (KPI) alerts.

* RapidScorecard—provides administration and data entry facilities for the CorManage product by automating proverbial Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard systems.

* CorPortfolio—enables executives to fairly quickly review reports, analyses, and business commentary from virtually any data source, collating them into an electronic portfolio.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/why-service-matters-enterprise-solutions-market-differentiation-and-iqms-17877/

Extricity Makes a Move into IBM’s Sphere of B2B Influence

2010-07-31T05:24:00.001-07:00

Extricity, Inc., a leading business-to-business (B2B) software platform provider, has announced that IBM is shipping the Extricity B2B software platform as part of IBM's WebSphere BtoBi Partner Agreement Manager. The two companies announced an OEM agreement in September wherein IBM licensed Extricity's B2B process technology to be integrated as a critical component of the WebSphere Business-to-Business Integrator offering.

IBM believes that their enhanced WebSphere Business-to-Business platform now offers a full range of B2B solutions that span customer requirements from simple connectivity and supply chain integration, to complete e-marketplace development and management.

"Extricity and its process capabilities offers a leading platform for B2B relationship management that provides a high level of interoperability and collaboration across trading partner boundaries," said Rob Lamb, director business process management, IBM Corp. "This critical requirement, combined with IBM's leadership in enterprise integration, creates a powerful solution for managing the entire range of B2B processes among organizations."

According to David Cope, vice president of marketing for Extricity, "Extricity is pleased to extend IBM's WebSphere Business-to-Business product family with its B2B process engine and look forward to building highly successful joint customer implementations. The strengthened WebSphere Business-to-Business platform brings to market a single, scalable integrated platform to simplify and seamlessly manage real world Internet-based trading partner communities that are easy to deploy, manage and change."

Market Impact

Any vendor possessing a technology sufficiently robust to be incorporated by IBM into one of their key product suites is going to give competitors reason to reexamine their product strategy. Many of the EAI and B2B vendors, including vendors who are pure-play in one of the two technologies, consolidators of the technology, and new entries to the field, are attempting to jump on the WebSphere bandwagon, especially by incorporating integration with IBM's MQSeries Integrator Version 2, and support for the WebSphere Application Server. (See prior TEC news analyses under EAI for related developments).

As the line between software for business-to-business and enterprise application integration continues to blur, (a process already started but greatly accelerated by the merger of webMethods and Active Software), vendors must increasingly seek strategic relationships with larger, better-established firms to add missing functionality quickly. In addition, they must protect their market share and prevent takeover attempts in this exceptionally competitive market.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/extricity-makes-a-move-into-ibm-s-sphere-of-b2b-influence-16292/

Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) in Process Part 1 Proven in Discrete, Ready to Blossom in Process

2010-07-31T05:22:00.002-07:00

Product Life Cycle Management is a series of business processes, enabled by application software, which has proven to generate business valuein a variety of industries. Discussion with end-user companies reveals a consistent list of benefits including reduced time to market, gains in engineering productivity, increased revenue, increased reuse, reduction of redesign activity and more. A review of vendor web sites supports this conclusion with a number of case studies about companies that have seen significant advantages from implementing PLM processes and software solutions. Many of the vendors are now offering collaboration solutions that allow multiple enterprises or locations to participate in a single, coordinated design project for great benefits.

The growth of a large number of software suppliers targeting the PLM needs of the discrete industries prove that the PLM market within discrete companies is hot. The "Discrete PLM" vendors are numerous with more joining the list. These vendors primarily come from a background in Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Product Data Management (PDM).

Proven Value - But What About the Process Industries?

Searching for users and reviewing the available case studies shows that few experiences are available that reflect the PLM value available to process companies. Some of the case studies that focus on process companies show the PLM products used to enable packaging design or plant engineering but few include the development of the basic recipes for products.

The development of a food, chemical, pharmaceutical or other process product is a complex and costly process. Process industry companies could benefit from many of the PLM concepts that have proven to reduced time to market, gains in engineering productivity, increased revenue, increased reuse, reduction of redesign activity in the discrete industries. But PLM has had minimum penetration into the process industries. Why?

Again, Process Requirements are Different

As in many application areas, the requirements for process companies are different from those of discrete companies. Process companies lacking the option to buy standard PLM packages, have been forced to build their own solutions. These solutions have often been built by individual departments and don't address the process across departments or enterprises.

Discrete PLM suppliers correctly provide a suite of products that support the needs of discrete companies, for example, Computer Aided Design (CAD), configuration management, parts and product structures and more. However, the process companies have different requirements. Their product development processes require different functions, for example, formulation, specification management, nutritional analysis, test/analysis procedures, processing procedures, batch manufacturing deployment, packaging and more.

In addition, the link into manufacturing within a process company is complex with the role of PLM stretching into the plant environment. Process companies require a standard process specification (based upon S88 and S95 standards) in order to create consistent product worldwide. While there appears to be overlap between some PLM functionality between discrete and process vendors, most PLM products are based on underlying discrete assumptions that don't work in process.

The Discrete PLM suppliers remain focused on the extensive needs and opportunities provided by the Discrete PLM market. The Discrete PLM vendors do not provide the process functions and therefore, their products have not been received well by process companies. Industry experts predict that the Discrete PLM vendors will be either slow to address the very different needs of the process industries or more likely not attempt to address the process needs at all - or possibly make alliances with the process PLM players.

The market is now seeing new PLM vendors focused on the process industries or "Process PLM" vendors. These companies are not working on the needs of the discrete companies. The Process PLM vendors are working towards suites of PLM products that address the specific needs of process companies. The founders of these companies come from a different background than their discrete PLM counterparts.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-life-cycle-management-plm-in-process-part-1-proven-in-discrete-ready-to-blossom-in-process-16815/

Product, Project, Process, and People: The Four Ps of PLM Analytics

2010-07-31T05:22:00.001-07:00

After a product lifecycle management (PLM) system has been implemented and used for a while, the accumulated data within the system becomes valuable. This data not only supports daily operations but it also has the potential to help companies to better understand historical performance and predict the future, if it can be interpreted properly. In fact, reporting and analytics has been a part of some PLM offerings for a while. For instance, Siemens PLM Software has included this capability in its Teamcenter solution since 2006. However, because most PLM adopters are still focusing on improving product design and development productivity, analytics remains a relatively quiet area.

Recently, following a series of activities such as PTC's acquisition of Relex Software Corporation (a vendor focusing on providing analytics in product reliability and safety), Aras and Microsoft's collaboration on enterprise business intelligence (BI) for product-driven companies, and Oracle Agile PLM 9.3 highlighting its product risk management capability as the extension of its analytics platform, PLM analytics may receive more attention from the PLM community.

Although the PLM industry has not reached a consensus on the definition of PLM analytics, it doesn't prevent us from discussing what insights PLM users should expect after mining through available data within a PLM system. The main purpose of this article is to propose a framework that may help you comb through possible areas that PLM analytics may apply to.

Different Data Sets Within a PLM System

Data is the raw material that needs to be processed in order to produce the final output of PLM analytics. Hence, before heading for analytics, taking a look at the different orientations of PLM data may help conceptualize what PLM analytics can provide (see table 1).
Orientation Description Example
Product This is the most prominent group of data within the PLM system. Product data (i.e., product definition information) is the backbone of the entire PLM data set. Other data exists and is organized around product data.

* Product requirements
* Product structure data
* Product document data
* Product document metadata

Project Project-oriented data is used to define and help execute product development projects and processes. This group of data exists for the purposes of facilitating the creation of product definition information, but it is not categorized as product data.

* Work breakdown structure (WBS)
* Resource information
* Work progression data
* Project risk data

Process This group of data refers to PLM users' specific business processes. In general, there are overlaps between this group and the previous group (project data). Process data refers to the daily operational activities that are not managed as projects.

* Routing and approval activities
* Problem-solving activities
* Collaboration records
* Transactional data associated with business processes

People User information (with regard to PLM systems) may be associated with all the previous categories. However, it is necessary to treat the user-oriented data as the fourth data set since the "people" element is an important part of a PLM system.

* System user information
* Roles and groups
* User login data
* User participation records

Table 1. Four orientations of PLM data

The above table separates PLM data into four groups: product, project, process, and people. This is not a scientific way of categorizing PLM data since there may be overlaps, dependences, and consequences between one group and another. However, these four sets of data represent four different facets when we look at the entire collection of PLM data, and each of these facets explores an area of PLM analytics.

Product: Developing Better Products

There are multiple areas where people can use product data to make better decisions for existing and future products. These areas include, but are not limited to, the following:

1.

Product quality improvement: Based on quality incidents, customer complaints, test results, design scenarios, computer-aided design (CAD) model analysis, and all other relevant information, analytics will help manufacturers determine root causes of product problems and address product quality issues more efficiently.
2.

Product risk management: Compared to product quality improvement, product risk management takes a more proactive approach towards product sustainability. By analyzing historical product data as well as product requirements data, manufacturers will be able to identify risk factors (e.g., underperforming suppliers, high production costs for parts, and non-compliant products) and address them before a product reaches the production stage.
3.

Product portfolio management: Based on quality, risk, and performance analysis, manufacturers are able to determine which products should be pursued. The result may include portfolios of existing and future products, which will affect product innovation investments in project portfolio management.
4.

Part portfolio management: Using standard parts is a long-term practice in various manufacturing areas. Based on part performance and usage data, analytics may help companies build an optimized parts library that contains standard parts (on international, regional, national, industrial, and organizational levels) and non-standard parts.

Project: Improving Product Development Process

Within the PLM setting, "project" mainly refers to product development and introduction endeavors. Common methodologies such as integrated product development (IPD), Product And Cycle-time Excellence® (PACE®), and Stage-Gate® have been developed to manage innovation processes and to facilitate project collaboration. The purposes of applying analytics to project-related data are to improve product development processes and to achieve the best project output.

1.

Project portfolio management: Project portfolio management adds discipline and structure to determining which product innovations should be pursued. While product portfolio management functionality focuses on the best assortment of products, project portfolio management functionality deals with project risks and returns in order to achieve the best combination of product innovation efforts.
2.

Project performance measurement: Besides helping people make "go" or "no-go" project decisions, analytics can also help evaluate projects that are in progress. Project completion status, resource usage, and cost allocation are some possible areas that project performance measurement can cover. Based on these analytics, project managers will be better equipped in making sound decisions.
3.

Project task measurement: Project managers can allow for finer granularity of the task (or activity) level within a project and evaluate task performance, whether it is related to a team, a role, an individual, or a lab resource. By doing so, productivity patterns can be revealed so project managers will be able to assign the most appropriate resources to a certain development task.

Process: Increasing Operation Efficiency

The intent of having this category is to cover business processes other than product development and introduction processes that are managed within a PLM system. For example, sourcing can be a task managed in a product development project. However, within the project management environment, the main interests include managing those involved in the assigned task and being updated on the current status of the task. However, there might be other data (e.g., transactional data and communication records with suppliers) in the sourcing process that are not included in project management. If interpreted appropriately, this additional data may reflect valuable information that will improve sourcing practices. Some examples include: What is the most efficient way to invite suppliers in a bid? Who are the most responsive suppliers?

Depending on the scale of a PLM system being used in an organization, the types of analytics that can be performed may vary. Based on data availability, companies need to use their own judgment to discover what insights they can acquire from PLM data. Possibilities may be located in ideation and conception process, manufacturing process management, sourcing, and others. In order to make the analytics more powerful, data from other systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and supply chain management (SCM) systems may be involved.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/product-project-process-and-people-the-four-ps-of-plm-analytics-19934/

Process PLM Vendor Sequencia Adds Portfolio Management

2010-07-31T05:21:00.001-07:00

Sequencia is developing a very broad product. With this announcement, they are now strong at the highest level (portfolio), adding to existing function from idea generation, through the project team (projects, collaboration), through design (R&D, collaboration), all the way to the plant floor. The power of PLM is in the integration of the business processes across the different levels. Giving greater visibility within management, we expect this to increase the acceptance of PLM in the Process Industries (see Process PLM series).

Sequencia competitors Formation Systems (www.formationsystems.com) and SAP (www.sap.com) have not entered into the area of portfolio management. Formation is strong in the areas of idea creation and R&D while SAP is just entering the market with an R&D focused announcement. At this time, only Sequencia covers the entire spectrum of Process PLM functionality.

The management of an array of projects is complex. Often, thousands of projects exist in multiple project portfolios. These projects may be in multiple semi-independent business units in multiple geographies. It is difficult to compare "apples to apples" with the projects having varying value propositions and risk factors. The projects may be supporting different business objectives and being evaluated by different people. This complex management environment can be aided with a technology-based approach.

Portfolio management is a dynamic decision process that permits the management of multiple projects. Portfolio management allows executives and management to compare and contrast their project portfolio using objective and measurable criteria. A business's list of active product innovation projects is revised and updated through integration with the remaining portions of the PLM system. Using common scoring models, portfolio management supports the process of ranking projects according to multiple project metrics, for example Net Present Value (NPV), Expected Commercial Value (ECV), Productivity Index (PI) and Project Attractiveness Score (PAS). New projects can be evaluated against both existing projects and competing new projects, selected and prioritized. Existing projects may be accelerated, killed, or re-prioritized based upon how they relate with other projects against the objectives of the enterprise. By comparing projects, resources can be allocated or re-allocated.

Portfolio Management is a natural part of Process PLM. The benefits of portfolio management to the process company includes:

* Value - Maximize Portfolio Value
* Balance - Attain the right mix of projects
* Alignment - Business Goals Reflected
* Focus - Execute the right number of projects

Unfortunately, there is often conflict between these four high-level goals. With this announcement, Sequencia delivers interactive decision support so that executives can intelligently balance these competing goals The Sequencia / Prosight partnership makes sense for the Process PLM market. Sequencia will offer the processPoint Portfolio Management as an integrated part of the processPoint PLM solution. Sequencia is the leading provider of web-based PLM solutions for the process industries providing deep industry knowledge to develop business templates for process industry portfolios. ProSight is the expert portfolio management software, providing deep experience and expertise in automating portfolio management methodologies. ProSight has initially focused on implementing portfolio management for IT technology investments. Sequencia and ProSight have been working jointly on integration of the products

Jim Brown, Sequencia's Vice President of Marketing comments, "While working with the industry, it became obvious that a major problem was the ability to manage the wide array of projects that existed in many companies. We formed the Prosight partnership to allow the industry to automate this difficult management process. Better portfolio management leads to better decision making, increasing the power and effectiveness of innovation."

User Recommendations

Process companies with an emphasis on innovation as competitive weapon should consider Process PLM solutions in order to maintain and enhance their competitive position. Companies with many R&D projects or geographically dispersed R&D efforts should consider portfolio management as a key requirement.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/process-plm-vendor-sequencia-adds-portfolio-management-16619/

Pelion Systems Champions Manufacturing Process Optimization

2010-07-31T05:19:00.000-07:00

Globalization and outsourcing are proliferating within the manufacturing industry, and most successful companies are implementing demand-driven business models as they seek ways to capture, shape, and respond to the demands of the dynamic global marketplace. This is because as demand visibility improves, manufacturers are called upon to respond to that demand more quickly and with more predictable results. Thus, increasingly, organizational visibility into the capacity and performance of production assets, whether wholly owned or outsourced, is needed to support decisions about where and how to meet production demands in a profitable and predictable fashion. In sum, manufacturing operations today are characterized by a significant need for factory transformation management.

Evolution of Tiered Manufacturing Operations

A top-down approach to manufacturing coordination and visibility is clearly in order. Consequently, manufacturers are looking beyond the realm of local execution capabilities to architectures and systems that support interdependent supply networks (ISN), synchronizing the execution of compliant manufacturing and logistics processes across a dynamic supply network (see Supply Chain Management is Evolving toward Interdependent Supply Networks).

In addition, the lines between familiar production applications have blurred. Modern production execution management applications combining traditional manufacturing execution systems (MES), quality, asset, and performance management functionality are beginning to emerge. These will offer manufacturers a more cost effective and integrated approach to contemporary manufacturing challenges, while providing an integrated view of site-level performance.

Global ISN Requires Continued Investment

ISNs require the orchestration of manufacturing operations on a global scale. Progressive enterprises view manufacturing as a strategic node in their ISNs. Brand owners are embracing the growing role of contract manufacturing and logistics to supply product in increasingly volatile supply networks. This is fueling the rapid evolution of a market for applications that provide brand owners with visibility into the performance of distributed arrays of manufacturing assets. ISN involves leveraging current investments, as well as making long overdue investments in the dynamic closed-loop scheduling of distributed assets, such as plants and distribution centers.

Local Manufacturing Operations Require Manufacturing Performance Optimization

First and foremost, production operations must focus on local execution excellence. Manufacturing capabilities vary dramatically across industries, geographies, individual manufacturing sites, and even production lines within those sites. Mergers and acquisitions have compounded the problem of highly heterogeneous plant software, instrumentation, and control landscapes, resulting in poor replication of manufacturing best practices. Moreover, for the past five to ten years, upgrading plant systems has taken a back seat to preferential investments in enterprise transactional systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and supplier relationship management (SRM).

Global manufacturers are now finding that in-house and contract manufacturing requires local investments in plant automation and control to ensure agile, compliant, first-time responses, as well as the associated visibility into the status and performance of all manufacturing assets. Enterprises are changing how they source, manufacture, and distribute products. They are gaining a greater appreciation for speed, timeliness, reach, execution, and integration with manufacturing operations strategies, including demand management, supplier management, product, and transportation and logistics strategies.

Pelion Systems and Manufacturing Performance Optimization

Pelion Systems, located in Boulder, Colorado (US), is a solution provider with a legacy in enterprise application integration, SCM, and manufacturing. Its goal is to assist demand-driven manufacturing operations that are in the midst of a transition by applying the best practices in manufacturing improvement strategies embodied in its manufacturing process optimization (MPO) software, a factory-level value-add solution for ERP and supply chain applications.

Pelion MPO software strives to synchronize the supply chain via a "virtual factory" approach. To this end, Pelion Systems has recently built out the solution to achieve a broader footprint. Pelion MPO includes modules for the following processes.

* Process optimization
* Demand management
* Supply management
* Factory management
* Distribution management
* Performance management

Pelion's solution set is designed to help manufacturers to enable and systemize contemporary manufacturing improvement strategies, such as "lean" strategies and Six Sigma. Pelion MPO utilizes a process-based modeling methodology to develop a factory knowledgebase of data that simulates and measures the business impact of manufacturing transformation. Based on the belief that there is a common manufacturing transformation lifecycle over time and using factory "pull" logic, Pelion MPO assists the manufacturer in modeling and visualizing possible future states of factory operations. Pelion MPO uses an "as is" and "to be" modeling and scenario simulation capability for new products, demand variations, and other unique shop floor processes in a state of change in order to enable a planned transformation. This, in turn, enables product and industrial engineering design capabilities that support new product manufacturing process modeling and even facility layout and design.

The real nugget here is that, unlike the manufacturing process management (MPM) solutions of the past, which focused on realigning manufacturing processes within and between other departmental entities, or enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI), which tries to bridge the gap between real time manufacturing operations and business systems, such as ERP, enterprise application management (EAM), and business intelligence (BI) applications, MPO is focused on modeling, visualizing, and optimizing a "virtual factory" with minimal disruption to manufacturing operations. By visualizing current and optimized manufacturing operations, and enabling a simulation of the future state, management can commit to a phased transformation and to a gradual though progressive adoption of change.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/pelion-systems-champions-manufacturing-process-optimization-18387/

Process-based Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance

2010-07-31T05:18:00.000-07:00

It is apparent that as global regulatory mandates multiply and become more stringent, manual approaches to control activities are inevitably becoming untenable. By embedding a rationalized set of automated controls into companies' cross-enterprise business processes, users can move away from resource-intensive, manual control activities to address critical business risks. Although the idea here is to ensure that every organization meets compliance mandates in the most timely and cost-effective fashion while optimizing operational efficiency, compliance will remain a mix of automaton and people for a long time to come.

The proper balance of automated processes with paper records and manual, human interaction keeps cost under control, and yields a flexible but controlled set of procedures. Each of these two extremes has its costs and characteristics. Specifically, computers do a great job of handling repetitive tasks and of organizing, storing, and retrieving standard documents. People, on the other hand, do a much better job of handling exceptions (see white paper by Olin Thompson, FDA Compliance for the Life Sciences).

In any organization, evaluation of the characteristics of operations, products, and so forth will reveal the mix of standard versus exceptional circumstances. The most effective procedures will allow computer systems to assist in repetitive operations. At the same time, computers can integrate manual or semi-manual approaches to exceptions, which should be captured in a digital form to facilitate the storing and retrieving of documents, where feasible (see white paper by Olin Thompson, FDA Compliance for the Life Sciences).

Information technology (IT) systems can lower people cost while generating their own costs, and people and IT systems must be balanced to yield the correct level of compliance at the appropriate cost. One should always remember that compliance is not about computers, but rather it is about processes that involve many elements, one of which is computers. The appropriate balance between people and systems in smaller and midsized companies is typically achieved by leveraging automation to handle normal and repetitive situations, and by relying on people for variations (see white paper by Olin Thompson, FDA Compliance for the Life Sciences). This system is cleverly explained in Kiran Garimella's book The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage (Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2006).

…while the business process management (BPM) software generally provides the DNA and the chemicals to bring processes to life, service oriented architecture (SOA) is the physio-skeletal system that allows the life-form to move about and function. XML (extensible markup language) may be likened to the nervous system that serves as the medium and protocol of communication. To stretch the analogy a bit further, just as RNA acts as a messenger and translator of the genetic code into proteins, MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) provides a technology-neutral way of translating the BPM architecture into practical designs. BAM (business activity monitoring) provides the feedback loop, the pain-pleasure principle, and the deep control mechanism that keeps the life-form in homeostasis and agile in a constantly changing environment.

For more pertinent information regarding the ideas above, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More, The Modelling Approach to Post-implementation Agility in Enterprise Systems, and Business Activity Monitoring—Watching the Store for You.

Benefits of Process-based GRC

The point here is that it is the emergence of the above technological concepts that, while not a silver bullet, at least promotes the treatment of controllership and compliance in a more strategic (top-down) way, rather than as a slew of knee-jerk reactions to the regulatory threats du jour (that is, the current regulatory requirements). To that end, BPM should be able to facilitate enterprise risk management (to identify, monitor, and manage all varieties of risks) by providing tools and a framework to gain and maintain knowledge of business processes. Thus, a process-oriented control application has to provide a risk-based approach to establishing the user's control environment and identifying the most effective and efficient controls. Such an application should integrate directly with control documentation in the required governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) repository. This integration will enable the user company to centralize control management, and eliminate the need to integrate separate tools for documentation, testing, remediation, and continuous control monitoring.

For an extensive exploration of GRC, please see the following series:

Thou Shalt Comply (and More, or Else): Looking at Sarbanes-Oxley, Important Sarbanes-Oxley Act Mandates and What They Mean for Supply Chain Management, Sarbanes-Oxley Act May Be Just the Tip of a Compliance Iceberg, Automotive Industry and Food, Safety, and Drug Regulations, "Evergreen"—Environmental Regulations for High-tech and Electronics, Chemical, and Oil and Gas Industries, and Global Trade and the Role of Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance Software, and The Challenges of Defining and Managing Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance.

As discussed in SAP Solutions for Governance, Risk and Compliance, process-based GRC will allow companies to conduct such activities as

* quantifying the financial exposure from control exceptions to properly prioritize necessary resource deployment;

* implementing controls for key risks with a combination of automated control monitoring, manual controls testing, and self-assessments;

* monitoring critical "procure-to-pay," "order-to-cash," or "reconcile-to-report" process configurations and transactions, ideally with pre-delivered, automated control tests;

* ensuring compliance with Section 404 of the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX);

* implementing effective IT governance and alignment with Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT);

* deploying consistent, automated control tests across multiple organizations and business units to reduce the number of controls that need to be maintained (control tests can be controlled using criteria such as customer and vendor IDs, company codes, fiscal periods, and financial accounts to increase precision and accuracy);

* routing manual control tests to appropriate personnel automatically;

* guiding control testers with step-by-step, manual procedures, and (occasionally) via approved spreadsheet templates for performing manual control tasks, while ensuring completeness and accuracy;

* performing self-assessments for entity-level controls, design reviews, and management certifications, such as SOX Section 302 sign-offs (this section requires the chief executive officer [CEO] and chief financial officer [CFO] to quarterly certify the existence of controls and to sign off on the veracity of the organization's financial statements);

* pinpointing control violations and prioritizing corrective actions through a global "heat map" (of burning issues); and

* creating remediation cases automatically for control exceptions to accelerate resolutions.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/process-based-governance-risk-management-and-compliance-19344/

How to Evaluate a Sales and Operation Planning System

2010-07-31T05:16:00.000-07:00

Sales and operations planning (SOP) is one of the more critical functions an organization must undertake, as its effects span across various departments, and have the potential to directly influence the organization’s profits. A successful SOP department harmonizes the different beats of each division into an agreeable melody. It is definitely a challenge to find an effective tool that can merge the data from different systems to create a coherent picture of the organization.

An SOP system is used by the most important departments of an organization: finance, sales, marketing, and operations. This is why a powerful SOP system can make the difference between the success and failure of an SOP cycle. SOP systems are very useful to senior management, as they allow a “bird’s eye view” (an overall view) of the health of the whole organization. With its graphical representations and dashboards, an SOP system is an indispensable tool for any organization.

The software market is becoming increasingly competitive, which is having a positive effect on the SOP products available. Today, SOP systems have many advanced features, such as real-time dataflow and intuitive user interfaces. A couple of years back, many features like these were considered “nice to have,” but today they are essential. Also, vendors have streamlined their products so that implementation times are more manageable, making the return on implementing an SOP system more attractive. Today, a typical SOP implementation—assuming that the organization is already running an enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and business intelligence (BI) system—should take around three months worth of labor hours.

Predefined Key Performance Indicators and Metrics

Standard key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics already built into an SOP system is a particularly useful feature that offers many benefits to an organization. Standard KPIs and metrics could be based on popular models, such as the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model, and they can drastically reduce the implementation time of an SOP system. Most SOP system implementations take a long time to develop reports based on SCOR-based KPIs, so this capability should be a fundamental feature of any SOP system. If this capability is not supported by the SOP system, then a considerable amount of time will go to identifying KPIs and then building reports for them, be they financial or operational.

If the KPIs on budget, inventory norms, sales forecasting error, etc. are built in, then they do not need to be configured from scratch. Furthermore, a visual representation of KPIs in graphs and dashboards helps top management to keep tabs on various “numbers.”

Integration with Different Systems

An SOP system should be able to integrate with different systems. Most organizations have a transactional system, which is usually an ERP system. Such systems are rich with data that organizations could use to their benefit. An SOP system should be able to draw data from these systems to show a realistic value of the KPIs and metrics through internal benchmarking of their historical data.

An SOP system should also be able to integrate with the SCM system. Integration of these two systems gives organizations the flexibility to modify data in the SOP system if certain organizational objectives are not being met. For example, a sales manager might need to change the sales forecast figure of a certain product in order to meet organizational objectives for that product. With the two systems integrated, instead of logging into the SCM system to make this change, it can be made directly in the SOP system, and the information will be updated in the SCM system as well.

An SOP system should be able to extract data from the BI system, such as historical data and calculated metrics. To do this, the SOP system should be sitting “on top” of the ERP, BI, and SCM systems. It is preferable that the dataflow from these systems is bidirectional, but still today, in some cases, technological limitations severely restrict bidirectional flow. For example, data changed in the SOP system may not be automatically updated in the BI system. For an SOP system to have this capability, it should be built on a platform that can integrate with heterogeneous systems seamlessly. This should be a fundamental feature of an SOP system.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/how-to-evaluate-a-sales-and-operation-planning-system-19231/

Oracle Further Orchestrates Its SOA Forays Part Four: SOA and Web Services

2010-07-31T05:15:00.000-07:00

Oracle has caught up with its competitors in terms of its platform development strategy, owing to its notable infrastructure strategy, including the Oracle Application Server 10g, and its integration set made up Oracle Integration InterConnect, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Integration B2B, and Oracle Integration BAM, and other components. It now offers a comprehensive integration solution with these components and with Oracle Portal. It creates composite applications involving enterprise business processes and data, and uses Oracle Enterprise Manager as monitoring and management solution.

Surprisingly, in the ongoing hoopla surrounding Web services, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP seem to have caught their archrivals, Oracle and Sun, asleep. The fact these two thought leaders in the "software as services" realm have not given a clear message about Web services, having only made vague vocal endorsements, is puzzling, especially, given their visions of services on the Web replacing traditional client/server applications. It was their innovation thinking that lead to the introduction of network appliances, devices connected over the Internet, mobile Java code, content stores, and even hosted/application service provider (ASP) discussions. Much of these, among other capabilities, are now present within the Microsoft .NET (the Microsoft Longhorn) strategy, which is, to say the least, opponents to play the public-relations catch-up game. However, when it comes to development capabilities, runtime services, standards participation and definition, and other pertinent Web services metrics, Oracle is still certainly one of the leaders.

Service-oriented Architecture

SOA is a development approach in which all functions (so-called "services") are defined using a published description language. It invokes callable interfaces to perform business processes. Processes, transactions, and special functional components have to be exposed so services allowing composite, diverse applications can be seen. Each interaction is independent of each interaction and the interconnect protocols of the communicating devices. In other words, the infrastructure components that determine the communication system does not affect the interfaces. Because interfaces are platform-independent, a client using any device using any OS, in any coding language can supposedly access or use the service.

The battle for the dominance in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services has been largely been a war of words so far, and one without the clear winner yet (and not any time soon), as many underlying Internet-based standards have emerged only recently. Still, bitter enemies agree on the future of Web services, and have been building similar technology frameworks for developers. Both Java and .NET camps also rely on the same set of established standards such as

* XML (a language that facilitates direct communication among computers on the Internet. Unlike its older HTML cousin, which provides HTML tags giving instructions to a Web browser about how to display information, XML tags give instructions to a Web browser about the category of information.)

* Universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI, a Web-based distributed directory that enables businesses to list themselves on the Internet and discover each other, similar to a traditional phone book's yellow and white pages)

* Web services description language (WDSL, an XML-formatted language that UDDI uses. It was jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM and describes a Web service's capabilities as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages)

* SOAP, an XML-based messaging protocol used to encode information in Web service request and response messages before being sent over a network. SOAP messages are independent of any operating system or protocol and may be transported using a variety of Internet protocols, including simple mail transport protocol (SMTP), multipurpose internet mail extensions (MIME), and hypertext transport protocol (HTTP).

Quite pertinent to its development is a well-publicized concept of SOA, which should help developers down the path of software componentization. The closer one can make the software map to business processes and adapt over time, the better the applications will support business objectives. A well-constructed application that tightly integrates, yet loosely decouples a set of solid, customizable modules will certainly find customers in this highly assorted, composite applications market.

Web Services

Though built on similar principles, SOA is not the same as Web services, which is a certain collection of standards-based technologies, such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI . In simpler terms, XML is used to tag the data and SOAP is used to transfer it. WSDL is used for describing the services available, while UDDI is used for listing available services. Used primarily as a means for businesses to communicate with each other and clients, Web services allow organizations to communicate data without intimate knowledge of each other's IT systems behind the firewall. Web services act analogically to electronic data interchange (EDI) because it is a set of Web-based applications that dynamically interact with other Web-based applications by using open standards. The difference is that it is an electronic process interchange. On the other hand, SOA entails a much broader notion, because it is more than a set of technologies and runs independent of any specific technologies.

Thus, the emerging Web services technology standards are likely to increase the awareness of this component-based applications concept and speed up its still fledgling adoption. Moreover, Web services has the potential of becoming the latest evolution of application integration technology. It may even be a revolutionary new application design model because it enables developers to create or enhance applications by connecting granular components that are accessed via platform-independent Web protocols. Endorsement by large vendors might also help make up for their latent endorsement of the component technology several years ago. While leveraging the aged concept of objects' reusability, vendors may finally offer that extra mile by adhering to the standards that are taking hold in Web services. Support for standards will be the difference between the less successful common object request broker architecture (CORBA), which was designed to enable pieces of programs (objects) to communicate regardless of the language or platform they were in, and Web services.

Additionally, Web services can wrap around virtually any type of existing business functionality. Furthermore, they tend to be simpler in their nature, partly owing to Web service's adoption of collaborative Internet standards. They also tend to be higher-level abstractions, which implies a greater opportunity for more platform independence and "mixing and matching" by developers.

Subsequently, the strategy will help the likes of SAP and Oracle further open or componentize their products, as standards like XML. and extensible stylesheet language (XSL) make it possible to share data and have a common look-and-feel across an application, without necessarily dreadfully digging in the source code. Namely, while both SOA and traditional EAI cover integration and horizontal application services, SOA goes much further by catering for vertical (business specific) services and presentation services. The latter would be the foundation for a universal desktop for all the Web-based applications of an enterprise, thereby providing a common "look-and-feel", and language transparency across multiple applications.

For a detailed discussion of the relationship between SOA, Web Services, BPM, and BPEL, particularly in terms of the complementary nature of Web services and BPEL, see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More.

This is Part Four of a six-part note.

Part One contained the event summary and began the market impact.

Part Two discussed strategy. Part Three covered strategy shifts.

Part Five analyzes the Collaxa acquisition.

Part Six will discuss weaknesses and make user recommendations.

Business Process Management (BPM) Technology

Closely related to SOA is the evolving business process management (BPM) technology, which covers a broad set of services and tools providing explicit and complete process management. The term "BPM" has long been used (and often misused) in industry lingo. The concept initially covered workflow management technologies, and was only recently adopted by application integration vendors focusing on other technologies. These technologies included a myriad of interconnected components that underpin a full fledged BPM system, including workflow, EAI, middleware, process modeling, process monitoring, enterprise applications, collaborative tools, integration brokers, Web integration servers, application servers, applications development tools, rules engines. The interconnectedness of these technologies naturally create a complex environment.

Its through these components that BPM allows companies to (relatively) quickly change the way transactions, queries, and other communications are handled, and deal with exceptions or glitches. BPM typically entails

1. process analysis and modeling, using a graphical process designer targeted for business analysts,

2. definition,

3. execution,

4. monitoring process performance, its degree of completion and out-of-bounds conditions, and

5. administration, for process termination and load balancing or rerouting, all including support for both human (manual) and application-level (automatic) interaction.

As the process flow is executed through a runtime execution engine, various enterprise applications (legacy, standard packaged, customized, third-party, and Web services) may be invoked, in addition to tasks that need to be completed or intervened by the user..

It may also be noted that though that smaller, mid-market vendors seem to be focusing less on complex routing and automated processes across disparate systems (see BPM Weaves Data and Processes Together for Real-time Revenues). Instead, their attention is turning towards aspects of BPM and how it handles exceptions and automates simpler processes.

One of the most attractive promises of SOA is the potential to create applications and systems using models, because Web services can generally be described by their metadata. This enables a person to construct or map the entire system by linking together the invocation of services in a given sequence (whereby even that sequence and its logic can also be described in metadata). The process of creating metadata to sequence the invocation of several services is referred to as orchestration. Composition amounts to the combination of assembly and orchestration.

SOA thus offers a promising design approach for making large IT systems more flexible and cost-effective. Namely, a plethora of extended-ERP applications, designed to work in conjunction with the core ERP and back-office systems, create a greater need for application and data integration. Any application must be able to communicate with external applications fairly easily. Since a great deal of the cost of implementation is often due to integration, extensibility has significant implications on cost and performance. Applications that embrace the SOA concept and provide standard-based Web services should significantly reduce the complexity and cost of integration. To that end, .NET was built with SOAP as a core data transfer protocol, albeit this may not necessarily be the best choice, as SOAP is comprised of XML over HTTP, which is not the fastest data transfer protocol.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/oracle-further-orchestrates-its-soa-forays-part-four-soa-and-web-services-17837/

Computer Associates Jasmineii - When Is A Portal Not Just A Portal?

2010-07-31T05:14:00.000-07:00

This article discusses the new release of CA's portal technology, but goes on to explore the deeper implications of what is actually contained in the product. Watch the TechnologyEvaluation.Com website for an upcoming series of articles on the nature of Application Integration, market forces, and players.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), a leading provider of e-Business management solutions, recently announced the general availability of Jasmineii Portal 3.0 e-Business information portal. The new release enables customers to meet global e-Business objectives through dynamic personalization, double-byte and European language support, and streamlined administration.

For IT administrators, Jasmineii Portal 3.0 features streamlined, centralized management and easy integration with a full range of existing corporate information systems. A Web interface enables Jasmineii Portal 3.0 to be deployed to users with virtually "zero administration" across an unlimited number of desktops and without the need for browser-specific plug-ins or applets. Administrators can also create visual templates for specific groups of users. Baseline content can also be developed and deployed in support of specific B2B, B2C or B2E requirements.

Centralized security controls provide Jasmineii Portal 3.0 with the convenience of single sign-on while ensuring that access to sensitive information is restricted to appropriate users. Business partners, customers and employees can be confident that their information remains confidential.

"We selected CA's Jasmineii Portal technology for its proven capability to integrate our rich, yet complex, information environment," said Romano De Carlo, CIO, Post Italiane, which teamed up with CA to create a regional network of more than 14,000 post offices linked to its main headquarters. "Jasmineii Portal provides a global solution that readily aligns with our business needs, allowing us to respond effectively to rapid market change."

In conjunction with the announcement, CA's field services organization is introducing JetStart for Portal, a packaged service that leverages CA's consulting expertise and best practice portal methodology for quick and effective deployment of enterprise information portals. Jasmineii Portal 3.0 supports Windows and UNIX platforms, it is available under CA's new simplified licensing model.

Market Impact

This announcement emphasizes the new product's ability to personalize and manipulate an enterprise portal for improved information access. CA would benefit from highlighting Jasmineii's ability to access, integrate, and then present, complex business information. The presentation layer is (arguably) the easy part. The other components speak to the entire area of Application Integration (EAI, IAI, B2Bi, A2A, depending on the vendor). The problem that many vendors face, and which is exemplified by CA's marketing quandary, is how to explain the exact nature of application integration, how it works, how it relates to portal technologies, and what it can do for a business.

As CA defines the overall product strategy, it involves the following 3 areas:

* e-Business infrastructure management. Products such as Unicenter and ArcServe to manage the environment. Unicenter can provide facilities to perform activities such as tracking distributed units of work. Security would also be provided at this level, an area in which CA has many industry leading offerings.

* e-Business process management. Process management can be thought of as the business level logic of the framework. Processes generally known as B2Bi and EAI can be performed at this level with offerings from CA's Interbiz e-Commerce subsidiary.

* e-Business information management. The ability to build applications, transform and integrate data, and provide intelligence. Products such as Jasmineii, AION, COOL, and DecisionBase can provide this capability.

This is a fairly accurate representation (at a high level) of what application integration tries to provide. The problem is explaining the issue to the market, how you address it, and how to measure return on investment with AI, (especially in the short term).

Another question CA has to address is "whom are you competing with?" CA believes that its technology is well positioned to compete with vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Plumtree, and iPlanet in the portal space. In the overall Jasmineii framework space, they can compete with IBM, Tibco, Vitria, webMethods, and NEON (now a division of Sybase). CA has admitted that it has not been very aggressive about articulating its market position and competitive advantages, but is putting renewed marketing focus on its portal technology and expects to gain both expanded mind share and market share in the near future. (Note that CA describes their Jasmineii Portal and the Jasmineii framework as separate products, which are not interdependent.)

The bottom line is that Computer Associates has virtually all of the components (with the exception of message-oriented middleware such as IBM's MQSeries, which CA is working on delivering in a maintenance update in the "near future") to provide a complete AI solution. All that remains for CA to do is decide that it wants to pursue that market, and throw some of its considerable R&D and marketing muscle at the project. The question is "will they"? CA assures us that it plans to do so, but only time will tell.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/computer-associates-jasmine-i-ii-i-when-is-a-portal-not-just-a-portal-16380/

Welcome to ERP - Distribution Showdown! Epicor Enterprise vs. JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite vs. Pronto Xi

2010-07-31T05:13:00.000-07:00

cc Chart 1 above indicates which industries these three ERP - distribution solutions support. What becomes readily apparent is that all three solutions are broadly based in terms of vertical markets. JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite and Pronto Xi support all ten, with Epicor Enterprise supporting eight out of the ten, dropping off only in Food and beverage and Wholesale . However, this should not be taken to suggest that there aren't any important differences between these three vendor solutions.
JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite
JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite is more of a best-of-breed solution, specializing in international trade and in logistics and transportation management, and is less of a full scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) system than the other two solutions. This is evidenced by its comparatively poor showing in back office functionality (a major part of what constitutes an ERP solution), and its relative strength in international logistics and transportation.

Also noteworthy is that JDA specializes in the high and middle end of the mid-market (as shown in Chart 2 above), deriving a full 50 percent of its revenues from companies in the $501 to $1 billion (USD) range, and a full 40 percent of its revenues from companies in the $101 to $500 million (USD) range. Only 10 percent of its revenues come from the low end of the mid-market segment ($51 to $100 million [USD]).

In terms of its customer base, JDA is very much North Americanâ€“based, with almost 70 percent of its business coming from North American customers, with most of the balance in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and very little in Asia.

Pronto Xi
Pronto is an Australian-based ERP vendor, so it's no surprise that 70 percent of its business is in Australia, with most of the balance in the Asian market, and very little in North America. Unlike JDA, Pronto specializes in the mid and lower ends of the market, with 60 percent of its revenues coming from these two segments, and only 10 percent coming from the high end of the market. Pronto offers a full ERP solution with strong back end functionality.

Epicor Enterprise
Epicor Enterprise falls right down the middle in terms of the market segment it most supports, with 45 percent of its business coming from the mid-level companies. Its next strongest segment of the market is the lower end, with 20 percent of its revenues coming from companies in the $51 to $100 million (USD) range.

Sixty-three percent of Epicor's business is in North America, with almost all the rest in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

We've included information on the vendors' market segments and geographical markets because we believe these are important factors to consider when selecting a software solution. Any vendor doing a lot of business with companies of your size and in your geographical market is likely to have the kind of knowledge and expertise necessary to understand and support your company's special needs and problems.

Functionality
Now we come to the all-important functionality scores. It must be remembered that the functionality ratings you see here refer to the specific solutions being rated, and not to the vendor in general.

Chart 3. Breakdown of business components.

As you can see in Chart 3 above, the functionality portion of the Showdown is broken down into four main areas: Supply Chain Management (SCM), Distribution Process Management (DPM), Retail & Commerce, and Back Office. Within each area are functional subareas, a total of 13 in all.

In SCM, the backbone of any ERP - distribution solution, Epicor Enterprise has the strongest showing across the board. JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite is strong in Transportation Management, Trade Logistics, and Procurement, but gets only average scores in Warehouse and Supplier Management. Pronto Xi is also strong across the board in SCM, except in Transportation Management.

In Retail & Commerce, Pronto Xi scored best, with Epicor Enterprise and JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite sharing the second spot.

In DPM, it's basically dead even. All three vendor solutions score well across the board, although Epicor Enterprise slightly outperforms JDA in Process Management, and slightly outscores Pronto in Purchasing Management.

In Back Office, both Epicor Enterprise and Pronto Xi get top grades, with JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite placing third. Again, this is no surprise, since this JDA solution is more of a supply chain optimization, best-of-breed solution.

Conclusion

Each of the vendor solutions we looked at in this Showdown offers a different combination of strengths and weaknesses.

For example, Pronto Xi scored well in every functional area except Transportation Management . If your business requires a strong transportation management module, JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite may be the better choice, but that comes at a price: JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite is weaker than Pronto Xi in Web Commerce and Financials . Epicor Enterprise also scored well across the board, but was weaker in Retail and POS . (It should be remembered that Epicor Enterprise offers other solutions that have strong retail and POS functionality). If your needs include a strong retail component, both JDA Supply Chain Planning & Optimization Suite and Pronto Xi may be better choices.

Also worth considering is which vendor is best positioned to understand and support your needs. With almost all its business in Asia-Pacific, Pronto has good knowledge and experience in that geographical market. On the other hand, if your company is in the upper part of the mid-market and North Americanâ€“based, that much more closely fits with JDA's corporate profile than either of the two other vendors. If your business is in the mid or lower end and North Americanâ€“based, Epicor is the closest fit in terms of business size and geography. And, of course, functionality, as we've seen above, has to be factored in as well.

The fact is, no solution is ideal for every business. At the end of the day, it's largely the particular needs of your business that will determine which solution is the best fit for you.

A quick and easy way to compare ERP - distribution solutions based on your organization's particular functional requirements is by using TEC's ERP - Distribution Evaluation Center, which contains the latest vendor request for information (RFI) data for 17 different ERP - distribution solutions. TEC's ERP - Distribution Evaluation Center allows you to set priorities that reflect your organization's business model and special needs at every level of functionality, and you'll get the results in a matter of minutes. At the modular and submodular levels—even down to the individual criteria—you can tell the system which business processes are critical, important, or not important to your organization. The system then compares your priorities against the vendor RFI responses to produce a shortlist of solutions. You get a custom comparison—one that ranks vendor solutions on how well their functionality matches the business requirements of your organization.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/welcome-to-erp-distribution-showdown-epicor-enterprise-vs-jda-supply-chain-planning-optimization-suite-vs-pronto-xi-19312/

A Single Software Solution That Enables Business Process Management

2010-07-31T05:12:00.000-07:00

Exact has focused its development on making sure that any user company can significantly benefit from data stored in different places within the organization. Accordingly, it has developed a platform that keeps all departmental data in one central information store, accessible, in near real-time, over the Web, to make sure everyone within the organization works with the same information.

Part three of the Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions series.

For instance, every customer-related phone call can be logged into e-Synergy, whereas faxes and Web site requests can be automatically merged into the system. As a result, every customer touch point should be available through e-Synergy allowing sales staff to know the latest service or credit issues. Likewise, people in customer service and finance can see the latest sales interactions. When the user enterprise has a full history of the interactions, it can better serve the customer, and employees will spend less frustrating time shouting across the office to find out who spoke to whom, and what was said. By focusing on improving and optimizing processes instead of just the departments, any user company should be better aligned and prepared to take on the challenges ahead.

Right now, the traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) mid-market for standard business software remains sluggish and fragmented. Pricing pressures continue to increase on products and services, but a back-office ERP, per se, does not give the same competitive advantage it use to. However, due to globalization and Internet usage within businesses, users are increasingly seeking collaborative and Web-based solutions to find supply chain cost efficiencies and to better organize content.

An example of agility includes how prospects respond to an e-mail and enter personal information. The system should automatically update the contact database, and users can check for duplicates and add or merge the information. A workflow request can then be sent to the appropriate people for follow-up. When a customer places an order, the pricing used in the back-office system should also appear on the Web site or user screen. Finally, the system should offer a centralized view of all customers and their activities, including workflow, financial transactions, support issues, etc. from anywhere, and at any time. Customers, suppliers, and partners should also manage their accounts through secure portals.

Exact's quintessential solution consists of two fully integrated (working from the same central information store) products: Exact Globe and Exact e-Synergy. Both are built on Microsoft technology and open standards and should connect to any application users may have with relative ease. To get to the next level of competitiveness, users should build their ERP investments while reducing the steps it takes to execute key business processes. They should also manage by exception through lean manufacturing concepts. Exact touts e-Synergy as a means of managing by exception and tying together processes, documents, and people. It is a Web-based collaboration platform with portal views, workflow, document, customer relationship, and human resources management (HRM). e-Synergy also integrates office productivity tools such as Microsoft Excel and Outlook.

Exact has integrated e-Synergy with most of its local ERP packages. It has only been available in North American for a couple of years, yet, the product is used by over 400 customers in North America. Exact cites this as evidence of user interest in business process management (BPM) capabilities that layer over back-office ERP solutions. The product is also supportive of the US Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) owing to its workflow and document management capabilities, and it meets the electronic signature requirements under the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "Part 11" rules. The vendor expects standard business applications to drive efficiency by connecting to mobile devices, which is in demand by new generation of users that want better and faster access to more accurate and useful data.

For background information on Exact Software see Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions.

This is Part Three of a multipart note. This series will explore Exact's strategic groups and global aspirations; its BPM strategy and products; and its acquisition of Vanguard. It will also present challenges and make user recommendations.

Exact e-Synergy as the Collaboration Solution

Exact e-Synergy is primarily the collaboration solution, and as the name indicates, it is designed to provide synergy within the user organization. It gives all employees Web-access to instantaneous information from one central information source allowing them to plan, track, and initiate collaboration, and search and retrieve content, documents, and transactional data. By making Exact e-Synergy the platform of communication and collaboration, no data should (in principle) ever be lost at the organization, because information is stored for quick retrieval. Because of its ability to align employees, information, and processes across the enterprise, users of Exact e-Synergy should be able to view the health of the entire value chain, help employees manage time more effectively and execute business processes more efficiently. Key strengths of Exact e-Synergy are

* It integrates all company information by recording data at one time and in context. It links that data to all the relevant people, products, customers, workflow, and financial transactions.

* It encourages collaboration by providing structure and context and by accommodating Web sites and portals creation (see Portals: Necessary But Not Self-sufficient ).

* It supports mobile connectivity and allows on-line add-ons for portal digital assistant (PDA) devices.

* It increases transparency by managing all business processes through electronic workflow. The workflow integrates with Outlook, which is used for external communication (since calendars and contacts can be synchronized, e-mails can be sent to contacts from within the e-Synergy contact database). The system also integrates with Microsoft Office and Exchange.

* It gives access (search and retrieval) to all information and processes, including existing back-office ERP data and non-structured content for the entire organization, since the browser-based system has a "Google box"-type feature that makes it fairly easy to look up records by using multiple parameters.

* It reduces implementation and training costs by using a common Web browser to input and access data.

* It also leverages investments in ERP systems by enabling access to this information for the entire workforce.

The Web user interface (UI) is familiar to users and provides an easy means of navigation. Consequently, Exact e-Synergy is completely built on Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.0 and runs on top of Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), both on Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 platforms. All data is stored in the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, whereas all supported client platforms are Windows versions that support Internet Explorer (IE) 5.01 or better (i.e., Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP). The product also provides support for other devices, including PDAs (such as HP Ipaq) and smart phones.

e-Synergy has a broad rather than deep functional scope that is difficult to pigeonhole into a single enterprise software category. It also represents an enterprise relationship management (ERM) solution that integrates the functionality of traditional front-office applications in a single solution, providing employees, customers, and partners with virtually an immediate view of activity across an entire organization. Front-office activities (such as customer resource management [CRM], e-commerce, and portals); back-office activities (including financials, HRM projects, distribution, and production); and their workflow, event, document, knowledge management modules share one database, Microsoft SQL Server. As a result, users have no integration issues and all of their information is kept current and can be viewed using only Internet Explorer.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-single-software-solution-that-enables-business-process-management-18358/

Project Portfolio Management for New Product Development: Tracking the Project Cycle from Idea to Launch

2010-07-31T05:11:00.000-07:00

Besides being relevant to professional services organizations (PSO) and internal information technology (IT) departments, project portfolio management (PPM) software is applied in multiple vertical markets in the area of new product development (NPD). In industries ranging from manufacturing and high technology to consumer goods and biotechnology, PPM solutions help manage the corporate objectives associated with NPD projects.

PPM for NPD and research and development (R&D) projects addresses the needs of organizations seeking to maximize resource utilization for a portfolio of projects. PPM software empowers decision makers to select, evaluate, and prioritize their NPD and R&D projects. Furthermore, existing projects can be accelerated, terminated, or de-prioritized by the allocation or re-allocation of the resources that deliver project tasks. In the area of NPD, the primary objective of a PPM solution is to facilitate strategic and financial control throughout the project or product lifecycle.

The following article will examine the features and benefits of PPM in the NPD arena, as well as some of the vendors that provide specific functionality for this growing market segment.

Challenges in NPD

PPM is a key component of an organization's NPD strategy. The main challenge faced by managers and executives tracking NPD projects is the identification of bottlenecks within the NPD process that are relevant to their unique function within an organization. For instance, at any given time, project managers need to identify the short term availability of resources in relation to the requirements of a portfolio of projects. Vice presidents (VP) and "C" level executives, on the other hand, need to identify mid-term and long-term viability, return on investment (ROI), and strategic business decisions regarding their resource investments.

According to the Product Development Institute (http://www.prod-dev.com), organizations apply PPM methodology to address the following three critical issues in NPD and R&D projects.

1. Maximizing the value of portfolios by effectively managing and allocating resources to optimize profitability, maximize ROI, and reduce risk. This is achieved through the financial controls and scoring models offered by PPM solutions.

2. Achieving balance between business goals, risks, vertical markets, business strategies, and technologies. PPM solutions offer bubble diagrams, histograms, and other graphical reports to assist organizations in benchmarking their balance.

3. Aligning portfolio spending with the organization's business strategy. This can be achieved by implementing a PPM solution that provides strategic cross-referencing between projects, as well as a "gating" process, which enforces checkpoints to evaluate the viability of projects.

It is important to note that PPM solutions help provide the streamlined system that is necessary to address these critical issues by centralizing the information needed to track and evaluate NPD and R&D projects from idea to launch.

PPM Phases for NPD

Traditionally, organizations have focused on capturing and organizing documents, content, bill of materials (BOM), and specifications for new products. In contrast, PPM emphasizes the human resources (HR) component of NPD, which can drive the success or failure of projects. PPM software uses the following phases to address NPD projects.

1. Planning. Planning enables an organization to share and prioritize ideas, ensure projects are aligned with business and financial goals, and determine resource capacity. PPM solutions facilitate planning by offering Web-based bubble diagrams, "what-if" scenario reports, and collaboration or repository applications to help rank and share ideas.

2. Development. This phase allows managers to build resource teams based on templates; provides quick access to information and collaboration capabilities for team members; and allows access to forecasting, scheduling, and costs reports. PPM solutions contribute to development by providing resource planning tools, dashboard capabilities for visibility and collaboration, and real time executive reporting.

3. Delivery. The delivery phase helps organizations to successfully launch a product by improving collaboration between production and marketing, optimizing marketing by providing a single repository for consistent information, and managing product engagements and installations. In aid of this, PPM solutions provide collaboration tools, workflows, and dashboard technology to view and control all aspects of the product delivery process.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/project-portfolio-management-for-new-product-development-tracking-the-project-cycle-from-idea-to-launch-18352/

A New Model for Evaluating Third Party Logistics Providers: Enter Service Oriented Architecture

2010-07-31T05:10:00.002-07:00

The highly competitive third-party logistics (3PL) market is a broad and diverse group of companies that move product over ground, air, and sea, from point-to-point for just about every industry imaginable. Companies like UPS Logistics, Ryder, C.H. Robinson, Airborne Logistics, Cardinal Transport, and Penske Logistics are some of the names from a pool of over 200 logistics service providers in the US alone. 3PLs are notoriously under tremendous pressure to manage costs, while providing a wider range of services to an expanded and diverse customer base. At the same time, 3PL providers need to view themselves as business process managers that can capitalize on today's evolving supply chain management (SCM) technology.

Most 3PLs have a significant inventory of applications to host business process outsourcing for order services, warehousing, pick-pack-ship operations, inventory control, kitting, light assembly, transportation, consolidation, international trade logistics, reverse logistics, and many other functions for requesting clients and prospects. Software applications from Descartes, i2, Manugistics, GT Nexus, Vertex Interactive, Nextlinx, as well as a plethora of warehouse management systems (WMS) packages are found within their applications mix.
Enterprises will stick with what they do best and outsource non-core competencies to 3PL companies.

Progressive enterprises have recognized that they cannot be all things to all people and, consequently, will outsource all but their main lines of business to service providers, which can do a more effective job for less money. This can create a huge opportunity for those services that are providing what the market demands, when the demands are made. As customers demand quicker goods and services and at lower costs, service providers need to be able to integrate technology into existing and future business functions and reinvent processes as demand dictates. Service providers also have to be able to match changing customer expectations and respond rapidly as customers require changes in business processes. Logistics service providers have matured to become logistics business process outsourcing (BPO) services for companies willing to focus on core competencies and outsource indirect tasks.
Lower satisfaction has renewed scrutiny of 3PL service providers.

Customers are demanding more and want to make sure they receive the perceived benefits from their logistics service providers. Enterprise' SCM staffs are reassessing the value of 3PL providers and their ability to lower costs and maintain service levels. Logistics management within enterprises are also questioning 3PL providers' ability to be flexible, innovative, and to make use of newer, more efficient technology. But companies are being shortsighted if they are only looking to the outsourcing option for specific logistics functions aimed at simply reducing costs while maintaining existing service levels. Alternatively, bringing outsourced functions back in-house may be a daunting task. Research on logistics services indicates the long-term trend toward outsourcing the management of entire business processes, such as dynamic business processes including order assembly and order delivery, which are subject to considerable change over time.

New criteria for evaluating logistics service providers

With these changes in customer needs come alterations in how users evaluate their potential 3PL providers. The old method of evaluation consisted of the following factors:

* Reduced labor costs and inventory carrying costs
* Lower transportation costs
* Reduced cycle time
* Improved customer system integration
* Business process efficiency
* Access to information systems
* Financial stability

Such criteria served a purpose at one time, but customers expect their 3PL providers to be more than just delivery mechanisms now. Customers want 3PL providers to be more like supply chain partners, so customers must evaluate which service they choose using higher standards than in the past. The new criteria include the following:

* Expanded supply chain capabilities
* Global access and deployment
* Leading-edge technology
* Supply chain service integration, visibility, flexibility, and scalability
* Business process management and innovation
* Support for collaboration initiatives
* Financial strength

Enter SOA: 3PL Technologies Need To Be Evaluated Against an SOA Blueprint

Service oriented architecture (SOA), in its simplest form, is an approach to managing business tasks and business processes made available from different software packages for reuse. SOA uses flexible connectivity with well defined standards-based interfaces. Components of SOA include Web services, portals, application servers, security and analytics frameworks, business process management (BPM), and master data management, just to name a few.

SOA is a guide companies can use for the strategic management of their business. At the heart of SOA is the concept that business applications must be active and based on internal and external business processes, including outsourced ones. Serving as a blueprint for the next generation of collaborative systems and business practices, SOA ties together a company's systems of record, process, and venture, so that the technologies within each system work toward supporting collaborative services. The SOA model must be applied to internal and external systems, particularly those in support of whole business process outsourcing.

Major technology vendors like IBM with WebSphere Live for SOA, Oracle's Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE) and Fusion, and SAP's NetWeaver with Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) are pioneering the development of SOA frameworks. Other major SCM vendors are touting plans for a service oriented architecture like Manhattan Associates and i2. SOA's most anticipated benefits include faster and more flexible reconfiguration of business processes. This should be just the trick for 3PLs.

Recommendations

For manufacturing enterprises over 1,000 employees, just over 20 percent report active investments in SOA infrastructure. Therefore, this is an evolving technology investment that will grow over the next five years. Don't expect your logistics service providers to be leading edge for SOA, but press them on their plans because it could be a differentiator in the near future. If you are considering outsourcing particular logistics functions or whole business processes to a logistics service provider, there are key actions you must take.

Perform an assessment of your business strategy. Is your market leadership a result of innovation? Profitability through cost reduction? Growth through merger and acquisition?

Identify critical processes. What are the critical processes of the company within the five major areas of enterprise management, SCM, customer relationship management (CRM), procurement, and product lifecycle management (PLM)? How automated are the processes?

Map out your IT infrastructure concurrent with anticipated 3PL technology. What are the applications or technologies that are implemented internally and will need to be integrated with the prospective 3PL provider?

Evaluate the combined technology road map relative to SOA compatibility. Does the road map work within the context of SOA pillars of technology compliance, such as application independent integration, business process management, and integrated systems management?

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-new-model-for-evaluating-third-party-logistics-providers-enter-service-oriented-architecture-18196/

Vendors Strive for Segment Pack Leader Status; Does Retalix Measure Up?

2010-07-31T05:10:00.001-07:00

Retalix is a supply chain software and solutions provider headquartered in Dallas, Texas (US) and Ra'anana, Israel with a truly focused vertical orientation in the retail food industry, worldwide. Retalix's growth strategy over the past several years has been to expand its enterprise and supply chain management applications while maintaining close integration with their widely installed, in-store solutions. It has grown both organically and through acquisition. Retalix acquired OMI International in early 2004, a warehouse management system (WMS) and supply chain execution (SCE) vendor that is also focused on the retail food sector in early 2004. It continued with its growth strategy through acquisitions of IDS and TCI Solutions in April of 2005. The planned integration of OMI's best-of-breed supply chain execution solutions into the current application suite, as well as the new combination of technology and expertise that will ensue will enable Retalix to offer broader wholesale distributor appeal. The IDS acquisition gives Retalix a stronger install base (along with more enterprise resource planning-like applications) to farm as a growth opportunity for the future. TCI Solutions, also retail food centric, brings to the table a set of merchandising, price management, promotions, and inventory management products to round out the product portfolio suite.

Vendor Strategy and Trajectory

Retalix' vision, from the day the company was founded in 1982, has been to build its competitive position by offering superior retail food sector technology. The software is designed to be modular, scalable to large transaction volumes, capable of handling rapid scanning with extreme reliability, and able to integrate multiple store formats and hardware systems, which are all key requirements of the retail food segment.

What is most compelling about Retalix is its absolute dedication to the food related segment of retail. Best described by Barry Shacked, Retalix' chief executive officer since 1982, the company's focus is on "the grocery, convenience store, fuel, and food service retailers and wholesale distributors world wide". Retalix only has one target sector, which is really a sub-segment of "retail" and it has its entire product, and human and intellectual resources solely aiming at this same target.

This is a unique quality in today's retail software market landscape. Many software vendors pursue growth via merger and acquisition, coupled with product verticalization into sectors that are not necessarily their domain. At the high end, SAP's ventures into twenty-six verticals are overwhelming, especially given that it's actually targeted all of these verticals over the years. Oracle's recent acquisition of Retek is a clear move to shore up its retail expertise, install base, and product footprint. But neither of these mega-enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors has significant traction in food-related retail, in relative terms, compared to their other varied segments. For mid-market vendors, far too often solution providers espouse vertical initiatives or capabilities driven by opportunistic means. In other words, they signed up a client or two that happen to fall into a market segment that they didn't necessarily target. Many retail software solution providers today are heavily steeped into retail apparel segments with its vast array of complex and unique requirements.

Yet, we are not likely to see Retalix announcing any initiatives into apparel any time in the near future, because it is not a part of Retalix' "genetic makeup". Retalix is of the sound opinion that its targeted market segment holds significant growth opportunity for the future, and if its stays squarely focused on this one segment, it can win the "lion's share" of the market over time, driving healthy organic growth.
Vendors with a deep vertical focus and an expanded footprint can achieve pack leader status.

Recognizing a Market Pack Leader

Software vendors want to be the leaders in there areas of expertise, and Retalix is no exception, but how do we recognize a pack leader? What are some of the key elements (besides revenue) that characterize a pack leader? Below are some of the key elements of supply chain pack leaders:

Elements of Segment Leadership

Deep vertical differentiation and industry domain expertise including

* Specific functionality required by those verticals, and scalability for high transaction-volume verticals like food-service retail

* Compliance for key vertical initiatives

* Market segmentation (territory and tier), and vertical business unit expertise, from sales to implementation to support

Expanded functional footprint from the warehouse to the store, throughout the enterprise, and across the enterprise

* Cross-enterprise footprints from physical and informational process integration with suppliers and contract services entities, with customers via browser or extensible markup language (XML) to back-office systems, to actionable supply chain event management, such as ability to support multi-channel sales

* Proven multi-channel enablement within the warehouse from order capture to delivery as a key strength

Horizontal influences

* Technology such as Web services, Microsoft .NET, J2EE, mobile, voice, radio frequency identification (RFID), portals

* supply chain visibility and event management capabilities for both inbound and outbound information

* Operational business process management and workflow, including logistics process management with cross-functional process models from the viewpoint of a role; and workflow configuration with pre-established workflow templates by role within vertical.

* Integration technology at various levels, with focused integration products that operate among modules (e.g.warehouse management systems and transport management systems for wholesale distribution, yard, labor/resource, productivity management); systems supporting new supply chain initiatives (including supply chain planning from a long term view or short term planning that falls within the execution time window); and other cross-enterprise applications

Strong value proposition

* Includes return on investment (ROI) market messaging, ROI justification, and value assessment tools spanning the project life cycle from pre-sales to post-implementation support

Structured implementation process

* Refined over several years of field deployment experience, and tailored to cover the full spectrum from quick short-cycle implementations in a stand-alone facility, to complex highly automated environments with multi-node distribution network configurations

Strong sales and service alliances

* Particularly in field sales and implementation service consultancy

Well balanced mix of revenues

* Licenses, services, maintenance, hardware, geographies, and tiers

Major Factors Determining Pack Leader Success

Retalix and other striving pack leaders must continuously show that they possess many or all of the following traits and characteristics:

* Solid and consistent financial performance including revenue growth, revenue size, and income (profit) along with a clean balance sheet and cash position

* Strong vertical marketing message and product depth

* Good value proposition messaging and cost-of-ownership models that extend before, during, and after the sale, and have equivalent importance, tracking, and measurement tools to establish benchmarks for measurement

* Simple-to-understand expanded supply chain or supply network messages with a technology footprint for supporting future cross-enterprise collaborative opportunities

* Implementation methodologies that manage tasks and risks, and are standardized for the sector of domain expertise

* Ability to execute in the field resulting in deployments that are flagship references

* Strong post-implementation support structures and personnel that are vertically aligned

When selecting a supply chain software provider, prospective buyers need to look for these characteristics, and have an exhaustive and fully executed due diligence plan for functional compatability which uses an RFI and response-selection process. Anything less will result in heightened the risk in your endeavors to select and implement the best software and services solutions possible. Adding the vertical elements to this process are key for retail food segment buyers of technology.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/vendors-strive-for-segment-pack-leader-status-does-retalix-measure-up-18223/

A Two-layer Model for Fashion PLM Functionality

2010-07-31T05:09:00.000-07:00

The past few years have seen the fashion industry show a significantly increasing passion for product lifecycle management (PLM) methodology. Generally speaking, a fashion PLM solution is a tailored PLM solution (compared with the general or comprehensive PLM) with extra functionality that serves the specificities of this industry in order to help the manufacturers and retailers of fashion goods (including apparel, footwear, accessories, etc.) to achieve more efficient product development, reduced costs, and better collaboration and control throughout the entire supply chain.

On the vendor side, established PLM players are expanding their solutions for the fashion industry; and experienced enterprise software providers in the fashion vertical are enhancing their PLM capabilities, resulting in a mushrooming of fashion PLM solutions in the market. On the user side, the adoption rate keeps growing. However, the question of how fashion companies can benefit from PLM in an optimal way remains unanswered. This question lies in many areas ranging from strategic planning, to solution selection, to system implementation, and to post-implementation operations. No doubt, many fashion players need more time to better understand what PLM is as a management methodology—and what PLM can do in terms of functionality before they can more confidently jump on the PLM bandwagon.

When we talk about PLM methodology in the context of the fashion business, recognizing the specificities of the fashion industry is as important as understanding what PLM is in the generic setting—if not more important. I have learned from a vendor that it originally used its "traditional" PLM solution (for industries such as automotive and aerospace) for the fashion industry, hoping it would perform well after some modifications. The results were not so successful until the vendor thoroughly rebuilt the solution for its fashion customers. To my understanding, a fashion PLM solution won't be a success unless the “fashion” part has been well taken care of.

The Specificities of the Fashion Industry

What makes the fashion industry so different when it comes to applying the PLM methodology? A look at the product features of fashion goods and the business processes of the fashion industry may help answer the question.

Product features

In the past, PLM used to deal with products with complicated structure and configurations. However, this is not the case in the fashion industry, where product structure is quite simple and flat. For many fashion companies, although the structure of each individual product is not complicated, product variety is the pain point in management—for each season, there may be different product lines, multiple styles under each line, and color and size variations for each style. In other words, the structure of the product line may be complicated, resulting in the need for tremendous efforts to manage the integrity of product line information.

In addition, fashion products change constantly from one season to another (or even within the same season) under a rigid time frame. Fashion goods now have a very short cycle time—sometimes just a few weeks from the time the designer has an idea to the time the product hits the street.

Business processes

The fashion business has established its own conventions for the product development process. From trend research to the physical item on the shelf, a fashion product may go through different stages in the form of storyboards, sketches, patterns, prototype, multiple types of samples, and so on. Within these process conventions, there are a lot of informalities. Fashion players do need to maintain the accuracy of their product data, but they are also fighting with large product quantities and short cycle times (as mentioned previously). Thus, the full process for tracking engineering changes is highly necessary for making a change to an automobile in development, but it is too lengthy for modifying a design detail of a jacket.

Today, many fashion companies rely on offshore production. While benefitting from low labor costs, they have to face drawbacks in areas such as on-time delivery, quality control, and collaboration between product development and production due to an elongated value chain. To address these issues, fashion players have to streamline the supply chain by working closely with suppliers using accurate and timely product data.

Challenges for a Fashion PLM Solution

The following are a few challenges that a fashion PLM solution has to address in order to be successful.

1.

Being secure enough to hold product definition information, but efficient and flexible enough to handle the sheer volume and variety of product and the fast pace of fashion business processes.
2.

Being well tuned to fashion business processes and user habits—fashion designers are not engineers.
3.

Although a traditional PLM system doesn't necessarily include sourcing functionality, it has become a critical capability for fashion PLM.
4.

The wide managerial span of a fashion PLM system requires effective integration between PLM and other systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM).

A two-layer Model for Fashion PLM Functionality

Above analysis mainly suggests that a successful fashion PLM solution should be able to bring all the benefits that the PLM methodology has to offer, and all the functionalities that specifically support the unique needs of the fashion business. Following this idea, we can separate fashion PLM functionality into two major categories: process-specific and non-process-specific.

The difference between the two is relatively clear. Process-specific functionality simulates fashion business processes and provides specific capabilities and interfaces to support each task or job function (such as line planning, design, sourcing, etc). Non-process-specific functionality is more generic and cross-functional, and often plays a supporting role. Examples for the second category include data vaulting, classification, workflow, etc. In other words, non-process-specific functionality is that running behind the scenes or in common amongst different job functions in order to maintain data integrity, increase productivity, and facilitate collaboration. For instance, a fashion designer may be tasked with modifying a design detail, retrieving the current design information, performing the modification, and then sending the change to his/her manager for approval mainly through the process-specific functionality called “design management.” However, without the support from non-process-specific functionality (e.g., routing, searching, checking documents in/out), “design management” can't sustain itself.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-two-layer-model-for-fashion-plm-functionality-19953/

The Importance of Plant-level Systems

2010-07-31T05:08:00.002-07:00

Currently, there are industry-wide concerns about the lack of consensus to define standards for connectivity and interoperability between various plant automation, manufacturing execution, and enterprise level systems. The upsurge of interest in standards-based interoperability indicates that manufacturers need better options to connect business processes throughout the organization.

Investments made in systems managing production processes in plants and within entire supply chains are playing a larger role and gaining in value as companies move toward using data collaboratively to support business processes. Originally, companies acquired plant systems to support narrow functional requirements, such as production order tracking, quality assurance (QA), time and attendance tracking, warehouse management, laboratory systems, production scheduling and sequencing, or plant and equipment maintenance and repair depot management. However, in the "New Economy" where an environment of increased collaboration, information sharing, real time business, and burgeoning compliance requirements exists, the place and value of plant-level systems in the corporate information technology (IT) portfolio hierarchy has become more significant.

Plant-level execution systems have largely been ignored and taken for granted, although they are vital for effective shop floor management and give first-line supervision staff visibility to manage work orders and work center assignments. Compared to enterprise applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or supply chain management (SCM) systems, which traditionally run in a batch mode and on a planned basis (with operating cycles of weeks or more), IT department, financial managers, planners, and other white collar staff have often treated production support needs such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), QA and lab systems, plant maintenance or warehouse management applications, as a necessary evil.

Although needed and cherished by department managers, most plant level systems have been difficult to justify. Plant-level systems are online transaction process-based (OLTP) and operate in seconds and minutes. Their transaction frequency is far shorter than typical enterprise applications and usually fall "below the radar" of most corporate IT decision makers.

Nevertheless, times and attitudes are changing, as user enterprises are increasingly asking about shop floor integration with the back-office. They want these systems to "talk to each other", and many customers are adding integration their requirements lists. The IT environment in manufacturing is facing a dramatic change, and traditional systems characterized by a standalone, static business model requiring periodic manual data entry, and sequential transaction processing have to evolve into systems that support near real time, collaborative business models. The purpose of this shift is to make product supply predictable, lower inventory levels, and created better response to demand. Other foreseeable benefits include reduced variability, improved compliance, decreased cycle time, and so on.

Visibility into operational measurements also provides the foundation for ongoing process improvement and can be an important enabler for Six Sigma, a set of concepts and practices that reduce process variability and deficiencies in a product; and balanced scorecard, a list of financial and operational measurements used to evaluate organizational or supply chain performance, which formally connects overall corporate objectives, strategies, and measurements. For more information, see Why Most Balanced Scorecards are Subverted). In these emerging business models, the entire business ecosystem is connected in a network. New real time management methodologies based on synchronized business processes, real time decision support, management by exception, performance-based service level agreements (SLA), and the like are used to drive manufacturing performance to the next level.

This is Part One of a three-part note. Part Two will discuss the obstacles to overcome and current developments. Part Three will analyze the market impact and make user recommendations.

What Manufacturing Now Values

Nowadays, manufacturing organizations are placing a much higher value on the information generated, aggregated, and used by events and processes within real production and logistics worlds. Information on labor, inventory measures, lead times, maintenance and operational equipment effectiveness (OEE), product data accuracy, uptimes, utilization, bottlenecks, yield/scrap metrics, etc. is valuable in environments where operating in near real time is critical. For instance, as SAP planned its 2005 delivery of Manufacturing Dashboard, it reportedly talked to over forty plant managers and over one hundred production supervisors, and asked them flatly "What do you do during the day to fulfill your role?" and "What do you need to be made more productive?". SAP reportedly found that this group needed a collection of consolidated information from a variety of sources and applications, and detailed knowledge of what is going on in the real world. Through these discussions, the vendor recognized that a portal might provide the ability to bring information together technically, but many gaps still need to be filled to meet customer satisfaction.

Supply chain planning and execution (SCPE) concepts have been used long enough to make a real difference, and more companies are making progress and taking excess, unneeded inventories out of the system. In other words, the amount of inventory available to cover uncertainties in the complex, multi-echelon supply chain is decreasing continuously, leading to the need to react quickly.

One should not forget that there are other areas to tap into that can make a business more agile, such as shop floor applications (see The Why of Data Collection). Thus, management is increasingly using business processes to strive toward greater information sharing and collaboration. Enterprises are addressing broader, real time business issues through initiatives such as analytics, business intelligence (BI), business activity monitoring (BAM), enterprise performance management (EPM), digital dashboards, supply chain event management (SCEM), collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM), mobile devices, radio frequency identification (RFID) etc. to create a real time enterprise (see Attaining Real Time, On-demand Information Data: Contemporary Business Intelligence Tools).

All of these initiatives center on the idea of near real time information sharing and use, preferably from its originating source. In practice, operating an adaptive enterprise requires real world awareness, which means providing timely information and establishing business processes that bridge traditional application gaps.

Many newer business initiatives, including collaborative manufacturing strategy applications, require near real time information to be available in order to satisfy even simple needs. The strategy of synchronizing inventories and production across a supply network requires knowing the current status of events, what is happening at a particular moment, what is expected, etc. It is insufficient to have a report of what happened last week or even yesterday. To be truly "in sync" requires timely information from plant- or warehouse- level processes, not a "guesstimate" about what was scheduled or what should have happened.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-importance-of-plant-level-systems-18273/

Vendors Strive for Segment Pack Leader Status; Does Retalix Measure Up?

2010-07-31T05:08:00.001-07:00

The Secret of One Vendor's Success in the Retail Supply Chain

2010-07-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

At the core of Eqos's offering is a platform that provides the key components for business to business (B2B) collaboration, including process management, workflow management, portal management, business rules, reporting, analytics, Web services, alerts and exceptions, and security. While these features are available out of the box, individual business processes can always be built to better match the customer's current and future sourcing and supplier management practices.

In other words, the technology enablers of the platform provide a virtual framework that allows merchandising and purchasing organizations to rejuvenate their outdated sourcing and supplier management processes. One example of such an enabler is a single extensible markup language [XML]-based data interface with a well-defined schema and Web services wrapper that can be leveraged for secure integration over the Web. Because Eqos's offering is built on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concepts of reusability and standards-based interoperability, and is based on the vendor's extensive experience with legacy systems and packaged applications integration, Eqos can deliver pre-configured, cross-enterprise business processes that blend both new and legacy functionality into a more coherent process.

In tune with the ideas of business process management (BPM), Eqos equips customers to configure and reconfigure (or orchestrate) processes as they evolve over time. As already mentioned, interoperability and connectivity are key tenets of Eqos's collaborative platform, since businesses have to rely on their existing IT assets to streamline, configure, and support business processes that span enterprise, supplier, and related service provider operations. The BPM tools thus also allow the application to be configured to support well-oiled business processes rather than it being “shoehorned” (or forced). For more background, please see Business Process Management: A Crash Course on What It Entails and Why to Use It.

The platform enables business analysts to model the data, process and interface requirements of the organization, and generate software to support the execution of that model. This is facilitated by the architecture, which features multiple layers of services and defined interfaces, such as

* data services to model business information needs and map to databases;
* presentation services to model interactions between people and the software;
* application services to model business rules, processes, and workflow;
* security services to ensure appropriate segregation of duties and information; and
* external Web services to integrate with remote systems in a secure manner.

As the market becomes more aware of the benefits of an SOA architecture, companies' expectations have increased in terms of the achievement of cross-enterprise, business process support; a decrease in the risk associated with the integration of new systems; and improved use and realized benefits from legacy IT assets. It is crucial to achieve integrated visibility across supplier networks (including the industry content), as legacy IT assets also deliver value to new business models, and there is an allowed evolution of solutions as new technologies become available, without massive disruption to the entire systems' footprint.

Enabling a Single Version of the Truth and Managing Critical Paths

Some of the typical benefits of the above architectural concepts are the users' ability to leverage existing IT investments through data integration in order to enable quicker response with real-time transaction processing, while removing constraints to evolve capabilities as new technologies become available. It is important to note that the Eqos platform features a single repository of data and process information for user enterprises and their supply chains. This is because today's retail environment requires more than the ability to simply track a product's success, given that the large multinational retailers (channel masters) want to manage everything from product launches through to the planning, execution, and post-event analysis of retail events.

Accordingly, Eqos's centralized repository of information ensures that accurate and vital product information is in place to facilitate this analysis for all the parties. To that end, an online archive and image catalog of every product can be retained in the system together with the information pertaining to the packaging artwork and specifications that are shared with packaging designers and manufacturers. This can ensure more precise control during the design phase.

Additionally, given the many parties involved and the countless interactions that take place across the retail supply chain (where many things can go wrong), critical path management—from concept to product delivery—is the cornerstone of Eqos's entire offering. In the realm of project management, the critical path is the set of activities that defines the duration of the entire project activities' network. Since these critical activities have very little float or slack (usually zero), a delay in any critical path activity will delay the entire project. Many retailers are driving shorter cycle turns across more seasons, which leads to both increased volume and complexity. Managing such an environment is creating the need for better control and increased visibility to ensure that scheduled activities progress according to plan, and that stakeholders are appropriately notified of exceptions.

Thus, the idea of leveraging critical path management is to enable buyers to automate and simplify complex sourcing processes, allowing them to manage more product lines more quickly and with a lower risk of failure. By leveraging standard project task structures that include responsibilities and due dates, Eqos's solution, somewhat similar to Microsoft Project, enables users to specify an ideal critical path and measure against it. It also helps them deploy best practices (provided templates enable the rapid creation of similar new projects to be managed) across product lines and merchandising and purchasing organizations.

In addition, the solution presents graphical representation and manipulation of the critical path, monitors upcoming tasks and late tasks, sends alerts as necessary, and automatically sends updates to external systems that deliver value to major customers (such as Tesco, which manages tens of thousands of tasks in the Eqos system each day).

Some expected benefits from the solution's deployment include a more proactive management of retailing projects, more informed and more rapid decision making, and promoted collaboration through a shared understanding of the tasks at hand, where any identified slack can be taken out of the product life cycle.

Further, visual reporting tools and analytics are also essential in helping buyers, merchandisers, and other retail decision-makers gauge success or identify problem areas quickly. As explained in Contemporary Business Intelligence Tools, dashboards can enable executives to appraise the business, highlight selected issues, and drill down to analyze the root cause of problems relatively quickly. This ability comes from the insightful visual display of the status of product portfolios based on real-time data, while only aggregated relevant data are delivered via intuitive format to executives.

Focused on delivering a graphical picture of the business's health, Eqos Dashboards enables an aggregated visual comprehension of multiple product portfolios. In addition to gauging success and identifying problems quickly, this dashboard also allows multiple-level, drill-down capabilities through to original source documents. Users can save regular analyses as “favorites” and deliver on a predefined schedule, while outputs to an enterprise data warehouse are possible too, if appropriate.

As for enabling strategic trading partners to communicate throughout the sourcing process (the success of private label programs is highly dependent on retailer-supplier collaboration, from product design through to selection, production, and ultimate delivery to the distribution center [DC] and stores), Eqos Supplier Hub Management enables suppliers to self-register and maintain their factory profile information (that is, the rapid onboarding of new suppliers is made possible). This portal also provides suppliers with direct Web access to the retailers' systems, enabling them to comply with the contract terms, improve their response, and meet (or exceed) performance objectives. The portal also provides the foundation from which retailers can select prospective trading partners.

In terms of potential benefits, lower technology requirements for supplier participation allow for increased supplier involvement, which in turn removes information silos and barriers previously preventing supplier execution; supports more consistent interactions between the retailer and its suppliers; and drives up supplier performance by creating a culture of information-sharing.

Integrated Eqos Sourcing Suite

Eqos's platform alone is not sufficient to achieve the benefits claimed by the vendor and its customers, neither at the top line (from the growth of the private label business, faster time to market, better product availability and fewer stockouts, more competitive offerings and improved customer value, broader access to global sources and growth of direct imports), nor the bottom line (from decreased costs of goods sold [COGS], improved margins, improved efficiencies and reduced operating costs, reduced inventory and tied-up cash, better regulatory compliance, and better ability to manage risks).

Thus, to help with the “inconvenient truth” of retailers' reality—that there is still a bevy of tasks that require spreadsheets or other rudimentary personal computer (PC)-based tools (see The Anatomy of Retail Sourcing Processes)—built atop Eqos's collaborative platform are eight distinct modules with functional capabilities aimed to address retailers' pain points.

These eight modules can be deployed as stand-alones, or they can interact with each other in a many-to-many relationship. They can be grouped within the following two product suites: Eqos Global Sourcing & PLM and Eqos Supplier Management. By integrating global sourcing, supplier performance, product lifecycle management (PLM) processes, and supply chain visibility into a cohesive, feature-rich solution, Eqos enables retailers to more effectively manage trading relationships, improve their leverage for supplier negotiation, deliver increased margins, reduce markdowns, and identify additional global sourcing opportunities.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-secret-of-one-vendor-s-success-in-the-retail-supply-chain-19130/

Exact Faces Challenges

2010-07-31T05:06:00.002-07:00

Exact e-Synergy features a multitude of clever capabilities. Geared towards a multitude of manufacturing and non-manufacturing businesses, e-Synergy is essentially a Web-based front-office product from Exact Software that promises to deliver integration with virtually any enterprise resource planning (ERP) back-office, and collaboration through knowledge sharing with trading partners. It is an Internet-based integrated suite for CRM, financial, workflow, and resource control. It has broad, rather than deep functionality, including business process management features and enterprise asset management tools.

The solution gives employees Web-access to information from one central information source allowing them to plan, track, and initiate collaboration, and search and retrieve content, documents, and transactional data. By making Exact e-Synergy the platform of communication and collaboration, no data should (in principle) ever be lost, because information is stored for quick retrieval. Because of its ability to align employees, information, and processes across the enterprise, users of Exact e-Synergy should be able to view the health of the entire value chain, help employees manage time more effectively, and execute business processes more efficiently.

Yet, despite the strength of e-Synergy, there are some inherent limitations that companies will need to work around. For example, the workflow engine supports only four steps within a process. While most workflows have a single start and end step, complex workflows may have multiple end steps (or dispositions), and very complex workflows can even have multiple start steps for entering a workflow. For complex processes, users will have to divide the process into a couple of separate sub-processes. However, this might be inadequate for some complex workflows that involve many steps and routes that cover all the possible scenarios that can occur within the process. Furthermore, the product does not feature a visual modeling engine, and it only provides a linear view of workflow steps. However, it is process design and modeling that drives what the complex business processes will look like; how the user will interact; and what underlying IT services are required to support and deliver that process.

For details on Exact e-Synergy see A Single Software Solution That Enables Business Process Management. For background information on Exact Software see Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions.

Part Six of the Exact Continues Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions series, which began January 9.

Another feature required in modeling is the ability to perform "what-if" scenarios, which is the ability to simulate changes in processes (using inputs from the business activity management [BAM] side) and project the impact on performance. Business process modeling tools chart out the information flows that support key business processes. Ideally, once these models are created, they should be dynamic, meaning that they are relatively easy to change without programming. Process modeling is typically the first step within a BPM system, especially when the models are used to remove variability from specific processes. Also, simple workflow focuses on routing approvals and documents, while a full-fledged BPM tool builds and executes workflows using the same "meta" model generated by process modeling. These tools, which are currently lacking in e-Synergy, are common in dedicated business process management (BPM) packages such as Ultimus or IDS Scheer.

However to be fair, many true BPM vendors offer much more comprehensive BPM solutions, given the myriad of interconnected components that underpin a full fledged BPM system, such as workflow, enterprise application integration (EAI), middleware, user interfaces (UI), rules engines, process-centric workflow, document-centric workflow, data transformation, connectivity services, access management, process modeling, process monitoring, etc., which naturally creates a complex environment. For more discussion of BPM and its components, see Business Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business.

Exact Software seems to be focusing less on complex routing and automated processes across disparate systems, and instead is developing BPM's ability to handle exceptions and automate simpler processes. Users should watch for Exact's forays to enable e-Synergy to launch native or third party applications based on selected information objects, and its ventures to define business processes (workflows) across multiple systems. Despite e-Synergy's lack of modeling and composite applications capabilities, the best results often come from deploying other BPM components that execute, manage, and analyze business processes. e-Synergy is very capable in this area.

This is Part Six of a multipart note. Parts One through Four, published January 912, explored Exact's strategic groups and global aspirations; and its BPM strategy and products. Part Five presented Exact's acquisition of Vanguard.

Challenges

Though it has notable strengths, Exact is not without hurdles. In addition to brutal competition from both above and below, the vendor has lower stature and brand recognition compared to its foes, Microsoft, and Sage. Exact also has a smaller channel because it has fewer resellers, and with revenue of close to $300 million (USD), its revenue from the enterprise applications market is small compared to these competitors. In this market segment, a vendor's size certainly counts, and so does its research and development budget. While Exact's solid cash position and cash flow operations are impressive, they are dwarfed by the its competitors. In fact, the possibility that it may be acquired by one of its competitors to remove it as a major competitive hurdle cannot be discounted.

Additionally, Exact's value added reseller (VAR) channel strategy seems to be unclear at this stage. Like its competitors, Macola (which is now a part of the Exact family) made a conscious decision to distribute its products solely through partners and VARs. At one point there had been over 400. They have since dwindled to 75, largely through Exact's conscious effort to screen partners and vendors to ensure it had real quality partners across North America.

Leveraging VARs has often proven advantageous for vendors targeting small and medium enterprises (SME) because it can keep costs down. Selling through partners requires a higher quality of product support, and accompanying documentation. However, Exact has seemingly decided to weed out resellers that have not been fully committed to selling its product portfolio. To do this, it imposed a $12,500 (USD) annual fee for its Total Partner Support Plan, which provides participating partners with complete product accreditation and support, and access to corporate lead generation and marketing programs. This move is still causing shockwaves in its reseller base. Exact also has to be more focused in its offering and how it translates into vertical messaging and positioning in order to better leverage its products.

Further, the acquisitions of some of Exact's best performing VARs have caused speculations about Exact Software reverting to a direct model (although this is not an uncommon practice), and even its inability to attract new resellers. One will have to see if these mixed-signals will nurture Exact's relationship with its VARs, boosting their morale and make them more successful (profitable); and how it will play against Microsoft's and Best's enticing financing arrangements for their own VARs and customers, particularly during these days of cash scarcity. Consequently, one should not forget about SAP's ongoing channel recruiting for its SAP Business One product, which has been attracting the disgruntled VARs of its competitors. This will also impact Exact's VAR relationship.

Additionally, although Exact has a notable worldwide presence, it does not have market leadership in many crucial mainstream regions or in certain vertical segments, largely because of the fierce channel competition from more aggressive, better known, and wealthier competitors. There are still some geographic regions where the vendor has neither reseller nor direct presence as of yet, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.

Exact also faces challenges from customers interested in its solution areas. For example, many prospective customers have long outgrown their entry-level accounting solutions l QuickBooks, DacEasy, Peachtree, and ACCPAC Simply Accounting, and are looking for an original provider for functional expansion opportunities in contact management and sales force automation (SFA); customer relationship management (CRM); human resources (HR) and payroll; electronic data interchange (EDI), and warehouse management system (WMS). These are all areas of which Exact has tackled. However, users often turn to a trusted adviser, such as their accountants for advice. Unfortunately, in this case, Exact has not made major strides to increase its clout and entice accountants to its accountant referral program. Exact also does not really have a so-called "feeder" entry accounting product, with the exception of minor products for some local markets. Sage and Intuit, on the other hand, have long been successfully in this area, while Microsoft is working feverishly to deliver a similar product, Microsoft Small Business Accounting (SBA).

Moreover, other North American product brands have some material management and manufacturing functionality overlap with the Macola ES product, one of Exact's key products. Thus, in addition to the always-inevitable efforts of integration and migration paths, and despite the complementary nature and somewhat different target markets of the product lines, the pain of appropriately positioning its products cannot be discounted. It is likely that there will be conflict between the direct sales forces and channel partners due to market overlap, and there will be problems due to longstanding associations with certain product lines, regardless of best fit.

Consequently, the management team will have to determine a narrow range of key markets for each product, clarify positioning, and segment and target the sales channels. It will also have to vigorously deliver an assuring message to current customers about its plans for support, enhancements, and migration, such as upgrading Macola Progression Series to SQL Server transaction tables, so it becomes One-X compliant.

Exact also acknowledges the challenge of properly positioning and marketing e-Synergy. At a strategic level, the product has the same features of a BPM solution. Modules can be configured to handle specific business processes in a particular way. On a tactical level, the system also offers built-in document management, collaboration, and visualization of all requests related to a particular business process. Last but not least, the product offers modules for a plethora of diverse functional areas, with a scope so multifaceted that it is almost impossible to categorize. These elements range from workflow or BPM in sales force automation (SFA), call center/help desk modules, professional services automation (PSA), HRM to Web publishing.

Ultimately, a product that is a mile wide in scope, but an inch deep in individual functional modules 1) makes it difficult to identify likely buyers, and 2) disadvantaged when competing against best-of-breed packages that have prospects' deep functional needs. In a nutshell, Exact's product is not easy to describe and thus will not likely be easy to sell.

Prospects are generally interested in e-Synergy because it meets a pressing need, or because a particular area of the product is attractive. They are not necessarily drawn to its overall capabilities. As demonstrated, this is not because e-Synergy's functionality is not without merit, but because there is a gap between user knowledge and the product's functionality. Not many users are fully aware the product's full capabilities. For example, as seen during a recent e-Synergy users' event, CRM users were not fully aware of the product's collaborative forecasting capability. Exact should work to emphasize its product's features among users, such as e-Synergy's support for synchronizing the user's Outlook calendar and e-Synergy calendar, or its document integration capabilities with Microsoft Word, which allows employees to create and upload information from a customer account directly into a Word document.

This knowledge gap may be further exasperated by erstwhile Macola's unclear marketing image, which Exact has likely inherited. In Macola's case, the market was often uncertain whether Macola provided accounting or manufacturing and distribution solutions. This had occasionally hurt sales because the VARs of accounting specialists would "accuse" Macola of being only a manufacturing specialist and vice versa. Consequently, Exact may have a similar conundrum with e-Synergy and Globe 2003.

Not only may perception issues plague Exact, but there is also the issue of retraining its VARs. Its VARs have long been accustomed to deploying accounting and manufacturing solutions, and it will take much effort to retrain them to become full-fledged implementers of the broad, and difficult-to-categorize e-Synergy. Current Exact VARs will not have many CRM experts and lack CRM implementation experience.

The same holds for e-Business, PSA, document management, and many other add-on applications that the company has recently delivered. Thus, one of the biggest challenges for the company has been helping traditional accounting VARs get up to speed on the new offerings' paradigm shifts, and teaching them how to sell, market, and implement them.

As a matter of fact, the full fledged BPM area is not easy to compete within either, with wealthy and viable competitors coming from enterprise asset integration (EAI) specialists, infrastructure (platform and tools) providers, and packaged applications vendors. Therefore, Exact Software has to position itself more clearly to avoid competition that is coming from many directions, such as the intrusion of best-of-breed BPM providers, business modeling players, infrastructure providers, and tier one enterprise vendors in the BPM arena.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/exact-faces-challenges-18366/

Global Software Aspirations

2010-07-31T05:06:00.001-07:00

To address the multinational needs of enterprises and to create "one face for each customer", Exact Software, a division of Delft, the Netherlands-based Exact Holding N.V. (Amsterdam: EXACT.AS, www.exactsoftware.com), has taken steps to offer Exact Globe, the latest generation of back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to North American customers. This effort, which began in 2005, should enable customers to benefit from an extensive range of ERP solutions.

Part Two of the Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions series.

Early adopters of Exact Globe have mainly been divisions of companies that have long been using the product elsewhere. However, the vendor is planning to use early 2006 to prominently roll out its flagship product Exact Globe Enterprise across North America. Exact Globe Enterprise is a multinational ERP software suite that offers manufacturers multilingual, multicurrency capabilities that local offerings of Exact lack. Throughout 2005, Globe has been in controlled release in North America and there have been about fifteen test sites for the product. The goal is to reach twenty sites in 2006. General availability (GA) of the product is also expected in early 2006.

For background information on Exact see Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions.

This is Part Two of a multipart note. This series will explore Exact's strategic groups and global aspirations; its BPM strategy and products; and its acquisition of Vanguard. It will also present challenges and make user recommendations.

Single Product Strategy

This initiative signals the start of a long-term migration to a single ERP platform, but by no means will users of systems other than local Exact ERP be forced to undergo any type of conversion soon. Still, for some time now, Exact has been focusing its research and development (R&D) efforts on a "single product" strategy, leveraging its so-called One-X (meaning one Exact) architecture framework. One-X means there is a single database (i.e., Microsoft SQL Server) and transaction table between the respective back-office products of Exact Globe or Macola ES, each with the e-Synergy front-office or business process management (BPM) product.

Initially, both product combinations were to provide customers with the full integration of back- and front-office solutions, albeit with different focuses, strengths, and markets. For example, the Exact Globe and e-Synergy combination targets non-manufacturing markets outside North America; Macola ES and e-Synergy is geared towards manufacturers. The idea is to eventually converge these three product lines into a unified global product some time in the distant future.

In the meantime, new versions of all the acquired product lines have been developed on the same architecture, which should ensure long-term economies of scale. It should also ensure the product integration of acquired brands, and product continuity for customers. To that end, Exact is using a common object repository to simplify development across its products, so that Exact Globe and Macola ES could "borrow" modules from each other accordingly, such as the warehousing, electronic data interchange (EDI) or shop floor control components from Macola ES. For more information, see Exact Software—Working Diligently Towards the "One Exact" Synergy.

However, because Exact Globe has superior multinational and process management (including grant-based) functionality, it will likely be given the "right of way" to become Exact's strategic product for its global base. It is an especially promising product since it is the first product with multinational capabilities to be offered to the North American market. As such, it should ultimately help attract new clients. In particular, while all four of the North American packages have the ability to interface with e-Synergy, none have particularly strong multilingual and multicurrency capabilities. In Globe, this functionality was built from the ground up, which is critical in addressing the needs of North America-based multinational manufacturers.

Exact Globe

Exact Globe has extensive functionality, including financials, distribution, light manufacturing, manufacturing resource planning (MRP), a product configurator, and project management. Exact has typically targeted small and medium businesses ranging with $10 million to $50 million (USD) in revenue, as well as manufacturing and distribution companies and divisions of multinationals. This is a great potential market because parent companies often use a tier one product from SAP or Oracle (including PeopleSoft), but these systems often have unnecessary functionality for the various divisions.

Globe, which has solid, but not excessive functionality, was built to integrate with other systems using extended markup language (XML), which has become the standard for integration. The product is also appropriately priced. The configuration includes e-Synergy, general ledger (GL), accounts receivable (AR), accounts payable (AP), distribution, order processing, inventory control, and purchasing and costs about $20,000 (USD) plus $1,200 (USD) per named user (any employee who would access the system). Ongoing annual service and support costs typically average an additional $20,000 (USD). Users can also buy e-Synergy as a standalone system for $10,000 (USD), plus $1,000 (USD) per named user.

Thus, as part of the multinational push, Exact North America has also created what it internally calls the International Parenting Group, a sales team dedicated to the needs of companies operating in multiple countries, since these enterprises need to be sold to, serviced, and supported in a different way. Though these companies want to run their North American headquarters office from the same database, they still operate in different countries and have different payroll, tax law, and distribution problems. Currently, Exact has roughly 30 salespeople in the International Parenting group, which services about 1,000 multinational clients. Value added resellers (VAR) can also benefit from these services. This group will also take care of all the logistics, communications, proposal writing, and implementation. At the same time, it will protect the partner's profit margin and all of this will be done in a process that is seamless to the prospect or customer.

Ironically North American prospects might consider Globe to be a brand new product; however, Exact built it twenty years ago for companies in the Netherlands that needed an accounting package that could handle multiple currencies. It focuses on automating traditional back-office ERP processes containing structured information (transactions), such as financial, human resources (HR), sales, marketing, logistics, and manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it is fully localized, so that all legislative, fiscal, and judicial obligations are met.

Typically, the product is used by a select number of users who are responsible for transactional actions, such as moving goods, buying, selling, budgets, etc. While the number of users may be small, they have to be well-trained in the application and require a powerful environment with all the functionality that Microsoft Windows can offer in terms of ease of use. Therefore, Exact Globe is developed in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, with a basic technical framework in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 to ensure programming efficiency and consistency. All data is stored in the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, whereas the supported client platforms are Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Key functional strengths of Exact Globe include

* support for fiscal, legal, and commercial regimes of more than twenty legislations;

* provides financial accounting, cash flow management, asset and contract management, project management and service management, all seamlessly integrated into a financial management system that is not traditionally general ledger centric;

* provides industry templates for manufacturing and distribution businesses;

* streamlines international payroll and improves document management;

* uses one central database for recording transactions, documents, and activities;

* uses classification of documents, making access relatively simple and easy; and

* reduces steps (data entries) needed to process a closed-loop transaction from the quote via order capture and fulfillment and shipping to payment.

Hence, Exact Globe Enterprise targets multinational companies running within global markets by offering multiple international legislation compliance, and strong project accounting and product management (in terms of R&D and intellectual property-intensive environments) capabilities, albeit mainly light manufacturing/assembly and distribution ones.

Candidates that are likely to use the solution are document-centric companies, including businesses in consulting, engineering, biotechnology research, intellectual property management, and software development companies. Also, these are project-based organizations, where a high percentage of employees require access to the system, and where trading partners require access to projects in back-office ERP systems. Also, many other Exact products worldwide have "borrowed" the Exact Globe architecture and functionality, such as Exact Macola ES in North America, Grote Beer for Windows and Exact Compact in the Netherlands, Exact Pro and Exact Pro Lohn XL/XXL in Germany, Cubic Pro in Belgium, and Exact Globe 2004 Enterprise in the Netherlands and in the International Group.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/global-software-aspirations-18356/

Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More Part One: SOA, Web Services, and BPM

2010-07-31T05:05:00.000-07:00

he battle for the dominance in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services has so far largely been a war of words without the clear winner yet (and not any time soon), as many underlying Internet-based standards have emerged only recently. Still, the advocates of both major platforms/frameworks, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft .NET, agree on the future of Web services, and have been building similar technology frameworks for developers. Both the Java and .NET camps also rely on the same set of established standards such as:

* eXtensible markup language (XML), a language that facilitates direct communication among computers on the Internet, and, unlike the older hypertext markup language (HTML) cousin, which provides HTML tags giving instructions to a Web browser about how to display information, XML tags give instructions to a Web browser about the category of information;

* Universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI), a Web-based distributed directory that enables businesses to list themselves on the Internet and discover each other, similar to a traditional phone book's yellow and white pages;

* Web services description language (WDSL), an XML-formatted language that UDDI uses, and which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM and used to describe a Web service's capabilities as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages; and

* Simple object access protocol (SOAP), an XML-based messaging protocol used to encode the information in Web service request and response messages before sending them over a network. SOAP messages are independent of any operating system or protocol and may be transported using a variety of Internet protocols, including simple mail transport protocol (SMTP), multipurpose internet mail extensions (MIME), and hypertext transport protocol (HTTP).

For information on the J2EE and .NET environments and their subtle differences, see Understand J2EE And .NET Environments Before You Choose.

Quite pertinent to the above, a well-publicized concept of service oriented architectures (SOA) should help developers further down the path of software componentization. The closer one can make the software map to the business processes and adapt over time, the better the applications will support business objectives (i.e., with an underlying agility).

A well constructed application that tightly integrates and yet loosely decouples a set of solid, yet customizable modules will certainly find customers in this highly assorted market. SOA is an application architecture in which all functions, so called "services", are defined using a description language and have evocable interfaces that are called to perform business processes. Processes, transactions, and special functional components all have to be exposed as services allowing composite, diverse applications to be exposed too. Each interaction should be independent of each and every other interaction and the interconnect protocols of the communicating devices (i.e., the infrastructure components that determine the communication system does not affect the interfaces).

Because interfaces are platform-independent, a client from any device using any operating system (OS) in any coding language can supposedly access or use the service. In simplified terms, SOA would be a set of services (which are, again, groups of software components executing certain business processes, such as processing a payment order, calculating or updating currency exchange rates, or authenticating users), on a network that can communicate to each other.

Though built on similar principles, SOA is not the same as Web services, which indicates a certain collection of technologies, such as the above-defined SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and XML. In simpler terms, XML is used to tag the data, SOAP is used to transfer the data, and WSDL is used for describing the services available, while UDDI is used for listing what services are available. Used primarily as a means for businesses to communicate with each other and with clients, Web services allow organizations to communicate data without intimate knowledge of each other's information technology (IT) systems behind the firewall. Being Web-based applications that dynamically interact with other Web-based applications using open standards, Web services act analogically to electronic data interchange (EDI), with the difference of being an electronic process interchange instead.

On the other hand, SOA entails a much broader and more abstract notion, given it is more than a set of technologies and runs independent of any specific technologies. Web services promise non-vendor dependence through the use of emerging Internet standards for Web-based messaging, application access and interfacing, business process transactions, and other key SOA activities. In any case, given the opportunity of more widespread, systematic software reuse, reduced complexity, improved agility, and a faster way of integrating legacy systems with contemporary applications, SOA and Web services have a promise of "gluing together" heterogeneous environments found in most IT departments nowadays.

Thus, still maturing Web services technology is likely to increase the component-based applications concept's awareness and speed up its still fledgling adoption. Large vendors' endorsement of Web services technology might indeed help them make up for their latency of endorsing the component- or object-oriented technology several years ago. Web services do have a potential of becoming the latest evolution of application integration technology or a revolutionary new application design model by enabling developers to create or enhance applications by connecting granular components that are accessed via platform-independent Web protocols. While they leverage the aged concept of objects' reusability, they may finally offer that extra mile by adherence to standards that are taking hold. Further, they tend to be simpler in their nature, partly owing to the above adopted collaborative Internet standards, and they also tend to be higher-level abstractions (e.g., if an object is a purchase order, a Web service would be the process of closing a purchase order), which implies more likely platform independence and "mixing and matching" opportunity by developers.

Furthermore, the strategy will help the likes of SAP and Oracle further open or componentize their products, as standards like XML and extensible stylesheet language (XSL) make it possible to share data and have a common look and feel across an application, without necessarily dreadfully digging in the source code.

This is Part One of a two-part note.

Part Two will cover BPEL and make user recommendations.

Business Process Management (BPM) Technology

Closely related to SOA would be the evolving business process management (BPM) technology, which entails a broad set of services and tools that provide for explicit and complete process management, where the companies can relatively quickly change the way transactions, queries, and other communications are handled, and deal with exceptions or glitches. BPM typically entails

1) process analysis and modeling, using a graphical process designer targeted for business analysts;

2) definition;

3) execution;

4) monitoring process performance, its degree of completion and out-of-bounds conditions; and

5) administration for process termination and load balancing or rerouting, all including support for both human (manual) and application-level (automatic) interaction.

As the process flow is executed via a runtime execution engine, various enterprise applications (i.e., legacy, standard packaged, customized, third-party, and Web services) may be invoked, as will the tasks that humans have to complete or intervene. Therefore, BPM has emerged from many sources given the myriad of interconnected components that underpin a full fledged BPM system, such as workflow, enterprise application integration (EAI), middleware, process modeling, process monitoring, enterprise applications, collaborative tools, integration brokers, Web integration servers, application servers, applications development tools, rules engines and so on, which naturally creates a complex environment.

One of the most attractive promises of SOA is the potential of creating applications and systems using business models, that could even be visualized, because Web services can generally be described by their metadata, so that a person can construct or map the entire system by linking together the invocation of services in a given sequence (whereby even that sequence and its logic can also be described in metadata). The process of creating metadata to sequence the invocation of several services into a business process flow is referred to as orchestration, and interchangeably to composition, choreography or so. Whichever way referred to, it enables any technical complexity to be transparent and "technology-friendly" for non-IT savvy business users, and enables enterprises to achieve that long-coveted, but so far elusive goal of bridging the proverbial divide between business and IT worlds within an organization. The beauty of an SOA approach might be in forcing IT staff to devise enterprise architectures based on business processes rather than in mere technology terms so that resulting systems will reflect the business needs and practices of the organization.

One might note though, that smaller, mid-market vendors seem to be focusing less on complex routing and invoking automated processes across disparate systems (see BPM Weaves Data And Processes Together For Real-time Revenues), but rather on the BPM's aspects of handling exceptions and automating of simpler processes (i.e., technology or infrastructure services like authentication, alerting or queuing, as opposed to more involving activity services). The BPM term has long been used (and often misused) in the IT industry lingo, since much of the notion had initially been covered by the practice of workflow management technologies, only recently to be joined by the application integration vendors, which focused more on BPM from the aspect of mere technologies mentioned above.

SOA thus offers a promising design approach for making large IT systems more flexible and cost-effective. Namely, a plethora of extended-ERP applications designed to work in conjunction with the core ERP and back-office systems create a greater need for application and data integration, whereby any application must be able to communicate with external applications fairly easily and simply. Since a great deal of the cost of implementation is often actually that of integration, extensibility has significant implications on cost and performance. From the above discussion, applications that embrace the SOA concept and provide standard-based Web Services should significantly reduce the complexity and cost of integration. To that end, the .NET framework was built with SOAP as a core data transfer protocol, albeit this might not necessarily be the best choice, as SOAP is comprised of XML over HTTP, which is not the fastest data transfer protocol.

On the other hand, although J2EE was drafted prior to the advent and adoption of Web services, the market has responded with an enormous amount of Web services tools and applications. Consequently, at this point, applications developed with either .NET or J2EE can take advantage of SOA and Web services, and answer the extensibility question effectively. Furthermore, Web services may motivate vendors to more tightly couple integration with development early in the life cycle of software applications. Microsoft seems to have realized this through the ability of its BizTalk Server to utilize Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET) objects and combine them in a process-oriented manner with other application components. BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, Oracle AS 10g, SAP NetWeaver, and other server platforms have been delivered along the same lines. Hence, instead of having to wade through the complexity of integration only after applications have been implemented and are up and running, enterprises can begin executing on integration strategy concurrently with development and deployment.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/understanding-soa-web-services-bpm-bpel-and-more-part-one-soa-web-services-and-bpm-17681/

Delivering Adaptive Discovery for Business Process Management

2010-07-31T05:04:00.000-07:00

Automating processes through business process management (BPM) solutions is not where the benefits of the solution end. Because the processes people use internally change rapidly, the BPM solution should adapt its processes accordingly. The ability of the BPM solution to adapt to the ever-changing environment within organizations provides the advantage of delivering increased productivity, and faster cycle times with fewer errors.

BPM solutions generally follow one of two approaches: human-centric, or system-intensive. BPM suites that have to deal with changing processes and work habits are often solutions that have high human-centric involvement. Human-centric BPM involves work done by people while interacting heavily with underlying databases, business applications, and documents. Human-centric systems thus focus on processes such as claims processing, mortgage approvals, and customer service. System-intensive processes, on the other hand, often involve high-volume, repetitive transactions which require no or minimal human interaction. These transactions take place between different applications. This article focuses on the human-centric BPM solution, and how it adapts to process changes.

Automating Processes

Automated processes represent the first step within BPM, and provide the primary business cost savings. The initial legwork captures and documents the inputs and outputs of the current workflows within the organization. After documenting the processes, organizations should analyze the processes to determine which should be eliminated, which should be automated as is, and which should be reengineered to improve processes and workflows within the organization.

Describing the processes in detail, rather than automating them, is the challenge. Discovering all the rules, flows, and exceptions takes a long time and much effort, resulting in delays to deployment. Even though the automation aspect is not trivial, once the processes are defined (together with the rules, roles, events, conditions, and scenarios), process automation is relatively straightforward. The difficulty comes afterwards, when the solution becomes part of the organization's culture and its people's habits. Processes need the ability to adapt to change, so in order for a BPM solution to fulfill these requirements, it should incorporate flexible out-of-the-box functionality that responds to business agility and environmental changes.

Automating processes often requires programming skills. BPM solutions already have built-in, out-of-the-box functions and features that enable the automation of processes, and these simple workflows require minimal technical skills, which enables business analysts to create workflows without interference of information technology (IT) departments. This results in accelerated deployment within the organizations.

Figure 1 shows how BPM reduces inefficiency and business costs, resulting in savings. The vertical axis shows the cost of doing business, and the horizontal axis represents time. Initially the business cost is high, but after the automation process and the deployment of these processes, the business costs will drop significantly, due to better process efficiency, which in turn will result in direct savings.

Figure 1.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

There are complex processes that take more time to develop, to optimize, and to execute within the organization. A longer development time for complex processes, and the "analysis paralysis" of the long discovery period will lead to slow deployment of these specific processes within the organization, resulting in a longer adaptation phase and a longer time frame before the savings are realized, as figure 2 demonstrates.

Figure 2.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

What happens after the deployment when the processes are in place and the BPM solution is implemented? While BPM deployments typically take less than six months, the life cycle of the BPM solution after deployment will be much longer. Organizations will need to see how actual users will adapt to these changes, so the time after deployment becomes a significant element of the BPM life cycle.

Adoption

The deployment of a new solution within an organization to optimize processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs sounds simple enough. Unfortunately, this doesn't always reflect the reality. The human part of the processes is extremely important in the phase after the deployment, as the actual people executing the tasks have to use the new way of working, by adapting to the solution and the workflow. Workflows should reflect natural ways of performing tasks, to make sure employees actually use them. Otherwise, the results are workarounds, poor execution, and low adoption rates for the BPM solution (this is represented in figure 3).

Figure 3.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

Adaptation Organizations want to accelerate the deployment and adaptation of automated business processes. The challenge is that processes within an organization change frequently. As soon as a process is deployed, people will change the process, enhance the process, or overcome exceptions to the processes as found. Consequently, BPM systems need to be highly adaptable. Systems should be able to meet the changing demands of the business. Otherwise, employees will be forced to work around the system. Users often will develop workarounds of the automated process to meet their needs, or even will revert back to their old way of executing the tasks, resulting in poor adaptation of the processes, thereby diminishing the potential savings. Figure 4 illustrates the effects of poor adaptation.

Figure 4.
Source: Ultimus Inc.

About Ultimus

Ultimus, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina (US), is a leader in adaptive discovery for BPM solutions. Indeed, Ultimus has developed a patented technology called Adaptive Discovery. This technology simplifies the discovery effort, shortens deployment cycles, and enables process changes to be implemented quickly and easily. Adaptive discovery shortens the effort required to deploy a successful BPM solution by continuously improving and adapting processes.

Ultimus started with a workflow module, but has created broader functionality than other companies such as Lotus Software, and offers small businesses (and even large enterprises) an organization-wide automated workflow solution. Founded in 1994, Ultimus has grown from a workflow solution into a comprehensive BPM suite. It has created its solution completely on a .NET environment, and is one of the leaders in .NET BPM solutions.

Ultimus' worldwide business operations consist of a network of more than 85 partners in 60 countries, with over 1,500 customers. Its solution is localized in twenty languages, with local offices all over the world, and a 24x7 support group is available. With its solution, Ultimus is the only BPM solution provider with a human-centric focus tackling both the automation and the adaptation cycle.

The Adaptive Discovery technology helps discover when a change occurs within a certain business process. This is the most important part of the adaptive discovery process.

The Ultimus BPM Suite is a mature seventh-generation enterprise-class application. The Suite provides an easy-to-use collaborative environment that includes all components of BPM (see Business Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business). Ultimus has architected the product to add value across the entire BPM life cycle, to enable rapid automation and integration, as well as innovative adaptive technologies that ensure it can readily adapt to change.

The Ultimus BPM Suite features Ultimus Process Designer for modeling and design, Ultimus BPM Studio for development and automation, Ultimus Director for adaptive rules management, Ultimus Administrator, and Ultimus Reports. Ultimus worked hard to create a distinctive value proposition with its Adaptive Discovery, but now it will need to work on its marketing to sell this value.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/delivering-adaptive-discovery-for-business-process-management-18762/

Giving a Business Process Management Edge to Enterprise Resource Planning

2010-07-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

Once the proof of concept that Exact e-Synergy could be a business process management (BPM) enabler had been made, Exact realized that the technology could also provide an edge to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) product lines. It hopes that Exact Globe 2000 and Macola ES will give user enterprises a greater reach that extends beyond a selected few power users traditionally situated within financial or manufacturing departments. The successful and quick integration of e-Synergy with the Macola back-office solution to create Macola ES was impressive, delivering more information to desktops across the enterprise, and better managing customer service.

For background information on Exact Software see Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions. For a discussion of e-Synergy and BPM see A Single Software Solution That Enables Business Process Management.

Part four of the Exact Software Continues with Its Share of Judicious Acquisitions series. This series will resume January 16.

Traditional enterprise systems typically touch only about a quarter (at best) of an organization, while bundled tools offered by e-Synergy could virtually reach every employee, bringing all employees into the process and tying them more closely to the company's business goals. Though traditional ERP systems cater to the core processes of service- and manufacturing-oriented organizations, there has long been a gap of workplace processes within an organization that yearns for some serious streamlining. For example, IT supported process optimization used to organize internal meetings, including note taking and minute distribution, and managing ensuing tasks has not been tackled. Managing processes for the internal orders of indirect goods and staples or managing and reconciling staff vacation plans, etc. are also areas that can benefit from streamlining. These processes have been neglected because they are not recognized as revenue generators. They are, however, cost generating processes can accumulate to a substantial total cost each year, and are therefore worth addressing.

This is Part Four of a multipart note. This series will explore Exact's strategic groups and global aspirations; and its BPM strategy and products. The series will resume January 19 with Exact's acquisition of Vanguard, and conclude January 20 with user recommendations.

Macola ES

Macola ES may differentiate itself from most peer ERP products through its native "closed loop" workflow management capabilities, which prevent events and tasks from "falling through the cracks". In other words, while most traditional ERP solutions are task-driven, Macola ES is process-driven, and adds structure to processes that are typically handled inconsistently or manually. The software lets users define business rules, processes, and exceptions as an integral part of their distribution, manufacturing, and other operational activities.

To that end, the embedded Exact Event Manager engine is not a mere alert producing application. It lets users define both the event and the outcome (action). Prescribed actions that are not taken within defined guidelines are escalated, so crucial tasks are neither left undone nor unattended. For example, e-mails will no longer drift into "cyber heaven" where they will be left unattended.

Some worthwhile examples of how Macola ES defines business rules include alerting the buyer when goods do not arrive on time from the supplier, and escalating alerts to the vice president of purchasing if the proper corrective action is not taken by the buyer. Macola ES manages exceptions, for example, by generating a workflow task/step to sales personnel when a particular customer stops buying, or alerting a customer service representative, via a workflow task, when credit is rejected on an order, which can allow an alternative payment method such as cash on delivery (COD) or prepayment to be arranged. This real time exception reporting eliminates the need to generate costly and time-consuming batch paper reports that are created after the fact.

The ease of creating workflows and mapping core business processes may distinguish Macola ES from its peer small and medium business (SMB) ERP products. Sure, many traditional ERP solutions will tout some BPM capabilities, but after scratching the surface, one will typically find the workflow to be a mere document routing application, where the components of content management, process execution, and connectivity are lacking. While secure role-based portals, single sign-on, event management, document management, and BPM features are now becoming a "matter of course" for tier one ERP solutions, most smaller ERP providers have yet to introduce these into their software suites, particularly in an integrated and closed-loop manner.

By automating these tasks, e-Synergy represents a broad suite of products, which may still only be a figment of its direct competitors' imagination. Rather than being a typical enterprise application that "crunches" transactions using a relational database, e-Synergy goes a bit further to support longstanding processes within and outside an enterprise that involve synchronized collaboration and document management. Therefore, the suite may indicate an emergence of a new category of software that tackles enterprise relationship management, groupware/workplace collaboration management, and so on. Some leading analysts place this type of collection in the nascent smart enterprise suite (SES) category (see Mid-market Getting the Taste of Some Emerging Technologies).

This is because extensible markup language (XML) and other, related Internet standards have given a semi-structure to the traditionally unstructured data environment, making it more agreeable to IT support. Nowadays, document management and enterprise content management (ECM) systems can store and retrieve unstructured data (see Enterprise Content Management: It Is More Than Just Web Content Management). Other technologies that should be credited for the emergence of similar enterprise systems include portals, search engines, and categorization systems that allow users to access any given information. Integrated report generators allow users to view and report any data from structured and unstructured data source.

For a discussion of the cautions and caveats associated with the emerging BPM market, see Business Process Management: A Crash Course on What It Entails and Why to Use It.

Exact e-Synergy and Exact Globe Combined for Business Unified

Exact has been focusing its research and development (R&D) efforts on its ERP product portfolio and e-business product set (i.e., e-Synergy). These tend to use the same architecture and databases, and integrate back- and front-office solutions. The new versions of the acquired product lines have been based on the same Microsoft-centric architecture. But, the two globally strategic products, Exact Globe and Exact e-Synergy, are tightly integrated on multiple levels. Both products share a single common data model called One-X, and run on the same database, thereby providing two user interfaces (UI) to the same data. However, a possible downside is that they may not have the same look-and-feel. Exact Globe and e-Synergy also share the same core business logic. A single Microsoft Common Object Model (COM)-based framework is used to store and implement business logic in both Exact e-Synergy and Exact Globe.

They also support the XML export and import of data, based on a common, published XML schema used for integration in distributed environments or with external applications. For backwards compatibility, legacy comma separated values (CSV) import flat files are still supported, but Exact's strategic direction will more forward with XML. Finally, an Internet-based installation technology ensures that both Exact Globe and Exact e-Synergy can be installed and updated basically anywhere and at any time via the Internet.

Furthermore, Exact believes that the real opportunities and technological challenges are in connectivity and reporting, since its products and services are offered in several target markets all over the globe. The reporting needs in today's ERP world have completely changed from being only accounting-based to being management by exception. To that end, the One-X concept of the Exact products holds information for knowledge based indicators, such as key performance indicators (KPI) and balanced scorecards. Due to its ease of use and familiarity, today's reporting is dominated by Microsoft Excel, but Crystal Reports is the standard in enterprise reporting. Consequently, Exact pledges to continue to deliver easy-to-use tools for getting users' valuable information into Microsoft Excel and creating customized Crystal Reports.

To suit the specific needs of these target groups, Exact has developed SDK (Software Development Kit) to connect third party applications, devices, and acquired leading, local ERP brands to Exact Globe and Exact e-Synergy. By improving connectivity, the vendor wants to leverage existing investments and provide a path forward in technology. Not only does SDK create a connection between Exact products and the products of other suppliers, but it also provides a means to use a wide range of mobile devices.

Additionally, Exact SDK, the connectivity platform completely based on industry standard Web services and XML, offers the opportunity for IT developers to meet the functional requirements set by their customers, as well as the standard functionality offered by Exact. In other words, the SDK allows users to extend e-Synergy beyond its core functionality to meet specific customer and prospective business demands. Given that expanding businesses unavoidably find themselves creating specialized and highly customized business processes to meet the shifting demands of the marketplace.

Thus, with the recently released SDK Database Editor and e-Synergy Editor, users have the ability to modify two layers of the e-Synergy architecture, including the UI and the database. The result is in the development of new functionality and industry-specific solutions without re-investing in IT solutions.

This was developed in response to Exact's business partners and customers demand for a flexible solution that meet their specific business needs. To that end, SDK complements e-Synergy's extensive configurability by allowing users to customize and integrate a broader spectrum of applications. At the same time, they can keep their total cost of ownership (TCO) low and future product upgrades can be handled easily. Additional features available with SDK include the ability to generate new tables and add fields to existing ones; configure business- and industry-related attachments and add-ons; generate links and connections to information portals and web sites; and extend and enhance elements of code for custom reports.

Priced at $1,000 (USD) per named user, with 10 percent annual maintenance and 10 percent annual support costs, e-Synergy is priced comparably to other licensed enterprise applications. The big difference is that the vendor delivers regular feature updates through maintenance, thus it is situated in a middle ground between traditional perpetual-licensing and more the modern subscription, software as a service (SaaS) models (see Trends in Delivery and Pricing Models for Enterprise Applications: Pricing Options).

Exact Software has placed the product in long term development. There have been no major version releases in the past three years, but any customer on a maintenance subscription contract has access to the new functions that have been introduced at regular intervals during that time. The latest build (version 340) was introduced in early 2005, and its improvements were not as large-scale as the major, annual releases of other ERP products, or even as major as the more frequent quarterly releases found with hosted applications such as Salesforce.com. The e-Synergy revisions generally have been more digestible when it comes to getting users up to speed.

Exact periodically sends enhancement survey campaigns to its existing e-Synergy users. The top three requirement needs from the recent one were 1) the ability to check for duplicates when adding customers, accounts, etc., 2) a simplified way to create multiple workflows, and 3) pop-up reminders for calendar items. In addition to these, the next build will feature the ability for multiple logins for customer portals; security checks (hiding) of accounts; the use of v-cards (electronic business cards) for employees and contacts; the ability to freeze comments upon request; increased options for extensible style sheets (XSS); and more compliance for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Part 11, the US Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), the International Standards Organization (ISO), and material safety data sheet (MSDS) requirements.

Exact Pledges for the Future

Exact believes that the key to success for packaged business solutions in the mid-market is to provide technology leadership that connects separate information sources. In this respect, Exact pledges to further integrate its Exact Globe and Exact e-Synergy product functionality and allow these products to connect to other third party business applications and mobile devices. Exact is also admittedly researching and testing the most suitable technological platforms to support its product strategy like Microsoft .NET, Oracle database, and application service provider (ASP) and hosting concepts.

In 2004 and 2005 Exact e-Synergy was fueling license revenue growth, demonstrating that Exact's vision to improve the performance of organizations by allowing access to one information system for all their employees, partners, and entire value chain, is materializing. For instance, North American sales for the e-Synergy product nearly doubled in 2004—which was only its second active year in the market. That growth may likely continue, since Exact has some story to tell, and is investing marketing dollars in appropriately selected media outlets, and other appropriate channels.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/giving-a-business-process-management-edge-to-enterprise-resource-planning-18360/

Business Process Management: A Crash Course on What It Entails and Why to Use It

2010-07-31T05:00:00.002-07:00

Integrated solutions that optimize only at a company- or department-level are no longer sufficient for success in today's highly competitive, integrated supply chain environment. Every department contains mountains of data, but without an integrated and process-oriented solution, all this valuable information is often lost to the company as a whole. What is needed is a real time solution that goes beyond integrating the content and processes of individual sales, marketing, or support department data.

Companies need a higher level of agility to respond to the different types of customer behaviors and over the last several years, cleaner, more reliable data has become the mantra of organizations seeking to improve their customer focus. As a result, user organizations are now swimming in improved data, which are still stored in disparate applications, data marts, operational data stores, and data warehouses. Companies have even attached sophisticated analytic tools to this scattered data with the hopes of gaining insight into customer attributes and behaviors (see Why Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected?). Despite these efforts, many companies have still failed to link data to business processes, and only a few companies have changed their business processes to reflect the insights gained from the data side. Even fewer have harvested this knowledge to make the most of every interaction with their customers.

Due to commoditization, a company that does not have a competitive product- or service may still be able to compete, if it has a nimble enterprise information system and process. The same holds for relationships with supplier on the other side of the supply chain, not to mention relationships with employees within the four walls of an organization.

Linking data and content to processes falls in the realm of business process management (BPM), a technology that coordinates the data and actions of disparate information technology (IT) systems and should allow companies to transform potentially damaging customer interactions into revenue opportunities. An ideal enterprise system in an ideal world would have a single software vendor providing 100 percent of the data, content, business processes, and connectivity to the outside world, and would accommodate changes instantaneously when required. However, this is a utopian ideal. Unfortunately in the real world, communication is impeded because content silos exist everywhere, and engineers, production, and sales people do not talk the "same language" and do not always use the same software.

Reality tends to fall short of ideal situations and processes on paper, because many issues can crop up at any time such as delays; "black holes", where information disappears; human errors; different context and semantics within different departments; and regulatory and compliance issues that must be addressed, etc. For example, it is not uncommon to see an invoice sent several days after the goods have been shipped. Thus, coordinating systems should help companies respond to key business events in real time (or close to it), and to minimize the risk of lost revenue. For example, a sales representative can contact and offer a customer discounts to pay bills on-line. Ultimately, by responding with the right action at the right time, companies can become real time enterprises (RTE).

BPM is a methodology backed by software used to manage businesses at a higher efficiency. It has emerged from the rising complexity of doing business in a competitive economy, where margins continue to narrow and the pressure to respond to market shifts is greater than ever. Companies are under increasing regulatory and investor scrutiny and must be run successfully, both in the short and long term.

A BPM high-level mission lets business processes become as manageable as data. To that end, BPM has to integrate existing applications, Web services, and people in a such way where it can quickly change, destruct, or construct processes, which is a capability that is far beyond the traditional enterprise application integration (EAI).

BPM: A Crash Course on What It Entails

As a nascent software category, BPM often means different things to different people. One could, in great part, blame this on the slew of budding pure-play software providers that refer to themselves as full-fledged BPM providers, but really only cover a niche or two of the entire BPM realm. One should also distinguish clearly between BPM as a management activity and BPM as a modeling tool, since these definitions are often used interchangeably. Below are the typical high-level tasks that a comprehensive BPM solution should cover (listed sequentially):

1. Process definition or modeling, which maps and defines business process;
2. process execution, which is a critical task that requires a core database and engine that contains process rules, and automatically initiates and manages processes;
3. process monitoring, which enables managers to see potential bottlenecks and monitor work in process (WIP);
4. integration layer, which, logically, links an organization's diverse business applications; and
5. user interface (UI), which enables people to interact with the process engine.

There is an ingrained belief that BPM is the enabler of agility; flexibility; increased competitiveness; compliance; actionable information sharing and collaboration; and workflow execution. To satisfy these assumptions, BPM software should be

* event-driven, since it is triggered by internal and external events;
* orchestrated, since predefined process flows must enable complex process steps that can be completed without human intervention;
* enable internal processes, inside the organization's firewall; and
* exchange process information with external user groups.

Further, despite the need for orchestration, a human-centric workflow is still necessary in many instances. Therefore, BPM should support both exception-based human interaction and human decision-making. And last but not least, business analytics in the system must enable real time business event processing through management dashboards and similar decision-making tools. BPM also often includes integration capabilities including extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tools, multi-channel integration, and support for enterprise mobility, though these are available through other functions.

Some pundits believe that the enterprise software world is being revolutionized by two big complementary developments: service oriented architecture (SOA), and event driven architecture (EDA). SOA is a formalized approach for managing Web services, which means that some kind of platform is needed to orchestrate how services interact, and to ensure that processes are auditable, flexible, scalable, and secure (see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More). On the other hand, EDA is about giving applications the ability to handle unexpected events and events that occur in conjunction with others. Full-fledged BPM systems exhibit many of the same functions on both sides (see The Future of Business Process Management Where is BPM heading?).

Moreover, business processes should by no means be viewed within the confines of departmental or even organizational boundaries, as businesses are becoming increasingly horizontal in terms of cross-departments (not to be confused with a vertical industry focus, which remains paramount) and role-based. Therefore, what is needed is an enterprise system with holistic, "big picture" answers for the entire enterprise, if not the entire supply chain. Basic questions like "What is the profit per product line?", "What is our current sales pipeline and how does that compare to last year?", and "Who are our most profitable customers?" need to be answered. With BPM-enabled and integrated solutions, these answers might come naturally, since BPM aims to formalize intricate business processes into highly manageable and visible workflows.

These processes already exist, but vary from department to department, by function, and as well as in their requirements to interact with various software products and business partners. This creates a management and training burden, stymies attempts at holistic reporting across the business, and often results in the duplication of information handling as the information moves from one department to the next.

Conversely, BPM forces common business process methodology across the enterprise, and if everyone uses the same system, a commonality occurs that should considerably reduce training requirements, simplify compliance efforts, and enhance internal communications. Duplication can also be eliminated because everything is under the same system, and in cases where information must exist in duplicate form, the BPM-enabled system can be configured to replicate it.

BPM: Why Use It?

Why anyone would want to consider deploying BPM? Some reasons include the potential to dramatically reduced operation costs, reduced lead times, streamlined outsourcing, improved performance visibility, better management of global operations, faster time-to-market, exceeded customer expectations, and so on. The Business Project Management Institute reports that an effective BPM strategy can

* reduce product design time by 50 percent, resulting in faster time-to-market, more competitive products, and increased revenue;
* reduce order time by 80 percent, leading to cost savings, improved customer satisfaction, and revenue gains; and
* help organizations achieve efficiency gains of 60 percent in call centers, resulting in improved asset management, reduced customer service costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

An Accenture report claims that a BPM-enabled enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can cut inquiry response time by 70 to 90 percent, decrease customer order lead time by 50 percent, increase inventory turns by 35 percent, and cut manufacturing cycle time by 40 percent.

An added benefit of BPM (combined with analytics) is that it can improve compliance with initiatives such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). In particular, the sheer number of provisions contained within the legislation is daunting, and although it is possible to use checklists and spreadsheets to achieve compliance with all of SOX mandates, most companies recognize that specialized software and systems can streamline the process of tracking tasks and managing the overall process (see Attributes of Sarbanes-Oxley Tool Sets). To that end, BPM technology should improve management control by automating processes and enforcing business policies. Management dashboards also assist executives in spotting problems earlier, through greater visibility of critical business information.

In the past, tweaking a current ERP system to simplify a job would have customarily involved costly custom programming. Today, BPM can streamline business processes within and between systems, because it is a mix of workflow, EAI, and application development that makes it easier for companies to codify current processes, automate their execution, monitor performance, and make "on-the-fly" adjustments to improve the processes.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-process-management-a-crash-course-on-what-it-entails-and-why-to-use-it-18301/

Business Process Management Notations within Business Process Management

2010-07-31T05:00:00.001-07:00

Business process management notation (BPMN) is the latest standard for modeling business processes and Web services. The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) (www.bpmi.org) was established to develop, support, and encourage the use of BPMN. The BPMI Notation Working Group (BPMN-WG) worked for over two years to develop BPMN before its 1.0 release in May 2004. The primary goal of the BPMN initiative was to develop a standard notation methodology, understandable to all business people, throughout the process of defining, designing, deploying, executing, and optimizing processes. BPMI also created BPMN to ensure that the actual extensible markup language (XML) used in execution languages such as business process execution language (BPEL), business process execution language for Web services (BPEL4WS), and business process modeling language (BPML) can be represented within the notation of the processes.

The BPMN-WG, a member of the BPMI organization, created BPMN to provide businesses with the ability to define and understand their own internal processes, and to communicate these processes and procedures in a standard manner. This notation standard increases the understanding of business transactions within the organization, and ensures that organizations will be able to communicate internally. Furthermore, it will also enable integration with third parties that the organizations deal with, to enhance business-to-business (B2B) processes.

BPMN enables better use of business process management (BPM) by standardizing the notation method used to assist in process automation. BPM refers to the systems and methods used to define, monitor, report, and continually improve processes aiming at meeting customer requirements. BPM includes the development and automation of new and integrated business processes to assist in real-time business visibility and decision-making. It includes workflow design and modeling, and automated process integration and management. Even though organizations have been modeling and managing processes for years, these activities have often fallen short, due to a lack of standards, control, and guidance during the design and execution phase of the processes. BPMN provides these standards for business process modeling and business execution languages in order to resolve the shortcomings.

BPMN can't solve all problems as it is purely a notation method that vendors and organizations can use. Software vendors still need to integrate the execution engine in their solutions for an organization to be able to automate processes instead of just modeling the processes.

What is BPMN?

BPMN is a specification for a business process diagram (BPD). BPD is used to model business process operations graphically, in a readable and understandable way for non-technical users, even for complex processes. BPDs can map processes to business execution languages in order to automate these processes. Within the BPD, the user creates the business process model, which is represented by a network of graphical objects. These objects display activities and work flow in the order of execution. The user simply models the events that occur from the start of a process, all the way through to the end result, with the notations defined by BPMN standards.

Understanding the Principles of BPMN

To be able to understand the principle of BPMN, organizations should know what makes a business process diagram BPMN-compliant. What are the basic elements used within BPMN? These graphical objects enable easy development of business diagrams and flow charts. Flowchart diagrams, such as those created in Microsoft Visio, often have similar icons. The shapes of these elements have been chosen by the BPMI-WG because they are recognizable to business users; this enables business users to understand the entire process.

Within BPMN, different elements are categorized, providing an organized overview of the basic elements available. Within these categories, there are variations of elements, identifying more complex requirements (which does not change the look and feel of the diagrams). These categories include flow objects, connecting objects, swimlanes, and artifacts.

Flow Objects

Process modelers use flow objects when defining business processes. Within a BPD, BPMN defines three main elements: events, activities, and gateways. With these three main elements only, business users can fully define processes.

Events indicate something that happens within the process, and that influences the process (the event being a trigger or result of an action). BPMN uses circles to notate events. There are three types of events: starting, intermediate, and end events. Specifying triggers within the events puts constraints on the processes, and these constraints can be messages, timers, links, rules, exceptions, or even multiple triggers.

Activities are represented by a rectangle, and indicate work performed. An activity can be a business process, sub-process, or task. They all have the same shape—it is only the order in which they appear (or a small indication within the shape, such as a plus sign [+]) that differentiates the activity as a process, sub-process, or task. In this way, different activities are easily recognizable within the diagram, and the diagram will be understandable to the business analysts.

Gateways are indicated by a diamond-shaped element representing decisions, mergers forks, or joins within the diagram. Gateways can be seen as questions asked within the process flow (with alternative answers), through which the process is pushed through the organization. There are numerous examples of gateway decisions:

* exclusive decisions (in logic, the exclusive or [XOR]), used to model data- or event-based decisions. Based on the condition of the activity, the flow continues towards one option or the other.
* exclusive merges (XOR), indicating that one of the inputs provided will become the output of the gateway
* inclusive or decisions, meaning that one or more outputs can result (at least one). There is always a default output indicated.
* inclusive or merges, where the first of any incoming inputs is processed
* complex decisions—based on the decision, the expression triggers a specific outgoing flow
* complex merges, where the complex conditions within the expression determine when the process moves forward (based on incoming events)
* parallel forking (and), where all sequence flows are executed based on this gateway
* parallel joining (and), where all incoming events must be completed prior to the execution of the next event, based on this gateway

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-process-management-notations-within-business-process-management-18796/

Vision Software Brings a Solid Business Process Management Solution to the Table

2010-07-31T04:57:00.000-07:00

The market for business process management (BPM) solutions is tough. Until recently, there were no real market leaders in the BPM space, even though there were big players such as Metastorm, Pegasystems, Staffware, and DST Technologies.

Currently there are a wide variety of vendors who are entering the BPM market with niche or full-suite solutions. One of these vendors is Vision Software. Even though Vision competes with vendors such as Ultimus, HandySoft, and Staffware, there are certain aspects of their BizAgi that leave room for improvement. These will be discussed later in the article.

Established in 1989 in Columbia, Vision Software is a privately owned BPM company, based since 2003 in Hertfordshire, UK. Vision Software has worked on delivering process technologies over the past sixteen years, resulting in their BPM solution BizAgi. BizAgi is a dynamic solution which supports continuous improvement of core business processes in the organization. Vision Software moved from workflow solutions for messaging services on top of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes during the late 90s, to adding business rules, a graphical user interface (GUI), and abstractions in 2000 and 2001, to become a fuller BPM solution. The integration with Microsoft Visio was important, as Vision Software created its own shapes for workflow design, and embedded this functionality in Microsoft Visio. This was critical to becoming a full BPM solution because missing modeling shapes was like "missing letters on a keyboard," according to Gustavo Gomez, managing director at Vision Software.

Vision initially focused on the governmental, financial, and utilities markets, but changed the focus shortly afterwards to just financials. The primary reason for focusing on financials was to establish a solid reference list and credibility before entering other markets.

BizAgi

Vision Software introduced the BPM solution BizAgi in 2002 after sixteen years of experience in different process approaches for organizations. BizAgi focuses on expanding the European client base, and already has solid references in Germany and Italy, with successful implementations at large banks in these countries.

Vision Software does a great job developing BizAgi in both Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and .NET without functionality loss in either platform. This enables end users to implement BizAgi regardless of the organization's technical architecture.

Organizations use BizAgi solutions mostly in the banking and insurance industries. In the context of these industries, BizAgi's BPM solution offers the following benefits:

* Cost reduction
* Reduced cycle time for transactions
* Visibility in processes
* Increased productivity and efficiency
* Better customer service due to reduction of errors
* Enabling process monitoring

BizAgi's solution takes the end user through various steps to optimize, automate, and manage the business processes:

1. Process design
2. Definition of process data and business rules
3. Assignation of resources
4. Verification of the process
5. Process execution
6. Analysis of process performance

BizAgi represents a model-driven architecture throughout the application. Figure 1 shows the architecture.

Figure 1. BizAgi architecture

The architecture covers the four main components: the client interface, the web server which processes the requirements from the client, the application server which processes all business information and components, and the storage components that contain the BizAgi database, the data warehouse and other external application databases.

This logical architecture is the foundation for BizAgi's agility. Figure 2 shows the several components within the different architecture layers of Bizagi.

Figure 2. BizAgi components in architecture

The business process layer uses BizAgi's Studio to define the organizational and data structures.

The business rules component uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tool which enables business users to design the business rules without any coding. Computational business rules are programmatic components, which are developed outside BizAgi, but the business rules engine has the capability to integrate this coded business rule for further use.

Forms are dynamically assembled, and validations of these forms are present within the form designer, through integration with the business rule engine.

The business objects component, together with the component manager, enables data processing and decision making, based on specific values of data generated by activities in the business process layer.

BizAgi integrates with Microsoft Visio for process design. The level of integration is extremely solid and BizAgi has its own BPM stencil (toolbar) to design process flows, regardless of the complexity in Visio. BizAgi also supports business processes that are created in Aris, but the integration limits itself to importing and exporting the models.

BizAgi Product Strengths

Vision Software has come a long way to develop their BPM solution. Their focus was to develop a tool that shows simplicity, and BizAgi does this extremely well. Navigation through solution and use is well designed.

BizAgi's ability to assign tasks based on roles is a good feature because this assignation can include rules for skills, geographical information, etc. One of the future goals for BizAgi is to give it the ability to assign tasks according to the phase within the workflow.

BizAgi's data management is one of few BPM solutions which manage data in a structured model. Competing solutions such as Fuego and Ultimus do not have a structured data repository; for every activity the user has to define "data in" and "data out" variables.

However, organizations should not be discouraged by its simplicity, as BizAgi is capable of handling a range of simple to very complex demands for the modeling aspect of BPM solutions. Vision Software incorporates experience and understanding of BPM, and uses this knowledge to develop a full range of functionality to allow easy development of business models.

Another powerful feature is the flash animation which shows the workflow phase. This very sophisticated animation is embedded into the workflow interface, showing the steps that have been taken so far, and the phase a certain process is in. The animation is populated by data from the data warehouse.

The scalability and performance of BizAgi in combination with its pricing model makes Vision Software an attractive competitor to other vendors such as FileNet or Lombardi.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/vision-software-brings-a-solid-business-process-management-solution-to-the-table-18488/

Business Process Management in Free and Open Source: An Overview of the Demand and the Supply

2010-07-31T04:56:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I wrote a product note about Aras Innovator, the only enterprise open source solution available on the product lifecycle management (PLM) market. After that, my interest in free and open source software (FOSS) did not fade but I changed my focus to another category of enterprise software—business process management (BPM). This time, I was able to find more than one BPM solution that’s offered without license fees and had an impression that in the BPM area, FOSS- as-a-software-licensing-model has established noticeable ground.

A market is comprised of two major sides—one side has the demands and the other side has the capabilities to satisfy these demands. In order to verify the relevance between BPM and FOSS from the user side, I used Technology Evaluation Centers' (TEC) data on demand trends to explore the stats of end-user demand for FOSS BPM solutions as well as users' requirements for deploying BPM solutions (be it FOSS or proprietary) in a FOSS environment. For the supply side, my findings are not as quantitative but still suggest that some vendors are addressing BPM users’ requirements in FOSS.

The Demand Side
Every year, thousands of users come to TEC’s BPM Evaluation Center looking for suitable BPM solutions. By answering a questionnaire regarding their business characteristics and requirements, users walk away with a working list of BPM solutions that are likely to fit their specific BPM initiatives. Although defining a working list is the first step of TEC’s entire software selection services, the aggregated answers captured in this process show a good picture of the overall requirements from the user side on different issues, in this case, FOSS. In order to have a long-term view of the demand, I looked into the aggregated data for specific years (2007, 2008, and 2009), and below are the results.

FOSS BPM
TEC data shows that almost a quarter of software seekers think the FOSS model is considerable when looking for a BPM solution—higher than all major application types that are more business process-specific (figure 1).

One of our questions allows users to identify their customization, software license, source code, and other miscellaneous requirements. Amongst the valid 2950 responses to this question, 23.0 percent said they wanted software licensed under an official free or open source license. Compared with the same percentages in some other enterprise software categories, this 23.0 percent is higher than all the others except for that for enterprise content management (ECM). I’m not sure whether the 23.0 percent of BPM initiatives would all end up with FOSS BPM solutions as wanted, but at least the percentage shows that the FOSS awareness in the BPM area is relatively strong.

Figure 1. Percentages of people indicating a desire for a FOSS solution in different enterprise software categories (2007-2009)

BPM Running in a FOSS Environment
Besides looking for FOSS solutions, BPM seekers also showed high interests in running BPM systems on top of a FOSS database and server platforms.

Figure 2. BPM seekers’ preference on database management system (DBMS) (2007-2009)

Figure 2 shows that FOSS databases—MySQL and PostgreSQL—are ranked third and fifth, respectively. We structured the DBMS question with multiple choice answers—an average BPM initiative selected 2.1 options—even though the percentage shown in figure 2 suggests that there is a considerable large group of users who are considering FOSS database while planning their BPM implementation.

Figure 3 BPM seekers’ preference on server platform (2007-2009)

Figure 3 shows that FOSS operating system (OS) Linux is ranked second. In this case, an average BPM initiative selected 1.9 options when asked to identify server platform preference.

The DBMS and OS preferences in Figure 2 and 3 are captured from all BPM initiatives regardless if BPM seekers were looking for FOSS or proprietary BPM solutions. By separating the BPM initiatives that preferred FOSS BPM solution from the rest, I was able to find that the two groups (named as the FOSS BPM group and the non-FOSS BPM group) showed significantly different preferences on FOSS DBMS and server platform (Figure 4).

Figure 4.Preferences on FOSS DBMS and server platform, FOSS BPM group vs. non-FOSS BPM group (2007-2009)
Clearly, Figure 4 shows the correlation between FOSS BPM and FOSS IT infrastructure preferences. However, it also shows that even if an organization doesn’t plan on having a FOSS BPM solution, it may want to run proprietary BPM solutions on top of FOSS software, though less likely than a FOSS BPM seeker.

The Supply Side
Where there is a demand, there is a supply. Again, this is true in the BPM area regarding the FOSS issue. Let’s take a look at how some BPM vendors’ support FOSS database and OS.
Amongst the 27 BPM vendors that are currently listed in the TEC BPM Vendor Showcase, 15 vendors support Linux. Amongst these 15 vendors, 10 of them support MySQL, and amongst these 10, seven of them also support PostgreSQL (figure 5).

Figure 5. Percentages of BPM vendors that support FOSS’s database and OS

Although these 27 vendors don’t make an exhaustive list, the percentages in Figure 5. give a sense of priority when supporting Linux, MySQL, and PostgreSQL from high to low, coinciding with the demands from the user side as we have previously seen.

Now the question is, as there is a considerably-sized group of users willing to adopt FOSS BPM solutions, how many options do they have? Although none of the 27 vendors currently available for evaluation in TEC's BPM Vendor Showcase deliver their solutions through the FOSS model, there are FOSS BPM solutions such as ProcessMaker, Intalio|Works, uEngine, Runa WFE, and BonitaSoft. If you want to find more options, SourceForge.net is a convenient place that hosts over 80 FOSS BPM downloads under the Business Process Management category. However, one should be aware of that many of the downloads listed here are just subsets of today’s general convention of a BPM suite in terms of functionality.

Software selection is a process of measuring what you want and what the alternatives are able to provide. When a BPM seeker is interested in FOSS solutions, cost might be a major reason, but IT strategy, existing IT infrastructure, experiences of the IT force, etc., might also play a role in the decision-making process. Below are a few points you should consider when regarding a FOSS BPM solution as an alternative prior to a more detailed evaluation.

• Think of what functionality you want, for now and in the near future. Without a doubt, FOSS software gives you more financial convenience to roll out your BPM initiative. Typically, with a phased approach, you may start from business process modeling, and then expand to business process execution and monitoring, and later on find that process analytics and process mining should be added. With that being said, you need a solution that not only provides you with a convenient start but also helps you explore during your BPM journey.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-process-management-in-free-and-open-source-an-overview-of-the-demand-and-the-supply-20974/

Business Process Analysis versus Business Process Management

2010-07-31T04:54:00.000-07:00

Talking to end users reveals that there is confusion in the market regarding business process analysis (BPA) and business process management (BPM) suites. Vendors use the term BPM in a very broad way, but what are really the differences between BPA and BPM, and where does BPM come from?

BPM in the Early Stages

In the 1980s, organizations used business process redesign (BPR) to improve productivity, quality of service, and cost effectiveness by making drastic changes within the processes of their organizations. Information technology (IT) solutions for these major redesigns were viewed as often resulting in major employee cuts, due to the fact that many businesses used BPR to restructure their company. Because of this, many organizations today are hesitant about implementing business process changes. This is particularly true when it comes to current BPM solutions, which focus mainly on lowering cost and increasing productivity, just as the focal points of these solutions in the 1980s were on drastic organizational changes.

In retrospect, the BPR approach of trying to change everything at once seems a bit extreme. Therefore, current BPM solution providers market a more subtle approach, in which changes are incremental and less drastic than with the old BPR tactics. Nonetheless, there are times when a more radical approach to process modeling and redesign is called for in order for an organization to position itself differently in the market. Moreover, businesses have a tendency to change certain processes rapidly. This is not a problem, as the new BPM solutions are capable of adjusting the process design accordingly, without having a huge impact on the company structure. Thus, even though the BPM strategy operates through incremental changes, businesses will notice the positive impact these changes effect within an organization.

Another huge difference between the BPR of the 1980s and the BPM of the present is the fact that BPR involved hard-coded process changes. Organizations not only needed programmers instead of business users to implement these changes, but they were time-consuming. Technologies for process automation, document management, etc., were independent of each other, and could only be integrated through coding. This made integration more difficult than it is now, resulting in it often not being used at all.

When pure-play BPM vendors arrived on the scene, they created a product whose components were already integrated with each other to form one cohesive solution. These vendors focus on the business side of the organization, creating a user-friendly interface, and involving business analysts in the entire cycle of process modeling and implementation—not just in requirements gathering and user acceptance testing. This means that business users can apply changes more efficiently without relying on the IT department, because changes are not hard-coded and usually do not require programming skills.

What Is Business Process Modeling and Design?

Before an organization starts the design or modeling process, it needs to understand what its business processes are. In general, a business process is a set of logically related business activities that combine to deliver something of value. A business process can be seen as different steps within a business cycle, but also as a set of steps or activities that run throughout the organization, and which are often built to the requirements of the customer. In this case, the customer is a different department, the actual end user, or a product in the next process within the workflow.

When it comes to specific business processes within an organization, business analysts should look beyond departments. Departments are often divisions or silos within an organization, but business processes lie on top of these departments. For example, selling to a customer is typically viewed as a single business process, but several departments, from the sales department to the distribution and finance departments, are involved in this single process.

There is a good reason why BPM solutions handle processes in this way, as horizontal rather than vertical or "functional" processes. If an organization views its processes vertically based on functions, the process is isolated. This can cause delays, increased costs, and duplication of tasks, as well as loss of quality control. Horizontal processes, on the other hand, cross the boundaries of departments. They focus more on human-centric processes ("who does what," in other words) than on task-centric processes (which take things step by step).

In terms of modeling and designing these processes, the main drivers for most organizations are optimization, effectiveness, organizational growth, and customer satisfaction. In fact, the most common ideas behind business process modeling and design are as follows:

* performance improvement
* cost reduction
* business process automation
* business process integration
* business opportunity creation

Business process modeling and design is more than just another project for an organization. Organizations should see business process modeling and design as an actual business change that will help it to meet or redirect its scope, and to continuously meet its customers' requirements and expectations. Business process modeling can include organizational changes, technical changes, or frequently a combination of both.

BPA as a Stand-alone Solution

Besides vendors that provide full business process management suites (BPMS) as discussed below, there are vendors that focus more on the modeling and analysis than the actual execution of the processes. Their solutions are called BPA tools. BPA solutions concentrate on process design and the associated business model analysis. Integration, performance, support, and ease of use are important for BPA solutions, as are the two modules described below.

The business model designer is a module that enables business users to visualize the business processes within an organization. This permits the identification of bottlenecks, tasks, and opportunities, so that business users can automate these processes. Module features such as graphical process design, validation of processes through checkpoints, and the inclusion of icons in the processes, improve process visibility for business users. Moreover, with the business model designer, it is possible to take a top-down approach to process modeling by starting with a high-level business process and drilling down to more detailed processes within the organization. This module also provides a communication method for business users to talk to people in more technical departments, such as system integrators.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-process-analysis-versus-business-process-management-18754/

The Future of Business Process Management: Where is BPM heading?

2010-07-31T04:53:00.002-07:00

Businesses are looking for a new way of using business process management (BPM) solutions. As they become more dynamic, businesses are demanding faster responses from their business templates. As a result, companies such as CommerceQuest, HandySoft, TIBCO, and Metastorm, are developing BPM suites that are compatible with application, integration, and content suites.

Understanding BPM

Approximately ten to fifteen years ago, organizations began assimilating their legacy systems in specific industries or divisions by integrating enterprise applications via data transformation and routing, event triggering, process automation, and adapters. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) vendors were flourishing at this time. They automated their transaction systems with ERP software while including information systems from CRM software. Five years later, business process integration (BPI) solutions, namely business process modeling, business-to-business (B2B) connectivity, and vertical industry process templates were built on top of these enterprise application integration (EAI) systems.

Today, the market offers BPM solutions that incorporate both the EAI and BPI functionality in addition to workflow, business activity monitoring, Web services, rule engines, and portal capability, etc.

What Is BPM?

BPM is a set of tools and services that support human and application interaction with business processes. BPM suites automate manual processes by routing tasks through departments and applications. These routings are rule- and action-based, and are defined in a set of formulas. Actions can be automatically triggered, without an underlying rule requiring additional information; therefore, the process can be continuous and manual processes can be avoided.

Organizations use BPM systems to improve the effectiveness of their core operations. BPM specifically coordinates interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. It automates the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away non-value adding activities, such as routine decisions, data, and form transfer etc., and instead, provides users with tailored lists of task. With today's tight integration of process definitions and underlying applications, changes in the definition can be deployed and communicated virtually immediately.

Additionally, BPM can also add value to a company requiring procedures to be created and published because it offers compliance management. Companies can use it to meet the US Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) and International Standards Organization (ISO) requirements. It can opening up a range of functions such as process (quantitative) analysis, and optimization. Thus, by implementing BPM, companies are able to orchestrate and leverage cross-functional business processes that are used over multiple systems, divisions, people, and partners.

Ultimately, the beneficiary of BPM systems is actually the customer because the customer will receive information sooner and products faster. This results in an improved level of customer satisfaction and translates into more revenue for the company. For more information, see Business Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business.

The Present

These days, the flexibility of a solution is what is important to businesses. As a result, more vendors are using service oriented architectures (SOA) for their products. Using this type of platform and by adding modules, vendors can create flexible BPM solutions for their clients. The architecture is presented in such a way that the flexibility of the platform supports the growing demand and evolution of business processes within an organization. These modules are applications on their own, but when on a platform, they are connected and are not considered independent applications.

To meet business needs, vendors are also trying to integrate process modeling and execution engines. This is done through a common interface format (CIF) to interchange the legacy process models with ones coming from other modeling systems. The current BPM life cycle starts with the modeling processes through assessments and analysis. Most BPM solutions can import Microsoft (MS) Excel sheets, and MS Project to a define processes and BPM solutions can bring these imports to the executable modules within the BPM environment for further use.

Process mapping leads to process execution. Within the processes, organizations can use exception handling integration by defining the rules in the exception processes. All processes can be monitored and generate key performance indicators (KPI) for the organization as focus areas. BPM solutions can also interface with task lists, e-mail, and handheld devices. It can also integrate with the mainframe and other databases, and with ERP, CRM, and legacy systems.

To close the BPM life cycle, once reporting is completed, the KPIs can be used for input and to analyze and create evaluations based on the data and identify where the bottlenecks occur in the company.

BPM suites also use business process integration (BPI) to integrate business processes with other applications, and to enable the flow across their legacy systems. However, BPI doesn't have the business management capabilities that a BPM has in terms of dashboards, analytics, and the ability to define and track metrics across different processes. It also cannot analyze impact and simulations. Yet by working in conjunction with BPM, BPI brings more depth to the BPM systems.

The Future

BPM is becoming more important to organizations and companies are slowly becoming aware of the role of BPM suites. Organizations still see their business partners as important ways to fuel businesses. As result, process driven BPM is shifting towards execution driven BPM, which integrates with different applications. Organizations will also start looking for ways to orchestrate their processes to meet the demands of their dynamic business models. Finally, because business intelligence (BI) is also becoming more important, vendors will have to focus on their execution driven modules and BI integrations to meet market demand.

The importance between BI and BPM is a key reason for BPM vendors to incorporate a reporting element and the ability to measure performance of the business processes into their solutions. Most BPM vendors already integrate with BI solutions, but now BPM vendors are either creating their own modules, or are buying other vendors to merge their products into one solution.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-future-of-business-process-management-where-is-bpm-heading-18560/

Business Process Management: How to Orchestrate Your Business

2010-07-31T04:53:00.001-07:00

Companies used to coordinate activities through the company manually. This resulted in inefficiency and errors in the operational process and often led to difficulties in improving the process itself. Organizations are increasingly focusing on the implementation of business process management (BPM) solutions for the purpose of improving functional efficiency and effectiveness in their core business processes.

Evolution of BPM

Approximately ten to fifteen years ago, organizations began assimilating their legacy systems in specific industries or divisions by integrating enterprise applications via data transformation and routing, event triggering, process automation, and adapters. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) vendors were flourishing at this time. They automated their transaction systems with ERP software while including the information systems from CRM software. Five years later, business process integration (BPI) solutions, namely business process modeling, business-to-business (B2B) connectivity, and vertical industry process templates were built on top of these enterprise application integration (EAI) systems.

Today, the market offers BPM solutions that incorporate both the EAI and BPI functionality in addition to functionality such as workflow, business activity monitoring, web services, rule engines, and portal capability.

What Is BPM?

Business process management (BPM) was recognized by the academic world in the fifties and sixties as an important ingredient in the quality management approach. In the eighties, authors Hammer and Champy drew the attention of business managers to process management, process (re-)engineering, and workflow management. Today, BPM is continually gaining ground. Many companies have learned from experience that BPM is a strong asset when facing the rapidly changing requirements that are typical of today's dynamic world.

The acronym BPM has been the cause of some confusion in the past. It can be mistaken for business process modeling, which is a subset of the more "evolved" business process management. It is important to note the distinction between the two.

Business process modeling is issued solely for the graphical representation of the workflow, which can be either information or an actual document in a business process. Business process management is the definition of the process as a whole, including EAI, business process modeling, workflow, and even B2B transport capabilities. Furthermore, BPM should not be confused with business performance management which belongs to the world of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing.

The Difference between Automating Functions (Vertical) and Processes (Horizontal)

Organizations regularly implement CRM, SCM, and ERP applications. As a result, key business functions such as inventory management, warehouse management, or product lifecycle management are highly integrated. All these applications focus on a specific function or area within the company and are vertically managed.

What companies are looking to do these days is to (1) achieve horizontal integration in order to cater to cross-functional business processes, and (2) achieve true process automation to enhance the processing efficiency of company transactions.

What Are the Different Components in BPM?

BPM encompasses several disciplines intended for use across different divisions and areas within organizations. Some of these disciplines are

Business Process Modeling. "Defines" the process (usually in graphical format). As explicitly modeled processes are required for all subsequent BPM disciplines, process modeling is often perceived as the starting point of BPM. Defined with the use of a process modeler (not to be confused with graphical editors such as Visio or PowerPoint), the resulting model is composed of objects that are able to be related to by the BPM engines. Composed of different diagrams (to represent different dimensions of the organization), the model is stored in a structured repository.

Business Process Documentation. Responsible for the process-enhanced documentation. It complements the process diagrams by providing, through graphics, the what-to-do description and sequence of steps. It also adds the extended documentation by providing the how-to-do of business tasks to the model "skeleton". Items such as the work instructions, standard operating procedures, master templates, training components, etc. are added to the diagrams to create a documented process.

Business Process Certification. Takes care of the process's ability to comply either with industry documentation standards such as ISO or with an internal "gating process". It confirms that the processes have been approved or certified in a proper manner before their internal deployment.

Business Process Collaboration. Deploys processes (intranet or extranet publication) on the one hand, and provides users with the ability to leverage the process know-how into enhanced productivity via user and task collaboration, on the other hand. This BPM discipline addresses corporate-wide knowledge management (KM) by not only making documented and certified processes readily available to all employees and associates, but by also providing employees collaboration functions, which enable them to manage projects, tasks, or transactions in a work team approach.

Business Process Compliancy. Establishes the process's readiness to comply with internal and external regulations (such as Sarbanes-Oxley [SOX]). The compliant certified processes are then used to achieve governance certification, audits, or both.

Business Process Optimization. Responsible for continuous process improvement (CPI), including tools to assess the performance of the actual process against internal norms or industry benchmarks. The integrated quantitative analysis capability is used to identify bottlenecks and estimate throughput times and cost saving opportunities. This often includes a simulation engine to perform "what-if" analyses to locate process issues in a proactive manner.

Business Process Automation. Responsible for the integration between users, processes, and related applications, resulting in the system automation of the process tasks. Driven by a workflow management engine, the BPM process information, as modeled, can be used for automated transaction execution and routing, including task execution triggered by previous events, evolved task scheduling and user notification, real time monitoring of task execution, ad hoc execution, etc.

Why Use BPM?

Organizations use BPM systems to improve the effectiveness of their core operations. BPM specifically coordinates interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. The expected results include

Saving money by automating the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away the non-value-adding activities such as routine decisions, transfer of data or forms etc., and providing users with tailored task lists.

Saving time by changing business processes as per technology, government, or competition requirements. With today's tight integration of process definitions and underlying applications, the changes in the definition can be deployed and communicated virtually immediately.

Adding value by opening up a range of functions that can be leveraged in a truly BPM-minded company. Value can be added in several areas—process (quantitative) analysis and optimization, quality certification (e.g., ISO)—requiring procedures to be created and published. Another area is compliance management (e.g., SOX) which is imposed on many organizations.

By implementing BPM, companies are able to orchestrate and leverage cross-functional business processes that are used over multiple systems, divisions, people, and partners.

The beneficiary of BPM systems is actually the customer. The customer will receive information sooner and products faster, which results in an improved level of customer satisfaction. This will translate into more revenue for the company.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/business-process-management-how-to-orchestrate-your-business-18050/

How Is Business Process Management Applicable to Financial Services?

2010-07-31T04:47:00.000-07:00

Business Process Management (BPM) is increasingly being used by organizations to improve internal processes in order to make them more efficient. But which processes are appropriate for BPM? Which industry, if any, has successfully deployed BPM?

BPM in Vertical Markets

BPM is already used in a variety of markets, from financial services and government to healthcare and manufacturing. In fact, vendors have different forms and workflows for each industry that companies can use as the basis for their BPM solution and that they can customize to their specific needs or structure in order to optimize their processes.

This customization is, in fact, fairly simple as BPM solutions are designed in such a way that business analysts are capable of doing most of the process development, thereby limiting the need for programming skills. BPM solutions enable analysts to design work flows, process flows, forms, and maps using the process designer.

Despite this, many organizations have focused on implementing vertical solutions, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). BPM, in contrast, spans the entire enterprise. Nonetheless, despite BPM's seemingly horizontal applicability across industries and enterprises, many organizations might benefit from industry-specific, or vertical, BPM solutions. This article focuses on such solutions within the financial services (FS) industry.

Core BPM Components

BPM is made up of a wide range of components. Most of these components are industry-independent and can integrate with different legacy systems. The core components include the process designer, the actual process engine, and the interface component.

The process designer component is where the process developers or business analysts design business processes. Every process for which the BPM solution is used, and every form within these processes, will be designed using this component. In addition, the process designer can often facilitate integration with other components and systems that integrate within the scope of the process and workflow, as well as towards any business rules associated with the process.

The process engine component is used to authenticate and authorize users. In order to do so, it either stores the information in its own database or is able to connect to external applications or directories where user information is being stored. If organizations are already using other authentication and authorization tools, the process engine can duplicate and synchronize the authentication and authorization process to make it more efficient and to reduce the risk of failures.

Finally, the interface component enables users to access the BPM solution through a variety of applications and interfaces, such as browsers, portals, e-mail, etc.

Besides these core components, BPM can have components that contain industry-specific information, such as rules builders, form builders, and analyses.

The FS Industry

The FS industry is one of the industries that are focusing on BPM solutions, and BPM vendors have responded by providing industry-specific functionality.

Within FS, we can talk about banking, insurance, credit card companies, securities, etc. These organizations are under intense competitive pressure and, thus, are constantly trying to improve their operations and to respond to dynamic market demands. FS organizations have implemented several enterprise solutions over the last few years and encountered mixed results. These solutions include customer relationship management (CRM), the year 2000 (Y2K) problem, and anti-fraud initiative solutions, as well as business improvement and competitive advantage applications.

One problem that keeps arising is that applications often are not integrated with each other or are not being used on an enterprise-wide basis. This makes it hard for companies to streamline business processes that are specific to the organization's changing needs. FS companies must be able to design the processes so as to increase productivity within the organization. To do this, it must be possible to adjust processes so that they match an organization's needs as they evolve in an ever-changing environment. For FS companies, these needs may include complying with regulations such as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), acquiring new customers faster, improving efficiency, integrating processes with legacy systems, automating manual processes, analyzing processes for risk management, improving exception handling, and decreasing the number of bottlenecks.

BPM vendors play to these industry requirements. Vendors allow companies to design processes within their solution in order to manage their resources in a structured manner. Through the BPM solutions that they offer, vendors also help FS organizations achieve compliance, reduce risks, keep or acquire new customers, and link different vertical applications together to become more efficient.

FS organizations can use BPM solutions to their advantage in the following areas.

* Claims management
* Loan management
* Client intakes
* Conflict processing
* Compliance regulations
* Credit issuances
* Credit processing

The Influence of SOX on FS

Within the FS industry, compliance regulations are becoming extremely important, if not critical. Many North American organizations must comply with SOX. Under SOX, executives must sign off on all financial statements, which have to comply with strict regulations and be monitored with a process control.

There are several key indicators organizations have to take into consideration when aiming for SOX success. These indicators are collaboration, security, control, iteration, adaptation, and measurability.

Collaboration involves employees across departments or offices, as well as external people, working together to collect data, consolidate data, put together financial reporting, and provide accurate financial statements.

Various levels of security must allow or restrict users' access to data, such that only management has the ability to sign off on tasks within a workflow. The security can be either user- or role-defined.

Controls that are mandatory under SOX are established, in part, through the afore-mentioned security system. A BPM solution, however, can contribute to these controls through its capability of showing a user only the information necessary for that user's authorization level in a particular workflow step.

Because financial statements must be audited, the ability to iterate processes is essential. Electronic, automated processes can bring consistency to processes every time they are used.

As rules and regulations change, an organization's processes must be able to adapt to these changes. A BPM solution should enable the organization to quickly change business processes in order to adapt to new conditions and to the market.

Lastly, in order to meet SOX regulations and financial industry standards, it is important to have a solution that is capable of measuring and tracking all financial data and of illustrating the processes and controls surrounding those numbers. A BPM solution is the perfect solution to these criteria for the financial industry.

SOURCE:-
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/how-is-business-process-management-applicable-to-financial-services-18344/

How To Use And Implement A Business Plan

2010-06-09T07:55:00.001-07:00

All businesses work to a business plan and all business use this as a guideline or a focus to gain successful results. The word business planning is used in a business for setting out or planning goals for the company. There are two resulting affects of this which determine the running of the business, whether it leads them to success or to failure.

Some businesses use their business planning skills for profit increase; others devise a non-profit business plan. These are often set out very differently from each, where one is purely based on financial goal; the other is focussed on the business services to their client. Some business plans are focussed internally or externally meaning, that those, which are externally focussed work, plan to target the goals important to stakeholders.

The stakeholders in profit organisation are known as investors or customers, whereas non-profit stakeholders are known as donors, sponsors or clients. Internally focussed business planning involves reaching to target immediate goals for external agents. These plans can work towards restructuring the financial aspect of a business, a new IT system, refurbishment, new product services or a new business service.

Content

With nearly all business planning the content is the most important part of implementing it into the business. All plans begin with a mission statement, a status of where the business is at right now, competitor analysis, history of the business performance and aims and objectives (goals to follow). Often these vary with different types of planning such financial or service based planning.

These plans are often presented in via oral group presentation, a short business pitch to alert the interests of stakeholders, written proposal and planning format, and an internal operational plan that includes management planning objective. An open business plan is one that is made available to the public, via the web. Access to this kind of information was once made confidential; however, new software developments have made it possible for public view.

Business plans are used collectively within a team environment. Not only does this benefit the business for good results, but also stimulates strong communication between staffs. This provides the staff a concrete understanding of their roles and a clear understanding of the methodology. These are normally implemented through setting clear instructions to specific people in their roles.

Normally these are designated purposefully for a specialised area possibly for improvement of this section or area of the business. This is usually discussed during team meetings, whereby during the planning process management and/or staff can input their goals and ideas coming to a mutual compromise.

The overall objective is always discussed first, which acts a central part of the planning process. However, externally planned goals tend to be hand written or discussed via directors and management level. These are generally tailored to meet to stakeholders goals.

Sales Lead Generation Must Start with a Strategy - Step 1

2010-06-09T07:54:00.001-07:00

If you're selling professional or technology services to business and you're not satisfied with the options and costs to outsource your lead generation, consider doing it yourself. There are challenges, but they can be overcome, even without a well staffed marketing group, senior marketing leadership or the expense of recruiting.

Keep Your Planning Simple

The first thing you need is a plan. Some companies try to skip this stage because they don't know how to plan a lead generation program or understand why they need one. Trying to skip the planning stage is a huge mistake.

If you’re not convinced, consider the only two reasons you should need to change your mind.

1. Without a written strategy it's difficult to repeat your successes and easy to repeat your failures.

2. You'll save a bundle of money by knowing what you want to do before you start spending.

Creating a strategy is a process like any other. It can be complicated or you can streamline it. Complicating is great if it's all you do and someone else is paying for your hours. But, if you have a business to run and other things to do with your time, go for the streamlined version. There are no guarantees that every lead program will be successful, but it's 100% certain that you will get no leads if you over complicate and therefore never get past writing a strategy.

You can write a workable lead generation strategy in five steps, but don't expect that you can run the program by yourself.

Create a Team to Get the Job Done

Running a lead generation and nurturing program is a lot of work, best accomplished by forming a dedicated team and matching the tasks with the skills. As tempting as it might be to try and do everything yourself, it's not efficient. You might be the best person to make important decisions that impact your business, but there's also a lot of legwork. Delegate it if you can.

Consider a team of three people:

* A Business Leader to spearhead the program. This is someone with an excellent overview of the business operation and the authority to approve whatever needs to be done – or spent. (Like you?) Don't waste everyone's time by creating a Lead Generation team without the authority to spend whatever budget is allocated.

* A Sales Leader. Without participation from Sales, your lead generation program is missing vital information and support. Your sales team knows your customers, their environment, their motivations and the playing field, better than anyone else. They know by being out there – not by reading about it. Many companies ignore Sales as a resource, but you can do better. Have a sales leader on your lead generation team.

* An Administrative Support Person. This person will do the legwork and make a critical contribution to your success. There are many small, important tasks that are not difficult. Assuming that a senior person can do them better or faster is wrong. With the demands on their time, the truth is they'll just become a bottleneck. So assign a motivated, intelligent, sales or marketing coordinator or administrative support person to do the legwork. As an added bonus, this is an excellent training opportunity to develop young talent in your business.

Step One of Your Plan - Define 'What are you Selling?'

The first step in your plan it simply to define what you're selling and what it does. If you're a reseller with a partner to underwrite your cost, write about what you're offering with them. If you have a variety of products or services, decide what you're going to lead with (no pun intended). Remember, you're not going to create any sales leads with puffy generalizations. This is the time to be specific and direct.

Put it in writing and try for 10 words or less. This might sound unnecessary, even silly, but when you try to put something in writing, you'll often discover that what you thought was crystal clear in your head, is difficult to write. That's because it's not as clear as you thought. Strategy demands absolute clarity.

If you're like many of your business colleagues, this simple question leads you into your first brick wall - and it reads like this:

'A comprehensive solution to optimize your business processes'

'Systematized process management and workflow optimization'

'Business intelligence software to maximize the value of corporate data'

'A complete range of value-added services'

Look familiar? Technically these statements are accurate (even if they do all sound the same). They're even meaningful to the right audience. But if you try to drive your lead generation, with an offering that is so bogged down in jargon that it's meaningless to the average business person – you're dead in the water.

A good strategy is a lot like a good CIO, it bridges the communications gap between jargon and the rest of the business world. What you need to eventually communicate are the benefits that will speak to the interests of business decision makers. They won't likely care about infrastructure optimization, but they'll probably understand a replacing five pieces of equipment with one. Don't worry about fine tuning any meaningful benefits. That will come later. For now, simply describe what you're selling.

So, try it one more time. You're done when you have a statement that's a truthful representation of your offering, that any reasonably intelligent person can understand.

As well as providing a platform for the rest of your strategy, this simple first step will help you acquire the most incredibly important communications skill. You're framing your message from target's point of view.

This is only the beginning of a process that will evolve as new pieces of information are unearthed, considered and integrated. Right now, your audience is generalized and we haven't looked at the benefits or competitive advantages that you have to offer.

But stop here for now. You have formed your team and you've defined your offering in a way that your prospects can relate to. It's not carved in stone. If you find a better definition you can go with it. Just remember that if you can't put it in writing, it's not as clear as you thought.

Getting Some Research Started

Have your sales or marketing coordinator (or your administrative jack of all trades) assembling information under the direction of your Sales Leader. You'll use it to create your Customer/Prospect Profile. Your Sales Leader will also need to contribute to Step 3.

Step 1

Identify 10 of the customers you most wish you could clone and five of your top prospects. Get some level of consensus from sales, accounting, customer service and other relevant groups. They will not necessarily be your biggest customers. Here are six questions to consider when choosing. If there are other key points that are important to your company, add or substitute as necessary.

1. Total revenue contribution

2. Good margins, pay their bills on time

3. Potential to increase revenue from this customer

4. A door opener to a larger opportunity; a division of a larger company, a marquis company that will attract others or a wedge into a new vertical

5. Does this company create an opportunity to expand or extend your product or service offering?

6. Reasonable to work with, not overly demanding or disorganized, not abusive to your people

Step 2

For each of the selected companies you need to identify: the industry, geographic location, # of employees and revenue. Set it up on a spreadsheet to make life easier. There is a sheet already set up on my site. Go to the Back Issue and Downloads Page and choose the Customer Profile Spreadsheet. Enter the names of the companies along the top and working though each company, mark the appropriate boxes.

Step 3

To be completed by Sales/ Sales Management
For each of these customers – What was their first purchase and as you recall– what was your first contact (cold call, partner referral, website inquiry, etc.) with them? For prospects, what do you expect the first sale to be and indicate your first contact.

Very simply, the first sale was your foot in the door. This is a deliberate look at which foot you've been using successfully in the past. It might help to focus your lead generation approach. If you have a big product line up, it's never a bad idea to use the product which you usually sell first to drive your lead generation. Sounds pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies choose to lead with something else.

The next step in your plan will be to examine "Who are you selling to?"

http://www.your-marketing.net is the new website for LAC Marketing Manuals. This company was formed to provide complete lead generation instruction to businesses with small marketing departments and budgets.

Run the Business / Change the Business - Dual Perspective Proves Key to Success

2010-06-09T07:53:00.001-07:00

Change management is a lot like artificial heart transplant surgery: A crucial surgical objective during the implantation of an artificial heart is to keep the patient alive while the surgery is going on. Not exactly a minor detail!

Actually, keeping the patient alive turns out to be a pretty complicated process; it requires very special machinery that has been developed and tested over many years. In fact, there may be more patents on the stay-alive-during-surgery technology than on the artificial heart itself!

When we implement change, we use two kinds of technology as well; in this case the first technology is the body of knowledge - or expertise - associated with the change, which is analogous to the artificial heart. Let's assume that the change in which we are interested in implementing is Process Management. In this example, we would need the Process Management body of knowledge which we are implementing (implanting) in the organization (patient).

The second technology is analogous to the surgical procedure. It is our Change Management system. And like our surgical procedure, it has the dual objectives of changing the business (implanting the heart) and running the business (keeping the patient alive during the procedure).

No change initiative (like Process Management) occurs in a vacuum. The initiative must necessarily go on while the organization is "staying alive," doing its "day job" of producing products, serving customers, collecting monies, and so on... in order to make a profit for share/stakeholders.

While in most cases there will be a number of moving parts to a full-blown run-the-business / change-the-business system, simple examples do exist. Imagine a senior executive team that meets every Monday. They might use the morning session to focus only on run-the-business issues (e.g., progress toward financial targets, status on actions to fix customer upsets, manufacturing breakdowns, etc.) In the afternoon they might focus only on change-the-business issues - like our Process Management implementation (e.g., who are the next managers to receive training, what is the progress on the pilot project in each department, how far along is the task force that is mapping core processes, how far along is HR in designing an incentive compensation system that supports Process Management, etc.).

The regular practice of the two executive meetings each Monday becomes a rudimentary "management system" that provides focus and balance to both running and changing the business. This simple but powerful idea can be extremely valuable to organizations trying to implement change because it moves their thinking from an unconscious "change the business OR run the business" to a conscious "change the business AND run the business."

It takes heroic leadership to maintain this duality. Daily temptation lurks everywhere...

* "Let's cancel the afternoon meeting; we don't need it. We had a good change-the-business session two weeks ago."

* "We really need the time this Monday afternoon to get to the details of the current customer problem in the southern region."

Just as a heart patient makes a heroic decision to permit the implanting of an artificial heart, we need executive leadership at the very top making the heroic decisions the organization needs to stay the course of organizational change.

Senior executives must make the decision to lead a fully-committed change effort, providing the personal "in front of the troops" presence and direction, to provide the needed resources and organizational time... while continuing to run the business on a daily basis in order to meet or exceed the year's business goals.

Doing Business In The Future - Business Process Management

2010-06-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

Business Process Management (BPM) is a set of activities performed by organizations to improve or streamline their business processes. Since software tools are usually used to aid these activities, these software tools are referred to as Business Process Management Systems.

- Business Process Management Systems

Business Process Management has been in place for some time now. Due to the introduction of software tools, however, there has been renewed interest in the body of knowledge pertaining to BPM. These software tools make design and implementation of Business Process Management easier, cheaper, and more efficient. There are three categories of Business Process Mmanagement activities - design, execution and monitoring.

1. Design

Designing BPM involves capturing the existing processes in a business environment. These processes must be modeled in a way that they can be simulated and tested. Modeling these processes usually involves graphical representation methods that document the processes and stores this data in repositories.

2. Execution

Traditionally, to implement automation in a business organization, developers would have to be contracted to develop applications that automate certain processes. Unfortunately, the scope of these projects was often too narrow. The result of which is that the automation is not well integrated into the business environment since the automation only deals with a particular department or function. BPMS champions a method that pushes for the development of applications that encompass the entire business process. It aims to fully automate the business environment only stopping to query the user when human intervention is absoultely necessary.

3. Process monitoring

Process monitoring involves observing and taking note of the performance of the individual processes so that evaluation and intervention become more straightforward for the business organization. From the information gleaned from here, the business organization's leaders can make further decisions on the direction the business process takes. The data from this activity can be used to generate different kinds of statistics that are necessary when having to make critical decisions. Business Process Management is an iterative process.

4. The Future

Although BPM strives to automate the mechanical processes of a business, there has been interest in developing BPMs that move into the territory of human judgment. Some of the processes involved in a business environment are not included in the automation because some sort of human decision is needed. With the growing complexity of information systems - especially studies into decision support systems and artificial intelligence - some human decision-making processes can actually be automated. This is the future goal of BPM, to futher automate previously unautomatable processes.

- The Business Process Management Ideals

In 1920, Frederick Taylor outlined three waves of business ideals in managing processes. These waves represented the ways of thinking business process engineers had.

Wave 1. Processes Set In Stone

They are secured in business policy manuals. The manual is the basis of the process, and the organization has to abide by it.

Wave 2. Processes Changed Once In A While

Using a one-time activity, changes can be made. This means that the business would have to build their processes around a fixed system since change can only come once in a while, and at a great cost.

Wave 3. Processes On-The-Fly

The primary consideration in such systems is flexibility to change. Businesses that adhere to this goal create business environments that can adapt to its changing needs. This setup also allows the business to constantly fine tune its operations. This wave is not about business-process reengineering. It is about maintaining an environment that is constantly on its toes, ready to adapt to the circumstance, and maximize its strengths while downplaying its weaknesses.

Change is the only constant, they say. In this modern day and age, this could not be truer. The survival of a business could very well rely on its ability to constantly tweak its processes according to the whims of change. With the growing body of knowledge concerning Business Process Management, the path towards a sustainable market advantage based on a streamlined, flexible business organization can only get clearer.