SAP ERP Platforms For Integrating Business Functions

No one can doubt that SAP is one of the biggest ERP software developers in the country. SAP carries the majority of U.S. based sales throughout the ERP systems, working with thousands of companies across the country. Again, there are other intelligent ERP setups, like Dynamics or Great Plains can be very beneficial to your business and probably all you’ll ever need. There are also other opensource software companies that provide very customizable programs for your business, especially if you have quality IT support, this can be an economic and successful choice. Why is SAP one of the best enterprise resource planning solution? SAP is focused on providing all of the framework and foundations for every need in a business solutions software.

Of couse SAP software is looking at the complete operations of your business: full integration and communication amongst all functions. Whether it is human resources, inventory management, sales, marketing, accounting, planning, any sector! All of these areas of the ERP software can be customized for your specific needs and requirements. There are a lot of opportunities to find local SAP consulting, primarily due to how many companies are implementing ERP solutions for their business intelligence needs. SAP is definetely one of the first companies to take a look at and evaluate for your business. Its tried and true, you can absolutely be successful and very efficient with this platform. Whether its overkill for your small business? Well, you need to answer that yourself and look into more economic options like peoplesoft, openbravo, and others. If you have quality IT support around or someone you can hire to integrate the ERP software, then these options may suit the small business owner or entreprenuer more. Just know that, this is 2011 and your company needs a brain for your business, get enterprise resource planning.

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ERP investments to slow in 2011

According to analyst group Forrester, ERP investments will continue to slow in 2011, despite growth in IT spending. Almost three quarters of those surveyed said that they would not be investing in ERP this year. That is troublesome for the industry and even ERP giants such as Oracle are being conservative this year.

You can read the full article here.

We would like to see what your plans are, please comment on this article and let us know if you are seeing any ERP investments in your company.

Total ERP software demo

Total ERP have a demo video which can be downloaded from their web site, but it is 35Mb and is an executable file which may can concern untrusting users. The codec used is also not conventional, so really they’ve not done themselves any favours if they want people to watch it.

Find more out about ERP Software.

ERP Vendor Directory – Updated!

ERPandmore.com is excited to announce that we have updated our ERP Vendor directory to include a lot more features and functionality.

This directory is a great resource for discovering ERP, CRM, and other enterprise software for your selection, or for other research. It is searchable and very fast. We will continue to be building the listings out over time, so continue to check back!

The directory includes listings for many common Enterprise Software:

Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Managemen
Enterprise Resource Planning
Human Resources Management
Product Lifecycle Management
Professional Services Software
Supply Chain Management
Time and Attendance

Some of the key features that you will find:

Social media login
Demo Requests and Pricing links on many of the listings (where available)
The ability to search by category or location

Additionally, there are listings for Implementors and Service Providers.

If you are a software vendor, please claim your listing and update it with the latest software. If it doesn’t exist, please add it! We have listed many of the common providers in the United States, but we welcome any non-USA providers as well.

Further, we ask everyone who is familiar with these software companies and providers to provide a rating and review.

Ultimately, we would like this to be a very useful tool for the Industry, especially for those who are doing research, or wanting to find the latest software available.

View the ERP Vendor Directory here!

Social Networking and ERP?

Social Networking and ERP

Social Networking has become the mainstay of the internet now. Facebook, Twitter, and the like are all drawing people in and essentially training the next generation of computer users. These social media sites are like magnets that people have to go to each and every day to keep up with their friends and share their updates. People are accessing these media sources from all types of devices. It is all absorbing.

One of the biggest problems in most business applications is user adoption. Getting the users to use the Social Networking and ERP together is a key challenge in many applications. So how does the business applications market combine the social media attraction to a financial or manufacturing system? Combining a social media approach to a business management system would seem to be a logical conclusion. But there are obstacles. You have two different elements playing here. The cold hard facts of transactional data and the emotional connectedness of the social media. How can these gel together?

Salesforce.com has begun a trend in combining social media with a business application through their Chatter application. Essentially, Chatter is a Twitter for Salesforce.com. It is an embedded part of Salesforce.com. Users can post status updates and see all of the updates from their chosen connections (friends). But the power of this application is that you can follow business objects within Salesforce.com such as Accounts, Opportunities, Contracts, etc. So anytime an update occurs on these objects, you get a status update, not from a friend, but rather from an application.

Social Networking and ERP in Action

So how would this likely work in an ERP solution? First you could enhance any alerts to post to a status page. Next you could potentially use it to notify you on any changes to any master record, such as customer, supplier, inventory, or BOMs. The next thing you might consider is to have criteria based alerts be in the form of status updates. Post an update when a customer exceeds their credit limit, or post an alert when a critical inventory part is below its optimal stocking level. Together Social Networking and ERP can have an amazing integration of functionality.

The next logical extension of this would be to extend the ERP to the social web. Imagine getting private posts on Facebook when your major customer falls past due or when your shipment that absolutely must go out notifies you that it shipped on time. When Social Networking and ERP converge, you will have seamless integration between your networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

Social Networking and ERP in the future

The problem with this whole concept is the ability for traditional client server based ERP solutions to move in this direction. Some of the new systems (or recently re-written) solutions may be able to implement this type of functionality quickly, but some of the older technology solutions may have difficulty bringing a social media function quickly to bear. Social Networking and ERP may only be a thing of dreams, but it can very well be reality faster than you might expect. This integration is clearly something that anyone looking for software should watch for and something we should add to our post on What to look out for when selecting software.

As this is a topic with no clear solution yet, what do you our readers think? Where is this going? When will we see it? Please post your comments and thoughts.
Social Networking and ERP

ERP Disaster Recovery

One of the most critical plans you can make is to prepare for the worst, especially when it comes to your enterprise software system and the database of all of the company’s critical information. A proper disaster recovery plan is essential, if you are running an ERP system, as it touches all aspects of the company. The plan can be as simple as a backup and recovery strategy, or as extensive as a global hot site fail-over plan. In either case, you need to prepare and test your plan.
ERP disaster recovery
Testing the plan is often where people fail. You often plan for the eventuality of a hard drive crash (and thus you use a RAID array), or you plan for the possibility of natural disaster, but what if you have a hidden hardware problem that is corrupting the database a little at a time?

That happened with one company we worked with. A failing motherboard caused problems with the email virus scanner, which in turn corrupted the email store a little at a time, so that it was unrecoverable. What do you do then? Well, in that case it was restore to the point in time that the email store database was usable. So the net impact was a few weeks of data loss. That is one illustration, but what happens if something like that occurs in your ERP database? Again the key is backups.

If backups are so critical, then why do people choose not to bother with testing and restoring them? This is a key concept in ERP Disaster Recovery. Many people happily back up night after night, but never try to restore a data file or much less a database. Is it too expensive to have a test server? The real question is it too expensive to not have your ERP data after a disaster? What is the company worth? Millions? A few thousand dollars for a test environment seems like a reasonable investment.

Key ERP Disaster Recovery Priorities

Here are some of the things you need to think through when planning for ERP Disaster Recovery:

1. Backups and Recovery procedures
2. Off-site storage of backup media
3. Security of backup media
4. Remote site backups (In a disaster, can you get the business up if the server site is destroyed?)
5. Personnel (In a disaster, can the right people be there to recover?)
6. Priority levels and potential downtime acceptability
7. Costs

ERP Disaster Recovery Resources

There are some excellent disaster recovery resources on the web on this topic. One article that we liked was on making proper backups for your ERP system. We would suggest that you invest the time to learn more about this topic before it bites you. Remember that disaster always strikes at the most inconvenient time, so make the time now.

ERP Disaster Recovery

ERP Software Selection Toolkit

We are happy to announce that ERPandmore now has a set of FREE ERP Software Selection tools that are perfect for anyone looking to embark on an Enterprise Resource Planning system selection. These tools include:

Manufacturing ERP Feature Checklist

This Excel spreadsheet details the core features that you should consider as you develop your manufacturing software requirements.

Ten Steps to Selecting Manufacturing Software

Download this step-by-step guide to get organized before buying your next manufacturing software system.

Apples-to-Apples Pricing Calculator

Understand the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for manufacturing software systems. Download this tool to compare multiple price quotes.

How to Assess ERP Vendors Financial and Strategic Viability

A straightforward guide that outlines the biggest risks you face when you partner with a new software vendor. Before you buy, make sure your vendor is financially stable and strategically viable.

Other tools will be released as soon as they become available. We are sure that you will greatly benefit from the gained objectivity and reduced stress of managing the software vendors with these wonderful aids.

Download these free tools (brought to you in partnership with Manufacturing Software Advice) to get a jump start on your software selection process. See through the smoke and mirrors and objectively evaluate your potential ERP packages.

Glovia and Salesforce.com Bring ERP to Cloud Computing

Glovia International, a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited and a leading provider of extended ERP solutions for engineer-to-order and high volume manufacturers, and salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced the availability of glovia.com Order Management on Force.com. Built on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, glovia.com Order Management provides complete visibility into all sales orders and quotes as well as the inventory, fulfillment and invoicing required to complete transactions. With glovia.com Order Management on Force.com, customers can now harness the power of cloud computing to deploy ERP applications to manage and run their businesses.

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