Relying on e-mails to coordinate everything from order management and inventory, to invoicing and billing, was keeping Asia’s largest produce and food distributor from expanding globally. Executives knew that Singapore-based SunMoon Food Company – only a few years after coming back from the brink of bankruptcy – needed a comprehensive enterprise resource planning system to live up to its new potential.
The time may be right for a new gadget to capture our imaginations. A Silicon Valley start-up called Livescribe believes so, and they're betting we'll become addicted to the "smart pen." The new Echo is a second generation of Livescribe's popular PulseTM Smartpen.
Pulling every aspect of a business together under one overarching enterprise resource planning system can shed light on efficiencies that might otherwise never have been noticed. That’s why URM (UK) Ltd. – Great Britain’s largest buyer and recycler of waste glass – decided it was time to round up its disjointed operations under the PurGo ERP system from VWS Software Solutions.
Enterprise resource planning system implementations rarely go smoothly from start to finish. But by the time an implementation fails entirely, problems have been percolating for weeks, months or even years. The team overseeing the struggling project, however, usually is caught by surprise. Immersed in the minutiae of the moment, team members cannot see beyond the walls of the box they have built around themselves and rarely have the experience to see signs of trouble.
Enterprise resource planning is so central to builder’s merchant BUILT/ that the new venture hadn’t even opened the doors on its first location when it chose NetSuite’s cloud ERP to anchor its business systems. In fact, managing director Nick Thomas went on stage at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference in late April to explain BUILT/’s ERP decision a month before the company had even begun to implement any systems.
Few industrial enterprises have hooked up their new Internet of Things technology with their legacy enterprise resource planning systems, a new study shows, impeding the success of broader digital transformation efforts. In a survey of 200 marketing and contracting managers at a variety of North American industrial outfits, enterprise software provider IFS found that only 16% of companies have connected data from their IoT devices to their ERP solutions.
Despite the increasing popularity of cloud ERP solutions, the choice between cloud and on-premise installations can be fraught. ERP consultancy Terillium, an Oracle partner, has released a white paper to help sort out some of the difficulties involved. Author Chris Garrity, Terillium’s director of ERP project delivery, has spent more than 25 years helping companies implement their enterprise resource planning systems.
Specialty bedding giant Mattress Firm has partnered with business process and IT consultant Visionet Systems to create a centralized information repository able to integrate data from across all its myriad retail channels in near real-time. The transition unifies Mattress Firm’s ERP and e-commerce platforms to allow constant monitoring and optimization of all customer interactions and workflows.
Growing from six employees to 200 in four years is hard enough. Try doing that while adding an order of magnitude to the company’s manufacturing space. It’s no wonder Sportsman Boats needed a top-quality ERP solution – and fast. When the South Carolina boating manufacturer decided that Infor’s ERP software would fit the need, they asked Michigan consultant Godlan Inc. to get the system up and running.
North America’s small- to mid-market enterprise resource planning competition has taken a turn as British tech giant Sage Group acquires Silicon Valley-based ERP developer Intacct for $850 million. Although Sage is the world’s largest provider of software for small businesses, it has offered little to the US channel.
Chris Hull is a busy guy. He teaches 7th grade social studies in Highland Park, Illinois. He also helps run Otus, which he describes as a student performance platform—a learning management system that also spans classroom management, curriculum, and assessment. Hull and fellow teacher, Pete Helfers, started to develop Otus with cofounder Andy Bluhm after establishing a 1:1 computing program and noticing how much time teachers had to spend on technology, instead of teaching.
Managing the supply chain for building new homes can be a logistical nightmare. But enterprise resource planning systems have begun to work at untangling some of the knottier aspects of the construction industry. Just in 2016 alone, more than 150,000 new homes were built from the ground up using the Hyphen Network.
More than a year after it paid a whopping $795 million settlement to resolve bribery allegations, telecommunications firm Veon Ltd. has decided to adopt a unified enterprise resource planning system in a bid to improve transparency. Finance chief Andrew Davies said Veon, which renamed itself from VimpelCom Ltd. in February, said the ERP system is one element of a much broader company-wide transformation that will tie its operating companies closer to the company’s Dutch headquarters in Amsterdam.
It’s hard to recover from a failed ERP implementation, but at least there are valuable lessons to be learned in order to avoid suffering the same fate. Panorama Consulting founder Eric Kimberling says one particular client, whose name he understandably chose not to release, had an implementation that was a disaster from Day 1.
Think people know everything there is to know about human anatomy? Think again. Researchers announced the discovery of two new body parts in 2013 alone. The first new anatomical feature was announced in June, when a previously unknown layer was discovered in the eye’s cornea. Now called Dua’s Layer after Prof.
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About
Janet Rae-Dupree
I cover innovation as my beat, focusing on emerging technologies, scientific discovery, R&D, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and market transfer. NEW: Travel writing!