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| White Papers
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A director's guide to choosing and implementing ERP software: Access (Feb 2010)
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All distribution and manufacturing organisations rely on software
packages to help manage their business efficiently. As you might
have discovered yourself, the time inevitably comes when your
existing software no longer measures up.
If you’re thinking about updating your ERP software, sit down and
think hard about your business. Consider: availability of information. How easy is it to gain access to the
data held in your system? Do you have to dig out lots of figures to
run a report? Can you run a report yourself, or do you have to ask
someone from accounts or IT to do it for you? Would you be able to
do your job more efficiently if information was at your fingertips? Your customers. If you’d like to offer them a better service, think
about how you’d go about it. What do you need in order to get your products out there more quickly and efficiently and
on time, every time?
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Distribution systems: Solarsoft (October 2009)
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When fast and accurate fulfilment are key, you need software that will deliver. Distribution systems from Solarsoft are at
work across the world, delivering products 24/7. From industrial equipment to fast moving consumer goods, we help
businesses achieve rapid and accurate fulfilment with minimal inventory and optimised stock movements.
Solarsoft’s software can help you get the fundamentals right, with barcode readers or RFID tags for product traceability
and location tracking. For businesses in intensive supply chains, Solarsoft can help with EDI and e-commerce. Our
customers routinely achieve 20-40% productivity gains while cutting errors and increasing throughput.
With Solarsoft, your marketing, sales, purchasing and finance teams can share a single view across the business,
allowing more effective management of customer accounts, seamless handling of non-stock items and improved
financial control. Best of all, our systems will give you clear management information, letting managers focus on
improving sales, margins and performance, confident that day-to-day operations are in safe hands.
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Building a business case for next-generation enterprise apps: Epicor (May 2009)
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Are enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems really ever in need of a change? That question plagues most CEOs,
CIOs and CFOs as their legacy ERP system continue to chug along.
It’s no light matter to replace your ERP system: by definition, the ERP system is your financial and operational
backbone and reaches into all areas of your business and value-chain. Replacing it would appear to be a difficult and
intensive process – but done right, it can open unlimited business opportunities.
Companies decide to replace their ERP systems for a variety of reasons. At the most fundamental level, the question is
whether your current system supports or constrains your ability to execute business strategies that will make your
company successful and establish it as an industry leader. These systems automate only a single business function and
not an entire, cross-functional business process; they demand manual, labour-intensive processes such as re-keying
data into separate systems.
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Selecting an ERP solution: a guide: Infor (November 2008)
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Looking for the right ERP package for your small to mid-sized business (SMB) can be a daunting task. Although a fair amount
of information is available on the internet about the actual software packages themselves, there is little advice on how to
develop a good, simple strategy to evaluate and choose the right package for your company. This white paper is intended to
provide some of that much-needed guidance. The first step in choosing an ERP package is to establish a software selection committee. Members of this committee should
be decision makers in the organisation representing all relevant departments.
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The 1% solution: how to drive your financial performance: Infor (November 2008)
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Strict regulatory requirements. Highly competitive environments. Globalisation. Ever-growing amounts of performance data.
Increasing pressure to do more with less. The imperative to be demand driven.
It’s no wonder that measuring, reporting and overall business performance are hot topics. Companies in every industry are
seeking ways to get a clear, accurate view of operational performance. Essentially, they need an effective, reliable approach to
connect operational performance to financial results.
To advance the general body of knowledge pertaining to performance management, Infor asked Rod Clarke, an independent
consultant with extensive experience as an IT executive, to research the topic.
‘The 1% Solution’ identifies what truly represents corporate value. It is not share price, as some believe. Instead, the truest
measure of corporate value is return on capital employed (RoCE), a calculation showing return on its assets before taxes and
interest. A similar measure of value, return on assets (ROA), calculates earnings after taxes and interest.
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Surviving in the electrical products industry: IBS (August 2008)
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Despite intense price competition for its volume products, the electrical products distribution industry remains
healthy and dynamic. In this industry, world-class companies are succeeding by providing high availability at the right
time, expanding into new geographic areas, implementing more efficient business systems, and focusing on ever-closer
relationships with suppliers, partners and customers.
This white paper takes a look at the issues faced by wholesalers and distributors of electrical products today. It examines the
current state of the industry and explores the issues confronting it for the future. The paper also spells out some of the
technological requirements that are specific to the industry.
Later, this white paper matches these requirements to the software products that IBS already provides to many leading
companies in this market segment. You will learn how key features of IBS software can make your electrical products
distribution business more efficient and more competitive.
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Business on the move: Sage (July 2008)
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Making your workforce mobile is about making them customer centric 24x7. A mobile salesforce and workforce can respond
more urgently to business opportunities, recover from problems faster and address customer problems more quickly.
But organisations face a particular challenge. While teleworking and remote access are becoming increasingly the norm, the
majority of business applications, and the critical customer data contained within them, still remain cordoned inside the four
walls of the enterprise.
Once field workers leave the office they become isolated from vital customer information and desk-bound enterprise
applications lose their immediate value.
A mobilisation strategy can counter this. At a corporate level mobile business applications play an integral part in increasing
customer satisfaction levels and meeting increasingly stringent service level agreements in an ever more competitive marketplace. There’s no doubt that the drivers for a shift to mobile working are real. There is a widespread acknowledgement that the
technology is now in place to support genuine mobilisation. PDAs, smart phones, Blackberry boxes and laptops are fitted with
HTML browsers and can be wirelessly connected to the internet at any place and time.
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Enterprise applications software licensing and pricing, Q4 2007: Oracle (Jun 08)
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Forrester conducted licensing policy evaluations of leading enterprise applications vendors from June 2007 to August 2007.
Interviews were conducted with 51 vendor and user companies including Agresso, Deltek, Epicor Software, IFS, Infor, Lawson,
Microsoft, Oracle, QAD, Sage Software, SAP and Sterling Commerce.
Oracle and Agresso were found to have established early leadership among large enterprises thanks to their ability to
accommodate complexity and choice in licensing metrics and support for the enterprise software licensee bill of rights
(LBoR).
Microsoft, QAD, Sterling Commerce, Epicor Software, Lawson and Infor are Strong Performers but lack breadth in usagebased
metrics. SAP provides strong usage-based metrics but could improve on provisions in the LBoR. Microsoft, Oracle,
QAD, Agresso and Epicor Software lead in delivering on small and medium-sized business (SMB) requirements like choice in
user-based metrics and support for the LBoR.
Sterling Commerce, Lawson, Sage Software, SAP, Infor and Deltek are Strong Performers that offer competitive options but
could improve support for SMB requirements in the LBoR. IFS’s licensing and pricing models leave SMB customers with
limited choices but offer a simplified, easy-to-understand approach.
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Manifesto for a perfect lean market: QAD (February 2008)
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Efficiency is crucial to the success of every enterprise. For manufacturing companies, the need to continuously improve
efficiency – to be ‘lean’ by reducing or eliminating waste in terms of time and materials – has never been more important than
it is today.
Over the last 25 years, successful manufacturers have made dramatic improvements in the speed and efficiency of production.
But in a world of increasing global competition, shrinking margins and accelerating time-to-market requirements, the neverending
quest to be lean represents new and daunting challenges for manufacturing companies.
Add to this the rapidly changing landscape in the global enterprise software industry, and it’s no wonder manufacturing
companies are clamouring for more IT innovation, reduced applications complexity, better visionary leadership and far less
swashbuckling from industry titans SAP and Oracle.
The enterprise software arena, once a super-high growth industry, continues consolidating. Yet as the leading enterprise
software vendors just get larger, some industry observers fear that true innovation is being sacrificed, putting customers’
businesses in peril.
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ERP technology audit – OneOffice: Butler Group/Strategix (January 2008)
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Strategix OneOffice is a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that covers rather more than basic ERP –
it extends out to the supply chain on one side, and over to managing customer relationships on the other, providing
comprehensive alerting capability about events that need to be flagged up on the way.
Integrated applications have had some problems but are still popular with many organisations because they have the ability to
provide a single application interface to the user. This application is differentiated by its component basis together with the
concept of Active Intelligence that provides users with the right information in the right context.
The vendor is relatively unknown, which could put off some prospective customers, but it is financially sound and highly
referenceable. Medium-sized organisations, particularly in the distribution or services sectors, that are seeking to
implement an integrated solution, are likely to benefit from OneOffice. Evaluation is best undertaken via an application
demonstration.
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Epicor iConnect technical brief: Epicor (July 2005)
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Epicor iConnect represents a revolutionary new approach to the problem of connecting application servers into an
integrated supply chain and/or internal integrated systems architecture. At the core of the iConnect product is a powerful
and flexible approach to mapping XML-based message formats to the back-office ERP applications supported by the
Epicor iSolutions division.
Until the advent of XML data standards, the predominant means of integrating application data between servers was via
sophisticated EDI solutions with message transportation via value added networks (VANs). The traditional EDI model is
expensive to implement and has ongoing transaction-based costs for the life of the partner relationship. However, the
flexibility of the XML data standard combined with the power of the internet in facilitating point-to-point messaging
between web servers now provides a cost-effective way to achieve direct integration between servers either within an
enterprise, or within a complex supply chain. Furthermore, iConnect allows you to continue using your existing EDI
solution while your implement XML transactions using iConnect.
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Lean manufacturing: going lean, step by step, with IFS Applications (May 2005)
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In the relentless pursuit of profitability and competitiveness, more and more companies are turning to lean
manufacturing to reduce or eliminate waste in their production processes. Once confined to the automotive industry,
lean principles are becoming standard operating procedure in many industries today. The reason is simple: when
implemented with a good performance management system, lean principles have a proven track record of operational
and strategic success, which ultimately translates into increased value to the end customer.
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