COST ACCOUNTING

So, you're looking for an accounting system.

This reference guide provides insight into the accounting features and functions currently available on today's market for small to medium businesses (SMBs). It will help you determine which features your organization needs—or doesn't need.

You can also download an extended guide in Excel format at TEC's Accounting Software Request for Proposal (RFP) Template page.

But first, here's a brief overview:

What Are Accounting Systems?

Accounting systems manage procedures for accurately entering, tracking, and maintaining information related to an organization's financial operations. These accounting applications typically support general ledger, accounts payable and accounts receivable, payroll, job and project costing, and multinational accounting.

Many SMBs require that other functions (such as inventory control, manufacturing management, and financial reporting) also integrate with their accounting system.

About This Guide

Although a full accounting system RFP can contain upwards of 4,000 features and functions, we'll focus on the "big picture" features for now, for (obvious!) considerations of space.

You'll notice that we've grouped accounting features by broad category. These categories correspond to a high-level functional breakdown of software features. In this reference guide, we provide a brief explanation of how each category impacts your accounting processes.

If you'd like more information about a full listing of accounting software features and functions, please visit TEC's RFP Templates page.

Reference Guide to SMB Accounting Software Features

1. General Ledger

Chart of Accounts
The chart of accounts is, for all practical purposes, the business management system. If revenues and costs are not captured and segregated into the best suited categories, the financial statements you produce will be useless.

Transaction Processing
This category describes features that address typical journal entry processes, including general transaction processing, workflow period closing, batch layout configuration, and job cost adjustments.

Month- and Year-end Closing
While you can bill revenue and collect cost information, if this information is not published in the form of financial statements in a timely manner, the statements themselves are essentially useless.

Control Reports
All business management systems must have some form of controls to make sure information is input correctly. Software features covered in this category are designed to accomplish this task.

Financial Statements
Financial statements drive the company. However, for smaller companies this may not be true to the same extent, since the owner or manager should have a "feel" for operations rather than relying on printed reports. Larger companies cannot do this, simply because they are too big.

2. Accounts Payable

Vendor Master File
Master files are the starting point in any application. For accounts payable, the vendor master file must be set up first, as that drives the rest of the accounts payable functions.

Purchasing Controls
While anyone can issue a purchase order, the process should be controlled. This category covers the purchasing process as well as control systems you can use.

Data Input
Once a purchase order has been sent and goods received, the obligation for that purchase needs to be recognized. This category reviews the various steps required to actually get information into accounts payable.

Payables Analysis
Once an invoice has been input, it needs to be approved and scheduled for payment. This category covers those steps.

Check Writing
Once an invoice has been processed and approved, it needs to be paid. This category addresses various check-writing features, including bank account assignment and check formats.

Control Reports
While you may choose to assume that information has been input correctly, that is not always the case. The features in this category address reports that give users the ability to check information to make sure it has been input correctly.

Financial Reports
Once data has been input into accounts payable, users will probably need to review slices of that data to determine if costs are in line, where costs are being incurred, and how those costs compare against other benchmarks.

3. Accounts Receivable

Customer Master File
Accounts receivable starts with customers. This category addresses the processes whereby you can set up customers, and define all the controls relating to that customer.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM and its relatively lightweight cousin, contact management (CM), are the keys to managing your relationship with customers.

Invoicing
This category covers the invoicing processes you should adopt to send invoices quickly and accurately.

Cash Receipts
Customer payments must be received in a timely fashion, recorded properly, and deposited into the bank as quickly as possible. This category includes features for variable payment terms, less-than-full payment, and so on.

Debt Collection
Recording profitable business counts for nothing if you are not receiving payment in a timely fashion (or at all). This category covers some of the procedures you can adopt to make your customers pay you in a timely fashion.

Control Reports
While you may choose to assume that information has been input correctly, that is not always the case. The features in this category address reports that give users the ability to check information to make sure it has been input correctly.

Financial Reports
Once data has been input into accounts receivable, users will probably need to review slices of that data to determine if revenues are in line, where revenue is being generated, and how that revenue compares against other benchmarks.

4. Payroll

Employee Files
The payroll application will not operate efficiently unless all parameters have been defined or set up. Features in this category cover typical setups, such as pay periods, deduction calculations, sick leave accrual basis, and so forth.

Human Resource (HR) Management
HR applications track detailed information for each employee. If users need to track educational qualifications, training, and other activities for employees, they probably require some form of HR application.

Canadian Payroll Processing
If your organization has Canadian employees, you will require a payroll system that meets various Canadian regulations. This category covers some of the more common requirements.

Data Input and Cost Distribution
Payroll information drives not just the production of payroll checks, but also the distribution of those costs to various departments and activities.

Payroll Check Writing
This category covers such features as flagging abnormal checks, voiding or reprinting selected checks, direct deposit, facsimile checks, and so on.

Control Reports
While you may choose to assume that information has been input correctly, that is not always the case. The features in this category address reports that give users the ability to check information to make sure it has been input correctly.

Financial Reports
Once data has been input into payroll, users will probably need to review slices of that data to determine if costs are in line, where costs are being incurred, and how those costs compare against other benchmarks.

5. Inventory

Inventory Master File
As with all other applications discussed up to this point, the inventory application will not operate efficiently unless all parameters have been defined or set up. This category covers such parameters as customer price matrix options, bar code tracking, and inventory costing methods.

Inventory Control and Assembly Systems
There are any number of activities that control how goods are received, stored, assembled, and ultimately shipped. This category addresses a variety of features, including bill of material types, computer-aided design (CAD) integration, tool management, work orders, and so on.

Data Input and Cost Distribution
Inventory information drives not just the shipping and receiving process, but also the distribution of those costs to various departments and activities.

Receiving Activities
This series of features highlights the receiving process and its many component activities.

Shipping and Withdrawal Activities
Once an order has been received, the objective of the exercise is to ship the goods to the customer as quickly and efficiently as possible. In some instances, the shipping is internal only, with goods being sent to a production line. This category of features traces each of the steps necessary to get material where it needs to go.

Financial Reports
Once data has been input into inventory, users will probably need to review slices of that data to determine if costs are in line, where costs are being incurred, and how those costs compare against other benchmarks.

6. Job and Project Costing

Job Initiation
The process of setting up a job is similar to setting up any other master file. First you have to define system defaults. Then you define how the system is going to work. Finally, you define the jobs themselves.

Data Input and Cost Distribution
Once a job has been launched, cost information will flow into it either directly or from other applications, such as payroll, accounts payable, and inventory. The key to the success of any job-related organization is allocating costs to jobs accurately and in a timely manner. Once the actual costs have been posted to a job, managers can control that job and bill for the work done.

Job Control
Small jobs are relatively easy to control. Larger jobs may be so complex that several people may act as managers. In cases like this, it is very easy to lose track of costs and labor. This category covers some of the support a business management system can provide.

Cost Analysis and Reports
While it is important to post all costs to jobs, it requires some degree of study to make sense of this information. This category covers some of the activities and information managers may need to help them control each job.

Job Invoicing
Collecting cost information is the first and most important step, but if those costs are not billed properly, then all control efforts go to waste.

7. Fixed Assets

Equipment Files
Equipment files perform the same function as master files for customers, employees, etc.

Cost Calculation and Distribution
Once an asset has been acquired, its acquisition cost must be amortized over a period of years. This category covers functions that control that process.

Reports
Users need to access reports that analyze depreciation. This category covers such features as cost distribution reports, maintenance cost analysis, and detailed fleet maintenance analysis.

8. Order Entry

Order Entry (Set Up)
Order entry is not just about taking orders and subsequently shipping goods. There are many other activities you need to consider when you set up an order entry system. This category covers some of those functions and activities.

Order Receipt
The process of receiving an order can be simple or it can be complex, depending on the nature of the order, how it is recorded, and the industry in which you're operating. This category covers various aspects of the order receipt process.

Order Tracking
To assume that an order has been received is a mistake. Anything can happen to prevent an order from being shipped or delivered on time. This category covers functionality that help users track orders from the moment they're placed to the moment they're delivered.

Shipping
The process of actually getting a shipment out of the door can be complex as well as costly. This category covers some of the activities that can be enhanced by a well designed business management system.

Invoicing
Once a shipment has been dispatched, invoices should be printed as soon as possible. This category addresses the procedures supported by a business management system.

Reports
Reports coming from the order entry system should help you get shipments out the door efficiently and on time—and also learn where improvements can be made.

9. Budgeting

Budgeting (General)
This category covers features relating to the budgeting process.

Review Process
Before a new budget can be created, users should review the results from the previous year (and earlier). This may give them trend information that will be useful when establishing a new budget.

Construction of New Budget
The actual process of constructing a new budget can be fairly simple or very complex, depending on the nature of your business, as well as your inclination to split the budget into smaller pieces





SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/your-reference-guide-to-smb-accounting-software-features-19938/

Introduction

The basic features and functions common to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) software will only be briefly discussed herein. It is assumed that the reader already has a good understanding of these capabilities relative to process manufacturing. However, if this is not the case and you want more information in this regard, please see my article entitled, Process Manufacturing Software: A Primer.

This article will concentrate on those features and functions that present considerable challenges to traditional software vendors trying to gain a foothold in the food and beverage industries.

Specifically, this article provides an overview of the requirements for software offerings catering to food and beverage by discussing the following aspects:

* ERP Functions and Features
* SCM Functions and Features
* Additional Considerations

ERP Functions and Features

The software should offer the standard functionality expected from ERP software to support manufacturing and back office activities. The modules to support these activities include financial management, specifically general ledger (GL), accounts payable (AP), accounts receivable (AR), and fixed assets; financial control, specifically budgeting, cash flow, and standard and actual cost accounting; human resource (HR), specifically payroll and time and attendance; production and manufacturing; order taking; and customer service.

However, there may be additional and integrated modules not normally found in ERP packages. These modules may be worth investigating to determine if a vendor can supply this functionality later, when and if needed. This functionality can encompass warehouse management systems (WMS), maintenance management and control (computer maintenance management system [CMMS], enterprise asset management [EAM]), performance management and reporting (enterprise performance management [EPM]), logistic management (third-party logistics [3PL]), financial reporting and consolidations, and material safety data sheet (MSDS) management. Having the flexibility to incorporate this added functionality from a single vendor can eliminate many of the interface issues when similar modules are purchased from third party vendors. Let's look at the maintenance function to illustrate this point.

When you purchase a third-party maintenance management system, you would most likely get only an interface with your inventory and purchasing systems so that you could procure needed but out-of-stock repair parts. With an effective and more encompassing software offering, additional interfaces to payroll (such as using hourly rates to calculate labor costs of repairs); human resource (such as matching an employee's skills with equipment being repaired); warehouse management (such as homogeneously slotting repair parts); and supply chain planning (SCP) (such as providing visibility to planned equipment downtime) now become available. Furthermore, this type of integration can facilitate the cost justification of acquiring and utilizing these optional modules.

As one would expect from software tailored generally to process manufacturing but specifically to food and beverage, an ERP package should ably support the subtleties needed by food and beverage producers. Formulas should be scalable so that production batches can be sized based on the minimum quantity of on-hand ingredients. For example, if you are making a car and you only have two of the required four tires, you cannot make half of a car. Conversely, in the beverage industry, what if you want to make 1,000 gallons of soda but you only have 500 gallons of the required 1,000 gallons of carbonated water? You have the option of making half of the 1,000 gallons of soda. You should expect the software not only provide this type of re-formulization but automatically suggest such alternatives to keep your customers, at least, partially satisfied.

By maintaining the formulas and packaging recipes separately, the software should be able to accommodate "brite" stock and make-to-order (MTO) production runs, typical requirements in the food and beverage industries.

The term, "brite" stock, is common for private label food processors. For example, large grocery chains sell products, such as soups, soda, and meats, under their own brand names, hence private labels. Don't think, however, that these chains have their own manufacturing plants. Chains contract for these products to be produced. In the case of soups, food processors create and warehouse non-descript, non-labeled aluminum cans of soup, hence the term, "brite" stock. Once a confirmed order is received, the private labels are then applied in a separate packaging run. A similar analogy can be made for a MTO scenario. Namely, you wait until the order is confirmed before you complete the manufacturing process.

As you would expect from packages serving the food industry, the software should offer "catch weight" functionality. By definition, catch weight is the recording of the actual weight of a product. For example, whereas a 50-pound case of meat lists for $100, in actuality the case is sold at $2 a pound based on the actual weight of the meat less the packaging material. Accordingly, capturing of this actual weight, which can be used for pricing, is known as the catch weight of the product. The software should take the process one step further by using catch weight to calculate the actual cost of manufacturing the product. Use of catch weight in costing is important because it provides a more accurate picture of the true production costs based on actual yields. The lack of incorporating catch weight in the costing calculation is tantamount to buying shoes without soles. They may look good but their lack of functionally will hurt your performance and ability to walk.

The software should support attribute management on the input side, namely ingredients, and on the output side, namely products. For inputs, attributes should be maintained to define the characteristics of the ingredients used in a specific formula. For example, a critical consideration in making orange juice is the acidity of the oranges. Based on the acidity, other ingredients, such as sugar and water, may be varied to bring the resulting juice output into acceptable ranges. Consequently, knowing the acidity attributes of the oranges will enable you to modify the formula accordingly. Likewise, a customer may require meat products with a certain lean consistency. By maintaining the attributes of various cuts of meat, you will be able to match a product's attributes with requirements of your customers and provide the flexibility of offering appropriate substitutions in out-of-stock situations. Finally, the underlying components within the software should be sufficiently robust to accommodate promotional, volume, and regional pricing practices common to food and beverage. While common in process manufacturing, the food and beverage industries stretch these practices to their collective limits and, therefore, should require special consideration and investigation.

SCM Functions and Features

Typically, ERP software supporting the food and beverage industries records what ingredients were used and what products resulted. Correspondingly, SCM functionality assists you in streamlining your operations to make them more efficient and cost-effective. From a SCM perspective the software should include the traditional modules to facilitate demand forecasting (how much of the product is needed), planning (where to make the product); and scheduling (what processes to use to make the product).

However, because of a tight integration with the other modules, the software should not only provide a view from inside the four walls of the plant but also into some of its nooks and crevices. For example, internal integration with a CMMS would enable the software to have visibility into resources and equipment that are offline or scheduled to be offline, thereby influencing the decision of selecting the most appropriate routing. Similar cases can be made for integration with other internally integrated processes such as warehouse management and attribute management.

The software should also enable integration with sub-modules, which would provide additional flexibility and efficiencies. These sub-modules include lot and sub-lot allocations, inbound logistics, cross-docking, and shelf life planning. By knowing what is inbound, the planning process gains increased visibility. As a result, the software should be able to take the advantage and be able to utilize "soon to be available" ingredients. This type of information can be incorporated in the planning and scheduling calculations.

Tanks are common storage containers for works in process in the food and beverage industries. However, tanks provide unique challenges. Typically, tanks require special handling such as pressurization and temperature controls. As such, SCM software should be able to account for the availability of tanks, tank volumes, special settings and controls, and the current status of each tank. You should expect the software to deal with and respond to the following type of tank-related questions:

*

Can the software handle product stored in tanks and, if so, can it maintain resource data needed for scheduling such as capacities, cleaning requirements, and changeover requirements?
*

Can the software handle the simultaneous or continuous flow of product in and out of the tanks?
*

Can the software record and utilize the minimum and maximum batch quantities for each tank? Minimum and maximum levels for each tank?
*

Can the software accommodate shelf life of the intermediate products stored in tanks? Maximum standing time per product in tanks?

One of the worst fears for a food processor and distributor is a call at 4:00 PM on a Friday, just before your staff is getting to leave for the weekend, from a restaurant whose customer said, "You know, this food tastes funny." The shock waves of recall reverberate throughout the organization. Anticipatory paralysis begins to set in. By meeting the requirements for such organizations as the European Union (EU), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), the software's trace engine should provide accurate and current recall information for your customers, suppliers, and consumers. Thus, it can speed up and simplify the recall process. This, in turn, can reduce the effect, impact, and cost of such events, not to mention minimizing adverse media coverage. The functionality might particularly be appreciated nowadays with recent outbreaks of "mad cow" disease and other consumer concerns.

The software should offer yield optimization processes. These planning components are decision support tools focusing on calculating the most profitable way to process raw materials and ingredients to meet demand. The inputs for yield optimization include supply quantities and prices, demand quantities and sales prices, production costs and capacities, and inventory costs and capacities. The output is an optimized day-by-day production schedule of what to produce and how to produce it. The inventory levels at the end of each day and any requirements to move raw materials or semi-finished products between sites, locations, and/or tanks are also calculated. The latter benefit is achieved through the tight integration and complete visibility within the four walls of the production facility and warehouse.

In the food and beverage industries, there are usually several ways to slice the pie (no pun intended). For example, each grade of meat may be sold as a whole product or cut into parts. Likewise, it also may be sold at one or more levels or be further processed to create other value-added products. This can also be influenced by pack sizes and prices as well as co-products and by-products. When evaluating the yield optimization functionality of the software, you should expect that formularized inputs and outputs, capacity requirements, and costs for each alternate process are all analyzed and considered. In turn, customer and forecasted demand for each different type of meat product, plus inbound and on-hand inventories, should be considered when generating the primary cutting and secondary processing schedules. This technique effectively uses available inventories and resources and maximizes profitability.

Additional Considerations

Look for the software vendor to offer a fairly flexible pay-for-what-you-need pricing model. This is particularly valuable to the small and medium-size enterprises that do not need the full functionality required by larger enterprises. For example, a company with only one division and one location would have little need for a financial consolidation capability. If this function was bundled in with the finance and accounting modules, your company could be paying for software it has no intention of using. Determine whether modules can be decoupled, removed from the software equation via configuration parameter switches, and, equally importantly, from the cost of the software. For such modules as warehouse management, computerized maintenance management, personnel skills management, and others, the customer should be able to selectively evaluate the modules benefiting their organization and structure the software contract accordingly.

As with any package the software should be platform independent to provide greater flexibility in formulating and negotiating a total solution. By incorporating, say, a Java-based development environment, the hardware centric look of software packages can be minimized. Consequently, vendor's offerings can provide greater hardware independence by running on such middleware and hardware combinations as: IBM's DB2 with IBM's eServer iSeries; Sun Microsystems' Sun Solaris and Oracle 9i with Sun Microsystems' Fire Server; or Microsoft's SQL Server and Windows with Hewlett Packard (HP) and Dell servers. In so doing, a customer has greater options by which to negotiate down the price of the software, hardware, or both as a bundle.

The additional advantage of utilizing a Java-like environment is that the software almost automatically becomes web enabled. With a high-speed Internet connection, you now have a feasible and easy way to implement a solution to connect remote locations to the central software. In addition to providing a browser-based user interface and portal, collaborative opportunities with customers are available, thereby cementing your relationship. Now days, you should expect web-enabled capabilities as part of a vendor's standard offering. In the food industry such functionality can facilitate "spot" orders or increases to existing orders, resulting in new business otherwise lost.

Another module that falls into the category of "nice to have but not essential" is a customer relationship management (CRM) module. In addition to the traditional functions such as sale force and marketing automation, features within the CRM module should include promotion tracking, pro-active telesales (i.e. outbound order entry), customer business chain support, and support for vendor managed inventory.

The software should come with a limited number of pre-configured models to measure the performance of your business to include built-in key performance indicators (KPIs) for the food and beverage industries. Standard models should be available for sales, production, order fulfillment, distribution, maintenance, and warehousing. While not a major factor when initially establishing an ERP and SCM environment and becoming comfortable with its care and feeding, these analysis tools can be helpful to fine tune operations and smooth out manufacturing speed bumps.

Another module or subsystem, that is extremely useful in the food and beverage industries, is manufacturing execution system (MES). MES software records data and yields from every step of the production process. Such an interface fosters grower/farmer relationship management to provide visibility to crop and livestock maturity as well as grower/farmer SCM integration. Of these efforts, the latter – integration with SCM, is the most intriguing. Such integration will provide cradle-to-marketplace control of the manufacturing process. Instead of being a totally push environment, namely when the tomatoes are ripe you must make tomato soup, food and beverage processors alike will be able to more accurately schedule resources based on expected yields and timing.





SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/food-and-beverage-industry-overview-of-software-requirements-19952/

A Wealth of Offerings

Even though it was run for over two decades as a family business (at least, this was sometimes the public perception), Deltek Systems, Inc. has become North America's principal provider of enterprise software and solutions for project-focused organizations. In mid-2005, Deltek announced that New Mountain Partners II, L.P. would make a majority capital investment in the company. See Mountainous Investment Transforms Enterprise Management Software Vendor and Enterprise Management Software Vendor Welcomes Additions for more information about this investment and its implications. This move, while certainly enhancing Deltek's prospects in terms of strengthening its global position, should not deflect attention from its already impressive offering.

Part Three of the series Mountainous Investment Transforms Enterprise Management Software Vendor.

Deltek uses a wealth of standalone and bundled modules to target the following core markets:

* professional services firms (including the architectural, engineering, and construction [A/E/C] "sweet spot," both domestically and internationally)

* complex project-focused enterprises and large federal contractors in aerospace and defense (A&D), nonprofit organizations, information technology (IT) services, and systems integration and management consulting industries, both domestically and internationally

* small to medium project-focused domestic businesses and federal contractors in the government services industry

In a simplified manner, Deltek's vertical markets can be separated by both government and commercial business. On the government side, it scales from small government contractors up to very large contractors with billions in annual revenue. On the commercial side (which includes A/E/C and professional services firms such as management consultancies), it also scales up, from firms under fifty employees, up to the largest A/E/C firms in the world.

In fact, Deltek has recently benefited from penetrating the professional services market: the use of project-oriented and professional service business application software systems is expanding as a result of a number of economic trends. These applications go hand in hand with one another, since service organizations have traditionally used project accounting more than product manufacturing firms, due to the need to customize their services for each client and to properly allocate the associated revenues and costs. As the North American shift continues from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, the market for project-oriented organizations is expanding too. Furthermore, the trend towards outsourcing an increasing range of activities broadens the market for project-oriented organizations, as both customers and vendors need to track the costs associated with their projects.

Understandably, professional services firms that provide consulting, know-how, or other types of billable services (rather than tangible physical products), need to track billable hours and other intangibles. Also, a typical professional services business will often also have fewer fixed assets; but it must keep close track of staff billable hours to remain competitive. The true value of the business is actually determined by the quality of intangible assets, such as the staff roster (including the aggregate expertise roster), and the client list. For some time now, professional service automation (PSA) applications have tried to fill a gap that traditional enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) have failed to address. Again, that's to say that ERP vendors have traditionally built products that collect data and generate reports on widgets rather than people, whereas CRM vendor have provided solutions that help automate the process of selling these widgets and subsequent customer service interactions. PSA applications, conversely, provide information about staff members (consultants), tapping near real-time data from the sales pipeline, the project teams, and finance, and in the process enable professional services firms to improve productivity, efficiency, and profitability. Deltek is one of a few enterprise applications vendors that have largely managed to bridge this gap (see Enterprise Resource Planning for Services, and Professional Services Automation: Where Do You Draw the Line?).

Deltek Vision

The main product for this market is Deltek Vision, a "young" solution (compared to many sibling products, and in terms of modernity) that was designed from the ground up for professional services firms, enabling them to attain an up-to-date 360-degree view of people, projects, clients, resources, and business in action. The product, which was initially released in late 2002, reached a landmark 1,000 customers in early 2006. Using Web-based technology, Deltek Vision provides client relationship management, proposal automation, project management, resource management, project and financial accounting, time and expense (T&E) capture, billing, purchasing, multicurrency, multicompany, and performance management functionality in a single solution. Project-focused organizations and professional services firms around the world have apparently been deploying Vision, since it offers an exceptional business fit for such firms in a wide range of vertical markets, including A/E/C, accounting, consulting and planning, IT services, software, and integration. The product's Web services-based n-tier architecture is scalable, and its open foundation allows for reasonably rapid deployment as stand-alone modules or a broader tightly integrated solution.

Developed in close collaboration with some of Deltek's high-profile professional services clients, Deltek Vision aims at solving the business challenges of professional services firms, such as winning repeat business, improving project performance, and maximizing project margins. Contrary to the typical detrimental practice of detaching initial customer interactions from subsequent project management and delivery, this unified solution serves as a single source of project-related data, which can be used to track performance, make strategic business decisions, and measure individual project performance. To that end, accessing a client record in Deltek Vision from the CRM & Proposals module will, for example, also list the client's employees and former employers via a hyperlink, enabling users to keep tabs on industry movement and team turnover.

Another example of how a tight vertical fit works compared to generic solutions, in the construction segment, is the requirement of cost-plus contract accounting (one of a variety of methods for pricing and billing project work). A cost-plus project has a different set of requirements from a fixed-price contract, since in the first case, a services company wants to maximize billable hours, while in the latter case, the goal is to minimize them. While "bolt-on" features exist for generic solutions designed solely for fixed-price contracts, Deltek Vision uses the percentage of completion method for subcontract progress payment requests, including variable rate retention for work in place (WIP) and stored materials. In the architecture vertical, project planning requirements are traditionally handled via disparate spreadsheets for project planning, whereas Deltek's project planning is integrated with accounting, and supports multilevel work breakdown structure (WBS), and revenue and profit forecasting. Finally, in the engineering segment, the ability to automate the proposal process as a key CRM component is vital; traditional product-based CRM systems have no qualification-based proposal automation capabilities, whereas Deltek Vision features project-oriented CRM capabilities, which intrinsically include proposal automation.

Deltek Vision is a Microsoft .NET-based platform for the commercial professional services market. With its support for Web-native hypertext markup language (HTML), dynamic HTML (DHTML), and Java Script on the user interface (UI) tier; Microsoft SQL Server as database; and the Actuate reporting server, the product features extensible integration architecture that enables collaboration and mobile extensions through Web services. For these reasons, the goal is for Deltek Vision to become the company's primary offering to professional services firms, and will be targeted at existing Deltek Advantage, Deltek FMS and Deltek Sema4 customers, as well as at new customers in all types of professional services industries.

In mid-2005, Deltek announced the release of Deltek Vision 3, which provided significant upgrades and enhancements for increasing productivity and workflow, including Deltek's new Microsoft .NET-based VisionXtend platform. This technology enables real-time, transparent connections via Web Services and extensible markup language (XML) across multiple platforms and applications, allowing professional services firms to integrate and streamline key business processes in order to achieve performance and compliance management, as well as a collaborative view of firm-wide operations. Other significant enhancements in Vision 3 include a new workflow engine, a screen designer, audit trail reporting, a purchasing module, and document management capabilities providing secure Web-based collaboration for users to share, upload, review, and edit documents, regardless of location. In addition, Vision 3 introduced improved international (multicurrency and multicompany) functionality. For more information on the product release, see Niche Software at Its Best.

Early in 2006, Deltek and AppForge, the provider of enterprise multiplatform mobile and wireless application development solutions, announced a partnership that will eventually enable Deltek to deliver mobile applications via Deltek Vision across any major mobile operating system (OS) and device. Through this partnership, Deltek plans to deploy mobile applications to more than 450 devices across PocketPC, Symbian, and Palm OS platforms (with the addition of the BlackBerry OS in the second part of 2006) via AppForge's Crossfire product. This should allow users to choose from a wide range of mobile platforms and devices, while significantly reducing development time and resources. With AppForge, developers can write an application once, and deploy it to most major mobile and wireless devices, PDAs, smartphones, and industrial devices, using Microsoft C# .NET 2003, Visual Basic .NET 2003, and Visual Basic 6.0. This should save businesses time and money by eliminating the need to rewrite an application for a new or next-generation device or OS. Mobile applications for timekeeping and expense management have been available since mid-2006 as part of Deltek Vision 4.0, and future releases will include other functions such as CRM, and alerts and approvals for requisitions, purchasing, and resource planning.

In March 2006, Deltek announced the release of Deltek Vision Small Business, a preconfigured, out-of-the-box business solution that delivers Deltek functionality to small businesses. The product features a solid combination of core modules from Deltek Vision, such as CRM, proposal automation, project management, resource management, project and financial accounting, and performance management functionality. The solution is the result of Deltek's vast experience, combined with the recent acquisition of Wind2, which provided the vendor with a deeper understanding of the requirements of a small professional firm. With its core functionality and low-cost special pricing (an affordable start-up fee), the product offers a wide array of convenient options, including new hosting services, an out-of-the box configuration of critical core accounting, billing and time keeping functionality, licensing options, and a new self-paced training program called Vision Fast Start Implementation that should help reduce implementation time, and ultimately lower the total cost of ownership (TCO). The solution is also available through Deltek's expanding reseller network throughout the world.

Finally, as a result of increasing requirements for Deltek's analytics capabilities, and given Deltek's quest to capture new markets, the vendor has lately been exploring data visualization technology (analyzing historical data from similar projects to improve project profitability presents a different problem from optimizing current staff deployments). These tools of this technology originate from scientific applications, and are now being merged with statistical analysis software, with the goal of replacing reports and tables with powerful, eye-catching images that convey important statistical messages to even the casual user. To that end, through a partnership with Panopticon, Deltek has been embedding this technology into Deltek Vision 4 to allow a firm-wide view of the health and performance of project portfolios to executives, project managers, and other users.

Most recently, in mid-2006, Deltek announced the release of Deltek Vision 4, which, for the first time, integrates planning, tracking and project administration features with innovative functionality such as visualization and mobile access, to create a solution that streamlines all facets of the project-based business. It is available as a complete enterprise-class suite, or as a preconfigured solution designed to meet the needs of smaller firms. Visualization is a powerful management tool that empowers businesses to take control of their data and quickly turn it into actionable information. A mission-critical technology in the financial services marketplace for many years, Deltek has harnessed the power of visualization for the project-focused organization with the release of Deltek Vision 4, enabling engineering and architecture firms, IT services companies, and management consulting firms to instantly discover trends and opportunities across their entire project portfolio. Visualization provides a simple display that depicts mission-critical information about a firm's entire business—including project performance, status, trends, and risks—using color and shapes to alert viewers of any performance issues at a glance, and allowing them to focus on the most critical issues.

Deltek Vision 4 also introduces a new Mobile Applications Suite, significantly enhancing capabilities that allow field workers to collect and provide their project data more simply than ever before. For the first time, project managers and consultants can work offline or from their wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones, contributing to project reports and entering critical information (including time and expense data) when they are not connected to the network. Businesses can now streamline field reporting without requiring large hardware investments.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sweet-spots-and-what-nots-enterprise-management-software-vendor-provides-notable-solutions-18626/

Business Management Issue

External financial reporting and internal operational control represent two fundamentally different functions. The former is guided by GAAP, tax laws, and the needs of stockholders and are lagging performance indicators. Operational control, on the other hand, is a leading performance indicator, and is guided by business strategy, and how well customer expectations are met. Satisfying these two needs are related but measured differently.

Reporting that is focused only on investor results can have a counterproductive impact on the longer term performance of the company (e.g., a focus solely on short-term financial metrics may force decisions that impede company agility to capture new market share). However, completely severing the tie between external financial numbers and day to day operating metrics is a mistake.

Art Schneiderman, pioneer of the balanced scorecard concepts at Analog Devices, claims that there is not and can not be a quantitative linkage between non-financial and expected financial results - but there is a soft link. Empirical research supports his claim. Several longitudinal studies verified the lead-lag relationship at a point in time. For example, companies that achieve fast cycle times later reported triple the revenue growth and double the profits over industry average competitors. However, given the many complex interactions between parts of the organization and the external environment, a quantified linkage is a stretch.

Architecture Impacts

Companies need a business reporting architecture that ensures that the right information is provided at the right time. As opposed to quantifying the lead-lag relationship, focus should be on getting the lead information to decision-makers to take appropriate action that will get desired lag results.

The reporting architecture should direct behavior, evaluate performance against preset goals, and provide information for adjusting the goals themselves through a feedback process. In many cost accounting-based performance measurement systems, this loop is not complete. Accounting variances, rather than serving to update non-financial goals (i.e., efficiency standards), are merely used to create adjusting entries for the general ledger. The underlying assumption, of course, is that the standards are right and operating reality is wrong. This assumption is at odds, for example, with the goals of just-in-time manufacturing.

Whether for an individual operation or the whole department, non-financial measures such as on-time delivery, quality, cycle time and waste provide a complete control loop. See the figure below.

Loop 1: Focusing in on the workgroup (or department) level, targets are set (e.g., reduction of waste or cycle time, improvement in quality), action takes place, and results are charted. Based on the results, process adjustments are made to keep the system on track. These measures are timely, and close to the point of action. Feedback can be used to accurately adjust current activities. This is the definition of a complete control loop.

Loop 2: The core business process level (e.g. new product introduction, order fulfillment and post sales service) actually consists of a double set of controls: operating and financial. The operating controls are used to evaluate how departments and teams work together in meeting core process objectives.

Financial reporting completes the control loop used at this level, translating the operating data into summary data for top management. For example, as improvements in cycle time are made at the department level, this information is passed up to the core process in a second performance feedback loop. Adjustments are made to inventory to satisfy external financial reporting needs and the information is fed back into the goal setting process (i.e., the goals are set more aggressively). The "time span" of decision-making at this level is longer and executives should resist micro-managing and leave that to the responsible workgroup.

Managers at the core process level need only enough feedback to know when a problem exists that is going to affect total period performance so that they can put in place appropriate programs to improve performance.

Loop 3: Moving up the organization, the level of detail decreases markedly, as does the definition, and realities, of the timeliness and frequency of reporting cycles. For example, core process performance (e.g., # of new products, time to market in new product introduction) is passed up to the business unit level to evaluate how well strategies have been executed.

The operating measures (and exceptions) provide a signal that financial and marketing objectives may not be reached. The financial control loop verifies this, after the fact. Here the market share and financial performance of the business unit is reflected in the unit's profit and loss numbers, asset turns, and revenues. Again, the financial results are translated back into operational imperatives in the business system level. For example, if asset return objectives for the business unit were not met, new programs would be developed or emphasis added to the cycle time measures in the business system to help improve financial performance.

Loop 4: The final feedback loop provides feedback on the corporate vision itself. Top management receives information over time on how effectively strategies have been executed and resources deployed. Total corporate performance is compared to expectations. Markets and competitive tactics are evaluated and adjusted as necessary.

In summary, the information architecture should support whatever type of reporting upper management wants. The detail is there, ready to be passed up through the reporting hierarchy on demand. Each level has its own tightly defined control loop as well as the means to access information from lower levels through the integrated system. For example, if there is an increase in product defects in loop 1, it will indicate future financial problems and pinpoint whether the problem is related to execution (loop 1), process design fault (loop 2) or strategy issue (loops 3 & 4).

Business Management Response

Balanced scorecard projects are predicated on the assumption that employee measures on commitment and capability will lead to desired organizational capabilities such as new product time-to-market, which in turn lead to customer results in terms of quality, delivery, and price. These measures are the independent variables at the core process level that drive the investor or financial/market results at the business unit or corporate level (i.e., the dependent variables). This assumption needs be taken on faith or 'fuzzy logic.' In other words, companies need to focus on the non-financial indicators at all levels because they represent in Schneiderman's words, 'the collective wisdom of the organization that they will improve the odds of success'.

In the case of Analog Devices, the leadership team focused on attracting and retaining great designers, provided high visibility to new product volume and time-to-market indicators, and paid attention to customer metrics as well as the quality system to continuously improve them. Over the years, these efforts have helped Analog improve production throughput rates (which delayed the need for adding capacity) and accelerated new product development - especially in the communications market (wireless applications and high speed internet access).



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/the-fuzzy-logic-between-lead-and-lag-indicators-15690/

Why Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected?

As its name suggests, customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on building enterprise profitability through the service and management of customer behavior and processes. It centers on the collection and analyses of customer-derived information to exploit this knowledge to better meet customer needs and business objectives. The APICS Dictionary describes CRM as a marketing philosophy where information is analyzed to provide marketing and sales with the necessary information to service customers' existing and potential needs. Thus, along with account management, catalog, and order entry, major commercial CRM software application areas include customer service and support (CSS), call centers, sales force automation (SFA), and marketing automation (MA). Of these, that latter two areas, SFA and MA best illustrate the interconnection between CRM and analytics.

With each new advance in technology, especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Internet and wireless application protocol (WAP) phones, more elements of the customer service relationship is being managed electronically. Organizations are therefore looking for ways to personalize on-line experiences through tools such as help desk software, e-mail organizers, and Web development applications. For more information on other aspects of CRM, see CRM is Busting Out of Its Britches: Operational, Analytical, and Collaborative CRM Is Born.

Many CRM software vendors focused their first marketing modules to generate and convey leads to the sales force. SFA thus refers to the application of technology that enables selling through all channels, including field sales, telesales, selling partners, Web selling, and retail. The goal is to integrate technology with optimal processes providing continuous improvement in sales effectiveness, as well as providing balance and optimization to each enterprise sales channel.

But, while SFA was designed to equip a sales force to close deals, it typically does not influence customer adoption, which is the tenet at the heart of CRM. SFA is about acquiring new customers, but the CRM is also concerned with identifying, servicing, retaining, and increasing profitable customer relationships. The technologies that CRM harnesses should enable greater customer insight, increase customer access, create more effective interactions with customers and trading partners, and be integrated throughout customer channels and back-office enterprise functions

Thus to enable an organization to become more customer-centric, marketing departments must lead by example and improve the management of their operations, including better allocation of marketing resources with the highest value opportunities. This feat is only possible through the improved orchestration of the marketing function—marketing automation (MA). MA eventually leads to customer relationship optimization by applying customer insight and intelligence to plan the execution of customer interactions.

Building a better understanding of customer preferences to better serve their needs and increase their loyalty is certainly the motto for the new generation of MA systems. MA involves analyzing and automating the marketing process through information technology (IT) tools to allocate marketing resources to activities, channels, and media that will best meet customer needs while delivering profitability to the company. Its functional components include customer data cleansing, analysis tools, and campaign management systems. MA also enables new metrics, such as customer profitability, lifetime value, and wallet share to supplement the traditional metrics of market share and penetration.

All of these tools focus on determining what an enterprise's strategy should be during each customer interaction and these interactions fall within the following three categories: outbound campaigns, event-triggered interactions, and inbound interactions. For example, target marketing focuses marketing activities specifically on those people who are most likely to buy a company's products and services. Data gathered on people who use the Internet enables companies to identify and focus on more likely candidates. Retention efficiency is a measurement of how well a company creates repeat customers. Marketing cost analysis is the study and evaluation of the relative profitability or costs of different marketing operations in terms of customers, marketing units, commodities, territories, or marketing activities. Cost accounting is also typically used.

These tools are used to replace or enhance human intelligence by scanning through massive storehouses of data to discover meaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by using pattern recognition technologies and statistics. Likewise, predictive analytics drills even deeper. It is a statistical method that includes all analytics to predict the probable future outcome of an event and falls under data mining, a class of database applications that look for hidden patterns and support decision-making by forecasting the outcomes of different scenarios.

Ultimately, given the depth of information MA processes can pull out, MA is an integral part of a sound CRM strategy that can help drive organizational alignment through its analysis of markets, customers, and segments. For example, it can help guide marketing campaigns and identify segments of the customer base that is likely to cancel their subscription. For more info, see Marketing Automation: Coming of Age Slowly.

Campaign Management

Once patterns and trends are discerned, the next step is to apply what has been learned. Overall, basic campaign management provides capabilities such as planning campaigns targeted at segmented audiences; keeping a history of all the campaigns that have been run; tracking and analyzing the response to various products and target segments; and executing and tracking responses, which help in generating leads for sales.

Campaign management and e-mail marketing functions were among the first modules for CRM vendors to include in their product offerings. Siebel Systems, E.piphany, Pivotal (now part of chinadotcom/CDC), DoubleClick, and Aprimo are some of the providers of such functionality. By using a campaign management tool, marketers can design multilayered marketing campaigns filtered by customer segments, and use the contact center capability to reach their target through multiple channels such as phone, portals, e-mail, direct mail, and personal digital assistant (PDA). Another functional category that falls within this realm and is also widely provided for is electronic marketing, which offers a web-accessible, enterprise resource that manages and delivers essential information to marketing's customers, both internal (sales, customer support, etc.) and external (prospects, media, partners, etc.). Integrated content management and customization have added value to the basic features of e-mail marketing by avoiding the pitfalls of traditional mass marketing.

Marketing analytics adds a new dimension to basic campaign management. With marketing analytics, marketers can conduct customer behavioral analysis and understand key issues such as propensity to buy. Traditional CRM vendors such as Pivotal, PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle), and Siebel have been offering marketing analytics mostly through former acquisitions. Marketing analytics is also offered by other pure MA players such as Chordiant, E.piphany, SAS Institute, and Unica.

Marketing Resource Management

Given the importance of intelligence on customer behavior and patterns, it is no wonder that the newest tool—and the latest buzzword—is market resource management (MRM). Pioneered by Aprimo, MRM is designed to improve the use of marketing resources, which is crucial for marketing departments facing shrinking budgets and greater accountability. Through workflow capabilities, tasks can be assigned and alerts can be triggered to better manage knowledge and comply with marketing best practices.

Yet whether a buzzword and the idea it encompasses lasts, is never guaranteed. Inevitably, tighter control over projected budgets, planning, and execution combined with a myriad of functions in campaign and lead management modules have pushed the limits of MA, and vendors such as Aprimo and Unica are now referring to their products as enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions.

However, the general appeal of MRM comes from MA and its ability to tailor marketing campaigns, track their effectiveness, control marketing costs, and perform better-targeted, finer-grained, multi-stage campaigns. Nonetheless, in the early 2000s, many MA point solution providers faced pessimistic investors and the diminished appetites of global corporations for technology. Consequently, the budding market of MA point solution providers has felt the brunt of this slowdown. They have yet to create a market awareness of their true value proposition and their situation is further compounded because marketing departments are slower to IT. These applications have also often been perceived either as a luxury (a nice-to-have but not show-stopping) application or, enterprises valuing the proposition may be more inclined to obtain it as a part of a broader CRM suite or from an ERP provider, rather than as a point solution.

Not surprisingly, MA-only providers are disappearing with only a few (and possibly endangered) providers like Unica, Aprimo, MarketSwitch, and MarketSoft remaining. The diminished life expectancy of independent CRM point solutions providers—and the importance of their solutions—is highlighted by a number of acquisitions and mergers. Annuncio was acquired by PeopleSoft (which itself, is now a part of Oracle) (see PeopleSoft Annuncio-es Continuation of Its Shopping Spree). MarketFirst was acquired by Pivotal as was Protagona by DoubleClick; Point Information Systems by S1 Corporation; DataSage by Vignette Corporation; Prime Response by Chordiant; and Blue Martini Software by Multi-Channel Holdings. Similarly Kana and Broadbase merged (see The Mid-Market Is Consolidating, Lo and Behold).

Supply Chain and Analytics Are Not Strangers Either

Lately, large business intelligence (BI) vendors have also been targeting vertical industries with prepackaged analytics and data models, especially in the supply chain management (SCM) and CRM areas via deep trend analysis capabilities in supplier performance, cross-selling opportunities, customer retention, fraud detection, demand creation, risk, and quality management. Currently, BI suites should enable users to access and present key business measures about the sales and customer service, as well as the supply chain and financials etc. From this, users should be able to create calculations and ratios to derive key performance indicators (KPI) and metrics.

For example, SAS Institutes is approaching this market in a couple of ways. It has enhanced its demand management module, High Performance Forecasting to allow consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to predict the needs and demands at different stores and locations in short time frames. (see SAS: Striving to Maintain Leadership series, especially Part Two.) It has also acquired Marketmax, a former provider of retail intelligence and merchandizing applications, which will give SAS' solutions a more complete view of demand/supply chain. Marketmax's retail optimization solution will be linked to the SAS Value Chain Analytics. (see Retail Market Dynamics for Software Vendors).

The amount of information generated by enterprises will only increase in the future, especially with the growing prominence of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Companies supplying retail industry giants such as Wal-Mart and Target are pushing their suppliers to use the technology. This coupled with the expected decline in the price of RFID tags, means the necessity for marketing departments to have analytical capabilities will be even more pressing. (See RFID—A New Technology Set to Explode?).



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/why-are-crm-and-analytics-intrinsically-connected-18114/

Overview of the Selection

A mid-market Engineer-to-Order manufacturer in the aerospace and defense sector retained the services of TEC to help select an Enterprise Resource Planning System. This system is intended to replace disparate applications that lacked the functionality and integration to support the company's Lean Manufacturing initiatives.

One of the most important steps in TEC's selection methodology is the Scripted Scenarios sessions. This step requires vendors that make the short list to validate their functionality with respect to the client's business requirements through product demonstrations (To learn more about TEC's selection methodology see An Overview Of The Knowledge Based Selection Process). The sessions require the vendor to spend over 15 hours of demonstration time showing the client how their software can be used to address specific business issues. Flexibility, Ease of Use/Navigation and Process Fit were also evaluated. Four vendors made the short list:
Vendor Package
Oracle Oracle Applications 11i
J.D. Edwards OneWorld Xe
SAP MySAP.com R/3 v4.6
IFS IFS Applications 2000

The Scripted Scenarios allowed TEC to gain a detailed understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each product. ERGO 2001, TEC's decision support tool, was used to record and analyze the results of the scenarios (For more information on ERGO 2001 see ERGO 2001 IT Evaluation Tool).

About this note: This is a two part note. Part 1 includes the Business Scenarios Model and Results. Part 2 contains the Qualitative Assessments and Analysis, and User Recommendations.

Business Scenario Model

TEC worked in conjunction with the client to develop over 450 specific functional software requirements resulting from business issues (scenarios) organized into a hierarchical tree. The high level illustration of the business scenarios model below indicates how the scenarios were organized.

Figure 1. Business Scenarios Model Tree.

Hierarchical functional requirements exist within each of the categories under Business Scenarios. The client weighs the importance of each of these categories as it relates to their business and scores each vendor on their ability to demonstrate the product's functionality. The weights appear below.

Figure 2. Business Scenarios Model Weights.

Results

Figure 3 illustrates the overall percent match for each of the vendors within Business Scenarios. Percent match is an optimal decision method which measures the compatibility of the detailed expectations of the decision maker, and compares it to ERGO 2001's detailed analysis of the options, using pattern matching statistical loss function approaches. It is usually a non-linear method of comparison.

Figure 3. Business Scenarios Results.

Figure 3 indicates that IFS took the overall lead in Business Scenarios by a slim margin over SAP. IFS also fared well in Product Ease of Use/Navigation, Process Fit and Flexibility. Figure 4 illustrates the results in Product Ease of Use/Navigation. The client generally felt that both IFS' and JD Edwards' products were intuitive and easy to use. JD Edwards' screens mimic the windows explorer environment and IFS uses customizable, instinctive right mouse click menu options. The client was impressed with the breadth and depth of SAP, but was dismayed by the cumbersome screen navigation and perceived steep learning curve. TEC felt that Oracle could have scored higher in this area, but the demonstration did not run smoothly and may have impacted client scores.

Figure 4. Product Ease of Use/Navigation Results

One of the key differentiators during the demonstration was the vendors' fit with the client's processes. This criterion, Process Fit, accounted for 13.5% of the model's overall weight. Figure 5 shows that IFS was the strongest in demonstrating the best match to the client's processes while Oracle and SAP were virtually tied for second place. JD Edwards' was not as strong due to a very weak fit in Product Repair and Customer Service. This criterion was dominated by Oracle, while JD Edwards showed the best fit with regards to Production Material Management and Cost Accounting. IFS led the pack in Product Definition, Supplier Definition and Procurement, Customer Definition and Proposal, Sales Order Processing, and System Overhauls and Upgrades. All vendors scored equally well in Goods Receipt & Handling, Goods Inspection, and Goods Shipment & Delivery.

Figure 5. Process Fit

To assess flexibility, TEC developed the criteria in Figure 6 with the client. These factors measured the perceived cost and risk associated with the implementation and modification of each vendor's proposed solution.

Figure 6. Flexibility Model Tree

Figure 7 illustrates the results in Flexibility. Both JD Edwards and IFS scored well in Flexibility primarily because both vendors focus on reduced implementation time and adaptable reporting and workflow features. Furthermore, IFS sells applications as a set of integrated, loosely coupled components. Implementation can be easily phased by choosing to implement a few components at a time. Oracle and SAP were perceived by the client as being rigid, monolithic applications that have a number of interdependencies amongst modules, thus requiring significantly more implementation time.

Figure 7. Flexibility Results

Although IFS had the overall highest score, it did not score the highest in each section. Figure 8 is a radar diagram that reveals how well each vendor did among the Business Scenarios sections as well as Product Ease of Use/Navigation and Flexibility.

Figure 8. Radar Diagram of Vendor Scores

The radar diagram indicates that all four vendors have very comparable products with regard to functionality. What particularly differentiated the vendors were Product Ease of Use/Navigation, Process Fit and Flexibility. These areas of the model can significantly impact the final selection decision depending on the importance assigned by the client. These three criteria were significant differentiators in the decision because they carried a combined weight of 36.5% in the model.

See Part 2 of this note for the Qualitative Assessments and Analysis of the vendors, and User Recommendations.

Sidebar Information



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/erp-selection-facts-and-figures-case-study-part-1-business-model-scenarios-16517/

Tools and Practices that Deal with Waste

Lean Manufacturing: A Primer described seven categories of waste. The following dozen or so fundamental technical tools and practices of lean manufacturing have long been used to curb or eliminate some of these types of waste. Note that this is not necessarily an exhaustive list, nor are the items within it in any particular order of importance.

This is Part Two of a multi-part note.

The Five S's

The first practice mentioned here sprang from the same Japanese system that originally gave birth to lean manufacturing. The five S's is a methodology for organizing, cleaning, developing, and sustaining a productive work environment to create a workspace that is more organized and efficient. The rationale behind the five S's is that a clean workspace provides a safer, more productive environment for employees and promotes good business. The five terms beginning with "S" are manual disciplines employees should use to create a workplace suitable for lean production. The first term, sort (seiri in Japanese), means to separate needed items from unneeded ones and remove the latter. The second term, simplify, straighten, or set in order (seiton in Japanese) means to neatly arrange items for use. Shine, sweep, or scrub (seiso in Japanese) means to clean up the work area to establish ownership and responsibility, while standardize, systemize, or schedule (seiketsu in Japanese) means to standardize efforts as checklists, so as to practice the preceding three principles of sort, simplify, and scrub on a daily basis. Finally, sustain (shisuke in Japanese) means to always follow the first four S's so as to create a disciplined culture that practices and repeats the Five S principles until they become a way of life for employees.

Visual Controls

In terms of tools, lean manufacturing tends to focus heavily on visual controls to make life straightforward for operators and to avoid errors. Visual control requires that the entire workplace is set up with visible and intuitive signals that allow any employee to instantaneously know what is going on, understand any process, and see clearly what is being done correctly and what is out of place. Typical visual control mechanisms include warning signs, lockout tags, labels, and color-coded markings. One example is andon, an electronic board that provides visibility of floor status as well as information to help coordinate the efforts to linked work centers, through signal lights that are green (for "running"), red (for "stop"), and yellow (for "needs attention"). The primary benefit of visual control is that it is a simple and intuitive method that shows an employee quickly when a process is functioning properly and when it is not.

Standardized Work

Knowing which processes to perform is as important as knowing when they are functioning properly. To ensure that the required product quality level, consistency, effectiveness, and efficiency are realized, documented step-by-step processes, or standard operation procedures (SOP), are needed to define the standardized work necessary to reduce errors and touch times. Standardized work is one of the most overlooked tools of lean manufacturing, despite entailing the useful creation and documentation of clearly defined operations for both workers and machines. Such clearly defined operations allow manufacturers to apply best practices to manufacturing processes. Standardized work also provides the foundation for continuous improvement, since documented processes can be more easily analyzed and improved. To define standardized work, SOPs should use pictures, words, tables, symbols, colors, and visual indicators to communicate a consistent, intuitive message to diverse workgroups. Such graphical instructions, also known as operation method sheets (OMS), explain each step in the sequence of event (SOE) defined for a given production line, and can design and produce visual work instructions on paper or on screen.

Mistake Proofing

As continual improvement is one of the primary concepts behind lean manufacturing, mistake proofing, or poka-yoke in Japanese, is an important waste reduction tool. Mistake proofing is an essential failsafe activity to prevent errors at their source. In simple terms, mistake proofing is any device, mechanism, or technique that either prevents a mistake from being made or makes the mistake obvious so as to avoid a product defect. The objective of mistake proofing is either to prevent the cause of defects in manufacturing or to ensure that each item can be inspected cost-effectively so that no defective items reach downstream processes. For example, in an assembly operation, if each correct part is not used, a sensing device detects that a part was unused and shuts down the operation, thereby preventing the assembler from moving the incomplete part to the next station or beginning another operation.

Total Productive Maintenance

Lean manufacturing further requires manufacturers to address equipment productivity issues through the adoption of total productive maintenance (TPM), which is a set of techniques, originally pioneered by Denso in the Toyota Group in Japan, that consists of corrective maintenance and maintenance prevention, plus continual efforts to adapt, modify, and refine equipment to increase flexibility, reduce material handling, and promote continuous flows (see Lean Asset Management—Is Preventive Maintenance Anti-lean?). TPM is operator-oriented maintenance that involves of all qualified employees in all maintenance activities. Its goal, hand in hand with the aforementioned five S's, is to ensure resource availability by eliminating machine-related accidents, defects, and breakdowns that sap efficiency and drain productivity on the factory floor. This includes setup and adjustment losses, idling and minor stoppages, reduced operating speeds, defects, rework, and startup yield losses.

Machine breakdown is a critical issue for the shop floor, as in a lean environment one machine going down can stop the entire production line or flow. Accordingly, TPM and other advanced enterprise asset management (EAM) options increase equipment reliability, and thus improve availability, reduce downtime, reduce product scrap (and wasted time managing that scrap), and increase machine tolerances (and consequently quality). As a further aid, diagnostics management features can automatically identify situations where the current maintenance strategy is not working and trigger a continuous improvement review. This often requires support for reliability driven maintenance (RDM), which can underpin the TPM strategy (see Reliability Driven Maintenance—Closing the CMMS Value Gap?). Finally, enterprise systems that can synchronize maintenance and production planning should maximize the available production time and contribute towards greater throughput and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).

Simulation is another tool to help reduce maintenance-related waste. By supporting simulation, advanced service management systems typically include maintenance scheduling based on production plans, with automated update of the maintenance schedule based on actual finished production (with electronic links into the equipment's own runtime meters to schedule maintenance). The idea is to eliminate the following "big six" maintenance-related wastes.

1. Equipment downtime
2. Setup and adjustments
3. Minor stoppages or idleness
4. Unplanned breaks
5. Time spent making rejected product due to machine error
6. Rejects during start ups

Cellular Manufacturing

Moving from maintenance to manufacturing processes, the lean philosophy traditionally depends on cellular manufacturing, which is a manufacturing process that produces families of parts within a single line or cell of machines controlled by operators who work only within the line or cell. Manufacturing cells, arranged to ergonomically minimize workers' stretching and reaching for parts, supplies, or tools to accomplish the task, often replaced traditional, linear production lines to help companies produce products in smaller lot sizes, ensure a more continuous flow, and improve product quality. A related concept, nagara, is the Japanese term used to depict a production system where seemingly unrelated tasks can be produced by the same operator simultaneously. Nowadays, however, lean thinking is moving beyond pure cell- and product grouping-based production.

Single-digit Setup

Since lean manufacturing requires manufacturers to produce to customer demand only, it requires them to make products in ever smaller batches. This is opposed to the traditional long runs of equipment and the fallacy that it is more efficient to run a big, EOQ-based batch rather to run several shorter ones that include changeovers. Yet, long runs mean large inventories, which in turn tie up large sums of money and keep customers waiting longer for finished goods and services. This trend toward smaller batches has created a need to reduce setup and changeover times throughout the manufacturing process. This is accomplished via the various embodiments of the single-digit setup (SDS) idea of performing setups in less than ten minutes (e.g., through astute jigs, optimized sequencing of internal and external process activities, roller tables or conveyers, hydraulic clamps, knobs and quick, fasteners, etc.). Related to this is the single-minute exchange of die (SMED) concept of setup times of less than ten minutes, which was developed by Shigeo Shingo in 1970 at Toyota.

Pull System

A pull system is another key characteristic of lean, demand-driven manufacturing, since the ultimate goal here is to have the flow of materials controlled by replacing only what has been actually consumed. Pull systems, also known as kanban (coming from the Japanese words kan, which means "card", and ban which means "signal"), ensure that production and material requirements are based on actual customer demand rather than on inevitably inaccurate forecasting tools. A kanban signal, which can be a card, empty squares on the floor for bins, lights, or a computer software generated signal, triggers the movement, production, or supply of materials or components that are usually held in bins of a fixed size. The aim is to improve inventory control and shorten production cycle times by controlling the level of inventory and work by the number of kanbans in the system. Over time and with process improvements, the quantity of components in the kanban bin can be reduced or resized dynamically, on-the-fly, as required.

Pull systems and pull signals (i.e., any signal that indicates when to produce or transport items in a pull replenishment system) can be found in many operational departments. For example, in just-in-time (JIT) production control systems, a kanban card can be used as the pull signal to replenish parts for the using operation. In material control, the withdrawal of inventory can also be demanded by the using operation, with material not being issued until a signal comes from the user. Likewise, in distribution, there would be a pull system for replenishing field warehouse inventories, where replenishment decisions are made at the field warehouse itself, not at the central warehouse or plant.

Conversely, materials requirements planning (MRP) is a push system, which schedules production based on forecasts and customer orders. Thus, MRP creates plans to "push" materials through the production process based on forecasts that by nature cannot be accurate. That is to say, traditional MRP methods rely on the movement of materials through functionally-oriented work centers or production lines (rather than lean cells), and are designed to maximize efficiencies and lower unit cost by producing products in large lots. Production is planned, scheduled, and managed to meet a combination of actual and forecast demand. Thus, production orders stemming from the master production schedule (MPS) and MRP planned orders are "pushed" out to the factory floor and in stock.

Sequencing and Mixed-model Production

Another lean tool is sequencing, or determining the order in which a manufacturing facility will process a number of different jobs from one production line in order to achieve objectives (e.g., the quantities needed daily). This is also referred to as mixed-model production, as it makes several different parts or products in varying lot sizes so that a factory produces close to the same mix of products that will be sold that day. The mixed-model schedule or sequence governs the making and the delivery of component parts, including those provided by outside suppliers. Again, the goal is to build models according to daily demand. This is of paramount importance in the automotive industry, given that competition for a growing percentage of sophisticated consumers in the global marketplace is driving automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to offer products with an ever-increasing number of features and options.

Today, from the perspective of pure functionality, cars and trucks are becoming a commodity, and competitive product differentiation can therefore be achieved mostly through offering unique colors, fabrics, styles, features, and option packages, which create thousands of potential combinations for any given type of vehicle. Stocking all of these combinations is price-prohibitive, while discovering whether a particular vehicle combination was produced is much too time-consuming, akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. In addition, fastidious customers expect immediate availability of unique vehicle features and option sets. These factors create a conundrum—how to quickly and profitably deliver a customized, finished vehicle.

Allowing buyers to uniquely configure their own vehicle and delivering their "perfect order" within a reasonable timeframe requires a radical departure from the traditional methods of mass production. This new process identifies the unique, individual requirements of each vehicle and synchronizes its assembly with JIT delivery of specifically configured components from suppliers. These components are then delivered to the OEM assembly plant in the exact sequence that each car or truck goes down the final assembly line, which allows the OEMs to produce a tailored vehicle for each customer.

It boils down to the fact that suppliers today are confronted with the dilemma of guaranteeing high levels of customer satisfaction as measured in on-time deliveries and high product quality at reasonable costs, while simultaneously striving to maintain low levels of inventory. For instance, if a car buyer selects or modifies the color of leather seats in the vehicle he orders just one week before that vehicle starts production, how can the supplier provide it if it takes the supplier twelve weeks to buy the leather that goes onto the seats? Furthermore, within the supply chain itself actual requirements and projected demand for component parts are typically out of sync.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/lean-tools-and-practices-that-eliminate-manufacturing-waste-18407/

Event Summary

On March 7, QAD Inc. (NASDAQ: QADI), a global provider of collaborative enterprise applications for manufacturing and distributing organizations, reported improved operating results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2002 year ended January 31, 2002. For Q4 2001, revenues amounted to $53.5 million, up 8% from $49.6 million reported in the preceding Q3 2002, but 10% down compared to $59.2 million a year ago. Likewise, the license revenues of $19.6 million for Q4 2002 improved 36% over the preceding Q3 2002, but again down 10% compared to $21.8 million in Q4 2001. Pro forma net income for Q4 2002, which amounts have been adjusted to exclude amortization of intangibles from acquisitions, a goodwill impairment loss, restructuring charges and a deferred tax asset valuation allowance, was $4.1 million, compared with pro forma net income of $3.4 million for the prior-year fourth quarter. Reported net income for Q4 2002, however, was $1.0 million compared with $2.4 million in fiscal 2001 (See Figure 1 below).

Figure 1

The fourth quarter of fiscal 2002 marked the company's sixth consecutive quarter of positive cash flow, as QAD generated cash flow from operations of $4.2 million. QAD's balance sheet at January 31, 2002 was strengthened by an increase of approximately 40% in cash and equivalents to $50.8 million, from $36.5 million at the end of January 2001.

For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2002, revenues were $204.0 million, a 4.7% decline compared with $214.1 million, for the prior fiscal year. License revenues for the fiscal 2002 were $62.8 million, a 9% decline compared with $69.2 million, for fiscal 2001. Operating income, adjusted for pro forma amounts in both years, was $4.9 million for fiscal 2002, a significant improvement from the $9.3 million operating loss in fiscal 2001.

Operating results were reportedly bolstered by gross margin improvement to 58% in fiscal 2002 from 53% in fiscal 2001 due to revenue mix, as well as cost containment efforts that reduced operating expenses by 8% year-over-year on a pro forma basis. Pro forma net income for fiscal 2002 increased to $0.4 million from a pro forma net loss of $12.5 million for fiscal 2001. Reported net loss for fiscal 2002 was $5.3 million, which is still a significant improvement to a prior-year net loss of $25.4 million (See Figure 2 below). For the full 2003 fiscal year, the company expects revenues to range between $210 and $220 million and operating income margin to equal approximately 5%.

Figure 2

The company points out the following major achievements during the quarter and the entire fiscal year:

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QAD secured three new customers in the fourth quarter for its QAD eQ private trading exchange (PTX) application suite. QAD eQ is a collaborative applications suite that creates private trading exchanges and enables intelligent order management via the Internet. The QAD eQ solution reportedly enables companies to quickly integrate their internal operations with those of suppliers, partners and customers, and provides manufacturers with new avenues of doing business electronically.
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The company also continued to broaden acceptance of its QAD MFG/PRO eB web-enabled ERP solution as customers realized the significant new functionality and value built into this new improved edition of enterprise software. Complementary products from QAD such as QAD eQ are integrated with MFG/PRO eB. The new release includes enhancements to the manufacturing, distribution, financial, and service and support applications of the solution. For manufacturing, Kanban Sizing automatically sizes and resizes Kanban quantities and the number of Kanban cards or containers.
For distribution, Customer Sequence Schedules address the need to ship product in a particular customer-specified sequence. For financials, an Extended Account Structure offers up to 32 characters for setting up general ledger accounts. For service and support, the Project Realization Management Module manages the execution portion of customer service, implementation, and configuration projects, including the procurement and shipment of project inventory, labor, and expenses involved in field installation. It also tracks project budgets and manages invoicing.
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Fiscal 2002 brought increased market penetration of QAD Supply Visualization (SV), a hosted web service that could generate increased profit for manufacturers by reducing operating and inventory costs through real-time collaboration with suppliers. QAD SV is the first application made available on a subscription basis through QAD's new MFGx.net manufacturing exchange, with which suppliers can have visibility of the sell-side of a manufacturer's supply chain. More than 135 QAD customers are currently evaluating the service and those QAD customers have connected nearly 200 additional trading partners who are accessing and evaluating the collaborative service.

Market Impact

Although there is continued sense of mixed blessing, it appears that QAD is beyond its most challenging days. The company deserves admiration for its traditional innovativeness and endurance despite limited resources compared to many competitors. QAD's (reportedly standing for Quality, Applications, Delivery) main ERP product MFG/PRO (alluding the product for manufacturing professionals) has been one of the most functional and, at the same time, one of the easiest to install and maintain manufacturing-oriented products in the market, with a low total cost of ownership (TCO). Its large client base remains satisfied and committed, as shown in typical follow up sales and project scope expansion to other functional modules and to other sites, after the initial MFG/PRO implementation.

The company has also done a masterful job in identifying and developing add-on vertically focused functionality through partnerships in the areas of warehouse management, product configuration and manufacturing execution system (MES). Another factor that bodes well for QAD's future is its international coverage, product localization features, and a broad geographic revenue mix, which no vendor of its size can tout (QAD applications run at more than 5,200 sites in approximately 80 countries in 26 languages). It also has a strong and dedicated international implementation channel among mid-market manufacturing oriented regional services companies such as Atos Origin.

Also, from its inception, QAD has been focused on developing sharp vertical manufacturing functionality long before most of its competitors. By delivering functionality specific to selected vertical industries, QAD has made its name within the automotive, consumer packaged goods (CPG), medical devices, industrial, electronics, and food & beverage segments.

The entrepreneurial spirit and enthusiasm of its founders/owners and an early mover advantage could not entirely make up for its finite resources. As a result, during mid and late 90s, many high-flying ERP competitors outpaced QAD both in the scope of the ERP functionality and market share-wise. Consequently, the lack of strong integrated global corporate financial and HR modules prevented QAD from securing many mega-enterprise deals.

To again leapfrog the competition, QAD embarked a few years ago on delivering applications that would optimize complex order fulfillment process across multiple enterprises/divisions. More recently, the focus has also evolved to target collaborative e-Business and event-driven manufacturing. These market need support for demand events such as a customer order, supply events such as a supply disruption, process events, product events, or others. QAD has thereby created a notable business-to-business (B2B) collaboration vision to appeal to its mid-market user base. The company shifted its focus from being a mere ERP vendor dedicated to the industrial mid-market to fully leveraging the Internet in the applications it provides to manufacturers and distributors to link their back-office systems to those of their business partners via private trading exchanges. To that end, QAD eQ product (formerly On/Q), might be viable for some focused areas such as direct materials procurement and/or replenishment and sales order fulfillment.

QAD Collaborative Applications

The eQ is a PTX suite that contains four applications: Commerce Relationship Management, Sell-Side, Buy-Side, and Replenishment. This software provides the backbone to allow a manufacturer to establish a private trading exchange among its suppliers and/or customers, with support for XML messaging, Java, HTML, and no need for a client side of the software. QAD eQ is also devised to support private Internet exchanges that are connected to multiple sites, run on diverse ERP systems, and to accommodate a rule-based order management functionality. One potential virtue of private trade exchanges is that enterprises should automate procurement without necessarily opening up sensitive information to unwanted eyes. Moreover, while most Internet exchange strategies rely heavily on procurement software, QAD eQ acts as a holistic order management hub by including commerce relationship management (relationship modeling), sell-side, buy-side, and replenishment applications.

QAD Supply Visualization (SV), on the other hand, is a hosted application that can be accessed via the new QAD MFGx.net manufacturing exchange through browser and password only. The SV module comes pre-integrated with the most recent versions of MFG/PRO, namely eB and 9.0 releases. It is devised to provide real-time visibility of inventory and order status to users through QAD's Poller software. From MFGx.net, users that are not necessarily the MFG/PRO users can download the software, which updates the system at certain time intervals by replicating data from the QAD MFG/PRO database and uploading it to SV. QAD MFGx.net is the vertical exchange, which also offers associated education and services, while QAD provides full consulting, implementation, migration and support services.

Challenges

Nevertheless, delivery of the above products has taken its toll on QAD's performance during last few years. In addition to venturing into a new territory for QAD (outside of traditional ERP), the dual product delivery had for some time confused/detracted customers, sales force and partners. All of them were not clear about whether and when to deploy MFG/PRO and/or eQ. The technological foundation disparity of the products has also taken its toll by doubling the development expenses and in delivering products integration.

Namely, MFG/PRO is written in the Progress proprietary development tool, which makes QAD dependent and vulnerable. Contrary to it, these new products (eQ and SV) are based on Java and other contemporary Web-based open technologies. MFG/PRO initially ran on Progress DB only (therefore being the most proven there, and with a majority of installations). The support for Oracle DB was introduced a few years ago, still with Progress tool. Because the Progress database is less scaleable than the Oracle database, it has less appeal to large organizations. The above predicament has resulted in part with stalled sales during last few years (See Figure 2 below).

Figure 2

However, the difficulties seem to be winding down, as the array of hefty losses seems to have been stemmed, while the company has concurrently delivered products and resolved their interconnectivity, which should keep it abreast with ever increasing market requirements. Additionally, QADs 'collaborative commerce' eQ system not only works with its flagship MFG/PRO, but also with others ERP and legacy systems.

It also connects with supply chain planning systems like QAD's partner Adexa, and demand planning systems like Demantra. Thus, there is the potential to build functionality on the usual heterogeneous mix of systems one may find in multi-national companies at this level. Look for QAD continuing to build on its early to market 'collaborative commerce' suite which might be ever appealing as more upper mid-market manufacturers seek to improve their external trade partner interactions to realize efficiency, responsiveness and reduced costs.

The openness and interconnectivity mantra of QAD's entire offering (via its Q/Link product) are commendable and quite needed given the company's strategy of penetrating individual plants of large worldwide dispersed corporations, although they yet have to be demonstrated 'en masse' in practice. Therefore, also look for more MFG/PRO ready-made application programming interfaces (APIs) to e.g., SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft, to further open up the system, and more native functionality in both MFG/PRO and eQ.

Competitive Impact

The above facts have therefore positioned QAD as a notable player in the upper middle discrete manufacturing market. It is a direct competitor for the likes of J.D. Edwards, Baan, IFS, Intentia, Epicor and Navision, and belongs to the Top 10 global manufacturing ERP vendors. QAD's mind share within automotive, medical equipment and industrial and electronics discrete manufacturing segments remains strong. It offers a shop floor level solution typically associated with fast implementation and price tags suitable for multi-national mid-market enterprises that do not require a global unified finance and HR strategy.

By combining eQ (for supply chain management requirements) and MFG/PRO (for traditional manufacturing ERP requirements), QAD often additionally competes with SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft in its sectors of focus, where it provides the individual factory level ERP solution while these giants remain the preferences at the corporate level.

The latest release of QAD MFG/PRO, eB, is a full web-enabled ERP foundation suite covering sales and distribution (sales order processing (SOP), customer and supplier schedules, products configuration, purchasing, etc), engineering (bills of material (BOMs)/formulas/recipes, routings/work centers, engineering change control, cost accounting management, etc), manufacturing control (inventory management, work orders, quality management, repetitive manufacturing, shop floor control, etc), manufacturing planning (master production scheduling (MPS), material requirements planning (MRP), capacity requirements planning (CRP), etc.) and a slew of typical financial modules. Additionally, it features advanced pricing management, advanced planning & scheduling (APS) including a supply chain optimizer, factory optimizer and global planner with available to promise (ATP) and shop floor sequencing, demand management, sales force automation (SFA), electronic data interchange (EDI), and service and supply chain modules (with distribution requirements planning (DRP) and enterprise operations management).

While the acceptance of its new collaborative e-Business modules proves to be well received by its existing MFG/PRO customer base, QAD still has to create greater market recognition and additional revenue from beyond it. Following last two years of particularly relying upon its existing customer base, look for QAD to more aggressively pursue winning new business.

The combination of MFG/PRO, eQ, SV, and embedded point solutions from its premier partners (IBM, Adexa, Robocom, Access Commerce, etc.) might provide QAD with a product set also suitable for larger, multinational corporations. Still, QAD's reliance on a number of partnerships to deliver extended-ERP functionality may not be the preferable option for its target market - medium sized manufacturing organizations that still prefer a single source provider and single data model and solution architecture.

The conundrum, for penetrating the higher-end of the market though, could also lie in the fact that MFG/PRO is not at the forefront of natively provided ERP functionality, particularly in terms of multi-national financials/consolidation, budgeting, project accounting/management, HR/payroll, marketing campaigns, etc. Without these in hand, it is a tall order for any vendor to penetrate the corporate management level competing against likes of Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft. Production management remains MFG/PRO's strongest module, and, therefore, QAD has often been implemented only in manufacturing divisions of large global organizations that use a Tier 1 ERP product for corporate financials and/or HR applications.

Although QAD covers multiple manufacturing styles such as make-to-stock (MTS), make-to-order (MTO), configure-to-order (CTO), engineer-to-order (ETO), mixed mode/hybrid and repetitive, it has not traditionally been particularly strong in the 'to-order' aspects. The company hints at product enhancements in that regard in the foreseeable future. There is thus even a challenge of fending off the bigger vendors' attempt to sway the corporate executives to implement QAD's system corporate wide (or, at least, in as many divisions as possible) given that these vendors might emulate QAD's deep manufacturing functionality over a period of time.





SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/qad-seemingly-nearing-the-corner-16623/