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| SAP Reports 43 Percent Profit Jump |
| Business software maker SAP AG said Thursday its net profit rose 43 percent in the second quarter on higher U.S. revenues and better margins
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| SAP Takes Another Hard Look at the GIS Market |
By Joe Francica
SAP has offered geospatial solutions in collaboration with ESRI for a number of years. SAP management believes, however, that the fundamentals of the market have changed. According to Oliver Mainka, SAP's GIS program manager, the company has taken the last 18 months to reevaluate the solutions that it brings to its substantial existing customer base. This self-analysis comes at a time when SAP' s main competitor, Oracle, has an established clientele, a mature technology, and an appetite for purchasing companies in market segments designed to displace SAP. In the fiercely competitive arena of enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and the systems integration services that may accompany them, SAP and Oracle have nearly equal market share with approximately 20% each
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| Lotus Notes and SAP R/3 Integration: A review of the LSX environment ,By Mark Huffman and Damien O'Neill |
| The LSX environment provides easy access to SAP R/3 via remote function calls and standard transactions. This functionality will appeal to many SAP sites that already have a substantial investment in a Notes infrastructure. There will be intense internal debates about the relative merits and development effort for new "front-end" applications. There will also be ample opportunities for development teams to combine the strengths of the ABAP/4 Workbench with those of Lotus Script. Paradoxically, sites that have yet to go live with SAP may well have the most to gain in terms of user acceptance, if they can provide access to the new SAP system from an already familiar Notes environment.
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| Gate Methodology |
| Everyone has heard the horror stories of cost overruns on SAP programmes. While there are a few factors which are outside the control of the programme managers (e.g. business change, funding withdrawn) the majority of the responsibility lies at their door.
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| ERP landscape: A year in (p)review |
| What did your ERP provider achieve last year, and what are its plans for 2006? Find out the answers to these questions and more in iStart’s review/preview of 2005/2006...
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| SSA Global Extends ERP, PLM Data Integration |
| Looking to keep its ERP software in sync with the evolving distributed design chain, SSA Global recently updated its product lifecycle management (PLM) offering to help harmonize product engineering and configuration processes with planning, purchasing and financial management activities.
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| SAP Mobile Engine Introduction |
| Information is the lifeblood of business in today’s increasingly interconnected world. The flow of Information across the physical confines of an enterprise is being driven by technological developments resulting in "true mobility" for its stakeholders. Businesses embracing this idea are reinventing themselves as boundaryless organizations, where access and interaction can be instant.
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| IBM's Bob Sutor sees interest in open-source mounting |
| IBM’s vice president of standards and open-source, sees 2006 as the year when a number of industries will move to embrace open-source software -- and he expects IBM to play a role in many of those efforts. Sutor, who spoke with Computerworld last week, also weighed in on the role of Linux and offered his thoughts on Massachusetts’ OpenDocument plans. Excerpts from the interview follow:
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| Making mergers matter |
| From a company that started out on the path of consolidation much earlier than its counterparts, here's a piece of advice from enterprise resource planing vendor SSA Global Technologies Inc.: "Don' t consolidate for the sake of consolidating."
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| Fundamentals of Supporting ERP-Linked Databases |
| On average, the majority of ERP systems rely on three or more databases to complete their tasks. Keeping these integration points scalable as transactions increase (in an order management system, for example) takes forethought and planning. Exacerbating this problem is the need to show audit trails during Sarbanes-Oxley audits. Louis Columbus examines the integration points that merit special attention.
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| Power ECM And ERP Integration |
| This VAR built a nationwide business selling software that integrates content management platforms with ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems
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| ERP Versus BoB |
| In the past two years, ERP providers have made increasingly aggressive efforts to boost their presence in the SCM software applications market, traditionally dominated by the best of breed providers.
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| Automation For Information |
| "Making chips" is a common-enough expression for describing production metalworking, but chips are not the only byproduct of production. Another byproduct is information. In addition to making chips, you're also making data. And today, it' s possible to put that data to use.
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| ERP Boosts Productivity And Paves Way For Horizontal Milling Center |
| When T. C. Scott Machining Inc. (Wilsonville, Oregon), a 15-person prototype shop, experienced a dramatic increase in business volume last year, a potential crisis loomed. The small company had 200 customers and 60 active jobs, many of them multi-component prototyping jobs with tight turnaround. The increase in business was leading to unpredictability and potential problems.
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| How CFOs Prepare Their Finance Organization for the Challenges of the Future |
| The role of the chief financial officer in an enterprise has been undergoing a radical change for some time now. What do today' s CEOs expect from their CFOs? How does this impact on the role of CFOs and the finance organization? What "finance transformation" strategies do they apply to enable finance to meet the challenges of the future?
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| Attracting the 'Passive Candidate' |
| The passive candidate has long held a certain mystic among hiring managers; difficult to identify and even more difficult to recruit, these professionals are considered by many to be the “Holy Grail” of job candidates for two primary reasons:
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| Software Helps Shop Automate Quality System |
| For Apex Design Technology (Anaheim, California), a comprehensive quality system is imperative because its customers—which include Boeing, Lockheed, BAE Systems and NASA—all require extensive paper trails. Two years ago, the company realized it needed to replace its time-intensive paper-based system with an automated online system.
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| King County ready to restart ERP effort |
| After spending $39 million on an ERP system that failed to meet management' s goals for the project, King County in Washington would like to have another crack at succeeding.
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| SAP buys manufacturing software maker Lighthammer |
| Business software vendor SAP AG plans to acquire privately held Lighthammer Software Development Corp. next month and will integrate its software with ERP' s xApps family of composite applications.
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| Lawson swallows European ERP vendor |
| Lawson Software Inc. announced today that it plans to acquire Sweden-based Intentia International AB in a $480 million deal expected to close by January.
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| Content Management Tools Dig Deeper |
| Customers taking advantage of plummeting storage costs to use unstructured data in unique ways have pushed the development of enterprise content management tools that dig deeper into business processes. EMC Corp., Interwoven Inc. and OpenText Corp. are preparing tools that permit more aggressive management, utilization and access limitations on content.
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| Java Content Repositories (JCR) on the Move |
| Day Software, a provider of content management and infrastructure software, announces that Obinary will embed Day’s Content Repository Extreme (CRX) across its entire product sets.
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| ERP at Your Service |
| ERP vendors are busily retooling ERP applications around service-oriented architectures and promising unprecedented flexibility. Users could see real benefits -- eventually
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| An Analysis of the Imagine PA Public Sector ERP Project |
| This paper first identifies various differences in ERP implementation methodologies deployed in the public and private sectors, and then focuses on the issues and success factors of one large-scale public sector ERP project. Finally, these issuess and success factors are compared to private sector ERP implementations.
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| Bungled ERP Installation Whacks Asyst |
| A failed ERP implementation at a majority-owned Japanese unit caused significant financial woes to Asyst Technologies, a maker of semiconductor automation products
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| IBM Shedding PCs for Services, On-demand |
| IBM's (Quote, Chart) decision to sell its personal computing division to China's leading PC maker Lenovo for $1.75 billion spawned diverse reactions in the industry.
Pund-It analyst and founder Charles King said Dell and HP will try to capitalize on IBM's exodus.
"Since Lenovo is not well known in the West, there' s lots of available fear, uncertainty and doubt to spread about why businesses should avoid working with them," King noted.
To be sure, rival HP sees the news as a market opportunity because of the potential of a little fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM may create by shedding its popular ThinkPad line, according to Deb Nelson, senior vice president of marketing
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| CA Picks SAP's Apps for Global ERP System |
| Computer Associates said it will use SAP's ERP applications to unify its accounting procedures and other business operations worldwide. The project is part of CA' s efforts to live up to a deal with the Department of Justice that could let it avoid prosecution over an alleged accounting fraud scheme
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| CA picks SAP for ERP rollout |
| Computer Associates will install an SAP ERP system to replace a collection of homegrown accounting systems. Accenture will help with the implementation.
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| How to Live with ERP Systems and Thrive |
| This paper offers one example of how the Faculty of Informatics and Communication (Infocom) at Central Queensland University has learned to live and thrive with CQU' s ERP system.
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| State Avoids Tax Refund on ERP System |
| A judge refused to order the state of Wisconsin to refund a half-million dollars in sales tax paid by Menasha Corp., ruling that customized packaged applications aren' t exempt from sales taxes as is software written from scratch
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| Enterprise Resource Planning Considerations |
| According to the author, ERP implementations are more likely to fail, be delayed, cost more than forecast or fail to deliver full functionality than they are to succeed. It is important to be aware of how ERP as a technology evolved, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and the nature of important implementation challenges.
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| ERP Investment: Business Impact and Productivity Measures |
| In this paper, the authors systematically study the productivity and business performance effects of ERP using a unique dataset on firms that have purchased licenses for the SAP R/3 system. Their goal is to better understand the economics of ERP implementations specifically, and more broadly, contribute to the understanding of the benefits of large-scale systems projects
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| Economics of Information Technology |
| This is an overview of economic phenomena that are important for high-technology industries. Topics covered include personalization of products and prices, versioning, bundling, switching costs, lock-in, economies of scale, network effects, standards, and systems effects.
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| Evaluation of Strategic IT Platform Investments |
| Summary:
This paper presents a conceptual framework for classifying different types of risk associated with major IT platform investments in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction environment.
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| Enhancing Student Learning in Accounting and Business Information Systems |
| This paper utitlizes a description of the integrated use of Tarrant Woods Wines, an authentic business, and the writers configuration of JDEdwards EnterpriseOne. Their new pedagogy is being implemented over succesive semesters and they report student feedback in order to fine tune their learning design for the future
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| CIO Discusses IT Methods for Mergers |
| Avnet CIO Ed Kamins talks about overseeing projects ranging from a global server and ERP system consolidation to the integration of Memec, Avnet' s latest acquisition.
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| Understanding Biases in ERP Systems Adoption Decisions |
| Much literature on ERP has been written with an emphasis on the implementation stage. This stage receives much attention because ERP project is costly and risky. User organizations would get benefits from the system if they successfully implement it, but they might totally lose their business if they fail at this stage
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| They Got It Together |
| Four winning companies demonstrate the true value of integration by achieving a single view of their customers and their data, saving time and money along the way.
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| Extreme ERP Makeover |
| The grand ERP vision of one application and one database for everything your company does may finally be achievable. But does that mean you should rip out all your systems and replace them with a single instance? Here' s how to decide.
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| Enterprise Systems Show Results |
| The infamous reputations of enterprise systems (ERP, CRM) is lots of money for little value, yet some companies are realizing value from these IT investments.
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| 'ERP Software Helps Increase Competitiveness' |
| Enterprise resource planning (ERP) helps increase returns on investments and productivity, and those who fail to respond to the change on account of new trends in IT and globalisation will be left behind, the joint secretary in the IT department, Pankaj Agarwal, said recently.
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| Squeeze Now, Pay Later |
| IF YOU'RE A CORPORATE CIO, you care enormously about your company's profitability. But how much should you really care about your supplier's profitability? Here's an original idea: If you want to dramatically cut your costs, dramatically cut their profits. This is a buyer' s market. Go for it.
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| No More OS-Agnostic |
| Oracle is aggressively advocating the use of Linux in India , especially in the government sector. Says Shekhar Dasgupta, country manager, Oracle Software India , “Let’s say we are no more OS (operating system)-agnostic. We say, go for Linux.”
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| Where is the knowledge in a content management system? |
| This column aims to answer the question: where is the knowledge in a content management system (CMS)? In doing so, light will be shed upon the long-term value of a CMS in capturing organisational knowledge, and the role a CMS has to play in a broader knowledge strategy.
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| Are You Looking into Content Management Systems? |
| SAVE TIME, save money. These are the tenets of content management. But with hundreds of content management vendors and systems — ranging in price from free to millions of dollars once implemented — choosing the right system for your organization can be daunting.
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| ERP applications and Web services |
| The ERP market has now stabilised, the picture at the head of the ERP supplier table as regards values of sales has remained virtually unchanged for several years. Faced with dwindling demand for ERP systems in the large enterprise sector, the larger market players are eyeing up medium-sized businesses.
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| ERP and eCommerce |
| E-commerce means IT departments need to build two new channels of access in to ERP systems one for business-to-consumer and business-to-business. These two audiences want two different types of information from your ERP system. Consumers want order status and billing information, and suppliers and partners want just about everything else.
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| ERP and information integration |
| Is ERP still a business necessity it was in the 1990s? Or has the internet invalidated the premise of integrated applications? If companies who create ERP systems are to be believed, the answer is no.
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| Content Management Goes Modular |
| The era of million-dollar companywide content-management deployments appears to be ending. Increasingly, companies are taking a more gradual approach to rolling out content-management systems, minimizing front-end investment and giving business-unit managers and department heads more control over content.
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| Unite and Conquer |
| New Tools to Manage Content and Documents Keep Web Sites Up-to-Date
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| If you thought going in for an ERP package was easy ...think again |
| Today anybody with a managerial sense would not choose a system that wasn't suited to his business processes, thats where you have enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: to integrate key business and management functions, particularly in the manufacturing, finance and human resource areas.
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| This Could Be the Start of Something Small |
| Cheaper and faster has become the motto of almost every CIO, and that's why the reign of vast enterprisewide application suites is drawing to a close. Taking their place are targeted point applications. Here' s how CIOs are making the switch.
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| Evaluation of a content management system |
| Any organisation however big or small they maybe will find that selecting and implementing a content management system will be one of their largest IT projects. The implementation cost will run into millions of dollars, which necessitates that only the right kind of package be selected.
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| ERP Consolidation |
| A Day in the Life of a Big ERP Rollup Celanese needs to merge seven SAP systems into one—a project expected to take 1,000 days. Here' s the story of one of them.
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| Hershey' s Bittersweet Lesson |
| HIDING PROBLEMS in your business can land you in jail, but revealing them, even if there's no deliberate malfeasance afoot, can get you in a lot of trouble too. Especially if the problems have some connection with software and aren' t well understood.
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| Nestlé' s ERP Odyssey |
| Nestlé USA' s costly and protracted struggle with its SAP project is a cautionary tale for any company intent on an enterprisewide implementation.
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