Business Process Management 101

by iBE Team

(Or, wake up and smell the coffee.)

BPM is about doing things the right way. Sometimes that might be the most efficient way, but not always. In theory, process efficiencies result in cost savings and cost saving are a good thing, right?

How about cutting your entire marketing budget as a cost saving?

So, unless you thought that was a great idea and are off to fire all your marketers, then we are in agreement that we want to do things the right way.

Automating any business process first requires that you understand the process. Let’s pick on sales. They are always an easy target and can usually benefit from a little process improvement.

Beachcombing for Business

by iBE Team

Yes, I am about to get cynical. It comes from trying to get people to make the most of the data their business has gathered over years of trading and realizing all too often that the seeds I sow are falling on stony ground.

Most people manage to misquote the one about failing to learn from history dooming you to repeat your mistakes (sorry, George), but most companies only pay attention to the boulders sitting on their beach, like large drops in renewals or falling sales. In doing so they skip over the large nuggets of gold mixed in with the sand that is right under their noses.

Most companies gather data like grains of sand; some keep it in a coarse meshed sieve and others keep it safe, very few sift through it in a methodical way to find the gold and exploit it.

Cloudfusion

by Richard Minney

Cloudfusion

• (noun) what happens when a historically on-premise software vendor jumps on the “cloud software” bandwagon and buys up a plethora of disparate and discrete cloud- or Internet-based software suppliers with the aim of recasting themselves as a cloud-based software vendor
• (noun) software development kit for PHP language on Amazon web services

For those of you watching the business software news, the latest round coming after Oracle purchased RightNow, is SAP’s bold announcement to buy SuccessFactors for $3.4B. It seems like both companies are in a race to buy cloud offerings, leaving Microsoft Business Solutions looking like they are asleep at the wheel. Watch out Netsuite, Taleo, Workday, Basecamp, Zoho etc. …SAP and Oracle are a-coming!

On the positive side, this demonstrates a firm commitment by the two largest ERP software vendors toward cloud-based business applications, a market now predicted to rise from $10B to more than $200B over the next decade. This re-affirms iBE’s strategy as a relative upstart in the cloud-ERP market, alongside other enterprise cloud computing start-ups.

In the Blue Corner

by Simon Hopkins

“Out of Waldorf, Germany, the undisputed father of ERP, and champion of integration, I give you, SAP.  While in the red corner, out of Redwood Shores, California, the American Heavyweight and the king of acquisitions, we have Oracle.”

This weekend’s news that SAP is to acquire SuccessFactors (following on from Oracle’s recent acquisition of RightNow), is setting up a potential feeding-frenzy in the cloud space, that could well see the two heavy-weights in business software locking horns for supremacy for a number of years to come.

How to Train Your Software

by Richard Minney

Anyone who has seen the movie, ”How to Train Your Dragon,” will have learned that the key to training or taming something is understanding it. The same is true of professional services software. If you can’t work out what it is doing, you can’t train it. By “train” I mean configure or customize your enterprise software: setting a bunch of switches and controls to make it behave the way you expect. These switches can range from personal settings like what language you are using, to deeper settings like mail system integration, the organization structure of your company, how documents are numbered, and so on.

A proper grown-up enterprise system, especially one you can use to run your whole business like an ERP-package, has a lot of these configuration options. That’s because no two businesses are alike. The traditional business automation, professional services automation and ERP software vendors have adopted a range of strategies to the issue of “how to train your software” so to speak:

The ABCs of Cloud Computing

by iBE Team

If the cloud is going to deliver for your business you will need to look at each application you are considering SaaS’ing and make sure they pass the ABC test. It isn’t difficult and your cloud supplier should be able to provide these pretty basic answers.

A. Availability – A cloud application is only of any use if it is always there when you need it. Look closely at the availability guarantees your providers puts into the service level agreement and think it through. A 99% availability could leave you without a core application for 3.65 days each year.

The other part of availability is the ability to access your cloud-based application remotely. So travelling staff should have access through their laptops and other portable devices. Similarly, home-based workers should have as much access to the system as if they were in the office.

Think you know ERP costs? Quintuple it.

by Chris Sands

Recently, a customer of the ERP vendor Epicor filed suit against them.  The alleged cause?  Cost overruns and a failure to deliver.

In the IT industry it’s generally expected that estimates are not ever going to be correct. I can’t tell you what I’ll be having for dinner never mind nailing down, to the penny, the true cost of a twelve month software project.

“Your project will cost $50,000.  Plus about $20,000.  Probably.”

So when a huge vendor like Epicor is taken to task for underestimating the cost of implementing an ERP system for Whaley Foodservice Repairs, who’s to blame? My knee-jerk reaction is to view it from the vendor’s standpoint – to assume that the customer, Whaley Foodservice Repairs, just didn’t know what they were getting into and then got sticker shock when they started asking for upgrades and enhancements.

Three Signs that you Need Business Process Automation

by iBE Team

Automating business processes is a bit like fitting a turbo to your car, sometimes you get to go faster but much of the time the rest of the world is slowing you down, it’s almost as ironic as calling it ‘rush hour’ when you probably drive at your slowest.

So what should you look for in your various departments that might indicate the need for process automation?

iBE Meets the iPhone

by Simon Hopkins

This is a post that I have wanted to write for some time, and now thanks to the release of iOS 5, I can.

As previous visitors to our site will know, iBE is currently writing a revolutionary cloud-based ERP system. Also, as regular readers of our blog will know, we believe that there are eight trends driving the needs for such a system (see The Inflection Point ). Personally, I am particularly passionate about the mobile trend (see The Mobile Revolution) that will see people interacting with their corporate IT systems in ways not imaginable in our recent past. Given the vastly improved user experience that devices like the iPhone have brought to the business user, as well as the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, we believe that our vision of putting an ERP system in people’s pockets will soon be a reality.

Clash of the Titans – Why More Expensive is not Better

by Richard Minney

With news out Monday that the US Air Force is considering scrapping their Oracle ERP system implementation after the cost ballooned from $3B to more than $5B and the schedule went over by four years, it got me thinking about why many large IT projects, and ERP implementations in particular, go over budget and over time.  A survey also out this week, by Panorama Consulting, called “Clash of the Titans” compares feedback from 1,800 ERP implementations (mostly tier 1 ERP packages like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics) and finds that the longer the ERP implementation timeframe, the lower customer satisfaction rates. Hang on a minute, I thought if you took longer and spent more money implementing your ERP system you would get more benefits, more customized user interfaces and a more satisfied customer, right? It seems not. Either bigger companies are just plain hard to please and smaller and mid-size businesses are satisfied with anything, or else by taking longer and spending more money the ERP implementation ends up worse. How can that be?

I have been implementing ERP systems for more than 20 years and can see exactly how longer ERP implementations are not only more expensive, but give a lesser result. There are obvious reasons like “the world is not standing still” meaning that when the new business system was conceived by a bunch of highly paid consultants and customer-employees merrily sticking post-it notes on brown parcel paper joined up with bits of string, it was all well and good during the initial blueprinting phase, but five years later when the darned thing is finally rolled out it is, er, out of date. But there are stronger reasons, to do with customer acceptance, quality and momentum. Let’s take each one in turn:

If you ask someone what they want and then give it to them a week later they can remember what they asked for.  The user gives sensible and realistic feedback and you are still in the honeymoon phase of your relationship between implementer and end-user where you work as a team to fix any issues. If on the other hand you come back five years later, chances are that the person you originally asked has long gone, replaced by someone who has no vested interest in the successful implementation of the solution. It’s not surprising they don’t accept it, don’t use it properly and as a result the planned performance efficiencies are never realized.  Acceptance is very hard over a five year timeframe.