Newsletter Archives

With the ERP system serving as the IT heart of a process manufacturing operation, it’s absolutely crucial that you get a system that meets your company's special needs. Today’s feature white paper gives you a guide to the questions you need to ask—and the issues you need to look at—before you commit to a new process ERP system.

Find out how attribute-based demand planning, essentially a method of lean inventory management, can enable you to reduce inventory levels and supply chain connections, resulting in lower manufacturing costs and higher levels of customer satisfaction. It’s in today’s feature article.

Read Optimizing Your Process ERP System

Here's an article about a demand-based supply chain approach that provides for the kind of flexibility, visibility, customer response, and operational efficiency CPG companies could only dream of with traditional pull supply chains.

More than ever, direct store delivery (DSD) is giving CPG suppliers a critical competitive edge. Learn why in today's feature white paper—and discover a seamless DSD solution that updates delivery, warehouse, and back-office information with no latency, data inconsistencies, or mismatches.

Read Web-based Sales Portals: An Essential Tool for Consumer Packaged Goods Companies

In today’s feature white paper, you’ll find 10 key questions to ask your finance and accounting software vendor before you buy a new ERP system. With so many vendors clamoring for your business, the answers to these questions will help you get the ERP system that genuinely fits the needs, business processes, and priorities of your organization.

One of the vendors you could end up directing those 10 questions at is SYSPRO, a mid-market ERP vendor bridging the gap in offerings between the “early adopter,” visionary-type buyer group and the more pragmatic, “early (market) majority”-type buyer group. Here’s a question and answer session in which SYSPRO expands on its unique vision of the future.

Read 3 Ways to Manage Risk and Prevent Fraud with Your ERP System

An integrated steel plant is a large and complex operation, with a unique set of issues revolving around process parameters and variations in the properties of raw materials. Today’s feature article looks at steel manufacturers' special needs, and how mixed-mode ERP solutions are being designed to address them.

Under constant pressure to reduce lead times, increase quality, and lower costs, make-to-order and mixed-mode manufacturers may be best served by powerful new integrated manufacturing applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Find out more in today’s feature white paper.

Read ERP Solutions for Mixed-mode Manufacturers

While on the subject of PLM, it’s important to realize that it's not just a series of add-on tools for computer-aided engineering (CAE), nor is it just another ERP module. Today’s feature article looks at PLM as the next enterprise application suite, and examines two critical aspects of PLM applications: innovation and integration.

And finally, check out the surprising conclusion of virtual company TurtleSpice’s long and often difficult journey to choosing a new ERP system. After many twists and turns, a winning vendor has finally been selected. Click here to find out who the winner is, and to cast your vote on how useful the entire selection process has been.

Read Guide to Data Purging and System Migration

Today’s feature white paper goes ”under the covers” of a process ERP solution by linking the unique business processes of process manufacturers to specific ERP functional capabilities, data model structures, and enabling technologies. You'll also find case study references to help illustrate process ERP capabilities.

Also today, our virtual company TurtleSpice, still in the throes of selecting a new ERP solution, is in dire need of a shortlist to keep the process moving forward. Which five vendors should stay alive, and which should be cut loose? That’s up to you to decide—you can make your selection here.

Read Inside Process Manufacturing

For a high-level view of SOX—its history, rationale, and basic requirements, as well as how to keep you and your company out of trouble for failing to comply—check out our second feature article on this groundbreaking US accounting and reporting compliance law.

Managing compliance activities is a major IT challenge. Governance aims to optimize resources, reduce risk, and gain more business value from compliance spending. Here’s a look at a framework that provides an integrated, sustainable strategy for IT governance and compliance management.

Read A Guide to Compliance-Inside SOX and More

As a small to midsized business (SMB), why should you opt for a BI solution? When is the right time to go for it (most SMBs get this wrong)? And how do you calculate the return on investment (ROI)? Get the answers to these questions, and more, in today's feature BI white paper.

For all the benefits BI offers your business, getting it right can be tricky—BI projects carry an estimated success rate of only 30 percent. Here, then, are the five steps you must take to avoid the common BI pitfalls, and ensure that your BI project goes into the win column.

Read The Rebirth of Business Intelligence: What it Means to Your Organization