Epicor University: Adds Activant and new Rigor to Processes

Posted by mintjutras on May 8, 2012   |   No Comments

Yesterday at Epicor Insights 2012 I got an update from Louise Keppel, VP and Amy Melton, Director, both with Worldwide Epicor University. It has been a little over a year since Epicor announced the launch of a its new university for customers, partners and employees to address the challenge of delivering consistent high-quality training worldwide, and to expand the range of Epicor’s education deliverables. The past year has seen a lot of change for the team with the addition of the Activant training group added to Louise’s worldwide responsibilities. Fortunately the Activant folks brought with them an extensive complement of training materials of their own. They were not created with the same set of robust tools that Epicor University has developed over the past few years, but the Activant team also brought with them added rigor to the development process, including a focus on Six Sigma process improvement.

As soon as it was announced, I was a fan of the University approach. Last year I wrote:

So why is a University needed? After all, user interfaces have become so much more intuitive and software has become easier to use. Navigation through an enterprise application is no longer cumbersome and confusing. And when was the last time you read the instructions for any kind of software anyway? If you can’t figure it out easily it just doesn’t get used.

Exactly! That’s one of the reasons that education and training often gets ignored. Sure the user interface is intuitive. Sure it is easy to navigate through the various functions. But these are potentially complex business processes that are being modeled through an ERP. Are those business processes efficient? Are they standardized and repeatable? Do they produce a clean audit trail? Can they be easily audited? Do they put you in a position of competitive strength or hold you back from realizing your full potential? Most importantly, are you getting the most value out of your investment? Why do you think one company fails miserably while another succeeds beyond all expectations while they both use the same software?

Since then the Mint Jutras 2011 ERP Solution Study gathered evidence to corroborate this sentiment. We captured the top goals of ERP, along with the challenges encountered in achieving those goals. Topping the list of goals (62% of respondents) was that of improving internal efficiencies. Stumbling around in search of the necessary features and functions, in the proper sequence and workflow is certainly not the way to achieve efficiency. Three out of the top five challenges included difficulty in managing change, user frustration with the system and user resistance to new processes. And what was the action most often taken to address these challenges? Provide additional training.

A recent change in the Epicor approach is to bundle access to on-line educational courses into every sale. This is a smart move. Because of the intuitive nature of navigation and all the reasons stated above, companies may be tempted to shave cost by skimping on or even eliminating training when it is purchased a la carte. Embedding it in the deal takes the decision-making out of the equation and insures every user has access to all the necessary courses and materials. Just seeing all the possible courses for all the different available functions could lead companies to take better advantage of the solutions they purchased.

In fact under-utilization of ERP is quite common. The Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study measured ERP usage on a scale of 1 to 100 where a score of 100 indicates all modules relevant to the company were fully implemented. We found the average score was about 65, indicating a lot of relevant functionality is being left on the table. Perhaps because the users don’t even know it is there? Of course the trick will be to condition the users to go looking for added functionality, rather than assume it is not there just because it doesn’t jump right off the screen and grab them. Putting all the materials at their fingertips is certainly a start, and on-line help goes a long way. But making a series of potentially quick (i.e. short) courses available on demand is equally important.

Prior to 2011, all Epicor training classes were classroom based. Today many of them can be delivered virtually. In a world where budgets are still tight and everyone seems to be doing the job of at least 1.3 people, this is a big plus. Companies need not pull key employees out of the office, insert them into an artificial environment and pay for travel and expenses only to have them forget half of what they learned when they get back to the office. Of course the downside is that managers and even the employees themselves may think because they never leave the office they can still accomplish their “day job” during the training, only to have the training suffer. And many of the online courses are 8 hours – often too long to hold someone’s attention well enough for the training to “stick.” But the Epicor University team is working on breaking the courses into smaller chunks that are more easily digested and more easily fit in with busy schedules.

I learned two other facts worth noting yesterday.

First: The Epicor University team is also responsible for putting together the demo databases that the field sales and presales teams use during the sale process. Why? Because these demo databases are also used in all the workshops in the courses. At least some members of the customer’s selection team will be the earliest participants in training. This way, what they see in a training class looks familiar, after having seen the same features, functions and data in the demos.

Second: While usually training reports up through the support organization, this team reports into the development organization. Louise reports to Paul Farrell, EVP of Worldwide R&D. Again you might ask why this matters. There are certainly several different schools of thought on this organizational structure, but Epicor feels the key advantage is in the coordination of product development with the development of documentation and training materials. By making the latter necessary steps in the delivery of a product, when the product goes GA (generally available), you can be sure that the all the course, help and training materials are also ready.

A comment from one early adopter of Epicor’s latest 700 release of Epicor ERP (Epicor 9) summed up the value quite succinctly, “We’ve been finding new functionality we didn’t know was there. People are like kids in a playground finding new things to play with – different ways of getting data and answers.”

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Ross Systems Hits Major Trends in New Release Ross ERP 7.0

Posted by mintjutras on May 2, 2012   |   1 Comment

I had a chance to get a glimpse of Ross System’s latest release of its ERP solution for formula-based process manufacturers. (Ross is a business unit of CDC Software.) The stated goal of the release is to offer “improved interoperability, increased collaborative capabilities, enhanced usability, new mobility features and more advanced traceability.” An added by-product of the new features delivered also added more visibility to enterprise data, as well as new and better exception management capabilities.

Let’s face it; few top executives (those making the real strategic business decisions) have direct access to ERP today. The perception (and often the reality) is that they don’t have time to be fishing for answers in an application that has traditionally not been intuitive and easy to use. These execs, as well as their generals and lieutenants don’t have the time to go trolling for new data to determine what, if anything in their sphere of influence has changed. That’s the traditional pull mode of inquiry, which is inefficient and prone to omission. It’s very easy to miss something.

Event Management

Several of the major features included in Ross 7.0 help to address this problem and replace “pull” with “push.”  At the heart of any kind of push approach is event management. Event management has been around for more than a decade, but its use is hardly pervasive. My research shows only about 15% of survey respondents have fully implemented it, although another 24% claim to have a partial implementation.

When the term event management is used with line of business executives it often draws a blank stare. Translating event management to mean triggers and alerts at least produces a response of, “Ah yes! I want to be alerted in real time when something happens.” Maybe it is when a big order comes in, when a customer cancels an order or exceeds a credit limit, or when a production run starts to stray out of tolerance. But in fact, event management is even more valuable when something doesn’t happen: a key purchase order is not delivered as expected or a customer order doesn’t ship on time.

Ross 7.0’s Event Management Framework’s (EMF) alert engine includes prepackaged SQL alert templates that can be modified and/or personalized. EMF delivers real-time, actionable alert messages to users’ dashboards, emails and mobile devices, as a result of both exception conditions and non-events, such as no response to a quote or an overdue delivery against a purchase order.

Mobility

Buried in the previous paragraph was another trend among enterprise applications today – alerts delivered to a mobile device. Ross Mobile 2.0 is now available on iPhone and Android devices. (Blackberry access has been available for a couple of years.) This is certainly one way to connect top executives directly to the data, rather than having them rely on others to track it down. The target audience is not just executives traveling or touching base during off hours, but also those that work in and (all) around the plant or in the field, not tethered to a desk.  So accessible data includes customer, sales, invoice, and accounts receivable data as well as product, inventory, lots and projected inventory.

My research shows the top priority for enterprise data on a mobile device is indeed the need for alerts and notifications. However today, once that alert is delivered, if it is delivered at all, most executives turn their smart phones into dumb phones. They call assistants or surrogates that have the direct access to further investigate or take action. While today Ross Mobile 2.0 is simply pushing the data, thereby encouraging this conversion from smart to dumb phone. But by the end of the year Ross expects to deliver that ability to take direct action from the mobile device.

Enterprise Viewer

Ross also delivers another important aspect of visibility with its Enterprise Viewer. In the past you often needed to be an expert ERP user in order to navigate the solution for data for decision making. This new user interface takes a similar approach to popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, employing the concept of “following.”

However, I hesitate to call this “social” because the connotation to traditional manufacturing types is that “social” is something you should do on your personal time. Mention the “social enterprise” or “social ERP” or “social manufacturing” and the very people that Ross sells to will shut down and turn off. But I think they will be very interested in “subscribing” to what Ross calls “content widgets.” That might not mean much to a VP of Manufacturing or a COO, but once they realize they will be following business objects (not people) like “Orders Due to Ship Today” or “Inventory Availability” they will likely say, “Sign me up!” As will the Sales team who might follow a customer, or the Purchasing team which will follow a supplier.

Each of these decision makers can have their own personal view which makes it unnecessary to go trolling for that tidbit of information they might not even know is there. It still takes a technically oriented user (e.g. a super user) to set these up, but once set up, even the highest levels in the organization can have clear and easy access. The trick will be getting them to take advantage of it.

Other Features

Ross 7.0 has a few other features that should catch the eye of these line of business decision-makers:

  • Document Connect: the ability to drag and drop documents like photos, PDF files, Word and other Office documents and videos directly into Ross ERP screens. All are automatically stored and indexed, eliminating the need to add more data structures to capture this unstructured data in order to make it easily retrievable.
  • Ross Reporting Services, built around Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Service, can embed graphical objects within report templates and generate interactive reports is a variety of formats.
  • Other features and functions near and dear to the hearts of formula-based process manufacturers. These include
    • Test group administration and retesting criteria in Quality Control
    • Bracket pricing, sales pricing and discount simulation
    • Time period administration in Traceability
    • Etc.

What about the cloud?

One “hot trend” not specifically addressed in Ross 7.0 might be the whole movement to the “cloud.” While Ross does have a cloud offering, it is single instance, so it is more like a hosting option than SaaS. But this seems appropriate given the market the company and the solution targets. This segment (formula-based process manufacturers) is not exactly known for being first-movers in trends or information technology. Many are subject to FDA controls, which require recertification after any major change in software, leading them to want to control that process. And many guard their recipes and formulas very, very carefully. The thought of these secrets being kept outside of their own firewalls is enough to keep them up at night. Therefore the remote managed services Ross offers seems far more suitable to the inclinations and disposition of their customers and prospects.

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Infor’s Innovation Team Helps the Company Go Faster

Posted by mintjutras on April 27, 2012   |   No Comments

After a 4-year hiatus, Inforum2012 made a big splash in Denver this week. I attended the last live Inforum back in 2008. There was also a “virtual event” in 2009. But, in my opinion, a virtual event just doesn’t have nearly the same impact as a live one. The Lawson customers in attendance haven’t had to wait so long. The last Lawson CUE was held just about a year ago in Boston. But this week, with no less than 21 different press releases talking about everything from the reinvention of the company under its new leadership to numerous technology and product announcements, Infor did a lot of catching up.

So given all these different announcements, what was the most important message I heard? I think it all boils down to the theme of the conference – Go Faster. And at the center of that theme is a fairly new group within Infor, the innovation team led by James Willey. What is this team all about? I think one of James’ team members summed it up pretty well.  “We have cool ideas and we’re going to build cool stuff. Then we throw it out to the different teams for them to pick it up.”

The reference to “different teams” has resulted from a long history of growth by acquisition. So there are different product teams, but with a renewed industry focus last year, it also means different industry teams. And there is not a simple one-to-one relationship between the two. It’s more like many-to-many relationships. A single industry is likely to be broken down into micro-verticals. The example Charles Phillips used on stage was in food and beverage. Dairies, meat processors, brewers and bakers (all target markets for Infor) share the common category of food and beverage, but are also each unique. On the other side of the equation, Infor has at least a couple of products that target food and beverage, including both Lawson M3 and Adage. So mapping solutions and teams is a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface.

This “cool stuff” includes

  • Intelligent Open Network (ION): lightweight middleware, providing common reporting and analysis, workflow, and business monitoring in one, consistent event-driven architecture (EDA)
  • Infor10 ION Workspace: a “consumer grade” user interface
  • Infor10 Motion: both mobile apps as well as a platform to develop them on
  • Local.ly (newly announced): a platform to deliver localized statutory reporting, accounting and tax content by country in a loosely coupled architecture

Through this “cool stuff” the innovation team powers a lot of the possible innovation in the industry-specific suites introduced with Infor10 about mid-year 2011.  And ION is at the core of a lot of the innovation. ION is based on much the same premise as Infor’s prior Open SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) was in the 2006 to 2009 timeframe in that it is meant to provide an environment that enables new functionality to be developed once and shared by multiple products in the Infor portfolio. However, unlike Infor’s Open SOA, which became very heavy and took years to develop, the new team has kept it lightweight and simple. It comes on 3 CD’s and can install in less than ten minutes.

But in keeping it lightweight, this forces some of the work back on the individual application development teams. And because Infor is in the applications business, not the middleware business, this means James’ innovation team doesn’t necessarily bring the innovation to directly to the market. The innovation team makes it available to the product and industry teams, who take it the final mile.

In order to take advantage of all that ION has to offer, the application has be what Infor calls ION enabled. I prefer to think of it as being IONized.

The individual application needs to provide a translation, sort of a mapping, to the Business Vault. Think of the Business Vault in ION as sort of a Rosetta Stone for applications. Infor still uses OAGIS (Open Application Group’s Integration Specification) as the standard template, along with its definitions of Business Object Documents (BODs). These BODs are really a combination of standard business objects (sales orders, purchase order, invoices, etc.) and processes (acknowledge a sales order, receive a purchase order, pay an invoice, etc.)

Infor’s strategic, go-forward products, which of course are based on newer technology, were the first to be IONized. But there are also a lot of customers on older legacy products. So the innovation team also built tools in ION to help IONize the older apps (e.g. MANMAN, older versions of BAAN, etc.). These tools essentially pre-process these business objects and then import them to ION, much the same way objects from non-Infor (3rd party) applications would be handled.

So there is work that must be done in order to take advantage of the innovation team’s efforts, but once that is done, the application teams get a lot of stuff for free. And that’s the real beauty of it – once the data in the application is exposed to ION, there’s lots that can be done with it, including complex event processing (CEP), making even older solutions exception driven. As data moves across, you can apply rules to it. If the cost changes by more than x%, notify certain roles or individuals. If the price change is too high, put an order on hold until it is approved. If the master data changes 5 times, you have 5 XML documents recording the changes and this can be tracked and reported.

If you recall, earlier I referred to the team as “fairly new.” In fact James (with his team) has been around and doing his “innovation” thing for a few years, ever since the decision was made to abandon the heavyweight Open SOA approach and stick to the Infor knitting, which was and is enterprise applications. But when Charles Phillips arrived at Infor James had a team of 8. Today it numbers around 110, a recognition of the power of a rapid application development mentality, coupled with a “develop once, re-use multiple times” approach and a willingness to invest in it.

The innovation team has a finger in all the hot topics today: cloud, mobility, social, the consumerization of IT, big data and embedded analytics. I say kudos to James and his team and encourage all the product and industry teams to bring the innovation that last mile, so Infor customers can finally keep pace with the fast-moving world of technology enablement.

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What SAP’s Technology Announcements Mean to the Businessperson

Posted by mintjutras on April 16, 2012   |   No Comments

On April 10,2012 SAP let loose with a barrage of announcements, all focused on development, data base and technology. It was enough to make a business person’s eyes glaze over as their attention turned away to more pressing business matters. So it is perfectly understandable that those business people should ignore SAP’s technology announcements. Sure it is…just the way it is understandable they should ignore the electrical wiring in their homes. After all, it’s behind the wall. They don’t really understand it. They can’t see it or feel it. They hardly even know it’s there. Until the lights or the appliances don’t work. Or until they want to install a hot tub or upgrade their lighting fixtures, and they can’t. Or until fixing problems with the wiring becomes exorbitantly expensive, leading them to believe it would be easier just to rip it all out and start over. Hmm…maybe it isn’t so wise to ignore database and technology after all.

You’re a Business Person. Why Should You Care?

Unless technology is your business, if you are managing a company, or even a division, a department or a group, you aren’t interested in technology for technology’s sake. Technology is only as valuable as the business value it brings. Business value can be measured in cost savings and performance improvements. Value can be derived from the ability to support data-driven decisions that lead to profitable growth, sustainable business and shareholder value. How do improvements in development tools and technology translate into delivering more business value? Let’s take a look at some of the underlying components of SAP’s announcements and answer the question, “Why should you care?”

Performance Counts in Data Management

One of the general announcements from SAP was the unveiling of a unified strategy for real-time data management. That statement itself won’t mean much to the average businessperson. But that’s not unusual. SAP’s management and many of its customer-facing staff often speak in terms that are only really meaningful to other software vendors and technology press and industry analysts. Or they speak in abstract terms leaving business people to figure out how that relates to their businesses and their problems. It is a problem they are attempting to remedy by listening more closely to their customers, but it’s still there.

“Real-time insight that combines our customer demand and marketing promotion with supply chain visibility on a rock-solid enterprise-class data platform is a must in our industry. With SAP HANA, we see tremendous opportunity to dramatically improve our enterprise data warehouse solutions… drastically reducing data latency and improving speed when we can return query results in 45 seconds versus waiting up to 20 minutes for empty results…“

Weijun Zhang, deputy director, Shanghai Volkswagen

The bottom line: SAP intends to become a leader in the database market by leveraging its own development efforts, as well as products and expertise it has acquired. Most of its customers probably don’t care whether it achieves this goal or not. Even those with a distinct preference for doing business with “market leaders” already chose SAP, at least in part because of its leadership in enterprise applications, not databases.

Over the past few years the company has invested a lot in its own in-memory database SAP HANA which is designed for both high speed and high volume. Even mind-numbing volumes of data will no longer present barriers and early benchmarks are producing processing speeds that are not just incrementally faster, but multiple orders of magnitude faster.

But SAP also acquired Sybase, and with Sybase came its own set of data base products. And the prior Business Objects acquisition also included enterprise information management (EIM) capabilities. Acquisitions often provide more cross sell and up sell opportunity for the acquiring company than bundled or embedded value for the customer. But a “unified strategy” means full integration of all these technologies and should eliminate layers of complexity. It should also mean customers will be able to run their existing systems more efficiently while also being able to take advantage of new capabilities and (hopefully) there won’t be a hefty price tag attached.

Ultimately SAP needs to deliver differentiated performance in order to achieve its database leadership goals. And its customers should benefit from added speed, the ability to handle unprecedented volumes of data, including a lot of types of data they might not even be considering today.

Whether You Know it or Not, You Probably Have a Data Problem

Most businesses today suffer from a data problem, yet might not necessarily recognize it as such.  But …

  • If you feel like you are buried under a mountain of data, or
  • If you know the data is there somewhere, but you aren’t sure where to look, or
  • Data is scattered all over the place, or
  • You have plenty of data, just not the right data, or
  • You can see the data but it’s just not in a format you can use, or
  • You lack the discipline to collect and store the data consistently, or
  • You have multiple versions of the same data, or
  • You don’t trust the data you have, or
  • All of the above

…then you have a data problem. You most likely have data in multiple applications, including reference and master data, as well as transactions. And you are starting to see the value in bringing other sources of data to play in decisions. A lot of this will be unstructured data from automated data collection, sensors, the Internet (e.g. Google alerts, news feeds, stock watches, etc.), from social media, captured conversations, etc. etc. etc. There has to be some “magic” that brings this altogether and makes it actually useful, “magic” that saves you time and effort in gathering and processing it for effective decision-making.

That’s the value of a unified strategy for real-time data management.

More and Better Apps

In presenting these new announcements, Steve Lucas, Global Executive Vice President and General Manager, SAP Database and Technology, posed the question, “What good is a new next-generation platform without new apps to take advantage of it?” SAP wants to be a database player, but it has been in the enterprise applications business long enough to realize the applications drive the demand for databases. And in turn, it is business needs that drive the demand for applications. Indeed, SAP’s announcements included an application development play, but a very specific one: mobile application development.

Enabling Mobile Application Development

 

Mobility was also a big factor in the Sybase acquisition, along with its SQL Anywhere product, used for mobile database management. For more than a year now, industry influencers have been hounding SAP to make it easier for communities of mobile application developers to develop apps with its mobility platform. SAP appears to have been listening. The announcements on April 10th included partnerships with Adobe (PhoneGap), Appcelerator and Sencha, as well as the intent to acquire Syclo, a provider of mobile enterprise apps.

For more information on these partnerships please see the full announcement: SAP Drives Openness and Choice for Millions of Mobile App Developers

Without going into detail that the typical business person won’t care about, each of the partnerships bring a little something different to the party, but the overall intent is to provide an open platform that supports third party development environments and tools. The goal is to have millions of developers developing millions of mobile apps. Why so many and why is this good news for business people? Isn’t part of the data problem a proliferation of enterprise applications? Yes and no.

Yes there has been a proliferation of enterprise applications and this proliferation can cause data redundancy that threatens data integrity. Just think how many different applications store data about your customers. Do they all use the same master files? Do you know if two divisions have the same customer? But just because you have multiple applications doesn’t mean the right people have direct access to data needed for decision-making. And therefore, no, even with all these enterprise applications, you still don’t have enough data and enough access.

Let’s face it, most senior management – those making decisions critical to company profitability and growth – don’t have direct access to applications like ERP, CRM or analytics. If you are one of these executives, chances are you rely on subordinates or a surrogate, thinking that is faster or better. You don’t have the cycles to learn/use/directly access solutions.  Part of the problem is that these applications are multi-purpose and multi-function. Perhaps with more intuitive user interfaces today they don’t require a lot of training in terms of navigation, but users do need to understand the structure and the processes involved.

Contrast these general purpose, large scale applications to your typical mobile applications. They are small, easy to download, easy to understand and easy to use. They are designed to perform a single function and solve a specific problem. So if each is focused and purpose-built, you need a lot of them to do everything you need to do.

And of course everyone has a mobile device these days. Interestingly enough, as we become more unwired, we also become more tethered to our work. We are always connected whether we are traveling for work, at our child’s soccer game or even on vacation. So now that we’re connected but remote, it becomes much more of an inconvenience to rely on someone else for access to data when we need to take action or make a decision and move on quickly.

If you also consider the fact that these mobile devices can be addictive then you have created the perfect storm where demand for access to data, the desire to solve a particular problem and the acceleration of application development converge.

The acquisition of Syclo further emphasizes the focus on delivering mobile apps. While Syclo does have its own mobile platform, make no mistake, for SAP this acquisition is all about the applications. Syclo not only brings industry-specific solutions, but also domain expertise in bringing enterprise asset management (EAM), field service, inventory management and approvals and workflow to mobile devices.

For more information on the acquisition please see the full announcement:

SAP to Acquire Syclo, Extends Leadership in Mobilizing the Enterprise

Summary

SAP has stated that its vision for database and technology is to be “the leader in business technology and data management innovation and help its customers to maximize business results with minimal IT landscape disruption.” This should be music to the ears of a businessperson. The key phrases are business results and minimal disruption. While there is so much talk about “disruptive technology” today, it is important to distinguish this from business disruption. A disruptive technology might prompt you to change the way you do things, presumably in a good way. But it should never disrupt your ability to conduct business.

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Exact America: Emerging from Stealth, Repackaged

Posted by mintjutras on March 27, 2012   |   No Comments

Last week I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Exact America team. Exact has been pretty quiet the last couple of years, so in case you aren’t familiar with the company, here’s a quick summary:

Exact America provides business solutions (think extended ERP) for Manufacturing/Distribution small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Its parent, Exact is a Dutch company that has been around since 1984 when it was started by a few students in a garage. As a result Exact has always related to and served entrepreneurial businesses, and these often start out very small. In fact the Americas team targets SMBs with 2 to 250 employees. They do that with 4 different product lines:

  • Exact Globe is an ERP for project-based manufacturers, distributors and service providers. It includes Integrated Financials/Business management software, as well as Web-based field project management, integrated with project accounting. Also sold by Exact worldwide, it includes support for multiple legislations, language and multicurrency for international sites.
  • Exact Macola comes in two flavors: Exact Manufacturing Pro (for manufacturers requiring full shop floor control) and Distribution Pro (for light manufacturers, distributors and service providers). Both versions offer eCommerce, payroll and warehouse management as well.
  • Exact JobBOSS is packaged as management software for job shops, make-to-order and contract manufacturers. It provides these small “to order” shops with the ability to quote jobs, track labor and material, and control shipping, invoicing and job-costing processes.
  • Exact MAX reaches down into the small business sector as a Material Requirements Planning (MRP) add-on, to be run in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics GP and QuickBooks or QuickBooks Enterprise Solution.  Exact MAX targets regulated discrete manufacturing companies in segments such as medical devices and aerospace, with its serial and lot tracing capabilities.

But there is also another very “horizontal” Exact product offering, known as Synergy. It had been quite awhile since I had last gotten a briefing from Exact and in fact, at the time (maybe 2007-2008 perhaps?) Synergy was the center point of discussion. Even back then Synergy was kind of hard to categorize. I remember walking out of the briefing thinking I wish I had it as a tool to manage my research projects. But it managed projects without being a project management application. It could also do customer relationship management, but it wasn’t CRM.  When asked what Synergy did, Exact would likely respond with, “What do you want it to do?”

That made it very flexible, but I suspect it also made it very hard to market. And something that is hard to market is also usually hard to sell. In reality, Synergy was being sold as a tool. And SMBs tend not to buy tools. They prefer to buy business applications that solve specific problems.

So now Exact is taking a different approach. In fact I would characterize this and much of what they have been doing the last couple of years as “re-packaging.” For example, a Total Quality Management offering was recently released as part of a JobBOSS update, and a CRM template is available for Macola users.  Expect some big announcements in the near future regarding this with the outcome being the transformation of Synergy from a tool into an application. Other re-packaging efforts include the two Macola products noted above: Macola Manufacturing Pro and Distribution Pr. Macola used to be sold as individual modules, with configurations tailored for each prospect or customer and priced accordingly. Now those same modules are available as two different “bundles” and the pricing complexity has been shrunk down to an all-inclusive per user price. Ultimately this makes the pricing and selling much simpler. Exact has also added a Quick Start program to make installation and implementation easier. And Macola is available “on demand” in a hosted environment, allowing customers who don’t want the burden of infrastructure on site to take advantage of a cloud deployment.

These changes were all made with customer satisfaction in mind. Exact is not setting out to position itself as the best bleeding-edge technological solution, but rather as the most trusted solution provider. Recognizing that a satisfied customer is not enough to guarantee customer references or retention, Exact’s goal is to create “extremely satisfied” customers and to become the customer’s trusted advisor. With a very long track record in the markets they serve, and a good stable of long-time, customers, loyalty and referrals are the ultimate goal.

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Is it “SaaS” or is it “Cloud”? But Wait – Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Posted by mintjutras on March 26, 2012   |   1 Comment

You would think with all the talk about SaaS and cloud today that by now we would all be talking about the same thing. But in spite of, or perhaps because of the huge volume of discussion around SaaS and cloud computing, there remains much confusion over the terminology. Many use the terms “cloud” and “SaaS” interchangeably, but there are some important differences. So let’s distinguish between the two:

  • Cloud refers to access to computing, software, storage of data over a network (generally the Internet.) You may have purchased a license for the software and installed it on your own computers or those owned and managed by another company, but your access is through the Internet and therefore through the “cloud,” whether private or public.
  • SaaS (short for Software as a Service) is exactly what is implied by the acronym. Software is delivered only as a service. It is not delivered on a CD or other media to be loaded on your own (or another’s) computer. It generally is paid for on a subscription basis and does not reside on your computers at all.

All SaaS is cloud computing, but not all cloud computing is SaaS.

What about “On Demand?”

In the past I personally have used SaaS and “on demand” interchangeably. However the inclusion of this moniker in many product names today has led me to think I need to stop implying they are synonymous. Many companies that want to check the cloud box will append “On Demand” to their product name. But it doesn’t always mean the same thing. The use of the qualifier “on demand” can mean anything from a hosted model to loading and shipping it on an “appliance” that is monitored and managed remotely, to a single-tenant or a multi-tenant SaaS offering.

Even the difference between hosting and SaaS remains a source of confusion. I am always reminded of that when a survey respondent who I know is running a SaaS solution (because that is the only way their solution can be deployed) tells me they would not consider SaaS, but they would consider a solution hosted by their ERP solution provider.

I’ve cautioned in the past against confusing the way you purchase software with the way you deploy it. Refer back to that post for more information, but in short, in a hosted environment, the software is usually licensed, just as it would be if it were going to be run on-premise by the company who licenses it. But someone else is taking care of it. When the software is then accessed through a web browser, it becomes difficult for the end user to tell whether it is hosted or SaaS.

Hosted models are far from new. In fact they pre-date the existence of the Internet. Early hosting was called “time sharing” (and it had nothing to do with vacation homes).  The hardware resided “someplace else” and the software was accessed through a modem, via shared or (preferably) dedicated telephone lines. This was quite popular in the early to mid 1980’s until the price of hardware came down low enough to be affordable for small to mid-size companies.

But let’s say the solution is deployed in a SaaS model. If the solution is offered as a service, there are indeed different flavors SaaS. And here is where the arguments start. Some analysts, experts and industry observers insist their definition of SaaS is the only “true” definition. Most that insist on “true” SaaS also insist on a SaaS environment which is multi-tenant.

Multi-tenant SaaS: Multiple companies use the same instance of hosted software; configuration settings, company and role-based access personalize business processes and protect data security.

Single-tenant (or Multi-instance) SaaS: Each company is given its own instance of the (hosted) software, but may share common services, such as an integration platform, and security.

The truth is most consumers of SaaS enterprise applications don’t necessarily understand the difference between multi-tenant and single-tenant (or multi-instance) and may prefer the latter over the former for a variety of reasons.

The most significant difference between the two of these flavors lies in the frequency and flexibility of delivering upgrades, and the ability to customize the solution. Many assume that little or no customization is allowed in a SaaS solution. The general perception is that vendors are more likely to support customization and less likely to force upgrades in a single-tenant solutions. But don’t make this assumption because each vendor addresses the situation differently. Some single-tenant solutions discourage or forbid customization. Some multi-tenant solutions allow customization.

So instead of asking whether it is hosted or SaaS, or whether it is single-tenant or multi-tenant, determine first your requirements and secondly ask questions that will help you choose the solution that is best for you.

Do you think you need customization now, or that you might in the future? Instead of simply asking whether the solution is single or multi-tenant, ask what the policy is for customization. Ask how upgrades are delivered. How frequently? Are they “scheduled?” Or do they happen transparently? If they happen automatically are you able to selectively opt in to turning new features and functions on? Or might you be surprised by some new features or behavior that you are not expecting or prepared for?

These are just some of the questions that can be useful in deciding on purchase and deployment options. For a full analysis, see a full discourse on The Pros and Cons of SaaS ERP.

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SAP responds to the 3 V’s: Increasing Volume, Velocity and Variety of Data

Posted by mintjutras on March 23, 2012   |   1 Comment

Last week I attended one of the SAP Insider events, the one that combines Financials (Financials2012), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC2012) and Human Resource Management (HR2012). I have to admit that HR was the odd man out here. I work with the GRC, financial applications and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) teams at SAP, but I only watch the HCM space from the periphery. That may change over the next year if companies that are, from my perspective, largely “ERP vendors” continue to acquire and invest in this space. For those who have been living under a rock for the last few months, SAP recently acquired HCM solution provider SuccessFactors and Oracle acquired talent management vendor Taleo. Sanjay Poonen (@spoonen), President & Corporate Officer, SAP Global Solutions made an interesting comment about this acquisition in his opening keynote to all three groups. He said that SAP had “followed our customers, who voted through their wallets.” I believe he was referring to both HCM as well as movement to “the cloud.”

Sanjay kicked off the event highlighting a key concern of many business executives today: the difficulty in keeping up with the increasing volume, velocity and variety of data. Actually Sanjay referred to it as “Big Data” although I suspect that phrase has not completely infiltrated the vocabulary of most top executives… at least not yet. I think there is still an education process that needs to happen before many will understand they have a data problem.

There is no doubt that anyone running a business today understands that both the speed of business and the speed of change, hence the velocity continues to accelerate. Nobody would argue that customers are more empowered and connected and expect service instantly and this, together with continued globalization increases the volume of data required. But have top executives really come to understand that data required for planning and decision-making also expands beyond the traditional boundaries of data that is collected and stored in enterprise applications? Some have, but many, particularly those in smaller companies, have not. This is in part impacted by the “social business” movement. CFOs represent the largest target market for Financials and GRC and CFOs are not known to be the most “social” folks on the planet.

That said, even the increasing volume of traditional data might be enough to prompt action. This was the case for Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, highlighted in Sanjay’s keynote. The merger of the two companies resulted in 8 mini companies, disjointed data, fragmented processes. All of this was going on during a financial crisis. The goal was one version of the truth on an integrated platform to support integrated business planning. Of course the reason Harcourt Houghton Mifflin was featured in Sanjay’s opener was because their solution to this problem was SAP’s Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) solution.

Harcourt Houghton Mifflin needed to get alignment among stakeholders. According to the video played, they were “looking for something easier to use than Hyperion.” They needed to transform the planning process and they feel EPM 10.0 changed the nature of the way people manage performance across finance and operations. The real power comes not from analytics as a separate tool but from embedding them directly into the applications wherever they are needed.

And therefore the one big announcement from SAP during the event serves to emphasize the convergence of these 3 V’s: volume, velocity and variety. The announcement was that BPC is now running on HANA, SAP’s answer to the “big data” problem. According to Sanjay, “The power of SAP HANA enables financial professionals to perform faster planning, query, reporting and analysis, profitability and simulation in real-time. As a result, SAP helps companies accelerate period-end closing and smarter decision-making — faster than other vendor offerings available today.”  So the message transcends the annual planning, budgeting and forecasting exercise and applies equally to the ongoing financial consolidation and reporting exercise.

However, it is only the Netweaver version of BPC that is powered by HANA (there is also a Microsoft version) and for this to work, the customer needs to be running a version of BW on HANA. The reality is that the version of BW sitting on HANA is still in what SAP calls “ramp up” (i.e. early adopter or what other vendors might call beta testing). So customers interested in BPC on HANA either need to be in this ramp up program, or they need to wait until it is generally available. SAP is hoping that it will exit ramp up by Sapphire in May.

I am hoping to do a more in depth analysis on this once customers are running live. In the meantime, the education process around big data and data management strategies needs to continue. This is more than SAP just creating the need in the mind of their customers and prospects for the technology solution it has developed. This is a real problem for many CFOs today. Many simply don’t understand that technology has advanced to the point of providing a solution.

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Infor’s Inforce Everywhere Completes Salesforce’s 360 Degree View of the Customer

Posted by mintjutras on March 12, 2012   |   No Comments

 

Today (March 12, 2012) Infor announced general availability of Inforce Everywhere. Built natively on Force.com and ‘ION-ized’ with Infor’s lightweight middleware platform, Inforce Everywhere brings the back office data from selected Infor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions safely and securely onto the screens of Salesforce.

While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution providers have been touting a 360o view of the customer for over a decade, this complete view is actually impossible just using CRM. Shipments, invoices, accounts receivable and returns are the domain of ERP, not CRM. Many companies today would like to turn sales reps into true account managers, but allowing a sales representative full access to ERP is enough to cause any Chief Financial Officer (CF)O) heartburn. By making this type of data accessible directly, selectively and securely through CRM, Infor helps sales reps really manage accounts without purchasing additional ERP seats and without opening the floodgate to ERP.

Infor’s Reseller Agreement

Fast facts:

Infor will provide support to customers that license Salesforce via Infor

Products that Infor will resell include:

  • Sales Cloud, Enterprise Edition
  • Service Cloud, Enterprise Edition
  • Salesforce Sales/Service Cloud related products such as Mobile, Portal, Sandbox, API calls, etc.

The INFOR:SALESFORCE Partnership

The partnership between Infor and Salesforce was originally announced at Dreamforce on September 1, 2011. The intent to build and deliver Inforce Everywhere was part of a three-way announcement including:

  • Three new Inforce applications including Inforce Everywhere, Inforce Ordering and Inforce Marketing
  • A reseller agreement which also extends to Infor’s partners
  • Salesforce investment in Infor

In a way, this partnership is just one of many Salesforce.com is striking these days in expanding beyond the boundaries of CRM and evangelizing its vision of the Social Enterprise. But the deal with Infor stands out in a couple of ways.

First of all the reseller agreement is very unique.  Infor has the ability to resell Salesforce Sales and Service cloud licenses as well as the native applications they develop on Force.com.  Salesforce.com has a very robust ISV ecosystem of partners developing and selling solutions that include Force.com, but only a select few have the right to position and sell Sales and Service cloud as well. This means Infor takes the order, delivers the product (as a service) and provides front line support. This reseller agreement also extends to the Infor channel, which is being actively developed and expanded. Partners can resell the portfolio but will only be allowed to provide implementation services if certified to do so.

Salesforce.com’s investment in Infor is not unique and signals the company’s interest in expanding Force.com solutions and its influence beyond the realm of the front office. FinancialForce.com (accounting applications) and Box.net (content management and storage) are two other examples, but this is the first and only major ERP company that Salesforce has invested in.

But the products being developed are perhaps most important to both Salesforce’s and Infor’s existing customers. In the world of enterprise applications, partnerships can be very easy to form but often never move far beyond the original fanfare of the announcement. Very often these partnerships are just referral-based. They are easy to form, but just as easy to walk away from. A reseller agreement further cements the relationship, but the bond truly forms when solutions are developed and integrated. The two most important factors are moving quickly and adding real value.

Inforce Everywhere has been developed and is being delivered in just over six months from formalization of the agreement and new releases are already planned for Q3 2012 and Q2 2013. It effectively marries the front and back office, exposing data from ERP to the Sales and Service Cloud. The other two Inforce products are planned for release in Q4 2012 (Inforce Ordering) and Q1 2013 (Inforce Marketing).

Infor is also introducing Salesforce.com’s vision of the social enterprise to the ERP world with Chatter in a way that makes sense to its ERP customers. By exposing data in ERP to users of Salesforce, Inforce Everywhere is encouraging a dialogue between the front office and the back office and Chatter will enable it.

How Does this Add Value for Customers?

Many companies today talk about the need for a 360o view of their customers. But getting that complete view is hard and allowing a sales rep access to this level of visibility is even harder. Yet in those businesses that thrive on developing close relationships with their customers, the role of the sales rep must be transformed into that of an account manager. By managing an account, you provide better service, generating customer satisfaction and loyalty, which in turn generates more sales and revenue.

To truly manage an account you need visibility to customer history, outstanding orders, shipments, open accounts receivable, payment history, and service performance. While account management and customer service are engagement-based, this history is transaction-based. Transactions don’t exist in a system of engagement (CRM); they exist in a system of record (ERP). Yet how many companies do you know that are willing to purchase an ERP seat for every sales rep? How many CFO’s do you know that are willing to allow sales reps open access to areas like accounts receivable?

Access to accounts receivable in ERP usually means access to all accounts receivable. While this is not always the case and role and context-based security is more common in ERP solutions today, the implementation of this level of security is not yet pervasive. At the same time, access to customers, orders and quotes through a CRM system generally is restricted to those customers “owned by” the sales reps. So doesn’t it make sense to offer this level of visibility through the existing structure of a CRM?

That’s what Inforce Everywhere does. It exposes that detail that already exists in ERP about customers, shipments, returns, invoices and open balances and makes it visible through secure inquiries within CRM. But the sales rep/account manager is confined to his or her own customers/accounts and doesn’t need to consume an ERP user license. There is no need to purchase seats in ERP to gain access to this data. Infor customers need only subscribe to Inforce Everywhere, which is priced at $30 per user per month.

Some of the data shared between ERP and CRM is shared bi-directionally, while some is single direction. For example, data about sales territories, accounts and contacts is shared bi-directionally. Products, system codes, quotes, orders, shipments, invoices, accounts receivables, return material authorizations are single direction – data in ERP is shared with CRM.

Added value is also derived from Inforce Everywhere in a multi-company scenario. While business units or divisions that cross international boundaries must be established as different legal entities in ERP for financial reporting and compliance purposes, often CRM must have a view across these entities from a corporate, global perspective. Global accounts may be managed across legal entities and international boundaries, so it is important to have visibility worldwide. While this seems simple enough on the surface, delivering this is not so simple. Inforce Everywhere can serve as the link, establishing an optional one-to-many relationship between CRM and ERP. This multi-company scenario will be supported in Q3 2012.

Which ERP Solutions and How?

Inforce Everywhere is currently available for Infor10 ERP Enterprise (LN), Infor10 Distribution iBusiness (A+) and Infor10 Distribution Business (SX.e). XA, Syteline and Visual are planned for release next quarter, followed by S21, Sun Systems, LX, (Lawson) M3 and Adage before the end of the year. Additional Infor ERP applications are planned to be rolled out later.

How is Infor able to produce this steady cadence of releases? Infor10 ION, Infor’s lightweight, middleware platform, is the key to connectivity between ERP, CRM and any other ION-enabled application, eliminating the need for individual point-to-point integration. Think of it as a layer of meta data that can connect Salesforce to potentially any or all of the Infor ERP back office solutions. Each solution need only to expose data to the meta data layer to make the connection, so any ION-ized Infor solution is easily connected.

Key Takeaways

Salesforce has slowly been infiltrating the customer bases of many of the ERP solution providers, especially those that have targeted the mid-market. While ERP solutions have continued to broaden, touching more and more functional areas within an enterprise, they have largely been viewed as back-office solutions. Satisfying the needs of the sales department has often been an afterthought or largely ignored in ERP implementations. As a result, sales departments have sought out their own solutions, sometimes with the blessing of the Information Technology (IT) department and sometimes doing an end run around IT. A cloud-based solution like Salesforce has provided a very viable alternative.

While it is not clear exactly how much overlap there is today between the Infor and Salesforce customers, one would have to assume it would be substantial. That overlap will be target number one for Inforce Everywhere and should be an easy sell.

Where there is no overlap, putting Salesforce Sales and Service cloud portfolio in the hands of the direct and indirect sales force provides them with more to offer the customer. Sure they could buy CRM directly from Salesforce, but the introduction of Inforce Everywhere keeps the sales department happy, but implicitly keeps them in the fold in terms of sharing data and added visibility.

 

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SAP Business One Heads Into the Cloud

Posted by mintjutras on March 6, 2012   |   2 Comments

Many have their heads in the cloud today. This goes for both individuals, as well as companies. The interest in Software as a Service (SaaS) has been steadily increasing over the past several years, led by enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and elements of Human Capital Management (HCM) such as recruitment, talent management and benefits administration. Yet broader applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which provide the transactional system of record on which a business is based, have been slower to warm to the idea. Today that is changing and as many weigh the pros and cons of SaaS ERP, the advantages appear to be winning.

On March 6, 2012, SAP announced that SAP Business One, characterized as its ‘most affordable ERP solution for small and growing businesses’, is now available “on-demand.” Previously only available as a licensed on-premise or hosted solution, this added deployment option launches Business One as a multi-tenant SaaS solution. The On-Demand version is available now in 18 countries (more to be added later) through selected partners. Subscriptions are competitively priced and offered on a monthly, named-user basis.

Responding to Market Opportunity

The fact that ERP has lagged behind other enterprise software with respect to SaaS deployment has led to conjecture. Has lack of acceptance of SaaS ERP resulted from few options being available? Or were few options made available because of lack of interest? While that may have been a valid debate in years gone by, the resistance to SaaS ERP appears to be breaking down while interest in traditional on-premise solutions seems to be waning.

The Mint Jutras 2011 ERP Solution Study, with over 900 qualified responses, found SaaS deployment is now more likely to be considered than traditional hosting options. Yet even more stunning is the decline in the willingness to consider on-premise deployments. A few years back the percentage willing to consider traditional deployments would have been in the 90’s while recent research pegs it at 56%. And the comparison is even more dramatic when we compare “World Class” ERP implementations where we see SaaS heavily favored over licensed options:

  • SaaS/On-Demand: 62%
  • Hosted by ERP vendor: 44%
  • Hosted by an independent 3rd party: 35%
  • Traditional licensed on-premise: 38%

Mint Jutras defines “World Class” ERP implementations as the top 15% in terms of results measured, progress achieved against company-specific goals and current performance. These are the implementations that have delivered the most business benefit to the enterprise, whether it is large or small. Installing ERP is a means to an end, and not the end itself.

So demand is definitely on the rise, and so is supply. With the launch of SAP Business One On-Demand, SAP is now one of several major ERP vendors taking to the cloud applications that are already well established as on-premise solutions. However, in evaluating these transitions, it is important to understand all the options as well as the limitations.

Often these transformations resemble hosted solutions more closely than they do software as a service. Some industry observers insist that a cloud offering be multi-tenant (along with other qualifications) before they will regard it as “true SaaS” and even go so far as to accuse vendors who offer single-tenant solutions (also known as multi-instance) of “cloud washing.” With its multi-tenancy for Business One, SAP avoids this label. But not all companies seeking a cloud-based solution want the same thing. It is important to look beyond these labels, understand your requirements and make sure they are met.

Not SAP’s Only Cloud Story

Often meeting customer requirements takes experience and practice. Note that this is not SAP’s first or only foray into the cloud. In fact, its cloud heritage dates back to 2007 when it officially launched its first SaaS solution, SAP Business ByDesign. Like Business One, ByDesign is part of SAP’s small to midsize enterprise (SME) product portfolio. Unlike SAP Business One, ByDesign is and has always been a SaaS only solution. Originally SAP segmented its SME portfolio only by company size, either by annual revenues or by number of employees.  Today SAP uses a slightly different positioning scheme. Business One is still viewed as the most affordable and recommended for small and growing businesses whether these companies are seeking an on-premise or on-demand solution. Business ByDesign, offered exclusively in a SaaS environment, is positioned as the best solution for mid-size companies looking for SaaS ERP. SAP Business All-in-One, which shares the same ERP as the Business Suite, is a scalable solution for mid-size companies looking to stay on premise. However, the earlier positioning by company size, combined with the assumption that SaaS was largely for small companies, often led to speculation by industry observers that ByDesign would cannibalize sales of Business One.

This never proved to be the case, in part because ByDesign was still a very “young” product and in part because SAP delayed unleashing its considerable selling and marketing engines to power sales. You see, unlike SAP Business One On-Demand, ByDesign was not originally released as a multi-tenant solution. While this did not adversely affect the value proposition, it did negatively impact the economics for SAP. It was not until Feature Pack 2.5 was released in mid-2010 that multi-tenancy was introduced, allowing SAP to reduce its internal cost by a factor of 20.

In the meantime, SAP had also announced other “on-demand” offerings, including what it refers to as “Line of Business” applications, as well as Business Intelligence (BI) On-Demand. While not originally the case, through evolution and performance improvements, ByDesign was announced as “the” platform of development for these on-demand solutions as well. SAP was getting more and more serious about its cloud offerings.

In December 2011, SAP went one step further and announced its acquisition of SuccessFactors, a SaaS-only HCM solution. However, it was quite clear, even at the outset, that this announcement was more about cloud than it was about HCM.  Amid the hoopla of the $3.4 billion acquisition, there was also speculation that ByDesign was dead. That prediction appears to be far from true. No, the latest cloud offering, Business One On-Demand, does not use the ByDesign platform but given the breadth of the entire SAP product portfolio, there appears to be room for multiple offerings and more than one platform.

So what does all this history have to do with Business One On-Demand? It’s really about the culture. Amidst all the merger and acquisition fanfare, there has been repeated reference to the ‘cloud DNA’ of SuccessFactors and the appointment of its CEO Lars Dalgaard, to take responsibility for all SAP cloud offerings. When an enterprise application has traditionally only been sold with an up-front license, like Business One has, shifting to a subscription based selling is a tough transition for the sales team (and sometimes Wall Street) to make. SAP management appears to “get this” and is proactively taking steps to address this. The first step last year was a conscious shift to sell all SME business through channels.  The acquisition of SuccessFactors and the appointment of Mr. Dalgaard to oversee cloud offerings is a second and important one.

Proposed Value Proposition

So what is the value proposition offered by SAP Business One On-Demand? In many respects, it is the same value proposition of any SaaS ERP offering. Survey participants in the Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study cited a wide variety of benefits to SaaS deployment, but three primary themes emerged: lower costs, more upgrades and the ability to support remote employees and locations.

Costs

Survey respondents anticipate lower total cost of ownership (TCO), smaller start-up costs and fewer Information Technology (IT) resources required in a SaaS environment. In order to deliver these benefits, SAP simply needs to price Business One On-Demand competitively. While SAP is not announcing the price publicly, (remember it intends to sell through its channel so prices are suggested) targets shared privately appear to be competitively priced and will necessarily fluctuate somewhat depending on geography.

There are still some that feel the cost of SaaS ERP is really not that much more inexpensive than on-premise, particularly over the longer term. Of course, this does not take into consideration avoiding the cost of hardware or internal IT resources to manage the installation. But even if you ignore the hardware factor, there is one advantage of purchasing SaaS ERP from a vendor that offers both SaaS and on-premise. That solution provider should be able to draw an apples-to-apples price comparison between the two deployment options.

SAP and its partners should be able to assist in helping the prospective customer in determining the break-even point purely from a software, services and maintenance stand-point. But don’t forget hardware, infrastructure costs and remember, often the larger costs from a TCO perspective are the soft costs of internal resources.

One cost concern expressed by 47% of survey respondents was that of escalating costs. What’s to prevent a software company from exorbitantly raising prices at the end of the term of the initial contract? Because SAP does not sell Business One On-Demand directly, it cannot guarantee, with absolute certainty that the price will not increase beyond reasonable expectations, but is relying on the competitive nature of its channel to keep escalating costs in check.

Upgrades

While lower TCO was the most frequently cited benefit of SaaS ERP, a close second was the reduced cost and effort of upgrades (48% of survey respondents). The availability of more leading edge technology through more frequent updates was also a significant factor for 39%. The frequency and method of upgrades do vary from vendor to vendor. Those with SaaS-only solutions, developed exclusively for an on-demand environment might have a bit of an advantage here in that they are not tied to a prescribed release cycle. Those which offer the same solution on-premise and on-demand may not be as fluid in the delivery of innovation. Existing customers of on-premise solutions often prefer a longer release cycle since the upgrade process can be disruptive. This disruption is minimized in a SaaS environment because much of the burden of the upgrade process is assumed by the SaaS solution provider.

SAP does not expect to accelerate the upgrade release cycle of Business One simply to compete on this front, but also points to the maturity of the product relative to newer products developed for SaaS only. With over 34,000 installations, the product is indeed mature. However, even mature products must continue to evolve to meet new business challenges, so SAP isn’t entirely off the hook for keeping pace with innovation. SAP intends to continue to deliver upcoming innovations including enhanced support and application management via its Remote Support Platform (RSP), enhanced mobile integration and complete partner initiated lifecycle management.

Indeed SAP is beginning to see the convergence of the three pillars of innovation it has been touting for the past two years: cloud, mobility and in-memory.  Many of the new mobile apps developed both by SAP and its partners, now (or soon to be) available through an “apps store” will have as much relevance for SMEs as for large enterprises. And in February 2012 SAP announced through “new analytics powered by SAP HANA for the SAP® Business One application and SAP HANA, Edge edition, SMEs will be able to leverage powerful in-memory technology from SAP.” The goal is to enable decision-making, dramatically increasing the speed of existing processes and speeding up access to potentially large amounts of data.

Remote Access

And finally, the third overall theme in terms of the appeal of SaaS ERP is in the support of distributed environments. There are several factors at play here. First of all, operating from multiple locations is no longer an issue only for large enterprises. The Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study found the average number of operating locations supported by ERP in small companies (annual revenues less than $25 million) was 2.5. This average grew to 5.5 as annual revenues grew to the $25 to $250 million range.

Secondly, large enterprises are often comprised of a network of small to mid-size divisions or subsidiaries. SAP has long referred to this scenario as an integrated business network. A very common scenario is to have a two-tier ERP strategy where one ERP is used at corporate (often called administrative ERP) and a second standard (often referred to as operating ERP) is used for units/divisions/locations. Because of its dominance in large enterprises, SAP is often the administrative ERP. While many other ERP vendors will make a concerted effort to interface to SAP at this level, nobody is better positioned to do this than SAP itself with one of its SME products.

Ninety percent (90%) of companies surveyed (and 97% of World Class ERP implementations) have defined standards for ERP implementations. What better way to control the standardization of solutions and processes than through SaaS deployment? In fact 36% of survey respondents cited the ease of remote access for a distributed workforce as a key advantage of SaaS and 27% noted the ease of bringing up remote sites.

Handling the Perception of a Down-Side

While SaaS ERP is gaining in acceptance, there is still a significant segment of the population who will not consider this deployment option and even those that will consider it still have some lingering concerns. Only 10% of the Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study indicated they had no concerns whatsoever in considering SaaS ERP.

In addition to the concern over the possibility of escalating costs, 46% expressed fear of down-time risk and unpredictable performance. Although a viable concern, due diligence can significantly reduce risk here. Prospective customers should ask for historical performance and they should also ask for guarantees of up-time, although appropriate caveats for natural or even man-made disasters may be negotiated in. Glenn Rhodes, IT Manager, DRIFIRE, a manufacturer of flame resistant clothing stated, ““Before we moved Business One into the cloud, I was concerned about performance impact but the impact has been minimal. Often you don’t see a difference at all.”

But the top concern, even with so much business being transacted over the World Wide Web, is still one of security, with 58% of survey participants expressing this concern. Mint Jutras would agree everyone should be concerned over security. But you should be concerned regardless of deployment option. And if you are a small company, without a dedicated IT security expert on board, chances are you assume more risk than you would in a SaaS environment, particularly one that has successfully completed an annual SAS 70 Type II audit. The SAS 70 certification was developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to annually audit the effectiveness of operations, controls  and safeguards to host and process data. Indeed another 29% of respondents admitted that part of the appeal of SaaS was the comfort of leaving security and other IT issues to the experts.

Which brings us to the final and very important factor in considering consuming Business One as a service: Who is the partner that will actually be delivering the service? What is the partner’s track record? Fully assess its ability to deliver services.

A New Kind of Partner

With the introduction of Business One On-Demand, SAP is also introducing a new kind of partner. In the past, a typical Business One partner would be an ERP specialist, a company engaged in selling and servicing an ERP solution. Some also might have provided a hosting option. This is the type of partner that will be most likely to see an opportunity to expand their offerings into the cloud. Some (not all) existing partners may seek certification by SAP to deliver the cloud option. Often these partners specialize in extending the Business One solution. In these cases, SAP will insure that existing on-premise add-ons will run in the cloud without disruption.

In addition to these existing partners, new strategic partners will include telecom service providers. These types of companies are experts in hosting, cloud infrastructure, billing and support. Generally speaking they are not experts in ERP. Some may decide to invest in building an ERP practice, others may not. Those that do not will most likely be partnering with one or more of the existing Business One partners who are experts in ERP and Business One, but have no experience or desire to provide this cloud infrastructure and support.

Key Takeaways

SAP sees the introduction of SAP Business One On-Demand more as a bid for new-named business, although it will be possible for existing Business One customers to make the transition to the cloud. SAP’s Business One business has been steadily growing and the market for ERP in small companies is far from saturated.

On balance the advantages of a SaaS environment for ERP seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Cost savings, including TCO, startup costs and cost of IT staff can be substantial. Even if the subscription cost equals the cost of software and maintenance over time, there are still the savings achieved by eliminating the purchase or continued maintenance of hardware.  If you have no IT staff today, there is no need to hire any. If you have good IT staff on board, let them engage in more strategic, value-add activities than routine maintenance without sacrificing the ability to take advantage of upgrades and innovation.

If you operate in a distributed environment, the advantages of a SaaS environment can be considerable in bringing standardization across the enterprise, providing access to remote employees and in bringing remote sites up quickly.

As with any selection of ERP, fit and functionality should be foremost in the decision-making process, along with ease of use and TCO which will directly impact the return on investment (ROI). So it is still important to put Business One and the partners selling it through their paces during the evaluation process. Make a careful choice that is right for your business.

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Infor Takes ERP Support to the Xtreme

Posted by mintjutras on February 14, 2012   |   No Comments

On January 31, 2012 Infor announced a new customer support program called Infor Xtreme. The program, which offers a choice of three different plans, consists of services that are specialized, personalized, social and proactive. It also includes new supporting technology and perhaps most importantly, it includes real people. Here we explore the why, what, when and how Infor intends to deliver extreme support.

Why?

This new program has in large part been prompted by Infor’s new leadership. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Charles Phillips was hired in October 2010. In a recent interview with IDG News, Chris Kanaracus asked what he initially saw as needing to be fixed when he arrived at Infor. Mr. Phillips responded, “The priority for me was reorienting resources into products and away from other areas. We basically reduced our expense in the back office and shifted all of that into product development. I think that the company had a stable customer base, but hadn’t delivered enough innovation and change. Some customers tend to view that as a good thing, but I think you’re better off shipping a lot of innovation even if it means a little disruption.”

Well, if you are delivering innovation and change, and expecting some disruption as a result, you better be prepared to handle it. As a result, Infor is redefining its support, with the goal of serving its customers better and exceeding what has become known as traditional product support.

The new support plans themselves are not disruptive. Customers are not required to sign new agreements. Existing standard support will automatically be converted to the Infor Xtreme plan and those with standard plans plus 24X7 Critical Incident Support (CIS) will convert to Xtreme Premium.

These plans offer more support, not less.  Xtreme Elite plans will be offered as a third, additional option, adding even more features. Pricing doesn’t change unless the customer decides to upgrade from its current plan.

What do ERP customers want?

While Infor’s motivation appears to have the customers’ best interest in mind, how do ERP customers and prospects feel about support these days? The most recent Mint Jutras ERP Solution Study collected data from over 900 survey respondents to rank the priority of different selection criteria in evaluating and selecting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, which represents the lion’s share of Infor’s product portfolio. Participants were asked to rate on a scale of zero to four, each of several criteria, including the quality and availability of support services. Zero was “not a consideration and four was “must have/most important.”

Figure 1 shows the mean (average) priority of each of these criteria, as well as the percentage of respondents that checked “must have / most important” for each. It is clear, few criteria are more important than support services.

Figure 1: Importance of Selection Criteria

 

Selection Priority

% “Must Have”

Fit and Functionality

3.46

58%

Ease of use

3.46

55%

Flexibility to address changing business needs

3.38

51%

Quality and availability of vendor support services

3.26

49%

Total cost of ownership

3.21

42%

Integration technologies and capabilities

3.17

41%

Ease and speed of implementation

3.16

41%

Software cost

3.03

30%

Ability to tailor functionality without programming

3.03

37%

Must be an integrated suite rather than multiple point solutions

2.99

37%

Deployment model

2.27

15%

Ability to access ERP through a mobile device

2.27

18%

The Times They Are A-Changing

This is a signal that times are indeed changing. There was a time when customers were more likely to ask for a la carte support plans that allowed them to subscribe to less, rather than more support. Of course the prime motivation was to pay less. But when customers ask for less, this is also a signal that the customers and/or products are stagnant. If you are stuck on very old releases, or legacy solutions based on outdated technology, you don’t want a support plan; you want an insurance policy. And when you buy an insurance policy, the best possible scenario is that you never need it or use it.

Vibrant, active and growing companies need support plans. Evidence that more companies fit into this category lies in the data showing which release survey respondents are operating on. The percentage of companies operating on the latest release of their ERP solution (44%) has never been higher (23% are one release behind and 20% are two or more releases behind.)

Also a significant portion (13%) is in the process of implementing. Combine this with the average age of current ERP implementations, which is an all-time low of 5.5 years, and we conclude that many companies today are far from stagnant.

But the very nature of support is also changing. If you are like most technology users today, you expect some level of self-service to be available. You want to search to see if a problem has already been reported and resolved. If it has, you want to be able to download the fix immediately. If you want instruction on how to do something, a video you can play (and re-play) on demand is extremely useful. But if you don’t know what’s wrong, if you don’t know where to look, or you need help in deciding how to proceed, there is nothing more frustrating than being caught in the seemingly endless loop of “press 1 for sales, press 2 for support, if you need to speak to a representative, please stay on the line [forever.]”

It is interesting that as business becomes more “social” we actually have less human contact, not more. “Social” is good for socializing a thought or even asking for some general advice. “Social” is not good if it prevents you from speaking to an experienced support engineer. Therefore, it is not surprising to find 30% of respondents do not feel their service needs are being met today. Almost half (48%) feel their needs are generally being met, but service could be improved. Only about one in five respondents (21%) indicated their service needs were being fully met.

As much as self-service options are a must, those can’t be the only options. This is why Infor’s message, “We’re there when you need us,” combined with skilled support resources co-located with the development organization is so very critical.

What And How?

So let’s dig a little deeper into what is actually behind the Infor Xtreme support plans. As noted earlier, these plans are a combination of services, technology and people.

Services

Infor uses five different adjectives to describe its support services: specialized, personalized, social, proactive and accountable.

Specialized: Infor has never had a “one size fits all mentality.” And indeed its launch of Infor10 last year accentuates this focus. Infor10 Workspace delivered a new user interface, which unifies information from multiple applications and sources on one screen.  Yet Infor didn’t stop there. It used Infor10 as the basis for designing, developing, testing, and delivering full industry suites. Infor assembled suites of software tailored to the specific requirements of a range of important industries, including:

Because its software is not designed, developed or delivered as general or generic solutions, even through multiple acquisitions, the company never moved to a single support center. Instead it stayed where the people were, the people involved in the development and support of individual products. Support is all about solving issues quickly, so intimate knowledge of the industry, the product and the customer helps the team get on point about an issue quickly.

Personalized: Not only does the choice of support plans allow customers a choice, but this choice is made per product installed. While it is not unusual for an Infor customer to have multiple Infor products, the industry norm would be to require all products to be covered under the same support plan. However, Infor customers might choose a higher level of support for one product as they are embarking on a new implementation, major company reorganization or expansion, or other kinds of special events.

A brand new customer portal, which includes newly delivered support apps, also brings personalization to a new level.  These support apps can be completely personalized.  Customers determine what they want to see and how they want to see it.  They can customize the support apps through the use of drag and drop features, change their user interface (UI) theme and use quick filters to easily get what they need.  Logging of issues is quick, easy and wizard-based. Preferences can be saved. Infor was striving to make it “beautiful” and consumer grade. So far customer feedback has been positive and at least one early adopter has called it “pretty.”  

Social: Infor has been tweeting important product news to customers. But perhaps the most important aspect of social is that of community building. Customers are able to join online communities with their peers with the same product, environment, configuration or industry challenges. While early in the development stage, Infor would like to get to the point where customers add an increasing volume of content that is shared. Customers can join any number of communities, or start their own.

“Social” should be about people helping people. The risk here is that unstructured conversations can turn negative and unproductive. But the value to be gained is certainly well worth the risk.

Proactive:  The goal here is to eliminate problems wherever possible even before customers experience them. As problems that could impact all companies or individual customers are identified, Infor will issue Xtreme Alerts.

Accountable: Support staff being “accountable” to the customer should be a given. However, it is often all too easy to shelter the members of the development organization from this accountability, purportedly so as to avoid distracting them from innovation. But Infor has chosen to co-locate the support and development organizations, making it much harder for the developers to hide from the reality of the real world.

Technology

The adjectives above describing service, along with the goals they imply, would be far more difficult to achieve without some supporting technology. At the heart of this new technology is ION Support Assistant (ISA). This is an automated tool that gathers information about the customer’s unique environment and provides it back to the Xtreme Support engineers.

This is not “spy software” meant to police the installation; it collects data that the support engineer would otherwise have to gather verbally on each support call. Have you ever been on the phone with a support technician, and thought, “Shouldn’t they know all this already?”  Infor may already know what products the customer has licensed, and may know which versions, releases and patches have been shipped. But without confirmation, that engineer would not know what had actually been installed and implemented.  And this data is far from static. Automating the collection of this data saves time and provides more information than might ordinarily be collected, which could indeed help resolve the issue more quickly. And just think, if the first support engineer needs to pass you off to another, you won’t have to go through it again!

The portal mentioned in the Personalization section previously is another piece of technology that adds value to the process. Having a portal is not something entirely new to Infor customers. Having this portal is new. However, the old version is still available to existing customers to help as they transition to the new terminology and the new features of Xtreme Support.

A nice feature that has been added to the portal is a set of analytics that will summarize previous incidents and the results, including response times and resolutions.

People

It is refreshing to find that in spite of automation, online portals and social media, Infor views its team of experts as an equally important element of Xtreme Support. These are long-tenured employees, with deep product knowledge, often enhanced by deep industry knowledge. They are co-located with the development team, so that they, with the help of their customers, keep the developers focused on both innovation and quality.

While all Xtreme Support customers have access to recorded briefings and how-to assistance in the form of training videos, the Premium and Elite Support customers also have additional access to other key Infor  staff through interactive briefings and Elite customers have further access to senior level support and development resources. Elite Support also includes an invitation to participate in Infor’s customer executive advisory boards, which provide a direct channel to provide input and feedback to Infor product experts and executives.

In addition to the regular Xtreme Support team, Infor has also created a new team of Xtreme Elite Account Managers. This was a position that Lawson (acquired by Infor last year) had created and Infor saw the value it added to the support equation. These Elite Account Managers are not commission-based and in fact are not allowed to sell the customer anything. Each manages an average of 10 accounts. They not only help resolve issues, but are also instrumental in helping Xtreme Elite customers in their planning processes.

When?

The answer is, “Now.”  Plans have been available since October 2011.

Key Takeaways

Support is hardly the sexy side of any software business. While new development is all about the latest technology and the most exciting new innovation, support is all about getting the job at hand done and doing it well. It’s about making the most of what you have. It can produce that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when something goes wrong. It is hard work and sometimes it can be a thankless task.

Being prepared for disruption and having the right tools, technology and people may not be glamorous, but in the end, it is what delivers real value to the customer. It is refreshing to see Infor striving for more innovation and change and comforting to see they understand that innovation comes with a price they seem willing and able to pay.

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