Mint Jutras

THE REAL FACTS ABOUT ERP IMPLEMENTATION

Posted by mintjutras on February 14, 2019   |   No Comments
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BUSTING THE MYTH OF FAILURE, BUT ARE YOU
OVERRATING YOUR SUCCESS?

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is certainly not for the faint of heart. But neither is it the scary ordeal that many describe it as, nor is it doomed to fail. While disasters provide good fodder for sensationalized headlines, failure rates are generally overstated. A recent Mint Jutras study of ERP implementation success by manufacturers and distributors found  67% rate their implementations as successful or very successful. While 31% only achieved partial success, a scant 2% said they were “not very successful” and only one out of the 315 surveyed described their implementation as a failure.

And yet, while many are meeting expectations in terms of schedule, budget and return on investment (ROI), we need to step back and question whether these expectations are set high enough. Based on benefits actually realized, Mint Jutras feels many are over-rating their success and leaving additional attainable returns on the table. In our view, an ERP implementation should never be viewed as done and the ROI should be sustainable.

In my latest report I explore the pace, the goals, the challenges, and the perceived success of ERP implementations. Where are the benefits are coming from? If you are in the midst of an evaluation, what should you expect? What should you do to maximize your investment? If you are not evaluating next steps, maybe you should be. What more could you be getting out of your investment? Is it time for a major overhaul or even a new solution? Today’s fast-paced, global digital economy leaves no room for complacency.

Click here to read the full report.

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Aera Technology Turns Data Into Decisions and Actions

Posted by mintjutras on January 15, 2019   |   No Comments
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Aera Cognitive WorkBench: Your Next Breakthrough?

Technology is changing the world today. On a personal level it changes the way we live, work and play. On an enterprise level, it changes the way we communicate and transact business. The rapid pace of technology innovation and exponentially growing volumes of data can be both exhilarating and also a little frightening. Artificial intelligence (AI) is insinuating itself into our personal and professional lives in many ways. As consumers we are subjected to personalized targeted marketing. We frequently have conversations with our mobile devices (think Siri and Alexa). And self-driving vehicles, while not perfected (yet) are no longer the stuff of science fiction.

And yet, even as we are surrounded by all this technology, even as modern enterprise applications open new doors to us in terms of data accessibility and visibility, most important business decisions are still made in much the same way as they have been for decades. We spend hours pulling reports to gather data and review exceptions. Next we spend days analyzing it to determine what options are available. Then we spend weeks sending emails and making calls to gain a more complete understanding. We run through different scenarios, trying to play the “what if” game and figure out the best decision. Only then do we take action and by that time, guess what? The data and the conditions have already changed. Windows of opportunity may already have closed.

Aera Technology thinks there is a better way. Its data crawlers (patented real-time crawling technology) collect, index and harmonize billions of data points from complex enterprise systems and external data sources. Its processing engine analyzes data continuously (even while you sleep) to detect business risk and opportunities. After utilizing decision trees and algorithms to recommend the best course of action, its new Cognitive Workbench engages the relevant users to collaborate, evaluate and approve a suggested course of action. Based on your response, it learns what works and what doesn’t. And in the future, it will evolve to take action autonomously right in transactional systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Click here to read the full report.

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Can Deltek be the Easy Button for Project-Based Business?

Posted by mintjutras on November 30, 2018   |   No Comments
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VantagePoint Unveiled at Deltek Insight 2018

Deltek is laser-focused on meeting the needs of project-driven businesses. Unlike a myriad of solution providers that simply provide software used to manage the projects themselves, Deltek takes a giant leap beyond, also providing software that runs the projects-based business. This type of software is typically referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP). But in Deltek’s case we’re not only talking about ERP, but also a special kind of ERP. Deltek’s stated goal is to become the recognized global standard for running project-based organizations.

In order to accomplish this, the company has taken a simple and direct approach: Deltek’s promise to its customers is to be:

  • Easy to access (think cloud and mobile)
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to understand
  • Easy to do business with

Over the years, through organic development and acquisition, Deltek has collected quite an array of products: specialized enterprise solutions for government contractors and a wide range of professional services organizations including architecture and engineering (A&E) firms, management consultants, advertising, PR and marketing agencies and more. The one thing all these segments have in common is this: They are all people-centric, providing services, largely delivered through projects.

Beyond this point of commonality, they can be very different. They don’t go after the same type of business; their customers are worlds apart; some are heavily regulated; others operate under few constraints. Some are small; others are large. Some manage projects that last days or weeks and others span multiple years. A general-purpose kind of solution just doesn’t work well here.

This leaves Deltek with a rather difficult challenge of providing continued innovation across a broad portfolio of products, but a challenge the company has embraced with vigor. Its innovation strategy involves investigating new technology, not for technology sake, but to determine its applicability, incorporating it into its solutions for a practical use. Over the years it has invested in social (Deltek Kona), analytics, mobile and cloud technologies. Next up is artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) and it is looking into geo location and optical character recognition (OCR). All these help organizations operate more smoothly, like hitting the easy button… well almost.

Introducing Deltek Vantagepoint

Deltek Vantagepoint, unveiled at Deltek Insight 2018, is the perfect example of the fruit of these efforts. It is the next evolution of Deltek Vision, its purpose-built solution for professional services firms including those in consulting and the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries. Available as an upgrade for Deltek Vision customers, Vantagepoint has been reengineered to enhance the user experience and deliver more innovation through advanced technology.

All Deltek customers got a preview of this new technology two years ago at Deltek Insight2016 when Deltek iAccess was announced. At the time Deltek described iAccess as an “Easy to use front office solution,” a front end to Deltek’s ERP solutions that provided a new way to navigate. But it was than just a pretty face, it also included three distinct workspaces specific to three different functions:

  • Business Development Workspace provided a lot of the functionality typically associated with sales force automation, supporting those charged with developing business, including managing clients, contacts and opportunities
  • Project Management Workspace helped project managers monitor projects and identify problems before it’s too late
  • Employee Workspace made it easier to keep timesheets and expense reports up to date from anywhere

While Deltek iAccess was browser-based, all three of these new components were available and integrated with both cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) and on-premise deployments of ERP. It provided a uniform look and feel across multiple products and was very well-received across its customer base. The message now is: if you liked iAccess, you’re going to love Vantagepoint.

But equally important as the new user experience is the underlying technology that allows Deltek to deliver more innovation, faster. Vantagepoint takes advantage of microservices architectures. If you are unfamiliar with the term, don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. Our 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study asked survey respondents about investments and plans for microservices architectures and other foundational technologies (Table 1) and found the largest percentages in the category of “no activity / no plans.”

Cloud enablement and Software as a Service (SaaS) is the only “technology” in Table 1 that is even close to being mainstream. This comes as no surprise. Whether you run a solution on your own premises or in a private or public cloud, the ability to access anytime, from anywhere is a significant advantage and cloud-enablement opens the door for the kind of connectivity you need as a full and active participant in the digital economy.

Table 1: Embedded (or foundational) digital technologies

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

However, in spite of lack of interest, which also implies lack of knowledge, development platforms and microservices architectures, on which applications are built, are very important. These platforms and technologies provide a level of agility, configurability and extensibility to today’s applications to help us respond to change.

For the reader with a technical background, a microservice architecture is defined (by Wikipedia) as an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. For those nontechnical readers, think of it as constructing a solution from a set of Lego building blocks.

Think about how you build a structure from Legos. Each Lego block is made of the same kind of material and is attached (connected) to the other Lego blocks the same way. In many ways they are interchangeable. But by choosing different colors and sizes, and connecting them with a different design, you can make a structure that is very unique. And once constructed, if you want to change it, decoupling some of the blocks and replacing them doesn’t destroy the parts that are not affected. There is far less disruption introduced than if you had constructed it with a hammer, timber and nails.

Technologies like machine learning, natural language processing and other forms of artificial intelligence have become quite prevalent in consumer technology (think Siri and Alexa, or GPS that learns your favorite route). Now is the time to bring them into the enterprise, much like they were insinuated into our personal lives. Note that Table 1 has a special column inserted “Expect vendors to deliver (as part of your subscription or maintenance.)” Note the low percentages in this column as well.

Customers are not demanding these technologies from their solution providers, or even expecting them. And yet more and more vendors, including Deltek, are working on delivering them, much like Apple delivered Siri. Apple customers didn’t demand the ability to converse with their mobile devices. Apple just delivered it. Other device manufacturers followed suit. Pretty soon virtual assistants became commonplace features. And people got hooked. It was only after the value was recognized that people willingly went out and bought stand-alone devices like the Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home.

Hey Deltek!

Deltek is taking this same approach and has introduced a new digital assistant., Hey Deltek! This is the ability to interact with Vantagepoint through voice, using natural language. According to Deltek, “With natural language commands, you can simply tell Vantagepoint to remind you to do something through a common language phrase, and it will create that reminder activity for you. You can use this same interface to create new records or navigate to a specific record within the different hubs. This great new feature extends the accessibility of the solution and makes it that much easier for someone to start using with very little training.”

While this is a step in the right direction, and certainly valuable, these are just a couple of examples of new technology that can accelerate the pace of innovation. These new features are embedded in Vantagepoint, only one of Deltek’s products. We are hoping that it can further leverage these types of development efforts across a range of products and ultimately allow Deltek to deliver more innovation across its entire portfolio.

Handling Disruption

This is especially important in an era of disruption because it makes it much easier for customers to consume innovation, allowing more agility in responding to growth and change.

The pace of change has accelerated beyond anyone’s expectations and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Technology innovation is partly to blame but is also the answer in helping us handle disruption. And indeed, we live in disruptive times.

Figure 1: What risk do you face in your industry being disrupted?

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

We asked our 2018 survey participants to assess the level of risk their industries faced in terms of the potential for disruption (Figure 1).  While all but 10% acknowledged some level of risk, the majority (84%) feel the risk is low to medium rather than high or imminent. Yet we feel compelled to ask the question: How do you think the taxi industry would have answered this question on the eve of the launch of Uber? Do you think the hotel industry anticipated Airbnb? Did Block Buster foresee the devastating impact Netflix would have on its business?

Nobody saw those types of disruption coming and therefore few (if any) were adequately prepared. But Deltek has spent the last few years preparing. According to Bret Tushaus, Deltek Vice President of Product Management:

“… for the past decade or so, we’ve been thinking about how transformational trends will impact the next generation of our solutions. We have been following the trajectory of things like big data, the millennial workforce, globalization, cloud and the internet of things. As a result, tens of thousands of lines of code have been written and hundreds of screens and applications have been reimagined, refactored and enhanced to bring Vantagepoint to life… the most exciting feature is what is at the heart of this solution: INNOVATION.”

Courtesy of Deltek, here are some of the new features and functions included:

  • A Command Center to manage the entire project lifecycle– Known as the Project Hub this gives project managers a command-center-like interface for managing an entire project from pursuit to closeout. The Project Hub acts as a one stop shop for managing project information – from the day you begin the pursuit, to getting project estimates, gathering general project information, building project plans, tracking project finances, collaborating with team members, and monitoring project performance.
  • Dashboards, providing the right data at the right time– Dashboards are a key tenet of Vantagepoint, with a focus on metrics relevant to professional services businesses. It’s a powerful tool providing simple, graphical views of very complex data to drive informed decision making. Key performance indicators target specific roles like project manager, business developer, principal, controller or executive.
  • A graphical proposal builder to generate winning proposals– Proposals in Vantagepoint give business developers the ability to harness a vast amount of project, employee, and experiential information managed by the solution. Critical for professional services firms, this tool has a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface and provides information that can be used to create polished proposals documents to help win new work.

Continuing its focus on innovation and the user experience, another innovation Deltek is exploring is the use of Optional Character Recognition (OCR) for intelligent expense capture. With this feature, the Vantagepoint mobile app can be used to take a picture of a receipt and quickly and effortlessly generate the expense report entry.

Wrap Up

So again, we pose the question: Can Deltek be the easy button for project-based business? Deltek is already recognized for its broad, deep and specialized functionality. It takes a giant leap beyond other companies vying for attention in a crowded field of project-related solutions. It was among the first, if not the first, to attack, not just projects (as in scheduling, managing and costing) but the organizations committed to running successful projects. Deltek knows it can’t serve all project-based businesses with a “one size fits all” solution. It knows it must keep up with the technology that is creating the potential for disruption. It knows advanced technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing is destined to become mainstream, just as it has in consumer technology. The key to adoption of these technologies is to make it easy to access, easy to use and easy to understand. The proof in being easy to do business with comes only through experience.

If you are project-based organization that is struggling to keep up with fast pace of business, if your business or your “market” is undergoing change, you owe it to yourself to check out new options. Deltek might be a good place to start.

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Oracle Enterprise Applications:  Speeding Innovation in the Cloud

Posted by mintjutras on November 1, 2018   |   No Comments
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With a Heavy Dose of Machine Learning

Oracle OpenWorld is a huge event, covering a plethora of topics. Here at Mint Jutras we focus exclusively on enterprise applications that run businesses. At the very core of those is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), but these days it is often difficult to tell where ERP ends and other applications begin. And therefore we often stretch the boundaries of ERP and also write about Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Human Capital Management (HCM) and also the “Customer Experience (CX).” While we leave coverage of hardware, infrastructure and data base technology to other analyst firms, enterprise applications provided plenty of food for thought at Oracle OpenWorld 2018.

According to Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Applications Product Development, the two key themes driving his development organization are movement to the cloud and speed of innovation. These two are closely related. Mint Jutras has long been a strong proponent of software as a service (SaaS) for many reasons, not the least of which is the ability to deliver more innovation – that is also easier to consume – faster. Mint Jutras would agree both of these themes are necessary and commendable. Both address the inertia holding many companies back from being fully active, successful participants in the rapidly changing, global, digital economy.

In the recent Mint Jutras report Digital Transformation: It’s Time to Develop a Sense of Urgency, we discussed digital transformation in the context of enterprise applications. Where are we on this journey? You might be surprised by the data we have collected that indicates enterprises might not be as well prepared for the global, digital economy as they think. What is Oracle doing to remedy that situation?

What Is Digital Transformation?

In our previous report, we began our discussion by posing the question: What is “digital transformation?” In so many ways, in the context of the software that runs your business, it is simply delivering on the original promise of ERP. Mint Jutras defines ERP as an integrated suite of modules that provides the operational and transactional system of record of your business. Even the earliest versions of ERP did indeed provide this system of record. But did they live up to the promise of an end-to-end, integrated solution that could streamline and automate all your business processes? Did they make your life easier? No. The technology necessary to deliver on that promise simply didn’t exist back then.

In the meantime, the pace of change and the pace of technology innovation continue to accelerate. Today that pace is staggering and fortunately, the technology needed to deliver on that promise finally exists, and a lot of it sits in Oracle’s vast portfolio of products. However, not all of Oracle’s customers are able to take full advantage of these technologies simply because they are still running older solutions. We would call them “legacy solutions,” or sometimes “heritage solutions” – legacy solutions you are proud of. Indeed Mr. Miranda is quick to point out, “So we don’t have legacy customers. They may be on older software. But our customers are still always modern and going forward.”

In response, we would argue: All the more reason to get them off that older software and onto something more modern and technology-enabled. They need the ability to transact business digitally in order to actively and fully participate in the global digital economy. This requires a level of connectivity that is simply not possible with older, legacy solutions. Many of these older solutions pre-date the Internet, and let’s face it… the Internet has forever changed our world. It has created the global digital economy and it has leveled the playing field for entry.

In the past, only the largest companies were able to establish a global presence and trade on a world-wide basis. Today any company, large or small, can establish a global presence, creating unprecedented opportunities. We see new markets, new economies, and even whole new middle classes emerging every day. But as you start to expand your global presence, be careful what you wish for. Without digitally transforming the solutions that run your business, windows of opportunity will close as quickly as they open.

The Role Cloud (and SaaS) Plays

The Internet has truly changed our lives both from a business, as well as a personal perspective. As noted earlier, the Internet has leveled the playing field, making it possible for any company, large or small, to create a global presence and be an active participant in the global, digital economy. The Internet enables the cloud as we know it today. The ability to access software any time, from anywhere is inherent in any solution that resides in the cloud, opening doors for improved and increased usage. And let’s face it – solutions only bring value if they are actually used.

So, web-enablement is the first step. You can simply take your software that is licensed and installed either on or off-premise and improve access. Web-enablement is conducive to supporting distributed users. But taking the next step and running software as a service (SaaS) brings additional value: No capital expenditure required; no need to build out a data center or maintain hardware. The elasticity of a solution, including the ability to expand the number of users without over-taxing the supporting hardware and software, is critical during growth spurts. When your plans involve expansion, bringing up remote sites rapidly and easily is an added benefit and requires less information technology (IT) staff on site. This is especially important when you venture into new, emerging economies where local IT talent may be scarce or nonexistent.

While cyber-security is an understandable concern to all today, if you are a small to midsize company, without a dedicated IT security expert on board, chances are you assume more risk than you would in a SaaS environment. Even if you are a large company with IT security experts on staff, there is no way you will be able to match the level of investment Oracle makes in terms of security from infrastructure and software and business practice. Plus Oracle can deliver the peace of mind of business continuity in the event of a disaster, either natural or man-made.

Based on many of the reasons noted above, the majority of companies today see cloud and SaaS in their future. While customers vote with their wallets, each year our Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study seeks more clarity on preferences for different deployment options, including preferences of those that might not have (yet) decided to make a move off legacy software.

We have been asking the following question for years now: If you were to consider a new solution today, which deployment options would you consider? Participants are allowed to select as many as they wish. A summary of answers since 2011 is shown in Figure 1. We skip every other year simply to fit the chart on the page. SaaS is currently the option most likely to be considered and the willingness to consider traditional on-premise solutions dropped off dramatically between 2011 and 2013 and has not recovered.

Figure 1: Deployment Options That Would Be Considered Today

Source: Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Studies

*Option added in 2015

But don’t let these preferences tempt you into thinking SaaS solutions will be prevalent in the very near future. Why not? There are simply too many existing on-premise deployments out there today, including some of the brands in the Oracle product portfolio (JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Siebel…) Our most recent 2018 Enterprise Solution Study found about 40% of business solutions today are deployed as SaaS (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Percentage of Business Software that is SaaS

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

Our survey respondents estimate that percentage will grow steadily, but it will take many years before SaaS solutions dominate. Mint Jutras believes the momentum is building and the transition will happen somewhat faster than Figure 2 would indicate. But the average company running legacy solutions on premise obviously need a gentle push.

Oracle Makes Moving to SaaS Easier

And Oracle is providing that gentle push. Earlier this year it introduced a new program called SOAR, a prepackaged set of utilities and methodology to get customers to the cloud. For customers running solutions like JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and even the E-Business Suite, this means replacing solutions. While some software vendors offer the same solution on premise and as a SaaS solution, allowing customers to simply lift and shift existing deployments, this provides limited value. In doing so you sacrifice some of the benefits of a multi-tenant SaaS solution (see sidebar). With multi-tenant SaaS solutions, vendors maintain a single line of code. As a result, they can deliver more innovation, at a faster pace. – one of Oracle’s stated goals. With single-tenant solutions running in private clouds, vendors and their clients still face the complexity and disruption of traditional upgrades.

Lifting and shifting also means you are dragging along any limitations of prior implementations. Oftentimes customers delay moving off of old systems because of customizations and yet many of those customizations were required, not to provide market differentiation, but to address functional gaps or other limitations of older solutions, or simply because that was the way things were always done. Today’s solutions are far more configurable and extensible, eliminating much of the need for invasive code changes. If an existing or proposed customization doesn’t provide differentiation, Mint Jutras advises against doing it. And if it does provide a level of market differentiation, look for ways to accommodate it without mucking around in the code. Look for component-based architectures that allow you to extend, rather than modify solutions.

Mr. Miranda seems to agree with these recommendations. When asked about existing customer perceptions around customization he said,

“… the more complex you are and the older implementation you have, the more strongly I would advise you, ‘Do not inventory your customizations.’ If you want an interesting archeological expedition, knock yourself out. What happens is they find things that they don’t even know why they did it. They don’t know if it’s relevant anymore. We have customers who customized things 15 years ago. We’ve actually added it to E-Business Suite. But they haven’t had the time to unravel it. I’m not saying this in a critical way; it’s just a reality. What I strongly encourage the customers to do is look at the baseline product. And guess what? There may be things that are missing that we haven’t built. But you won’t need an inventory of your customization to figure that out. You will know what’s relevant.”

Through the SOAR program customers can see the depth and breadth of the product, and determine, with a level of certainty, how long it is going to take to get there. How much is it going to cost them? And when they come out the other end, what they will see in terms of improvement in business practice. In Mr. Miranda’s words:

“So, based on our experience of existing customers, we developed a set of utilities with Oracle Consulting that can take what we think is a reasonable scope – a certain number of integrations, certain number of reports, certain number of extensions. We’ve done the work to automate the data migration. We know how much it’s going to cost in terms of each migration or each extension or each report. And so, we can quickly give you an estimate. Here is your size and shape. Here is your cost. Here is your time. And here’s what we believe, based on a typical customer, will be the amount of business process change/improvement.”

Speeding Innovation

So, cloud is the first step towards speeding innovation, but there’s more to it than that. You also need some foundational technologies, which we still find lacking in the majority of businesses today (Table 1).

Development platforms and microservices architectures, on which applications are built, are the perfect example. For the reader with a technical background, a microservice architecture is defined (by Wikipedia) as an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. For those nontechnical readers, think of it as constructing a solution from a set of Lego building blocks.

Table 1: Embedded (or foundational) digital technologies

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

Think about how you build a structure from Legos. Each Lego block is made of the same kind of material and is attached (connected) to the other Lego blocks the same way. In many ways they are interchangeable. But by choosing different colors and sizes, and connecting them with a different design, you can make a structure that is very unique. And once constructed, if you want to change it, decoupling some of the blocks and replacing them doesn’t destroy the parts that are not affected. There is far less disruption introduced than if you had constructed it with a hammer and nails.

These platforms and technologies provide a level of agility, configurability and extensibility to today’s applications to help us respond to change. Oracle has invested heavily in both its Platform as a Service (PaaS) and its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), resulting in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It is now turning its attention to other foundational technologies like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). But it is approaching these differently than some of its major competitors. Instead of providing these technologies as tool sets, Oracle is embedding them into applications so that customers of all sizes (not just those with deep pockets and large development staffs) can take advantage of them “right out of the box.”

Throughout the entire suite of application products, the concept is to turn what used to be “input-receiving” apps into “recommendation” apps. Examples include suggesting the next-best offer or the next-best action in CRM. Or they might help prioritize employee recruiting in HCM or make audit suggestions and cash-management recommendations in ERP.

Digital assistants (bots) will be available pervasively throughout the ecosystem, not only from your phone and through SMS, but also through Slack, Siri, Alexa, or Google Home. The way people work is changing, so the applications must change too.

Mint Jutras believes this approach to embedding these technologies is smart. Notice Table 1 captures not only current adoption rates, but also plans for adoption. We also allowed survey respondents to indicate where they expected software vendors to simply provide these technologies with no additional purchase required (the next to the last column). Few are demanding this today, or even expecting them. And yet Oracle is working on delivering them, much like Apple delivered Siri. Apple customers didn’t demand the ability to converse with their mobile devices. Apple just delivered it. Other device manufacturers followed suit. Pretty soon virtual assistants became commonplace features. And people got hooked. It was only after the value was recognized that people willingly went out and bought stand-alone devices like the Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home.

Now is the time to bring them into the enterprise, much like they were insinuated into our personal lives. Pretty soon these types of technologies will be generally available throughout the Oracle Cloud, but you won’t be able to take advantage of them if you are still stuck on old legacy solutions.

Develop a Sense of Urgency

As we noted in our report on Digital Transformation, it is time to develop a sense of urgency – the same kind of urgency Oracle has demonstrated in urging customers to move to the cloud in order to speed innovation. The digital age is upon us. The pace of change and the pace of technology innovation has accelerated beyond anyone’s expectations and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. We live in disruptive times.

We asked our 2018 survey participants to assess the level of risk their industries faced in terms of the potential for disruption.

Figure 3: What risk do you face in your industry being disrupted?

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

While all but 10% acknowledged some level of risk, the majority (84%) feel the risk is low to medium rather than high or imminent. Yet we feel compelled to ask the question: How do you think the taxi industry would have answered this question on the eve of the launch of Uber? Nobody saw that disruption coming and therefore few (if any) were adequately prepared.

Disruptive change is nothing new, but the speed with which it can impact business models and revenue flows has certainly changed. While it took a decade for the personal computer to disrupt the computer industry, and years for digital photography to disrupt the film industry, it took less time for Netflix to put Blockbuster stores out of business. And how long did it take Airbnb to impact the hospitality industry or Uber to disrupt the taxi industry? These kinds of disruptions can happen virtually overnight, creating new ways of transacting business that can have a cascading impact on both front and back office applications.

This type of disruption might come from a variety of sources. We asked survey participants to select the single most likely cause of potential disruption (Figure 4).

Figure 4: What is most likely to cause this disruption?

Source: Mint Jutras 2016 Enterprise Solution Study

While the threat from new, innovative products may have the lesser disruptive impact on business processes and business models, it does require companies to place more emphasis on innovation. Windows of opportunity can open and close very quickly. Of course an agile ERP solution isn’t all you need to accelerate new product introductions, but you also don’t want it to be the reason you can’t respond to new market demands or take advantage of new and unprecedented opportunities.

New ways of selling/pricing existing products might include subscriptions to services or outcomes that replace outright sale of products. Rather than selling a machine, you might invoice for uptime or hours of production. You might ship a physical product for free and charge for usage and/or consumables. Software companies that used to offer perpetual licenses might now also (or instead) offer subscriptions to software as a service (SaaS). These types of changes can have a major impact on how you invoice, recognize revenue and manage cash. And these changes must be reflected in your ERP solution.

The impact of entirely new business models is even harder to predict because of the inherent “newness.” You don’t want your ERP solution to be the reason you can’t capitalize on that brilliant new idea that can create a new revenue stream. Your ERP must adapt as your business evolves.

And yet many hesitate to replace or upgrade aging solutions that have no hope of ever connecting with or leveraging the emerging digital technologies required to survive in today’s digital economy. Perhaps they are looking for proof they will not be taking a step backwards in moving to a newly developed solution. Indeed, there are some industries that may (still) be better served by some of its older, deeply entrenched products – industries like food and beverage or project-based businesses. These industries are still on the horizon for the Oracle Cloud solutions.

But perhaps the best customer reference for a wide range of industries comes from Oracle itself. The diversity of Oracle’s business is a testament to the breadth of the solution in a world of changing business models.  Oracles runs:

  • an on-premises software business
  • a subscription software business
  • a reasonably large consulting services business
  • a reasonably large, assemble-to-order, hardware business
  • a procure-to-order business for Micros on smaller machines

We wrap up with a quote from Mr. Miranda.

“We spent a ton of time combining feature functions we needed, technical innovations that either we built or the industry built, so now we have what we think is an extremely compelling, deeply functional, and differentiated solutions in just about every area: EPM, ERP certainly, now with Supply Chain Manufacturing as well…. Core HR including global core HR, benefits, payroll; and then CX being sales, service, marketing, both B2B marketing … and B2C marketing…. It is just an incredibly feature-rich area on top of those baseline components.”

The entirety of Oracle’s business runs on the same software in the cloud that all of its customers are running. That spells confidence and commitment.

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Plex Systems Accelerates Push Into IoT With DATTUS Acquisition

Posted by mintjutras on August 3, 2018   |   No Comments
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Customers: Prepare for a Tsunami of Data

On July 31, 2018 Plex Systems, a cloud ERP and MES solution provider for manufacturing, announced it had completed the acquisition of DATTUS, Inc. a leader in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) connectivity technologies. This is an important step in executing on its product strategy, which includes connecting to more IIoT data for more actionable insights, along with enhancing manufacturing and business processes.

As a solution provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP), the Plex Manufacturing Cloud provides the operational and transactional system of record of your business. But looking beyond business transactions, Plex’s goal has always been to connect the shop floor to the top floor. But that is often easier said than done.

While sensors, machines and equipment on the shop floor have been collecting vast volumes of operational data for decades now, that data has not always been “connected” or accessible for decision making. Indeed the very fact that this data collection has been happening for decades contributes to the problem. Many of the machines and software put in place decades ago pre-date the Internet and therefore have no ability to connect to a network. Retrofitting equipment or replacing it is expensive and most of these machines were designed to last a lifetime. Expensive custom integration projects are beyond the expertise and budgets of all but the largest manufacturers. So what’s the alternative?

Providing an alternative is what DATTUS is all about. DATTUS solutions connect manufacturing equipment and sensors to the cloud. Think of it as the bridge between you and your machines. The platform is a hardware/software combination, which collects data from PLCs, VFDs, industry protocols like MTConnect, and popular enterprise applications including Salesforce, SAP and (of course) Plex.

In addition to this plug and play connectivity, DATTUS also brings IIoT data management and industrial analytics. The data management and analytics capabilities previously offered by Plex were sufficient for managing the volumes of data within ERP. But as customers are empowered to bring almost any data stream into the Industrial Internet of Things, they now need to be prepared for a tsunami of data.

Giving Manufacturers a “Leg Up”

The IIoT is just one of several inter-related digital technologies we continue to watch, and what we most often see is limited progress being made in terms of leveraging these technologies. Our 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution study explored plans and investments in selected digital technologies normally associated with Industry 4.0. We find very low rates of adoption (Table 1) and many have no plans to change that. In spite of all the hype around all these technologies we confirmed many are still sitting on the sidelines of the latest manufacturing revolution.

Table 1: Digital Technologies Plans and Investments in Manufacturing

Source: 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study

*Includes those that expect vendors to deliver at no additional cost

Running legacy solutions based on outdated technology forcibly sidelines some. And others are hamstrung by decades-old equipment on their shop floors. Plex Systems’ acquisition of DATTUS can’t help with the first unless those running legacy solutions are willing to trade up to a more modern, technology-enabled solution. But it can help in connecting those disconnected machines.

While all adoption rates are quite low, we do find IoT has the lowest percentage of manufacturers with no plans and no activity and close to the highest percentage of those that have already made some investment (second only to 3D printing). This tells us manufacturers have at least a grasp of its potential. Indeed manufacturers have been collecting vast volumes of data from sensors on the shop floor for decades. And yet that data has gone largely underutilized because manufacturers fail to connect the data back to the enterprise applications, and the business decisions. And this is where DATTUS can open new doors.

Instead of retrofitting equipment or developing custom connections, the DATTUS platform provides “out-of-the-box” direct connectivity for machines using cellular capabilities. It can capture data from non-networked, discrete industrial assets while remaining agnostic to data type, machine protocol, and infrastructure. It is a hardware-agnostic IIoT solution that can reliably collect and manage data and make it available for further analysis and open doors to several other of the technologies listed in Table 1.

The availability of more data increases the need for analytics in order to make sense of it. The data within an ERP solution lends itself to historical reporting and perhaps even ad hoc queries. Both are designed to answer questions you already have. But where do you turn when it is not intuitively obvious which questions you should be asking in order to optimize production or grow your business?

Therein lies one of the primary differences between reporting and analytics. While reporting answers a series of pre-defined questions, the discovery process and the iterative nature of analytics helps you ask the right questions. Reporting helps you identify a problem. The right kind of analytics helps you avoid it. Reporting seldom helps you recognize an opportunity. Analytics help you seize it.

But as volumes of data start to grow exponentially, you eventually reach a point where the human mind is no longer able to assimilate and cope with that volume. This is where machine learning can add a level of intelligence that is simply not possible without technology. Data sets have grown rapidly in recent years, thanks, at least in part, to information-sensing devices such as those to which the DATTUS solutions connect.

And the shop floor provides us with some of the most often cited use cases for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The ability to constantly scan data collected by machinery and equipment on the shop floor, searching for patterns that have previously led to failures, have saved manufacturers countless hours (and costs) associated with preventive maintenance. By predicting failures, you only need to bring production to a halt to perform maintenance when it is really needed.

Similarly, in environments regulated by strict adherence to specifications, by monitoring sensor data continuously, machine learning can alert operators before out-of-spec product is made. While shop floor supervisors are only able to scan, monitor and cope with a limited amount of data, machine learning knows no such limitations. Machine learning can recognize patterns and correlate data points that a human does not recognize as relevant. And as more data is gathered, it keeps on learning. That is what continuous improvement is all about.

DATTUS adds capabilities for analytics on data-in-motion, quickly providing insights in support of decision making on the shop floor. This includes:

  • Anomaly detection (quality control)
  • Custom event rules
  • Real-time production and efficiency reports
  • Performance forecasting
  • Predictive analytics
  • Machine learning

As part of Plex Systems, we also see the potential of applying these industrial analytics capabilities to the business side of the equation within ERP for supply chain planning, financial planning and budgeting, forecasting and more. The possibilities are endless.

Mint Jutras believes these digital technologies are destined to be absorbed into the enterprise in general, and manufacturing in particular, in much the same way as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have insinuated themselves into our personal lives.

Think about it. As consumers, we didn’t loudly voice our desire for AI or NLP. But that didn’t stop Apple from delivering Siri on an iPhone. Pretty soon Microsoft delivered Cortana on Windows 10; Google delivered Google Now; Amazon delivered Alexa and now Bixby is on your (newer) Samsung Galaxy. We see these digital technologies being absorbed into the manufacturing landscape in much the same way, as long as solution providers like Plex and DATTUS continue to innovate and push them into the mainstream.

Conclusion

While the technologies in Table 1 are typically outside the scope of ERP, in order for them to be truly transformative, they must interoperate and/or integrate with the enterprise applications like ERP in the front and back office. When purchased separately it is often a daunting task to connect back to ERP and in turn, the business itself. But without this connection, factories don’t get any smarter and neither do the leaders making business decisions. And that’s the real goal of digital transformation in manufacturing: a smart factory and smarter business decisions. And therefore this acquisition makes perfect (and practical) sense.

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Workday Family of Planning Applications Grows

Posted by mintjutras on July 23, 2018   |   No Comments
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Proposed Acquisition of Adaptive Insights

A couple of years back, in May 2016 Mint Jutras posed the question: Is Planning & Performance Management A Marriage Made In Heaven? We concluded that if you find the two live entirely separate lives, either consciously or unconsciously avoiding each other or (even worse) they are in a contentious relationship, perhaps it’s time for a divorce. Conversely, with the right solutions, you can marry actual performance to the plan, in all the relevant detail. And that plan can evolve over time to lead you down the most effective path to growth and profits. Ahhh… marital bliss!

That same year we reported on how Workday Brings the “Power Of One” To Planning and Analytics, having wedded the two by unifying financial and workforce planning with transactions in one cloud system. Organically built as part of the Workday system, the new (at the time) planning application was designed to simplify setup and support collaborative planning. Since then about 250 Workday customers have subscribed to the solution, but those customers and a maturing market is pushing for more. Workday’s recent announcement of its intent to acquire Adaptive Insights and its cloud-based platform for business planning signals a commitment to accelerate the delivery of exactly that – more and better planning.

From a Marriage, A Family Emerges

Any marriage starts off as a two-some, but marital bliss often results in a growing family. If we start off with the concept of marrying planning and performance management, the natural offspring would be the different components of planning. It all starts with a business plan, followed by financial planning, budgeting and workforce planning. Of course Workday could conceive, give birth to and nurture these different components through its own development efforts. But just as the capacity of two people to go forth and multiply is limited by the human gestation cycle, so is the ability of a software company limited by software development cycles. To grow a human family more quickly, couples might choose to adopt. To grow a software portfolio more quickly, companies might choose to acquire.

But if a company chooses the merger and acquisition (M&A) route, how does it ensure the product acquired doesn’t turn into the redheaded stepchild? This often happens because some companies aren’t very good at integrating acquired products and companies. However, Workday happens to do this very well.

Preserving the “Power of One”

Workday’s strength lies in what it calls the “power of one” – one code line, one security model, one mobile app, one data model, one user experience (UX), one platform, one version. And the “power of one” has already survived several acquisitions.

Workday’s acquisition of Identified in 2014 was an important step in incorporating predictive analytics and machine learning into its repertoire of capabilities. Identified’s patented SYMAN (Systematic Mass Normalization) technology mines Facebook for social data and then uses artificial intelligence to transform that data into professional intelligence. The machine learning comes from continued use, validating predictions with outcomes from Workday employee data on performance and retention.

After acquiring the technology in early 2014, Workday released Workday Talent Insights in 2015, identifying retention risk and delivering a talent scorecard. Workday learned that customers preferred an embedded experience, not a standalone application and that the overall user experience was key, along with access to data for training algorithms.

In 2015 it acquired Gridcraft and in 2016 it acquired Platfora. With both of these acquisitions, it has woven the technology into the fabric of its solution, rather than bolting on components. More recently it announced the acquisition of Rallyteam, for the express purpose of adding more intelligence to optimize talent. In its accompanying blog post Workday said:

“With Rallyteam, we gain incredible team members who created a talent mobility platform that uses machine learning to help companies better understand and optimize their workforces by matching a worker’s interests, skills, and connections with relevant jobs, projects, tasks, and people.”

It would appear that this acquisition was made for the express purpose of acquiring talent to accelerate its machine learning efforts, and therefore poses no threat to diminishing Workday’s power of one.

But the acquisition of Adaptive Insights is a different animal. Adaptive Insights has been a Workday certified partner since 2015 and the two companies have somewhere between 30 and 40 joint customers, so integration already exists. Workday has already stated it will harmonize the data models of the two solutions and Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO of Workday is committed to applying the power of one. However this is a very small slice of the 3,800 Adaptive Insights customers and part of the mutual attraction between the two companies is their shared customer-centricity. The benefit to the Workday installed base is obvious. But it is unclear what impact this will have on and the potential benefit it will bring to the larger population of Adaptive Insights customers.

It is also too early to say exactly how and when Workday will preserve its power of one, although Mint Jutras suspects the two companies will be hard at work figuring that out even prior to the anticipation of closing the deal later this year. Workday has admitted in the past that bringing innovation and acquired technology to the (Workday) market has been slower than some might expect because additional care and effort is taken to embed innovation at the platform level. Again, the benefits to Workday customers is clear, but the impact on Adaptive Insight’s non-Workday customers is unclear.

Also unclear is the impact on any pre-existing partnerships Adaptive Insights has with other ERP players. One in particular, Plex Systems, will likely be preserved because of Workday’s existing partnership with Plex. The two solution providers partner to present a cohesive two-tier solution (Workday as the corporate financial and human capital management solution and Plex Systems at manufacturing subsidiaries), so a shared planning platform between corporate headquarters and subsidiaries could be a huge plus. Plex also runs Workday to manage its own (software) business.

Conclusion

The acquisition of Adaptive Insights appears to be mutually beneficial to both companies. Workday stands to accelerate its financial planning and budgeting roadmap while freeing up some of its current staff to concentrate more fully on the workforce planning aspects of its current planning solution – a particular strength of Workday. Adaptive Insights finds a home that is compatible with its employee and customer-centric values and will likely be able to come up market a bit.

There are still many outstanding questions as to how Workday will preserve its power of one, a key strength and differentiator. But both parties seem committed to the concept and we suspect they will be hard at work figuring it all out even before the ink is dry on the final deal.

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FinancialForce Leverages the Power of the Salesforce Platform

Posted by mintjutras on June 28, 2018   |   No Comments
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Targeting The Emerging Services Economy

In a recent Mint Jutras report, Leveraging the Power of a Platform for Enterprise Applications, we encouraged business leaders to leverage the power of a modern, technically advanced development platform for agility, usability, extensibility and speedy innovation. In order to thrive in today’s global, digital economy, businesses need to be able to turn on a dime. We live and work in disruptive times and this potential disruption can have a cascading impact on the enterprise applications you use to run your business. In this report we take a closer look at how one enterprise application provider, FinancialForce, has responded to this challenge as it relates specifically to the new services economy. Built natively on the Salesforce Platform, FinancialForce provides enterprise applications purpose-built for service-based businesses.

Agility and the New “Services Economy”

While the name FinancialForce may imply a solution largely for the office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), its product(s) extend beyond accounting. In fact that is the hidden message when FinancialForce describes itself as “a customer-centric ERP.” Architected around the customer lifecycle, in this case “customer” actually refers to FinancialForce’s customers’ customers. With an eye towards full engagement with that customer, from opportunity to delivery and revenue, it offers a full-fledged enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for the services industry. It leaves the domain of manufacturing and distribution to others, but that doesn’t mean it has limited growth potential. The company grew 38% year over year this past year.

Indeed, management at FinancialForce is betting big on the global, digital economy rapidly becoming a services economy. FinancialForce’s CEO Tod Nielsen is a firm believer in Marc Andreessen’s prediction and explanation of “Why Software is Eating the World.” That Wall Street Journal article was published in 2011. Now Mr. Nielsen contends, “Services are devouring the galaxy.” Today’s “everything as a service” (XaaS) environment is creating new, disruptive business models.

As noted in our prior report, the 2018 Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Study found the vast majority (90%) of survey respondents felt there was some level of risk in their industry (and therefore their business) being disrupted. In the past much of this disruption would have been caused by the introduction of new, innovative products. But today it is more likely to come from new ways of selling/pricing existing products (think subscription to services), entirely new business models, or some combination of all of the above (Figure 1).

Figure 1: What is most likely to cause this disruption?

Source: Mint Jutras 2018 Enterprise Solution Study

Indeed, in many industries today subscriptions for services have replaced the outright sale of a product or service. This can have an enormous impact on the way business is transacted, as can entirely new business models – new ways that your old applications, including ERP, may not be able to accommodate. In the services industry, managed services and new technical services are often added to existing portfolios of service offerings. So how does FinancialForce address these challenges?

First of all, FinancialForce is purpose-built for services industries, which means it knows how to invoice and account for subscriptions and recurring revenue, in addition to the more traditional types of services delivered. In fact it prides itself on supporting “unlimited revenue models.”

SaaS + PaaS + IaaS supports XaaS

Having been born in the cloud, FinancialForce is delivered exclusively using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. It is built natively on Salesforce’s Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) and is offered through Salesforce’s data centers using its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This positions the company well in understanding all the nuances of what is rapidly becoming the “everything as a service” (XaaS) model.

As mentioned in our previous report, enterprise applications delivered as software as a service (SaaS) have the potential to deliver more innovation through more frequent updates. And multi-tenant SaaS solutions are the most likely to deliver more innovation, more frequently. FinancialForce is now, and has always been a multi-tenant SaaS solution, which means the company only has to manage a single line of code for any and all of its products.

But we also noted the speed with which innovation is delivered will depend a lot on the strength of the underlying platform. So how does the Salesforce platform stack up?

The short answer is that it stacks up quite well. The popularity of the platform speaks for itself. Also noted in the previous report, there is strength in numbers (of developers), particularly when you are reluctant to invest in your own. The more developers attracted to the platform, the more applications get developed, which ultimately can be shared. Features, functions and extensions have the potential to start to grow, if not exponentially, at least much faster than the typical linear sequence of development.

Salesforce is literally a “force” in the industry. The Salesforce AppExchange is the largest online marketplace of its kind, offering over 3,000 products built on a single, consistent platform. Salesforce estimates the platform speeds development by a factor of five, and cuts the cost of development in half. As a result, both solution providers and customers benefit. For a partner like FinancialForce, it means fewer wheels to (re)invent, by taking advantage of application services already built into the platform, including:

  • Support for a multi-tenant SaaS environment
  • A workflow engine, access and identity management
  • Other rapid developer services include Salesforce standard user interface templates, (business) object orientation and built-in mobile support
  • Support for collaboration through online chats (through Salesforce Chatter)
  • Salesforce Communities provide a social channel, a public platform to encourage active engagement between customers, partners and employees where all can voice individual opinions, while encouraging more personal interactions, creating a deeper connection to brands
  • Embedded analytics with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, a cloud-based data platform as well as a data-analysis front end designed to analyze not just ERP data, but also any third-party app, desktop or public data you bring in. And Einstein Analytics will also add the element of guided discovery.

Microservices Architecture

The architecture of the Salesforce platform contributes to its success. In our previous report we introduced the concept of microservices. For the reader with a technical background, microservices, also known as the microservice architecture, is defined (by Wikipedia) as an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. For those nontechnical readers, think of it as constructing a solution from a set of Lego building blocks.

The Salesforce Platform makes it possible to quickly and easily deliver microservices in a couple of different ways. Developers can code custom microservices in any development language they prefer, including Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C++, Python, and Node.js. The result is a “Lego-like” component that can be easily plugged into FinancialForce as an extension without mucking around in the source code of the application, extending the functionality with minimal disruption.

This is extremely important for any application that is “purpose-built” for an industry. A purpose-built solution is intended not only to satisfy the basic needs of any business, but also the last mile functionality specific to certain industries. This is the route FinancialForce has taken. It is not a horizontal, “one size fits all” kind of solution, but instead has been developed to address the specific needs that arise from being a services business. In today’s XaaS environment this often means subscription billing, recurring revenue and a host of other needs. Addressing these needs has resulted in further products (beyond financial management), including Services Automation, Subscription and Usage Billing, Revenue Recognition and Forecasting.

However, FinancialForce customers come in all sizes, large and small and many have selected a strong SaaS solution provider for the express purpose of not having to invest in information technology (IT) staff and developers. Of course, there are Salesforce and FinancialForce partners that can assist, but many prefer a more “self-service” approach.

The alternative to writing code is to use Lightning App Builder (Lightning), an intuitive point-and-click visual tool, which allows developers and business users alike to create data objects and business actions without ever writing a line of code. While Lightning provides an updated user interface (UI) with a focus on displaying data graphically, rather than relying on text and numbers, it is also more than just a UI. Lightning Experience is a new user experience designed to help you work faster and smarter. With the launch of Lightning Experience, the focus is on delivering a higher level of productivity with a re-imagined desktop. As a result, FinancialForce customer, Rich Tolocka of Phase 2 Technology, describes Lightning as a “game changer.”

“Lightning is a game changer. We now have a blurring of the boundaries between business systems, data and analytics. I can sit in one application and see backlog from Salesforce and actual and accounts receivable from FinancialForce. I don’t have to go into another tool. I could do all this in classic, but it didn’t really look right.”

Rich Tolocka, Phase2 Technology, FinancialForce customer

As a result, the Lightning Experience and the Salesforce Platform address two issues we raised in Leveraging The Power of a Platform for Enterprise Applications – the user experience and configuration/tailoring without invasive code changes. But the user experience today means much more than a pretty face or an intuitive, customizable look and feel. Web-based access for access any time, from anywhere has become table stakes today. Access from a mobile device is fast becoming table stakes as well. The Salesforce Platform takes care of both of these, safely and securely.

Now we need to turn our attention to other means of communicating and connecting, including advanced technologies like voice recognition and natural language processing (NLP). This is the user interface of the future even though few business users are asking for it now. But we also recognize that consumers never asked for virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Home. Yet once delivered, we all got hooked. At some point, the same thing will happen in the enterprise and solution providers that ignore this eventuality will be left behind. FinancialForce will rely on Salesforce to prepare for this while it focuses squarely on the new and ever-changing functionality required for the (still) emerging services economy.

Figure 2 depicts the current solution offered by FinancialForce and its ecosystem, including Salesforce.

Figure 2: FinancialForce’s Solution Ecosystem

Source: FinancialForce

Summary and Key Takeaways

In Leveraging The Power of a Platform for Enterprise Applications we suggested before your company makes a significant investment in enterprise applications, that you ask the tough questions about platform of any prospective purveyor of enterprise applications. For those of you in services-based businesses, we include those questions below, along with an abbreviated answer (in bold font) as it pertains to FinancialForce.

  • Does it take advantage of the latest technology that has brought us into the digital age? FinancialForce is built natively with the Salesforce Cloud Platform, which continues to be one of the most popular and powerful in the industry. As a “force” in the industry Salesforce invests heavily to keep up with new and ever-advancing technology.
  • Look carefully at the entire user experience, including mobile capabilities and other ways of interacting with the solution. The user experience is very subjective. We encourage you to try before you buy. It is not enough to see a demo done by the professionals, put your own hands on the solution and experience it for yourself. But rest assured Salesforce is investing heavily in mobile access and other technologies such as voice recognition and NLP.
  • Is it a platform that supports configurability over invasive customization? Look carefully at the Lightning Experience. Ask for a demo. Don’t look just at the result, but demand to see how it is accomplished.
  • Is it easily extended without invasive customization? Beyond the Lightning Experience, the Salesforce Platformmakes it possible to quickly and easily deliver microservices in any development language, including Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C++, Python, and Node.js. The result is a “Lego-like” component that can be easily plugged into FinancialForce as an extension without mucking around in the source code of the application, extending the functionality with minimal disruption.
  • Are analytics built in? Einstein Analytics from Salesforce is the vehicle by which these will be delivered. FinancialForce has already developed dashboards and datasets; analysis is completed in Einstein Analytics, with more investment to come, which will include artificial and augmented intelligence, along with external data feeds.
  • What deployment options are offered? What is the vendor’s cloud strategy and is it conducive to providing innovation that is easily consumed? FinancialForce and Salesforce are both offered exclusively as multi-tenant SaaS solutions. The underlying platform is a Platform as a Service. All of this is conducive to more innovation, delivered more frequently.
  • And finally… how popular is it? Will you be searching for developers or searching through a large marketplace of add-ons and extensions? The Salesforce Platform is one of the most popular development platforms on the market today and its AppExchange is the largest of its kind.

In today’s fast-paced, global, digital economy it is necessary to prepare yourself for the inevitable disruption. Don’t be complacent with the status quo. Recognize the threat and prepare yourself to take positive action. You may not be investing in developing the application, but the speed and volume of innovation that can be delivered depends on you selecting the right platform. If you are now or are becoming an active participant in the new services economy, FinancialForce is certainly worth a look.

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Can SAP’s Partner Program Hit a Trifecta In the World of ERP for SMB?

Posted by mintjutras on June 22, 2018   |   No Comments
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The Odds Have Never Been Better for a Win-Win-Win

In any normal, healthy business relationship, two parties seek a win-win. But in the software partner world, you really need to hit a triple – a win-win-win. In order to truly succeed you need the partner, the software vendor and the end customer all to win. You can’t afford to compromise the success of one for the success of another; you need a perfect trifecta. At the recent SAP Partner Summit immediately preceding SapphireNow 2018 it struck me the odds had never been better for a trifecta, not only in SAP’s home turf of the large enterprise, but also in the world of small to medium size businesses (SMBs).

While it is often hard to sort through all the different products and messages at events like these, particularly for a company the size and breadth of SAP, one message came through loud and clear: SAP needs partners, particularly in the SMB space. The partners are the trusted advisors and the face of SAP. The partners are faster, more nimble and more appropriately sized for dealing with smaller companies that might be intimidated by the likes of SAP, the 800 pound gorilla of ERP.

Many seem to forget (or ignore) the fact that SAP has a huge presence in the SMB market for ERP. Even competitors dismiss SAP as a threat in this space. Agreed, these competitors aren’t seeing SAP in deals, but they should be seeing its channel partners. SAP has one of the most mature partner programs in the industry. It works exclusively through channels in the SMB space and therefore has a vested interest in attracting new partners, and helping and empowering new and existing partners to actively pursue new business more effectively and at a lower cost of sale. More partners means more feet on the street , a broader reach into new geographic territories and even new industry sectors. Quite often partners bring specific and very deep industry expertise.

With over 60,000 customers using SAP Business One and about 4,000 using SAP Business ByDesign, how is it legitimately possible to dismiss SAP as a competitive threat in the SMB market? If those competitors are not seeing these products in competitive situations, that tells me there are a lot deals they just aren’t getting into.

But the 100% channel focus down market is not new. Why are the odds stacked in favor of SAP and its SMB-focused partners now? Let’s back up a little and examine motives here.

What Vendors and Partners Want

During the summer of 2013 Mint Jutras conducted a research project designed to provide insights to enterprise applications vendors engaged in developing and maintaining partner strategies. The study collected input from two different communities: the end users that consume enterprise applications and the solution providers that author and/or sell the solutions. “Solution providers” included both vendors that “manufacture” and “publish” the solutions, as well as their partners. While the data collected is now five years old, many of the insights gleaned are still very relevant today.

The study found the single most important objective of the vendors (in engaging with partners) was expanding their addressable market. SAP seems no different today. Growth would appear to be a high priority. But markets can be expanded in different ways, including geographical expansion into new territories, adding new industries or macro-vertical markets, or expanding within existing industries or verticals by diving deeper into micro-verticals.

Hold that thought for a moment!

So what do these partners look for in a partnership? Figure 1 gives us a general sense of priorities. While priorities vary significantly, the top priority is clearly the quality and functionality of the product itself. Sixty-six percent (66%) of partners interviewed rated this at the very top of the list.

Figure 1: Priorities in choosing a vendor to partner with

Source: Mint Jutras Partner Strategies Study
Note: While partners were asked to sequence these from 1 to 8 where 1 was most important, the scaling was reversed in the analysis. The higher the number presented, the higher the priority

So what do these two perspectives tell us? The ERP product itself is key to the success of both the vendor and the partners. And I would also argue it is very important to the end customer too. The latest (re-)organization around the SMB product offerings at SAP, along with the introduction of a platform approach to development, lead me to believe SAP also agrees with that conclusion.

A year ago in SAP Business One: The Next 20 Years | Becoming an ERP Platform I wrote:

SAP Business One is becoming more than just ERP. It is becoming a business process platform. That means it will be open, extensible, and poised to meet very specific needs across many different verticals… and fully capable of being delivered through the cloud as a service.

SAP continues to invest (and invest heavily) in the ongoing development of the generic core ERP, including new features and functions, as well as the user experience. It will also invest in the underlying architecture and technologies that enable partners to more easily enhance and extend the solution for the specific needs of different vertical, and in some cases even more specialized micro vertical industries.

Remember I told you to hold that thought about micro-verticals?

Many of SAP’s partners have been developing extensions to SAP Business One for years. It is part of the value they add. Yet up until now they have also been very likely to customize the software for individual customers. Yet some have approached it differently – I would say they are being smarter in packaging up specialized functionality for specific verticals. For example:

  • Produmex offers solutions for industry verticals including life sciences, consumer products, food & beverage, wholesale & distribution, including third party logistic providers (3PLS).
  • Liberali offers SAP Business One with complementary solutions for agriculture management.
  • VistaVu Solutions specializes in industrial field service companies, including those in the oil and gas industry.
  • beas Manufacturing offers a bit more generalized solution, but specifically for manufacturing.
  • MTC Integration Technology is very specialized, offering the MTC Chicken Integration Solution built on SAP Business One.

These are just a few of the hundreds of partners that have been creating add-on solutions that complement SAP Business One for years. The plan now is to open up the platform, making it more extensible (i.e. easier to add new functionality) while preserving the integrity of the core. SAP will encourage loose coupling of these extensions through modern APIs (application programming interfaces) and discourage invasive customization.

Now SAP is taking this one step further. It has combined the development teams for SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign to further encourage development of shared components. Where new features and functions require deep and complex integration with existing code (on either product), they might (still) be embedded in the existing product. A new field service mobile app for SAP Business One is a perfect example.

But where the new component has a limited number of touch points with the existing product, it can be loosely coupled. In these cases it will be developed once and simply connected to one (or both) using product specific APIs.

While obviously a win for SAP, why is this a win for the partners? The partner gets more product to sell to a larger audience (both installed bases combined). This of course is further encouragement for SAP Business One partners (the larger of the two partner communities) to take Business ByDesign into their own stable of products to sell. For partners that might be starting to hit a ceiling with Business One (for size and multi-company requirements), it allows them to continue up market a bit as well.

What About Customers?

Quite simply, the customers get more innovation, faster. So how important is this? In our study we also asked the customers to prioritize the different types of value add they might look for from a partner. Figure 2 shows the results. (Note: Hopefully I haven’t confused you. Forgive me, but I got a little lazy here and did not reverse the scaling as I did in the previous figure. Here, the lower the number, the higher the priority.)

Figure 2: Customer Priorities for “Value-Add”

Source: Mint Jutras Partner Strategies Study

Note: Customers were asked to sequence these from 1 to 6 where 1 was most important. We DID NOT reverse scaling in this analysis. The lower the number presented, the higher the priority

The important take-away here is that functionality is key. Over the years customers have been conditioned to expect and request additional functionality in terms of customization, which has been invasive and often built barriers to applying further innovation. We hope that in the future these types of requests will be satisfied, not by invasive customization, but by extending the solution. SAP is providing the architectures, tools and technology to make this happen, but it will require a culture shift for both customers and partners to embrace this new approach.

To further drive that point home, there currently exists about 3,500 add-ons to SAP Business ByDesign and 60% of ByDesign customers use at least one. As a multi-tenant SaaS solution it was never possible to develop modifications with invasive code changes, so ByDesign Is already a step ahead of Business One in this regard. But it is not quite “there” yet, as evidenced by the fact that most are still one-offs. So that culture shift amongst customers and partners still needs to happen.

To that end, SAP is not only supplying the development platform on which to base this shift, but also a digital commerce platform. There is a whole new team at SAP dedicated to this kind of digital transformation. According to Bertram Schulte, SAP’s chief digital officer, “The ability to represent our ecosystem offerings side-by-side with related SAP IP [intellectual property] on sap.com is powered by the SAP App Center. We have over 1,500 applications from 1,100+ partners that provide the type of open marketplace where our customers can find the solutions they are looking for.” For SAP customers, searching for, finding and purchasing a new add-on solution is facilitated. I don’t believe this will have a major impact on the acquisition of a new ERP customer, but once you are a customer, the whole process from start to end is dead simple.

Click here to listen to Bertam talk about this digital transformation.

Conclusion

So, are you a betting man or woman? What do you think the odds are that SAP, along with its partners and customers in the SMB space, can hit a trifecta? Will SAP be successful in growing its business in a way that is lucrative for its partners and satisfies the needs of its customers? Where are we in terms of this culture shift to last mile functionality through extensions rather than customization? Who stands to gain the most? Does anyone stand to lose? Is everyone ready for some change?

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Workday Leverages the Power of its Cloud Platform for Application Innovation

Posted by mintjutras on May 22, 2018   |   No Comments
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The “Power of One” In a Hyper-Connected World

In a recent report, Leveraging the Power of a Platform For Enterprise Applications, Mint Jutras encouraged readers to seek out and leverage the power of a modern, technology-enabled development platform in order to bring agility, usability, extensibility and more innovation to the enterprise applications they use to run their businesses. Agility is an absolute must today as new, innovative products, new ways of selling and pricing products and services, and entirely new business models emerge seemingly overnight. Meanwhile consumer technolgy has raised expectations for how we interact with these solutions, and the pace of innovation must accelerate to match the pace of change. Here we explore how one solution provider, Workday, is responding to change today and the change ahead in today’s hyper-connected world.

The “Power of One” Shared

We live in disruptive times… or as Workday likes to say, “Shift happens.” Not only must the pace of innovation accelerate, but also that innovation must be easily consumed without adding disruption of its own. That means the application must be easily tailored (configured) without invasive code changes, and it must be extensible. Platforms play a very key role in delivering against these requirements.

Workday’s strength lies in what it calls the “power of one” – one code line, one security model, one mobile app, one data model, one user experience (UX), one version, and most pertinent to our exploration here… one platform. Indeed, one platform facilitates the rest. And therefore, taking a platform approach to development is not new for Workday. It has always developed its cloud-based business applications using a solid and modern platform. But up until recently Workday employees were the only developers allowed to use that platform.

However, last year it soft launched the Workday Cloud Platform, feeling it was time to open it up to third party developers and its own customers in order to further accelerate innovation. Quite simply, the Workday Cloud Platform enables customers and partners to build applications that run on and integrate with Workday. It provides all the tools needed to manage the application life cycle, complete with data modeling and a single Application Programming Interface (API) point of integration. Having worked with early adopters for some period of time, the platform is now ready for prime time.

Workday’s vision for the Platform is in line with how Mint Jutras defines “leverage.” The vision is stated in terms of three objectives:

  • To enable specific industries and geographies with last mile functionality beyond the core functions required by any business
  • To be the engagement layer for all employees in an enterprise
  • To expand and strengthen the Workday ecosystem

This vision aligns quite well with the kind of strong development platform we described in our prior report.

In that report we talked about platforms providing “a better way” to tailor, customize and extend solutions… better than waiting for long development cycles or invasive code changes. “Better” becomes “best” in combining cloud computing and a modern, next generation architecture that delivers the kind of “application services” that speed and simplify development.

While the cloud is certainly a factor, Mint Jutras contends that Software as a Service (SaaS) and associated Platforms as a Service (PaaS) have a bigger impact on innovation. Workday’s Cloud Platform (still in limited availability) indeed qualifies as a PaaS, and the Workday applications are true, multi-tenant SaaS solutions.

Enterprise applications delivered as software as a service (SaaS) have the potential to deliver more innovation through more frequent updates, while also reducing the cost and effort of upgrades. The cost and effort part is intuitive and universal – the solution provider does the heavy lifting when it comes time to upgrade. But not all cloud-based SaaS solutions provide more innovation, more frequently.

Some SaaS solution providers offer the option of running the same solution on-premises, in private clouds and/or as SaaS. While many today value this choice, there is a price to be paid for it. Solution providers that deliver on-premises solutions are forced to maintain multiple versions of the software. Instead, Workday leverages the power of one, maintaining a single line of code in a strong, safe and secure multi-tenant environment, and delivers significant new capabilities every six months. But this multi-tenancy (all companies use the same instance of the software) only increases the need for configurability and extensibility because no two companies operate identically.

Let’s explore how the three elements of Workday’s vision align with some of the most important elements of architecture.

Features and Functions

At the very core of innovation is the development of new features and functions in support of the business, either to provide core basics or some level of differentiation. When applications were developed as tightly integrated, monolithic structures, this not only meant developing new code, but also modifying existing code in order to “fit” the new features or functions into the overall application. But in our prior report we introduced the concept of component-based architectures. New components can be added as extensions, or used to replace existing components without having to invasively modify that monolithic structure. By taking a platform approach, modern architectures support loose coupling of these extensions by providing APIs (application programming interfaces) that negate the need for invasive customization.

As a refresher, we described microservices. For the reader with a technical background, microservices, also known as the microservice architecture, is defined (by Wikipedia) as an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. For those nontechnical readers, think of it as constructing a solution from a set of Lego building blocks.

Think about how you build a structure from Legos. Each Lego block is made of the same kind of material and is attached (connected) to the other Lego blocks the same way. In many ways they are interchangeable. But by choosing different colors and sizes, and connecting them with a different design, you can make a structure that is very unique. And once constructed, if you want to change it, decoupling some of the blocks and replacing them doesn’t destroy the parts that are not affected. There is far less disruption introduced than if you had constructed it with timber, a hammer and nails.

This is indeed how Workday envisions delivering a complete end-to-end solution (Figure 1), something their customers have been asking for. Customers have indicated a strong desire to consolidate within Workday.

Figure 1: A Consistent Platform for All Development

Source: Workday

Core functionality is delivered within Workday applications, but industry-specific, and regional requirements (localizations such as tax and regulatory compliance requirements) can be packaged as optional extensions. The platform ensures these extensions are seamlessly integrated with the core applications, but can be optionally selected and deployed. This prevents having to add unwanted complexity to the core applications.

While configuration is preferred over customization that involves the development of code, custom components or applications can be justified when they bring customers a level of differentiation in their markets. These are simply extensions that are not shared across a segment or the larger installed base of Workday customers. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) applications are also a form of extension (also easily and seamlessly integrated with Workday applications) but are made commercially available. These will either fill a gap in the Workday solution or address industry-specific requirements, much like those extensions that Workday will provide.

An Engagement Layer for the User Experience

We used to talk about the end user experience solely in terms of intuitive and easy navigation and perhaps general look and feel. But Workday’s efforts to improve the user experience stretch well beyond the look and feel, encompassing many different facets and different roles within any company that uses Workday. It has invested heavily in developing a user experience (UX) layer that encourages engagement and tailoring (configuring without code) different types of experiences. This investment has zeroed in on three principles of design: simple, clever and fast.

Individual users can configure their own “home pages,” which include most frequently used applications and functions within those applications. These might be specific inquiries or transactions in Workday. Users can easily create new “cards,” which might also bring external data into Workday. Think of a card as a new box or tile on the screen.

Workday users can also create “Natural Workspaces,” which allows them to access Workday functions right from the workspace or tool they are already in (Slack, email, etc.) without having to jump from app to app. These Natural Workspaces can also include workplace hubs supported by collaboration tools like Slack, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams. Indeed, Workday and Slack have recently formed a partnership to deliver a productized integration that will be delivered in 2018 and beyond (in phases).

For many, those frequently used tools include spreadsheets. Workday understands the love-hate relationship most of us have with spreadsheets. We can’t seem to live without them despite the obvious problems they create. Once extracted from the system of record, the data in a spreadsheet takes on a life of its own; it can’t be governed, controlled or audited. And mistakes are incredibly easy to make. So Workday provides a viable alternative: Workday Worksheets is a cloud-based enterprise spreadsheet platform. First introduced in its Release 27 (September 2016), along with another important element of business management – planning, budgeting and forecasting, they now power three different Workday applications, and have customers live across multiple industries.

Workday Worksheets look and feel just like a spreadsheet, but you get this level of familiarity and functionality without ever leaving Workday’s secure enterprise environment. You can create models and scenarios, applying application rules and logic, using over 500 different standard functions (like SUMF, VLOOKUP and CONCATENATE), while leveraging live transactional data. The technology behind Workday Worksheets came from its acquisition of Gridcraft.

Workday has also introduced a new concept called Livepages, which help you create a narrative about your data, incorporating live data and charts, and supporting secure collaboration. Workday Assistant, a conversational user experience (think Siri, Alexa, Cortana for the enterprise) also supports collaboration with real-time conversations. But instead of having to follow up through the application later, users can take immediate action from and during those conversations, retrieving information and performing tasks.

While these different elements of the Workday UX target the business user and don’t require special technical skills, Workday also supports a new kind of persona: the “citizen developer.” According to Workday,

“A citizen developer is a technically skilled person who builds new business applications using development and runtime environments sanctioned by their corporate IT team, which in turn allow [the] company to more quickly and efficiently solve business problems. This persona is filled by employees within our customer, partner, and developer organizations worldwide. While we have surfaced capabilities since the beginning for citizen developers to configure their Workday deployment, the Workday Cloud Platform provides a complete toolset for the citizen developer to create their own Workday application experiences.”

To address the needs of the citizen developer, Workday has announced its new Workday Canvas Design System, which provides all of the resources needed (including standards and guidelines) to design and create new experiences that look and feel like Workday. As more customers start to take advantage of this design system, we expect to see the Workday community of developers grow, which brings us to the last of the three goals for the Platform.

Expanding and Strengthening the Ecosystem

As we noted in our previous report, the better the development platform, the more likely it will attract more developers. The more developers attracted to the platform, the more applications get developed, which ultimately can be shared. Features, functions and extensions have the potential to start to grow, if not exponentially, at least much faster than the typical linear sequence of development.

There are currently about 300 developers in the community of the Workday Cloud Platform, but remember, the platform has only been recently opened up. We expect this community to grow very quickly.

One More Thing – Intelligence

While analytics and intelligence are not necessarily stated goals of the Workday Cloud Platform, that doesn’t mean Workday isn’t addressing what Mint Jutras sees as an important element of any platform. In fact last October we recognized Workday as getting smarter and smarter.

In many ways, intelligence is a new currency in the global, digital economy (the hyper-connected world). While many solution providers talk about intelligent applications, they often deliver the minimum you should expect today, which is new ways of interacting with the solution and analytics that help you derive more and better insights from the data. Workday has gone beyond this, through acquisition and its own development efforts, aggressively taking steps towards real intelligence. Workday Prism Analytics, Benchmarking and Data as a Service (DaaS), machine learning, and natural language processing combine to make Workday smarter and smarter. By blending these capabilities with the Workday Cloud Platform, Workday is able to provide powerful insights and intelligence, not through separate bolt-on tools, but embedded in a single solution.

Summary and Key Takeaways

For many years Workday resisted the urging of pundits and industry observers to become a “platform” company, characterizing itself instead as an “application company.” Its strength has always been in what it calls the “power of one” – one code line, one security model, one mobile app, one data model, one user experience (UX), one platform, and one version. The introduction of the Workday Cloud Platform doesn’t change this; it only serves to strengthen it. The goal is not to become a platform or technology company, but instead to better leverage technology (through a platform approach) to foster and promote application innovation by (also) allowing others to innovate and extend the solution.

We are just beginning to see the rewards of this decision come to fruition, but Mint Jutras fully expects as the Workday Cloud Platform gains traction those rewards will grow and multiply quickly.

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ECi To Help Macola Evolve

Posted by mintjutras on April 24, 2018   |   No Comments
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Embracing a Platform Approach to Create More Innovation

The theme for this year’s Macola Evolve user conference was Embrace –Create – Innovate. Indeed these three words, along with the name of the conference itself, epitomizes the recent past and the projected future of the product. Macola, the product is evolving into Macola, the platform. The goal is to make it easier for customers to create their own unique customized solutions through configuration, not code, and to be able to extend and innovate with less disruption. A key to this configurability and extensibility is an open architecture that facilitates integration and makes it easy to “plug in” added functionality. This transformation has been underway for the past several years, but has been energized and accelerated as Macola has found a new home.

Last August Dutch software company Exact Group B.V. (Exact) announced that an agreement had been reached to sell Exact’s Specialized Solutions division, which included Macola, JobBOSS and MAX. The division was acquired by Apax Partners and combined with ECi Software Solutions, under the leadership of ECi. ECi is a business management and e-commerce software publisher, comprised of four business units specializing in serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in manufacturing, wholesale/retail distribution, building and construction, and field services. Macola, along with JobBOSS and MAX, joins ECi’s M1 in the product portfolio of the manufacturing business unit of ECi to become ECi Macola/MAX, LLC. While previously each operated autonomously, ECi is planning on the four manufacturing product teams working more collaboratively, leveraging best practices and creating shared services and synergy. An open platform facilitates the sharing of common services, while allowing each to serve its own, differentiated market.

What Does a Platform Approach Mean?

While Mint Jutras is a strong proponent of taking a platform approach, we realize the typical business decision maker might not fully understand or appreciate what this means today. To a certain extent any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution is built on a development “platform.” In the early days of ERP, the platform equated to the programming language, the operating system and the data structures used (e.g. a flat file structure or a relational data base). Data structures for enterprise applications tended to be hierarchical in nature and rather complex. Enterprise application solution providers would develop standard routines for common tasks like retrieving and storing data or printing, but there was still a lot of heavy lifting to be done in developing code, and most so-called platforms were closed in that it was hard for anyone apart from the original author to add value beyond invasive customization.

Today a platform approach means much more. Modern platforms allow developers to create software without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure and services typically associated with developing an enterprise application. Clearly developers benefit from using the services delivered with a platform, speeding the development process. But how does this translate to benefits to the business?

While there are numerous benefits, the most important is that it brings agility – the ability to easily innovate, evolve and respond to the rapidly accelerating change all businesses face today. Furthermore, an open platform encourages more innovation, not just from the original software developer, but also potentially from an expanded ecosystem.

The Growing Need For Agility

Upon observing the growing disruptive forces in the economy today, we started asking questions about disruption in our 2016 Enterprise Solution Study (our annual survey). Citing examples like Uber, Airbnb and Netflix, we asked survey participants to assess the level of risk they faced in their industries (and hence their businesses) being disrupted. At the time we found 88% of companies believed they faced some level of risk in their businesses and/or industries being disrupted by new innovative products, new ways of selling or pricing existing products or services, entirely new business models, or some combination of all of the above. And then of course there are still the more traditional disruptive factors like expansion and growth, organizational restructuring and regulatory changes, just to name a few.

We repeated that question in our most recent 2018 study and found similar results (Figure 1). The risk has not lessened, but we suspect the speed of that disruption has increased. We also found that speed was reported as the single biggest challenge to growth.

Figure 1: How much risk do you face in your industry being disrupted?

Source: Mint Jutras 2016 and 2018 Enterprise Solution Studies

All this disruption can have a cascading impact on business application requirements, making agility – the ability to easily innovate, evolve and change – even more important than current functionality.

As a result of this potential for disruption, we made innovation a centerpiece for our 2017 Enterprise Solution Study. The days of slow and limited innovation are long gone. Our survey participants last year confirmed many solution providers have increased the pace and volume of upgrades (Figure 2).

Figure 2: How has the pace of innovation delivered changed?

Source: Mint Jutras 2017 Enterprise Solution Study

This obviously puts more pressure on Macola (and ECi) to remain competitive. How much pressure? We also asked respondents, on average, how frequently new releases (not just bug fixes) are delivered today (Figure 3).

Figure 3: How frequently are new releases delivered?

Source: Mint Jutras 2017 Enterprise Solution Study

If we average the responses, we find solution providers offer a new release every 5.2 months. This frequency is higher than expected. We suspect this was largely due to the high percentage of companies surveyed in 2017 that had deployed ERP as cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS). The breakdown is noted in the sidebar to the left.

The Role Cloud and SaaS Play

Continuous innovation is really only feasible with solutions. This is one of many of the potential benefits of SaaS, and one of the many reasons why fewer and fewer manufacturers (Macola’s target market) will no longer even consider a solution that is only available through traditional on-premise licenses. And also why one of the goals of parent company ECi is to speed the transition of Macola to the cloud. This transformation was already underway under its prior owners, with new extensions to the product being designed and delivered with a “cloud first” strategy, but we expect the pace of this transition to accelerate now.

We’ve been assessing preferences for deployment models in our annual Enterprise Solution Studies for years now. The question: If you were to select a new solution today, which deployment options would you consider?

Figure 4: Which deployment options would you consider today? (manufacturing only)

Source: Mint Jutras Enterprise Solution Studies

* Hybrid option added in 2015

Participants are allowed to select as many as they desire. Figure 3 gives an historical perspective to this question based only on participants in manufacturing. Between 2011 and 2013 the percentage that would even consider a traditional on-premise solution went over a cliff and never recovered. Correspondingly, the percentage that will consider SaaS has slowly but steadily risen. Solutions hosted by the solution provider are also popular and, when cloud-based, often serve as an interim step for both the solution provider and its customers.

This year we added a follow on question, listing all the deployment options selected and asking which is the top choice. Over half (56%) of all manufacturers surveyed selected SaaS and 81% of those that would consider SaaS, indicated it is their first choice. The time has truly come for SaaS.

Architecture is Equally Important

Agility and the ability to transition to the cloud both require a strong foundation built on a modern architecture. Early ERP solutions were monolithic structures, eliminating data redundancy and the need for separate integration efforts. The good news was: All of the modules and all the departments affected, moved forward together in lock step. The bad news: Everyone had to move forward in lock step.

That meant purchasing couldn’t move forward until order management, shop floor control and inventory management modules (and people) were ready to move. It takes massive efforts of coordination by the vendor to make sure all the pieces of the puzzle more forward together. And it takes similarly massive efforts of coordination for all departments within their customers’ organizations to take those next steps altogether.

But what if a supplier (or, even worse, a customer) demands that your enterprise change the way you conduct business with them? In our disruptive times, the likelihood of this happening, and happening quickly, increases. What if your current solution can’t support that new way of doing business?

Today’s modern technologies solve this problem by creating solutions as components rather than a single monolithic line of code. New components can be added as extensions, or used to replace existing components without having to invasively modify that monolithic structure. By taking a platform approach, modern architectures support loose coupling of these extensions by providing modern APIs (application programming interfaces) that negate the need for invasive customization.

This type of loose coupling is often described as microservices. For the reader with a technical background, microservices, also known as the microservice architecture, is defined (by Wikipedia) as an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services. For those nontechnical readers, think of it as constructing a solution from a set of Lego building blocks.

Think about how you build a structure from Legos. Each Lego block is made of the same kind of material and is attached (connected) to the other Lego blocks the same way. In many ways they are interchangeable. But by choosing different colors and sizes, and connecting them with a different design, you can make a structure that is very unique. And once constructed, if you want to change it, decoupling some of the blocks and replacing them doesn’t destroy the parts that are not affected. There is far less disruption introduced than if you had constructed it with timber, a hammer and nails.

Many other vendors have started to introduce this kind of architecture by refactoring the underlying code. Again, for the nontechnical reader, think of it as restructuring the code without changing the behavior or the functionality. These other vendors may be making it easier to work with their ERP, perhaps reducing complexity and the cost to maintain, but the refactoring itself adds no new features or functions.

ECi Macola/MAX, LLC is taking a slightly different approach. Instead of refactoring the underlying code, it is instead attaching a new layer with which new services and new functionality may be connected. Think of it as adding that Lego-like coupling to modular structures that may have been built with a hammer and nails. It has added more than 200 of these connections in the form of APIs and has also used this approach in modernizing the user experience (UX).

A year ago Mint Jutras recognized (Exact) Macola’s new UX as more than just a pretty face. We concluded Macola 10.5 brought some added new features and functions along with its pretty new face. These included:

  • A newly re-architected tablet-led user interface that uses size and fonts, color and contrast or added visual clarity, along with the ability to collapse or expand sections to take better advantage of the real estate on the screen
  • Progressive disclosure, keeping added detail (clutter) hidden until needed
  • Responsive design of software, which behaves differently depending on the device in use
  • Special search capabilities that ask the question as you type, “Did you mean…?”
  • Intuitive screens (but don’t take our word for it, see for yourself)
  • Available in the cloud

This year, we see the momentum continue with Macola 10.7. According to ECi Macola/MAX, LLC, “The key features and benefits of Macola 10.7 include:

The End of Version Lock
By creating a powerful and flexible extension layer to the platform, Macola will virtually eliminate the “version lock” that has plagued ERP systems for generations. This will revolutionize the way customers think about extending their ERP system—liberating them from the fear of upgrading. 

 An Expanding Ecosystem

Macola 10.7 continues to expand the Macola ecosystem with yet another round of API coverage, including hundreds of new API functions available for systems integrators to use. Macola’s “expanding ecosystem” ensures visibility of real-time data and control of enterprise processes through integrated third-party apps.

 Doubling Down on User Experience and Streamlined Processes
Continued Focus on User Experience – focusing on the UX, 10.7 has incorporated convenience features such as “at a glance” status indicators that instantly let customer service personnel determine the status of orders. 10.7 has also redesigned one of the more complicated aspects of Macola 10—the “features and options” configurator—which has been dramatically simplified to increase speed and simplicity when getting orders into the system. Lastly, with 10.7, customers who use multiple divisions can now simply toggle between divisions without disrupting their workflow.
Streamlined Processes – to further streamline processes, such as order entry, billing selection, searching and filtering orders, the quoting and creating of credit memos has been streamlined and simplified to closer mimic the way people do their jobs.”

Summary and Conclusions

ECi Macola/MAX, LLC is indeed embracing technology to create, innovate and evolve. Its product’s transition to the cloud and its goal of becoming a platform to sustain configurability and innovation continues. With this approach customers enjoy industry-specific functionality and are also able to differentiate themselves within their individual sectors.

After having been combined with ECi Software Solutions, it has not strayed from its declared path. But all signs point to an accelerated journey, learning from ECi’s own cloud transition and leveraging the combined efforts of multiple product teams in the manufacturing business unit. While all of the different products in the ECi manufacturing business unit target different sectors, there is enough overlap between targets to provide synergy. Macola customers and prospects should rest assured investment will not only continue, but should effectively increase.

Neither Macola nor ECi are exactly household names in the world of ERP for manufacturing. But Mint Jutras suspects the days of relative anonymity are about to end. As Macola settles into its new home and ECi strengthens its executive ranks with a new Chief Marketing Officer and a new Manufacturing Division President, expect to hear and see more… lots more.

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