Curated content of top five ERP news and articles on the web, mostly related to ERP in India
1. Filtrec Bharat accelerates business growth with Infor: Businesswire India: Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications, today announced that Filtrec Bharat, a specialist in manufacturing filter elements for industrial and process filters, has selected Infor solutions to deliver greater visibility, productivity and competency for business growth. The implementation is expected to go live in Aug 2018 and will be deployed by Godrej Infotech..
Upon a comprehensive evaluation, Infor was selected for its specialized expertise in discrete manufacturing module, especially for manufacturing planning and supply chain.
2. 10 Manufacturing buzzwords you should pay attention to in 2015: IFS World: Manufacturing Industry has undergone rapid changes in the last four to five years mainly driven by technological advances that were unthinkable a few years ago. Terms like 'Rapid Prototyping', 'Collaborative Robots (Cobots)' are the in jargons in this industry. This article from ERPNews talks about 10 such jargons that you should be aware of in 2018. These are Smart Factory / Industry 4.0, Robotic Process Automation, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Servitization (This is new...), Additive manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality / Mixed Reality (AR / VR / MR), Block Chain and Technological Unemployment. Add the two I mentioned in the beginning, and you have a well rounded dozen !!1
3. Top 5 ERP Predictions for 2018: Panorama Consulting: As we enter 6 months into 2018, it is interesting to revisiting the predictions on ERP made at the beginning of the year. Panorama Consulting, a respected name in ERP Consulting made five predictions for 2018. These included, one, capital investments in digital transformation initiatives will continue, two, cloud ERP will reach a tipping point, three, more organizations will be forced to lay off their legacy ERP systems, four, more companies will say 'No' to ERP Software, and five, Organizations shy away from OCM (Org. Change Management).
While some of these are carefully worded to be generic and cannot be validated by data, it is safe to say the cloud has not yet reached the tipping point. With the new EU Data Protection regulations, Organizations will have to rethink their central server cloud strategy. Also, On premise applications are far from Sunset. Oracle is in fact releasing upgraded versions of its EBS On Premise applications. (12.2.6). I think there is a confusion and lack of clarity on the cloud / on-premise strategy, mostly related to standardized / customized applications.
4. ERP Beauty Contest: GotERP.com: One of the underrated criteria when selecting an ERP application is its Ease of Use. Considering that the users of the application are the key stakeholders of the application post go live, it is surprising that this aspect is not given the due importance. Ease of use will automatically translate to increased user interest and enthusiasm, smoothing the requirement gathering, end user training and shortening the data collection time.
So what are the criteria that qualify as ease of use (also called Beauty Contest?). These include intuitive navigation, personalization and ease of customization, integrated application philosophy (for example same design principles used in Payables and Receivables), integration with Microsoft Office applications (very important), quick opening of data forms, quick retrieval of data, intuitive and actionable alert messages, quick retrieval of latest realtime information (latest inventory figures when the sales person is sitting with the customer accessing web over a WIFI) etc (Some of these criteria are mine)
How do ERPs stack up? I would love to know. I have worked on Oracle, IMO, it is somewhat average when it comes to these criteria.
5. Clover Infotech Implements Oracle Financials Cloud: Economic Times: In my earlier role, I was a customer for Clover Infotech. Their customer support is excellent. Now I see this news that they have implemented Oracle Cloud for Financials and Project Contracts Billing. We discussed this elsewhere, Indian companies are looking at a modular approach to cloud rather than the Application approach.
