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„A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” is a proverb well-known. In B2B, this concept is translated by an ERP solution is only as strong as its weakest integration. Commonly overlooked and underestimated, integration is one of the most important factors to consider as part of a best of office application vs. integrated ERP solution. The benefit of richer functionality is limited by partial integration.

Therefore, to take an informed decision regarding best of office application vs. integrated ERP, you must know this:

- Integrating a best of office application with ERP software will result in additional cost and maintenance (ex. dual upgrade and maintenance cycle).

- Developing integration between a best of breed application and ERP software will not be as robust as the delivered ERP integrations between its applications. Part of result has to do with the total integration cost over the life of ERP and the other area is the simple fact that the underlying data models are different.

Knowing the facts expressed above, the question I challenge you with is: will having a best of breed application versus integrated ERP worth the cost? Will the additional investment generate a significant impact to competitive advantage?

The new version of the open source ERP / CRM application SocrateOpen just said „Hello world!” The 2.6 version cames with a series of new improvements and adaptabilities coming to support companies activating in services, construction, telecommunications, distribution, discrete manufacturing and agro.

During my years of industrial marketing and sales, I learned that there is a big difference between corporate information and Strategic Knowledge.

In today’s business world, human resource outsourcing (HRO) is becoming increasingly popular than it was few years ago. This dramatic change occurring in today’s organizations has propelled this latest trend toward outsourcing. Workers’ needs are changing, human resources costs are rising and there are increasing pressures to be aware with the latest legislative changes.
At this point, you may be asking yourself a question: how to efficiently manage the all this? The answer is simple. By partnering with a firm that can deliver an HR IT solution that can empower your managers to make healthy workforce decisions.
To find the right answer to „To outsource or not the HR”, you must answering to those questions:
- What HR outsourcing model do I need? (business process, shared services or an application?
- Do I really need an outsourcing?
- What are the benefits and concerns of outsourcing?
And, before making the decision, there are some high-level factors that must be considered:
- Ensure the outsourcing firms you are looking at have enough experience to handle your company’s needs and that they will be able to meet or exceed your quality expectations.
- Ask for references.
- Have open communication with your provider.
- Understand your provider's limitations by asking the right questions.
Having the answers to all those questions, you will be able to take the right decision: outsource or not the Human Resources.

Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, meaning the effective application of the broad suite of data analysis tools and analytical approaches to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.
BI applications find their way into a vast range of business areas including customer relationship management, external market assessment, supply chain analysis, human resources, enterprise resource planning, financial management, research and development, as well as the various quality control activities such as Six Sigma. They employ technologies such as: data mining, text mining, geographic information systems, language translation, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, simulation, and advanced visualization.
Business Intelligence software allows companies to access their databases and deliver insights to employees, managers and business partners. The insights provided by BI then turn into actions as companies use BI applications to find new opportunities, reduce costs, reallocate resources and improve operational efficiency.
BI applications allow business persons to make informed decisions by providing timely, relevant and accurate answers to business questions. They do so with the help of analytical insights ranging from intuitive, graphical dashboards to highly formatted operational reports.

The business performance improvement cycle

Improving business performance often starts with setting priorities, by answering questions such as: Which business areas need the most attention? In which areas can results be enhanced with reasonable resources and effort?
Through the use of BI Applications, organizations gain improved insight and make more rational resource prioritization decisions each day. By monitoring business results and fine-tuning business actions, organizations create a system and culture of continuous performance improvement.
Intelligence in Business today is applied to 3 distinct and interrelated business needs – Monitoring the business, Reporting on the business, and Analyze the business. Monitoring BI applications constantly track business metrics to inform and alert the persons responsible about ongoing business activity and the decisions that might be required based on them. Reporting BI applications deliver detailed data on current and historical operational performance so managers can see what is happening across the enterprise, and how well the business is operating. And, finally, Analysis BI applications present views of the business from many different angles so that managers can uncover the causes of performance problems, uncover opportunities that the business should exploit, or predict business results.

 

by Iulian Lixandru

BITSoftware BI Consultant

The traceability is an important component of the requirements imposed to food industry by the European Union. And means the need of controlling the history of a meat product, from raw material until the final product and its location after sale or distribution. In other words, by traceability the manufacturing process conforms to the European legislation and quality standards.

Even in the case of extremely small businesses, a strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence solution can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company. Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes. Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.
- Should we treat all customers equally? (If you say yes, I’d suggest reading “Angel Customers & Demon Customers”)
In a company that has more than thirty customers, the Pareto Principle will be evident. Looking inside the famous 80/20 rule one can find that five percent of the customers generate close to 50% of the profits while the bottom 50% of the customers generate only 5% of the total profit. Many companies have a hard time identifying which customers belong to each group. A strategic deployment of Business Analytics provides the answers instantly.
Even when sales revenue is growing, management should be able to ask key questions and find the answers right away, so the train of thought isn’t interrupted:
- Is revenue growing profitably? Where? How and Why?
- Are we paying sales reps commissions for bringing in unprofitable tonnage?
- Can we quickly tell whether the growth trend is just over last month, last quarter, same quarter last year or year to date?
- How about the profit growth of the last 52 weeks compared to the previous 52 weeks? Is it really growing?
- Is our growth accelerating or decelerating? How much?
- How is our profit growth versus budget or business plan? Where is it failing to meet objectives? Why?
- Which competitors are threatening our business?
- In what regions and market segments can we maximize our growth?
A BI solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues. Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is. In the past deploying a BI solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to licensing cost but also because the internal and external resources needed for set-up and maintenance.

Finding the right ERP software for your business is, sometimes, a very difficult process. Why that?
In the first place, because the analysis of your company needs are not complete.
Second, cause your expectations are a little bit unrealistic.
To simplify the entire process of finding the right ERP for your company, you must follow those 5 steps:
1. Set clear objectives implementation, acceptance criteria and, especially, your business requirements;
2. Awareness of technological change impact that will occur on the company processes, with direct influence over each employee work.
3. Check the market share and reputation of the vendors, its expertise in your field.
4. Check the supplier's ability to provide help in the reorganization of your business processes.
5. Ask for recommendations from other users of the ERP solution you want to implement.
After that, the whole process will appear much simpler and easier.

For any manufacturer and supplier of integrated management systems, the launch of an ERP solution is not an endpoint, but rather a new beginning. Because any such solution requires, over time, updating, correlation with legislation changes and functional adaptations designed to help users to improve / control / optimize businesses as much as possible.

In a time when the market forces companies to lower profits to maximum in order to earn new contracts, every penny spent elsewhere counts. And if, as a company, you own a large vehicles fleet over which you have no control whatsoever regarding its efficiency and productivity, that can mean your exclusion from the market or even bankruptcy.

But there is a solution by which you can control all costs involved by a fleet of vehicles and / or machines and you can have a clear image on undertaken activities, expenses and events occurring in the fleet. And this solution its named SocrateOpen Fleet Management. And with it, identifying and tracking each vehicle or machine is very easy. SO Fleet Management allows a comprehensive vehicle/equipment description with information on technical data (type, engine, category, capacity), registration data (temporary/final), procurement contract type (credit, leasing, custody, etc.), costs, maintenance, historical and planned inspections, rentals.

Also, it is a lot easier to operate mechanism by which the vehicles are allocated on people and by which the official report/protocol can be printed in small or detailed forms. Plus, with this solution you can track the insurance contract on each vehicle as standard functionality, the administrator being notified within a predefined number of days before the expiration of each insurance policy. The mechanism can be also applied to other car components with a validity period, like first aid kits or fire extinguishers.

What is extremely important to know is that in SocrateOpen Fleet Management was created a mechanism that allocates costs on resources, allowing the possibility to group them by source or cost categories, in order to obtain the profitability on vechicle.

What does this mean for your business? In short, efficiency, control, operational cost savings. You seem a bit?