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.
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.
What this means? For example, when a contamination occurs, the meat manufacturer will have to remove its entire production from the market. And that because the identification of compromised lots will not be possible in the absence of a solution able to store all information related to raw materials entered in their composition. For any producer who wish to increase profit, its essential to be able to track the raw materials sources, the processing of those materials, the products lots on batch, the returns and losses.
For this reason, the purchasing of an IT system has become a essential condition for Romanian meat producers and processors to fulfill both EU requirements and increase profit. Unfortunately, most Romanian meat producers do not buy whole systems of production management activities, do not implement an ERP solution, but only a few modules which do not concern automation.
According to a marketing research performed by students at Economics and Business Administration Faculty from Babeş Bolyai University, only 48% from the Romanian companies bought a software to control the production process and other 19% took into consideration adoption of software solutions for traceability reasons. 33 procents of romanian meat producers not have budget for such an investment, not heard from the existence of such software or failed to identify on the market a software that meet their business needs.
In such conditions, the question I ask is: will be able the Romanian meat producers and processors to face competition and to comply with traceability rules without purchasing any IT systems for production chain management?
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?
I recently read an article published by Brett Beaubouef on his blog (Cloud ERP – New Dog, Same Fleas), about the future of ERP in the cloud. Referring to the traditional ERP, Brett called these systems „the panacea for all business automation pains”. Instead, Cloud ERP is positioned as a revolutionary approach to deploying an ERP solution.
„Practically speaking, Cloud ERP is just another deployment option available to customers. Cloud ERP provides a solution that is flexible, adaptable, scalable, efficient, and affordable. Customers can enjoy painless upgrades, rapid deployment, and easy customization along with availability “anywhere at anytime”!”, said Beaubouef.
The question that arises is the following: are there major differences between those two ERP solutions? At first sight, it seems not. The activities required for an “on premise” ERP implementation are also required for Cloud ERP and the scope and responsibility for the implementation activities are still required. And then, what would be „the key impacts that a Cloud ERP deployment will have on the implementation?”
As Brett said in his article, „from a technology perspective, Cloud ERP offers a faster implementation timeframe and provides very robust functionality”, but if the organization is not prepared to properly use the software then the value of Cloud ERP will quickly dissipate. Also, „integration will be a greater challenge in a Cloud ERP model versus an on-premise ERP model – if only because the Cloud ERP will be outside the company’s internal network”.
Than, the customizations and integrations are impacted based upon the cloud model. Regarding Brett, a customer will have greater flexibility if the customer has a dedicated instance. „If multiple customers are on single software then the Cloud ERP provider may limit the level of integrations and customizations because the software changes may have an adverse impact on all the customers on a shared instance”, specified Brett.
As a conclusion, As with every deployment model, there are advantages and disadvantages to consider. „But it is important to remember that Cloud ERP is not a short cut to success”, noted Beaubouef.
