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December 2005
December 31, 2005	Demand at the Fount of Open Source Part Two: A Primer Based in Demand Trends Organizations globally, are contributing to increased demand for Free and open source software but vendors may not yet be meeting this demand. This article highlights FOSS fundamentals with the goal of adding clarity for the uninitiated.
December 30, 2005	Demand at the Fount of Open Source: A Primer Based in Demand Trends As we witness the inexorable increase in demand for Free and open source software (FOSS), many organizations have yet to glean the FOSS fundamentals. This series highlights fundamentals for the enterprise as manifested in global customer demand trends.
December 27, 2005	Easy ERP: A Challenge to Conventional Thinking There is a new paradigm when it comes to evaluating ERP systems. With little difference between industry players' solutions, the key is the longevity of the system, its usability, and total cost of ownership.
December 24, 2005	Predictive Analytics; the Future of Business Intelligence Business intelligence (BI) is evolving as it grows in popularity. Within BI, there is a shift from traditional analytics to predictive analytics, and predictive analytics is emerging as a distinct new software sector.
December 23, 2005	Outcome Sourcing in the Outcome Economy The move to an outcome economy encompasses radical changes in the core elements of commerce. It requires a whole new way of thinking on the part of both buyer and seller—from buying and selling things to buying and selling outcomes.
December 23, 2005	The Channel Management Shuffle Executives and middle management are constantly faced with determining policy, process, and technology around managing one or multiple channels. What is critical to successful channel management?
December 23, 2005	Single Version of the Truth Today's enterprise is no longer a single, vertically integrated organization. Globalization, outsourcing, and off-shoring have created an environment where end-to-end supply chains include many players, with a shared need for accurate and timely information.
December 23, 2005	Working Toward Truly Strategic Partnerships If good partnerships seem to be a rarity, true and lasting relationships that benefit both parties are downright unique. How to avoid a Barney relationship and create a partnership that really works!
December 23, 2005	New Approaches to Software Pricing Hearing the complaints of dissatisfied customers, some vendors are developing customer-centric contracts. HarrisData has even gone so far as to draft a Bill of Rights for customers. How well do these pledges measure up?
December 22, 2005	Enterprise Software Service and Maintenance Alternatives Traditional license models may be wearing out their welcome for both vendors and customers. A competitive market and a more IT savvy business generation is prompting change, but what alternatives are out there for software service and maintenance?
December 21, 2005	Is There a Panacea for Enterprise Software Pricing Yet? While enterprise applications are becoming a commodity, their pricing schemes have yet to follow suit. Users are put in a costly position where the "fine print" clauses of implementation contracts may inhibit reasonable expectations for software warranties.
December 20, 2005	Plant Intelligence as Glue for Dispersed Data? Enterprises that have manufacturing or plant-level intelligence systems can be guided through the forking paths of exception-based decision-making. Not only will they be better prepared for unplanned events, but they will also know how their responses will impact the company.
December 19, 2005	Document Management and Digital Asset Management Is There a Difference and What Might It Be? As enterprises seek better content management systems, documentation management (DM) and digital asset management (DAM) are growing in popularity. Despite market confusion, the two solutions serve different functions, but can still be integrated to meet an enterprise's needs.
December 16, 2005	A Unique Product Lifecycle Management Tool for Private Label Retail The Worldwide Retail Exchange (WWRE) and the Global NetXchange (GNX) have merged their complementary Web-enabled product sets to form Agentrics LLC. One outcome is the ProductVine PLM solution, which is clearly designed for and targeted to private label retailers.
December 15, 2005	ERP Plus and Beyond ERP Plus provides tools that metal fabricators need to streamline their quoting, order entry, inventory control, production, labor collection, shipping, and invoicing processes.
December 14, 2005	The Strengths of a Vertically Centric Enterprise Software Provider Verticent, a revitalized reincarnation of the languishing public mid-market enterprise applications vendor PowerCerv, seems to be thriving under a financially stable adopted parent, and it has found a defendable niche where it can exploit its competitors' functional "fatal flaws".
December 13, 2005	IT Governance: Maximizing the Business Investment Implementing information technology (IT) governance means using a structure of relationships and processes to direct an organization. Some project portfolio management (PPM) vendors have adopted the IT governance mantra to differentiate their solutions from those offered by the enterprise resource planning (ERP) industry.
December 12, 2005	Global Product Development Seen as a Boon for Product Lifecycle Management Vendors An enterprise that wants to shift to a global product development strategy must invest in modern product lifecycle management (PLM) technology. Therefore, the PLM software market could be on the edge of a significant growth cycle.
December 9, 2005	Supply Chain Vendor Morphs into SCEM with Response Management Vision Supply chain planning vendors have moved beyond enterprise planning to solutions that encompass the whole supply chain. Companies like Kinaxis are using enterprise response management to manage events and responses as they occur and align results at the point-of-action.
December 8, 2005	Business Process Management: A Crash Course on What It Entails and Why to Use It Business process management (BPM) has to integrate existing enterprise applications, Web services, and people in such a way that it can also quickly change, destruct, or construct processes. This is far beyond the realm of traditional enterprise application integration (EAI).
December 7, 2005	Records Management Becoming More Important Due to Compliance Regulations Electronic media and corporate governance have complicated records management for enterprises. Properly defining information as corporate records and using a record management system can help enterprises meet regulatory compliance and reduce liability.
December 6, 2005	Integrating Customer Relationship Management through Software As A Service The customer relationship management (CRM) market is changing. Over half the market is served by small vendors. Fully integrated business suites like NetSuite standalone solutions like salesforce.com, are heeding the demand for software as a service, but they are approaching the market with very different market strategies.
December 5, 2005	Comparing On Demand Customer Relationship Management Service Alternatives Customer relationship management (CRM) functionality can fall into four categories: core functionality; non-core functionality; vertical, industry-specific features; and accounting-related features. When evaluating and selecting a CRM solution, enterprises must be aware of the potential issues associated with functions and features that are not part of core CRM functionality.
December 2, 2005	Positioning Makes Your Marketing Budget Go Further—and Hit the Target Many business-to-business (B2B) software companies don't have a formal positioning process, and it's costing them time, money, and much more—a marketing message that misses the mark. This article explores the benefits of implementing a business process for positioning.
December 1, 2005	Enterprise Software Product Outsourcing: A Fresh Perspective for Mid-market Vendors Creating outsourcing centers is a viable option for companies under pressure to develop quality products with tight time and budget restraints. Mid-market companies, however, often do not have this option, but can still benefit from partnering with an outsourcing provider.
November 2005
November 30, 2005	The Exacting Needs of Metal Service Centers General enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers that are viable companies with a solid product, typically do not meet the dimensional inventory, chemical, and physical properties requirements that are vital to the metal service industry and material converter businesses.
November 29, 2005	What Are Manufacturing Execution Systems? Manufacturing execution systems (MES) can be defined as a collection of business processes providing event-by-event, real time execution of planned production requirements. However, market ambiguity and functional overlap with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems obscure what an MES can bring to an enterprise.
November 28, 2005	The Challenges of Integrating Enterprise Resource Planning and Manufacturing Execution Systems While enterprise applications solutions are moving closer to the plant floor, and plant-level systems are moving closer to enterprise planning application functionality, these two will not likely converge anytime soon because they use different technologies and have different user requirements.
November 26, 2005	Inventory Control Is Perhaps the Most Powerful Tool You Have for Containing Your Warehousing Costs Your company's success is not only dependent on sales, but also on your company's ability to say, "Yes we have that item in stock." The problem is, inventory control is usually an after thought.
November 25, 2005	If There's One Thing CRM Tells Us: Don't Do PLM the Same Way Product lifecycle management (PLM) doesn't work, but it should. Industry's general approach and attitude to PLM mimics the early days of customer relationship management (CRM) adoption, and lessons from that experience should help when tackling the "ifs" and "hows" of PLM investment.
November 24, 2005	Profitable-to-promise: A New Exciting Era Any manufacturing business is faced with promising accurate delivery dates for customer orders. At the same time, the manufacturer has to ensure that every order taken, is profitable. This article focuses on the issues related to order delivery date promising in view of profitability of orders to the manufacturer.
November 23, 2005	What Plant-level Systems Can Do for the Enterprise Market To gain the competitive edge, enterprises are seeking tools to break information silos. Collaborative planning and manufacturing has given plant-level systems a whole new meaning.
November 22, 2005	Plant-level Systems: Facing and Dealing with Obstacles Production supervisors and plant managers are constantly fighting problems within a plant because they lack visibility in the supply chain and do not have an automated exception-based management system. However, a value-adding processing layer can create transparency and link information to unify company processes.
November 21, 2005	The Importance of Plant-level Systems The information technology (IT) environment in manufacturing is facing a dramatic change. Traditional systems must evolve to support near real time, collaborative business models. This is especially prudent at the plant-level.
November 18, 2005	Parametric Technology Corporation's Bold Vision Drives Growth and Innovation Cooperative markets and clever strategies controlling internal developments and guiding marketing may help Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) reach revenues of $1 billion (USD) by 2008. However, more impressive is this may make PTC an innovator in product lifecycle management.
November 17, 2005	Prepackaged SAP Best Practices—Are They for You? SAP Best Practices are a series of fixed-scope, pre-defined packages of software and services solutions designed to address the demands of midsize enterprises in multiple industries. Are they right for you?
November 16, 2005	Best-of-breed Approach to Finance and Accounting CODA's savvy accounting and financial offerings include budgeting, forecasting, scorecards, and tools that use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets collaboratively and securely. However, CODA must defend its narrow specialist and best-of-breed approach against larger-scale integrated enterprise system offerings.
November 15, 2005	Joining the Sarbanes-Oxley Bandwagon; Meeting the Needs of Small and Medium Businesses To meet tough government compliance, more vendors are offering compliance solutions. CODA's collaborative task modeling tool takes an enterprise's best practices model, audits business processes, automates data collection, and creates a secure collaborative space to offer checks and balances to simplify compliance monitoring.
November 14, 2005	Composing Collaborative Financial Applications With its short term ownership under Baan all but forgotten, CODA has been doing well, owing to its astute offerings tailored to the preferences of each regional market, coupled with some recent appetizing acquisitions.
November 11, 2005	Global Trade Management Software Vendors Under-Perform, But Were Predictions Overly Optimistic? After 9/11, the analyst community optimistically predicted a sharp rise in the demand for global trade management (GTM) software. While initially vendor shares rose, pre- and post-9/11 barriers have prevented the profitability and ubiquity of GTM software.
November 10, 2005	Professional Services Organizations Automate their Processes Major vendors are entering the professional services software market and small niche vendors are repositioning themselves to compete. This changing market is conveying mixed messages; however, users can navigate this space by separating market messages from vendors' functional capabilities.
November 9, 2005	Using Visibility to Manage Supply Chain Uncertainty Technology has advanced supply chain visibility beyond mere track and trace functions. Visibility can be used to manage supply chain uncertainty, thereby preemptively troubleshooting problematic areas and reallocating resources to better meet the demands of an enterprise.
November 7, 2005	Supply Chain Management Is Evolving toward Interdependent Supply Networks Optimizing supply chain management processes to work more closely with trading partners, requires enterprises to act together as interdependent supply networks. The development of service oriented architecture will be crucial in achieving the necessary flexibility characterizing such networked supply chains.
November 4, 2005	The Role of Sales Training Requirements Definition and Requests for Proposals in the Success of Technology Companies The first step in choosing an effectiveness service provider (ESP) that best meets your company's needs is to develop a requirements definition. When used as a request for proposal, the requirements definition can be a powerful evaluation and negotiation tool.
November 3, 2005	The Why of Data Collection Data collection systems work; however, they require a investment in technology. Before the investment can be justified, we need to understand why a data collection system may be preferable to people with clipboards.
November 2, 2005	Partnerships with Vendors and Independent Software Vendors: Rejuvenating Legacy Systems The rapid pace of global business places a unique set of challenges on all enterprises looking to improve and automate their operations, and at the same time, remain poised to adapt quickly to change.
November 1, 2005	Server Platform Revitalization in the Enterprise Applications Space The whole idea of enterprise application modernization is to renew existing software so that it can satisfy the need for integration and graphical presentation without losing any functionality. IBM is looking towards independent software vendors to help it in this endeavor.
October 2005
October 31, 2005	Server Platform Situational Analysis: IBM AS/400 Customers value IBM's AS/400's reliability, stability, and security. However, despite its impressive performance and use of independent software vendors to broaden its functionality, AS/400 suffers from the perception that its an ancient technology.
October 28, 2005	The Challenges of the Lawson-Intentia Merger The new company forged from Lawson and Intentia will have to carefully blend their different corporate cultures, which has traditionally been proud of in-house development spawning a limiting "not invented here" attitude.
October 27, 2005	Market Impact of Lawson-Intentia Merger The Lawson and Intentia merger might create a much-needed, strong statement for the market, and provide the mid-market with more options. It may also decrease the negative momentum both companies have experienced in the frenzied and rapidly consolidating enterprise applications market.
October 26, 2005	Intentia Prepares for Merger with Lawson Before merging with Lawson, Intentia already had initiated cost-cutting measures on its products, target markets, and sales channels. This, corporate cultural changes, and an infusion of research money help the "new" Intentia become a world class solutions provider to the mid-market.
October 25, 2005	'New' Lawson Software's Transatlantic Extended Enterprise Resource Planning Intentions The recent merger of Lawson Software and Intentia, two vendors of similar size, but servicing different markets, will complement each other to become the largest enterprise applications supplier that is dedicated to the mid-market customer segment.
October 22, 2005	CRM Application Users Are Key to Project Success For a customer relationship management implementation to be successful, consulting firms, vendors, and users must pay attention to user training and change management.
October 21, 2005	Critical Components of an E-PLM System E-business has prompted a lot of vendors to move towards creating electronic product lifecycle management (e-PLM) suites. However, enterprise resource planning vendors with extensive e-commerce initiatives, development staffs, and renewed interest in PLM, are as likely to lead the way.
October 19, 2005	Retalix Strives for Leadership in Retail Food Segment Retalix, a supply chain software provider is positioning itself to be a segment pack leader through vendor positioning, vertical differentiation, and horizontal influences. It may be poised to oust industry heavyweights including IBM and SAP as the retail food industry software provider.
October 18, 2005	Vendors Strive for Segment Pack Leader Status; Does Retalix Measure Up? Software vendors strive to be leaders in their areas of expertise and Retalix seems to be no exception. But how do we recognize a segment pack leader and what are the key elements that characterize a supply chain pack leader?
October 17, 2005	Looking For Software—The Expectations of Small and Medium Enterprises Small and medium enterprises (SME) looking for software must understand their needs and articulate their expectations to get what they want and need from software.
October 14, 2005	SCM in a New Flavor: Real Time and Demand Driven To meet the needs of a demand driven market, Apptricity is leveraging service oriented architecture to deploy and integrate modules.
October 13, 2005	Enterprise Resource Planning: Bridging the Gap between Product Vision and Execution Why has Infor been successful at tacitly nurturing and growing acquired companies when many more noisy competitors have not?
October 12, 2005	Stability and Functionality for Process and Discrete Manufacturers While superficially, Infor's acquisition strategy may appear to be impulsive, it has actually been calculated to develop a stronger vertical functionality. This may mean that Infor can offer customers more stability while offering niche functionality.
October 11, 2005	Technology Hurdles Plus Retailer Consolidation Yield a Fragile Market for Consumer Packaged Goods Manufacturers As major retailers increase their share of the market and exploit technology for business process improvement, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers risk losing ground in the market place, if they cannot meet retailers demands for compliance.
October 10, 2005	Demand-driven Supply Networks for Small and Medium Business Lately demand-driven supply networks (DDSN) are a much talked about topic, yet little is written about SMBs and DDSN. By understanding the basics of DDSN, and through selective implementation, SMBs can experience the agility, adaptability, and alignment of DDSN.
October 8, 2005	Aligning Java-based Application Strategies In announcing their merger plans, Lawson and Intentia will not only have to grapple with the usual issues, but will have to deal with the nuanced differences in their respective Java application endeavors.
October 7, 2005	A New Platform to Battle Software Bloat? Lawson has unveiled a new standards-based business applications platform designed to increase overall application quality and improve the product lifecycle experience for current and future Lawson clients.
October 6, 2005	Can Java Perk Legacy Enterprise Resource Planning Systems? Intentia has poured Java into its enterprise resource planning system, Movex, to meet the growing demand for functional enhancements and remote accessibility, without ripping and replacing legacy systems. However, are users willing to make the transition?
October 5, 2005	Portal Strategy: One Vendor's Story and What It Means to You Epicor is working with Microsoft so that portal adopters can benefit from SharePoint's models and access to other enterprise data.
October 4, 2005	Epicor To Give All Its Applications More Than A Pretty Facelift In August, Epicor announced a revised portal strategy to provide rich portal content through a more secure and standardized portal platform. By leveraging Microsoft .NET across all product families, Epicor Portal will reportedly deliver data exploration, collaboration, and on-line management features.
October 3, 2005	A New Model for Evaluating Third Party Logistics Providers: Enter Service Oriented Architecture Third-party logistic (3PL) providers are under pressure to keep costs low, expand services and capitalize on evolving supply chain management technology. As customers are becoming more discerning, 3PLs can leverage service oriented architecture to meet customer needs.
September 2005
September 30, 2005	Product Architecture for Product Endurance? Product architecture can ensure product scalability, endurance, and the incorporation of emerging technologies. Consequently, LANSA 2005 offers Web Application Modules (WAM), to give developers a shorter learning curve and lower development costs to produce browser-based commercial enterprise applications and even Web services.
September 29, 2005	Programming for Business Analysts? The Promise of Simplified Web Services Implementation and Access LANSA offers to rejuvenate legacy systems by empowering developers with simplified programming to use Java services.
September 28, 2005	Project Lifecycle Management Implies Long Term Value; Forget the Total Cost of Ownership Fuss Understanding the nature and specifics of your product development life cycles, and especially new product design and initiation, can help you realize tangible cost savings and will offset the total cost of ownership of a product lifecycle management system.
September 27, 2005	Niche Software at Its Best Deltek Vision and other Deltek enterprise solutions, have been major players with project management-oriented organizations for the past twenty years. Vision a leading product in the professional services automation market and has taken significant strides to maintain this market leading position.
September 26, 2005	Portals: Necessary But Not Self-sufficient Having moved beyond its original role as a standalone presentation layer to become a part of a larger technology stack, the portal is now considered part of a larger offering, be it in collaboration, vertical-specific applications, or application infrastructure and middleware.
September 23, 2005	Lean and World Class Manufacturing and the Information Technology Dilemma—The Loss of Corporate Consciousness Companies relying on manual implementation and support for lean and world class methodologies risk losing corporate consciousness. Avoid the pitfalls of lost information and flexibility; place value on performance gaps and create matrixes of tools and applications to prioritize issues.
September 22, 2005	ERP and Warehouse Management: Technology, Challenges, and User Recommendations Intense product architecture rejuvenation, functional enhancements cycles, and market consolidation exert pressure on all mid-market vendors offering ERP and warehouse management solutions. Adonix must carefully allot research and development funds and screen its new assets to increase its competitive edge.
September 21, 2005	Responding to Warehouse Management Needs The area of warehouse management systems and supply chain execution might be the best examples of Adonix' commitment to provide small and large businesses with the building blocks for supply chain management.
September 21, 2005	Project Management Office: Framework Strategy IT initiatives driven within silos, where each department maintain its own project management office, inhibits the overall cohesiveness and effectiveness of corporate strategy. This document outlines best practices to centralize and deliver a scalable and robust project management framework strategy.
September 20, 2005	Mid-Market Strategy: International Enterprise Solutions Adonix marks its strategy with two catchwords: "growth" and "independence". It has carefully assessed and added acquisitions to broaden Adonix X3 suite's functional scope, licenses and services; and continues nurture internal development with its own resources.
September 19, 2005	Adonix' Mid-Market FORMULA – Adopting Best of Both 'Organic Growers' and 'Aggressive Consolidators' Worlds Adonix appears to be a force in the Southern European enterprise resource planning and supply chain management market since acquiring Gruppo FORMULA. There might be a greater buzz internationally, but the road to success might not be an easy Mediterranean sail.
September 16, 2005	The Blessing and Curse of Rejuvenating Legacy Systems Catering to existing and prospective customers is problematic. Existing customers often value their legacy systems because they are reliable and prospective customers want the latest technologies and rapid deployment. To cope, independent software vendors offer continual enhancements and offer custom extensions.
September 15, 2005	Throw Away Your Financial Statements: Managing by Metrics Analyzing static, detailed financial statements has been the modus operandi for hundreds of years. Because many business management systems can isolate and create graphics of key performance indicators (KPI), businesses should now concentrate on KPIs, which influence profitability.
September 14, 2005	Technology Enablers for the Lean Supply Chain Transforming an enterprise to a lean supply chain requires both enabling technology and discipline. By following some specific guidelines to extend lean methodology, you can proceed through your supply chain transformation to become effectively lean.
September 13, 2005	Moving Beyond Lean Manufacturing to a Lean Supply Chain Most lean manufacturing deployments target production operations, but can also be extended to other supply chain processes. To realize the multiplicative benefits of real time information and reduced inventory, companies must assess their production environment and supply chain activities.
September 12, 2005	Rapidly Consolidating Enterprise Applications Market: The Worlds of 'Organic Growers' and 'Aggressive Consolidators' What types of vendors' approaches to the mid-market have emerged from the wave of mergers and consolidations and what characteristics ultimately distinguish the contenders from the pretenders are two questions that are emerging from the consolidation market.
September 10, 2005	The ERP Life Cycle: From Birth to Death and Birth Again The enterprise life cycle is often misunderstood, which can lead to complications during the selection, implementation, and maintenance phases. Knowing what to expect during each phase will allow an enterprise to get better money for value from the solution.
September 9, 2005	Demand-driven Manufacturing and Warehousing: Challenges and User Recommendations Among its promising initiatives, IBS offers flexible rescheduling tools that integrate with existing manufacturing resource planning systems. Its warehousing solution also promises better use of space, and automates reception put-away, etc. However, the vendor still must navigate through some rough competitive terrain.
September 8, 2005	The Impact of Demand-Driven Technology in the SCM Market: IBS The integration solutions market will be an interesting area of growth. IBS has an attractive offer for companies with complex and expensive business software at the group and headquarters level, wanting to lower costs and quicken implementation in their subsidiaries.
September 7, 2005	Supply Chain Operations Reference and Other Features in ASW IBS may be the first vendor to fully integrate a supply chain operations reference model in its business intelligence solution. Customers receive more efficient measurements and benchmarking across their supply chain regardless of their supply chain and ERP software.
September 6, 2005	Supply Chain Economy The US Labor Department reported an increase in jobs in June and July ... but the manufacturing industry cut jobs for a third month in a row. We are moving from a manufacturing economy to a supply chain economy. This article gives the big picture.
September 6, 2005	IBS–Slow but Steady (and Demand-Driven) May Win the SCM Race IBS, a conservative Swedish enterprise resource planning and supply chain management, seems to be making right moves to remain the leader within its selected segments. However, the road to becoming uniformly globally recognized player will not be smooth.
September 6, 2005	The Middle Kingdom - From Wired to Wireless Confused about RFID middleware? RFID middleware has a critical role to play in cleaving together and clarifying the signals and intelligence, bidirectionally from the device layer to the business applications, or out to the communications infrastructure, to the web or satellites. This article explains it all.
September 6, 2005	Interview with Joe Cowan "Manugistics is not a software company." This was among many of the interesting statements that Joe Cowan shared in our interview during Manugistics user conference, Envision 2005, in Atlanta, GA.
September 6, 2005	Interview with Michael McGrath, CEO, i2 Technologies The former CEO and co-founder of PRTM is a keen observer of management cycles and philosophies. As he takes over the helm at i2, Michael McGrath talks about how the company is preparing for the next generation of supply chain.
September 6, 2005	New Chapters in the Evolutionary Journal Recognizing that change is a constant is the first step to survival in this new economy. Identifying the changing nature of business partners—customers, suppliers, and service providers—is the second step. Finally, embracing change and developing a sustainable business strategy for a digital economy provides the final impetus for the future.
September 5, 2005	Essential ERP—Its Underpinning Technology In its simplest sense, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems create interactive environments designed to help companies manage and analyze the business processes associated with manufacturing goods, such as inventory control, order taking, accounting, and much more.
September 3, 2005	Process Manufacturing Software: A Primer This article defines process manufacturing; discusses its formulation, packaging, and pricing issues; talks about interfaces; and provides cautions and caveats.
September 2, 2005	What Makes Process Process? The systems dealing with manufacturing, inventory, procurement, and customer order management systems are among the systems that often prove to be the hardest to acquire due to the unique issues of the process enterprise.
September 1, 2005	Mid-sized SCE Buys Small SCP: No Sure Bet on Short Term Profits Leading supply chain execution (SCE) vendor, Manhattan Associates has recently announced its acquisition of Evant, a supply chain planning (SCP) company. Adjusting to a different type of supply chain application, gaining profitability, and maintaining high levels of customer care are some challenges facing the company.
August 2005
August 31, 2005	Warehousing Management: Yard Management, Competitive Analysis, and Challenges The business remains challenging to even the most established vendors, since an intensifying product architecture rejuvenation and functional enhancements cycle, the pressure from the ERP intruders, and continued market consolidation exert fiscal pressure across the sector.
August 30, 2005	Who Needs Warehousing Management and How Much Thereof? The warehouse is no longer merely a static storage facility. It now has to use virtually real-time data to closely match supply to demand, eliminate the need to hold excess inventory, and increase the flow of goods throughout the supply chain.
August 29, 2005	Best Manufacturing Scheduling Systems The market place is awash with many kinds of manufacturing scheduling systems. Due to the dynamic nature of the manufacturing shop floor, it is of utmost importance that a manufacturing scheduling system can take care of these dynamic conditions.
August 27, 2005	The Technology Choices In the battle between Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) and the UK-based the Sage Group for the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market segment, technology choices will be a major factor.
August 26, 2005	Global versus Local Channel Approach, Who Will Win? There is a clear distinction between the market dynamics within the respective MBS and Sage/Best channels.
August 25, 2005	The Market Impact of Two Powerhouses This is an analysis of the equivalent moves of two superpowers to secure the lower-end of the market, also known as the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market segment. One is Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), the other is UK-based the Sage Group.
August 24, 2005	Addressing Channels and the Low-End Market Microsoft announced plans to increase resources and provide new tools and offerings for MBS independent software vendors (ISV) and value-added resellers (VAR). These efforts are designed to accelerate the MBS Group's partner-driven vertical strategy, providing stronger opportunities for partners to align their services and solutions with their customers' specific needs. Microsoft has to be in the small business market, which is a springboard or a feeding ground for more scalable products as these businesses grow over time.
August 23, 2005	What Do Users Want and Need? At the basic level, users want a more intuitive way to "look inside the business", and they want applications to bring them closer to their operations, such as alerts that can help them handle exceptions or better yet, to act on business events (or even non-events) well before they become exceptions.
August 22, 2005	Is 'Sage' Wiser And Better Than 'Best'? The two small-to-medium enterprise (SME) market segment leaders seem to have somewhat different strategies going forward (despite inevitable watching over each other's shoulder), and time will tell who will ultimately win (or maybe both will remain in a stalemate power sharing situation).
August 20, 2005	Brain of Supply Chain System Advanced planning and optimization makes supply chain systems cost effective. It is the brain of the supply chain because it works on top of all other software tools that plan, monitor, and control supply chain activities and control them.
August 19, 2005	Planning Horizon of a Technical Personnel Management System Airlines struggle every day to reduce costs, maintain the level of customer service, and have more efficient processes, and this puts more pressure on line maintenance supervisors and engineers. This is where a maintenance personnel management system can be useful.
August 18, 2005	Technical Staff Management Systems for the Aviation Industry In the airline industry, aircraft maintenance is an activity that has to be done throughout the day, so maintenance personnel must be available at all times. The complexity of the operation increases the need for a maintenance personnel management system.
August 17, 2005	Marquee Vendors Partner for Deepening Inherent CRM and BI Links Despite the logic behind combining customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) elements, the implementation of marketing automation (MA) has been stunted by slow markets, and pessimistic investors. Vendors in CRM and BI are building alliances in order to gain market share and illustrate the value of MA.
August 16, 2005	Why Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected? The new metrics of customer profitability, lifetime value, and wallet share are needed to supplement the traditional metrics of market share and penetration. Typical functional components of marketing automation include customer data cleansing and analysis tools, and campaign management systems.
August 15, 2005	Three Cs of Successful Positioning: The Competition Learn how to avoid the most deadly sin of all marketing—using the same position or a similar one as your competitor, and not knowing it.
August 13, 2005	Selecting an Outsourcing Provider—Art or Science? As there are many different categories of outsourcing services, there are also many outsourcing providers. With many different aspects to consider, how can a company ensure they have made the right choice in selecting one?
August 12, 2005	When Customer Relationships Meets Business Intelligence Marketing Analysis and User Recommendations For many reasons, SAS's alliance with Amdocs and partnership with Aprimo might be some of a few vendor partnerships where customers and the vendors benefit.
August 11, 2005