360 Visibility Software » ERP planning

The Battle for IT Dominance in Professional Services Firms

Lynn Cooke — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:08:41 +0000

Professional services firms with an interest in technology, take note: The lines distinguishing one C-suite dweller from another are pretty damn blurred on the question of who enjoys — and deserves — authority over IT purchases. This makes it more important than ever that the CFO and CIO establish parameters around IT decisions at their firm.

All of this has come to increasing light with new research that reveals a powerful lack of faith among CFOs for the CIOs with whom they share an executive bathroom.

Mistrust of CIO and IT Palpable

A recent study undertaken by Gartner in conjunction with professional organization Financial Executives International reveals that it’s the chief money guy who enjoys dominion over his organization’s IT department.

In turn, the CIO, the nominal head of the technology-furnishing wing of the company, is relegated to a less-empowered role. The CIO is rendered impotent by a CFO whose outright mistrust of his IT-equipped colleague and the team that assembles beneath him, is palpable.

The survey, undertaken with 344 North American CFOs whose companies are engaged in financial services, healthcare and other professional fields, exposes a broad-based dissatisfaction among CFOs with the IT-spending and application activity inside their firms.

CFOs Dissatisfied with IT Service Levels

Indeed, a mere 18% of responding CFOs believe their “IT service levels meet or exceed business expectations.” Further, just ¼ express confidence in their IT departments’ “organizational and technical flexibility to respond to changing business priorities,” and ability “to deliver against the enterprise/business unit strategy.”

Even fewer financial chiefs believe their IT departments “deliver the technology innovation needed by business,” or have “the right mix of skilled people to meet business needs.” Only 35% of CFOs regard IT as a strategic driver of business performance.

Alas and alack.

The Implications

The report lends credence to the mounting impression that CFOs wield more influence over their organizations’ IT-based activities than ever. Meaning, this news could be troubling for companies that might gain more corporate efficiencies from clever technology purchases and implementations. In other words, the CFO’s natural interest in spending company dollars as frugally as possible could have damaging implications on the firm’s overall performance.

Currently, the survey shows 42% of IT departments now report directly to their CFOs, and 26% say their CFO alone authorizes IT investment in their firm. It’s a startling figure considering that just 18% copped to the same thing last year. Only 11% of respondents work at companies in which the CIO has the sole responsibility for filling their toolbox.

With technology investments so tightly linked to a company’s success, it’s desirable for the CFO to have a hand in developing IT’s roadmap. But the carriage is a two-seater, and the opportunity for more than one C-suiter to handle the reins is considerable.

Can’t We All Work Together?

Ideally, the CIO and CFO would work in tandem toward maximizing IT purchases while paying adequate mind to the realities of their business environment.

The CIO would provide clear data on the strategic wisdom of IT purchases, taking care to spell out the long-term benefits of deploying technology today whose rewards might not be reaped until tomorrow.

The CFO, in turn, would enlighten his technologically-grounded cohort on the economic realities in which the lot of them mutually operate, and encourage a wider appreciation among the techies for whether some cool new toy actually has a place inside the company’s overall mission.

ERP: Time 2 Recover from Y2K

Lynn Cooke — Wed, 18 May 2011 21:20:35 +0000

Remember Y2K, the much-anticipated and wildly-feared turn of the millennium that sent us all filling our bathtubs and plundering the grocery stores for canned goods? If your ERP system does too, it may be time for an overhaul.

The Y2K reference is significant, given that it was this global event that provided the last widespread impetus for businesses to regard their ERP systems with an eye for refurbishment. Lots of organizations, in those last panic-filled months of the century, raced into major ERP implementations they hoped would provide a safeguard against all manner of unknowns.

It was a time before Facebook, before wifi, before any but meteorologists were concerned with the “cloud.” With that in mind, companies need to consider how that software — now more than a decade old — is serving them today. How valid is it now, in a business environment that has evolved considerably in the time since we emptied our tubs?

Food for Thought

Here are the key questions businesses should reflect on:

Can your organization’s various functions speak to one another? Is there a link between your customer sales orders, for example, and your accounting system? Is the status of your shipping activity automatically updated in your general ledger? Is your purchasing activity integrated with your accounts payable system?
Is your legacy system inextricably tied with another time and place? This can include another person (the staffer who implemented it, perhaps, long gone from your reach). Was it meticulously customized to meet your needs at the time; if so, are those needs still relevant?
Are you making provisions (and even apologies) for an out-of-date system? And is success on these fronts more often in spite of your old-fashioned ERP infrastructure, and not because of it?
Are you overwhelmed with the sheer amount of data your ERP system oversees? Have the years of blindly amassing stuff, without the means to efficiently purge or even archive it, left you with a surfeit of bytes too unwieldy to effectively manage within current conditions?
Does your system provide you with an updated view of your current status? Does, for example, your material planning process automatically include refreshed actual and projected sales orders? Are key performance indicators and job status on the shop floor reflected in real time?
Are you in step with your customers and suppliers? Or do you have to bend over backwards and launch into patch mode in order to simply integrate with the rest of the world? Are there occasions when you have to acknowledge an inherent inability to communicate with these progressives whatsoever?
Are your key management reports the spreadsheet product of a mishmash of legacy systems in constant need of manual manipulation? Do you find yourself training new hires on ancient systems that a voice in the back of your mind shames you for still having in place?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, change could do your company good.

The Great Debate: ERP vs. Accounting Packages

Lynn Cooke — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:46:07 +0000

Aspirations of greatness notwithstanding, you’re still a fairly small organization at this point in your development. Your employee count is modest, your daily operations straightforward, your technical requirements few.

Only the big guys, surely, stand to benefit from the complex computerized infrastructures that come by way of installing sophisticated ERP systems. Or so you tell yourself as you start yet another day with the technical support of nothing grander than a basic accounting program.

SMEs Benefit From ERP

In fact, many small companies are surprisingly complex entities that may, in fact, stand to benefit greatly from an investment in ERP software. Increasingly, business leaders acknowledge the fallacy of the longstanding assumption that ERP systems are the province of larger organizations alone. Indeed, a company’s personnel tally is no more an indication of its technical requirements than the size of its lunchroom or the age of its chief executive.

Given that ERP software can be among the single largest IT investment a company makes, it behooves clever managers to determine their operation’s suitability for such a technological outlay (or to accept that a solid accounting package actually does the trick just fine, thank you very much).

Some considerations to undertake:

Bear in mind the inherent strengths of each system. An accounting package exists to sort through a company’s accounting and financial data. It tracks the financial activities of the firm, focusing particularly on accounts payable, accounts receivable and cashflow management.

An ERP system expands upon these functionalities, promising oversight of an organization’s entire oeuvre of business processes. In its rich database resides the great bulk of a company’s story — including its finance, manufacturing, supply-chain and HR activities — with different functions drawing from different elements thereof.

Does your organization regularly exchange large parcels of data with clients, or import in great volumes from overseas? You may find the sophisticated offerings of an ERP system more in line with its daily needs.

Consider your patronage of spreadsheets. If you use them sparingly and specifically, an accounting system will probably suffice. If, however, they genuinely dominate the ongoing operation of your business and provoke in-house contention about which spreadsheet version is the best, consider moving up to the more accommodating embrace of an ERP system.

Think carefully on the total cost of ownership associated with an ERP purchase. More than just up-front pricing and ongoing support fees, consider the fallout such a fundamental addition to your operation would have on the rest of your legacy systems, and its attendant costs. Critical here is the engagement of a vendor partner that can help an organization, new to the ERP space, to manage its purchase.

Look to the future with clear eyes. An organization with enough confidence in future expansion may well find that the installation of such enabling scaffold from which to grow — at a point, maybe, when it is yet to specifically require it — simply makes sense.

By contemplating plans for tomorrow seriously, managers of smaller businesses can position their technology to be a fundamental part of future growth, and sophisticated ERP software can play a big part in this.

Supply Chains: Green; ERP Systems: Not So Much

Marco D'Ercole — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 17:30:26 +0000

The world of manufacturing is becoming a greener place, to be sure, but the technological infrastructure required to manage this good-for-everyone evolution isn’t keeping the pace.

A new study out of IFS North America, triumphantly reports that almost 77% of manufacturers conduct their business these days in a setting characterized by customers demanding they report on the environmental impact of their activities.

Green Trend Growing

Moreover, more than 80% of respondents feel that green supply chains will become more important to them over the next three years. Manufacturers cite social responsibility, mandates by their companies and pressure from customers as the principal forces driving this trend. Whatever its impetus, crow the authors, this development is a good thing, given the increasing “norm” this suggests is emerging on this front.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

But the IT revolution falls critically short in application, with a massive 87% of survey participants conceding that at least some of their supply chain data are still being handled in hard-copy form. A mere 5% rated their ERP software as “excellent” in its ability to handle green supply chain data. Fifty-four percent called it “poor” or “not at all helpful.”

For those manufacturers who engage in the sharing of their environmental data with customers, the great bulk (28%) continue to enter information from hard copy into spreadsheets, into supply-chain management solutions (16%) or into ERP solutions (20%). A quarter of respondents use purely paper-based solutions to manage this information. And a paltry 12% employ a system that allows their trading partners electronic access into their environmental and materials data.

On top of that, some 43% of respondents shrugged when asked of what types of functions their enterprise software is capable of in regards to its ability to track and share those environmental factors involved in their green supply chain initiatives.

It’s like 1982 out there, and it’s a disconnect, say the study’s analysts, that could prove a serious challenge for the days ahead.

Navigating the Path to Green

Without a system of integrated ERP functionality that can promise comprehensive environmental footprint management along the entire value chain—from the procurement of raw materials through to their eventual utilization—the manufacturing industry will eventually stumble in its journey along the green path. Without it, organizations cannot responsibly analyze their operations from the holistic perspective that will afford the critical big-picture view of their environmental influence.

The study called ERP Solutions in the Green Supply Chain and Multi-Mode Manufacturing, was conducted last December interviewing more than 200 executives, from whose manufacturing operations’ revenues exceed $100 million. It was undertaken in a bid to better understand how business software applications like ERP and EAM impact an organization’s efforts to green up their supply chains.

Join Us – Wanted: ERP Implementation & Support Lead

360 Visibility — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:00:27 +0000

Looking for a talented, enthusiastic work team you can grow with? We are always searching for intelligent, motivated individuals to join our team of experienced, knowledgeable leaders.

ERP Lead

We are currently looking for a ERP Software Implementation & Support Lead to configure and implement software, diligently document the implementation, consult on business processes/requirements, conduct end-user training and provide ongoing support.

Check out all our Current Open Positions: http://www.360visibility.com/join-us

Business Software Planning – Where a Dollar Spent Will Payback Fivefold

Marco D'Ercole — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:30:52 +0000

It’s a hackneyed, overworked, inelegant maxim. But my God, it’s a good one: every dollar spent in planning saves five dollars in implementation.

Too many folks operate under the misguided notion that they can secure the best results for their businesses without investing much in preemptive effort. They believe an afternoon spent gladhanding and hanging in front of a handful of vendor demos will provide them with all the data they need to make an informed choice about what often proves to be a pretty hefty IT spend.

Or they issue a standardized call for quotations on a project whose multiple features and fiddly requirements are not given nearly their due in the process—and then suffer the consequences.

Do they really think publishing an RFP or even hiring a business analyst who knows nothing about the intricacies of their operation is going to result in a successful, on-time, on-budget implementation?

Ridiculous.

The traditional approach to orchestrating an IT software installation within an office is altogether too shortsighted to generate as much of a business impact as it could. Historically, SMBs make IT purchases without enough focus on improving those key business processes that occupy the lion’s share of their corporate existence, or that possess the most potential for profit.

At 360, we don’t waste our time cherry-picking what software will work in a particular organization, but concentrate on identifying the things that engage its participants in a day-in-the-life kind of way.

Reality always trumps theory.

And through our Business Impact Workshops, IT Health Checks and IT Road Maps, we guide clients along a more comprehensive path that invites them to identify their big-picture corporate goals and objectives, and align them with current, rooted-in-truth business strategies.

What’s more, where an organization will typically charge its IT department with the task of finding a new ERP, CRM or even VoIP system, our 360 Business Impact Workshop redirects and redistributes the responsibility, so that everybody has fingerprints on the murder weapon, as it were. From the CEO on down, each employee is engaged in an overhaul that will, after all, have fallout for them all.

Together, we work to discover an organization’s pains and the options for alleviating them.

Inside of this, we explore what factors are driving the need for a new system. We ask how we can improve customer service, increase productivity, lower costs, boost revenue and so on.

And we question what might happen to a company if it made no improvements at all.

The final selection and implementation of equipment, when pursued inside of this strategy, translate into a material impact on the business as a whole. Wandering along the thin path that begins with identifying a company’s functional challenges concludes merely with influence on the particular project in question.

A measly thud where you could have heard such thunder.

A dollar spent that could have paid you back fivefold!!