When Your Value Stream Begins With Software
Stay in the Flow: Estimate Your Software Value Returns Businesses are supposed to earn a profit. New software can quickly lead to debt. Before you commit to a new software acquisition, know if your new possibilities will also be new expenses. If one of your customers...
Custom Cloud: Public Cloud Choices, SaaS Challenges
What to Do When ERP Turns SaaS I once sat in at a sales conference for an ERP vendor and listened as the CEO explained sales strategy as it related to their ongoing movement to the cloud. He described the situation as one of configurability vs. customizability. There...
Hosted or SaaS ERP? Understanding the Differences
In the world of enterprise resource planning (ERP), companies spend a lot of time on the software selection cycle. Determining which application will best fit the needs of the business also brings deployment model questions to the table. Currently, many manufacturers...
A Business Automation Nation – How AI Helps Us Connect
The 2020 shift to remote work forced small to medium companies to increase business automation. To quickly become touch-less and contactless, owners used technology solutions managed by third-party suppliers to guide the new network of online business communication,...
Principles of Successful Supplier Relationship Management
A Shifting Landscape is Changing Supplier Relationships The past year underscored the impact and the importance of supply chains more than ever. For manufacturers and distributors, the criticality of a robust and flexible supply chain cannot be understated. Supply...
6 Steps When It’s Time for a Software Demo
STEP 1: Contact providers and arrange demonstrations A new day is here and you can finally start contacting potential suppliers for your new software. If you already have a short list to begin with, you can start right away. Software suppliers come in several flavors,...
Prophet 21 Event: Servers, Financials & Supply Chains
With summer in full swing, distributors are on the move, crossing docks, splitting shipments, and delivering goods by the truckload to a diverse array of customers. It is a time for expansion—of old trade routes of supply chains and of new opportunities as our...
Software & Vendor Selection: Where to Look
The Best ERP Software Begins with the Best People At every step, from software selection to ERP implementation, people are always your best resource.Back-feed your software & vendor selection script with experiential feedback.Now that the internal part of the work...
Don’t Avenge a Cyber Attack – Prevent It
One cyber world story that captivated me as a youth was the character of “Ultron,” as depicted in comic books and in the movie adaptation of The Avengers. The character was a breed of artificial intelligence created with the intent of protecting the earth. But he...
Understanding the New Client Architecture of Prophet 21
Software development never stands still. I remember a time where I felt like I had finally come to understand DataSets, DataTables, DataRows and DataViews, only to have a much more experienced developer inform me that the System.Data namespace was old, antiquated, and...
Getting Selective with Software Selection
Begin by gathering both business requirements & software requirements After all that inward looking, it is time for some more inward looking. It's now time to set a basis for communication that will help keep current and future software projects on track. It's...
Manufacturing Cybersecurity by the Numbers
Old Cyber Risks, New Cybersecurity Rules Longtime NHL coach and living legend Scotty Bowman once famously claimed that “statistics are for losers.” For a game filled with numbers, that was a pretty bold statement. Around the same time, business author Peter Drucker, a...
How Manufacturers Can Prevent a Cyber Security Breach
Cyber security solutions are technological processes and practices designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access. Over the years, they have become a necessity in order for industrial firms to succeed....
How To Begin Your Software Selection
Toward a Simple Software Selection Process A very typical software selection process begins by clicking on “I am interested” after reading about a software product. Someone replies, and pretty soon a salesperson has you convinced their product will have you living the...
Three Ways to Make Compliance Everyone’s Business
Compliance acronyms often become the “inside jokes” of an industry, a sort of alphabet soup, but the language of business governance can quickly result in confusion. Clever letter combinations echo the rules and regulations of businesses, especially for companies in...
Five Ways to Ensure ERP Satisfies Financial Compliance
Every business has financial compliance requirements from many sources. ERP is your primary tool — helping you prepare the required reports easily, timely, and consistently.Set up ERP to produce the reporting needed. The first step toward financial compliance is a...
Managed Services vs. Break-Fix IT
What happens when break-fix IT breaks? As a business owner, you make daily decisions on how to serve your customers and how to improve your company. As part of this, you choose partners and solutions to create a support system that guarantees the quality of your work....
Catching up with the Competition
This company didn’t know where they were losing money. By implementing ERP software, they were able to learn their costs and discover areas for cost reduction.
Filling the technical gaps
This company publishing 40 business publications and having over 3.6 million readers, needed our help to bridge the gap between their current software interface and their Epicor program.
Merging Two Systems Into One
Founded in 1954, this electronics company was looking for a solution to be as up to date and in sync with their customer demands.
ERP Recovery Project
This company, who is remaining anonymous, contacted us in the middle of an implementation they were doing with another company, because they had hit the end of their budget and they were far from complete.
From Spreadsheets to 30 Million Dollar Growth
With the proper use of an ERP, this company was able to pinpoint areas that weren’t functioning optimally and was able to grow over 30 million dollars in 2 years.
cGMP Compliance & ERP
What is cGMP? cGMP stands for current Good Manufacturing Practice and, more than just initials, it is at the center of the US Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to protect citizens from potential hazards related to food and beverages, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals,...
ERP Training After Go-Live
Make Training Part of your ERP Project Plan Your employees just had a grand celebration. Your ERP project is complete! The months of hard toil, testing, trepidation, and training are in the past. Or, maybe the education has only begun?Here are some considerations for...
3 Ways to Spring your Epicor Installation Ahead
Spring Cleaning & New Growth for Epicor ERP While individuals differ in their opinion of daylight savings time, the metaphor of “springing ahead” feels perfect for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) season. Spring is, after all, the time of growth and...
Partnering with your ERP Consultancy
How the Right ERP Consultancy Can Take the Risk Out of ERP Implementation Implementing ERP presents many challenges. One of these involves the simple dilemma of finding good help. Implementing ERP is not a one-man band, but rather a symphony of interconnected members,...
5 Takeaways from the Microsoft Exchange Server Attack
A Microsoft Exchange Server Attack Caused Hours of Downtime for Businesses Around the Globe Last week's Microsoft Exchange Server attack underscores the liabilities of on-premise architectures compared to their cloud counterparts. On Friday, March 5th, 2021, a...
3 Signs It’s Time For a Server Upgrade
Is Your Server Seeing Stars? Sometimes called a "super computer" or simply a "computer bigger than yours," a server is a technological infrastructure that hosts a shared resource pool. Servers become more complicated as small businesses grow and require multiple...
3 Things to Consider When Upgrading From Epicor 905 to E10
People, Infrastructure, and Scope in an Epicor 905 Migration A customer on the front end of an upgrade from Epicor 905 to E10 asked me for advice on ERP upgrade planning. I’ve long reflected on some of the keys to a successful Epicor 905 upgrade to E10—the lessons...
Epicor Part & MOM Settings: Learning By Example
Epicor Cover: Lessons From the Trenches Sometimes the best way to understand the inner workings of an ERP system is to review examples of its activities and to trace them back to the underlying setup that generated the activities themselves. In the Epicor ERP context,...