ERP SYSTEMS - MSC NewsWire

Combative sales tactics a no-win for ERP vendors

Any vendor looking to poach the clients of a competitor is wasting its time, writes Martin Olsen for iStart … The mid-market ERP space is fascinating right now. Oracle (an enterprise player) just bought NetSuite for $9.3 billion. Sage (which likes to buy and rename software) just purchased Intacct for $850 million. Microsoft (dominates mid-market ERP on-premise software) spent hundreds of millions building Dynamics 365 Financials. Mid-market companies are often defined as companies that have between 50 and 1000 employees, or sometimes as those with revenues between US$100 million and $3 billion. This is a very large market segment with…

How manufacturers make the most of machine data

Digitizing the manufacturing process via ERP systems can greatly improve ROI. However, it doesn’t come without challenges. For many manufacturers, there is a disconnect between what goes on in their factories, including their engineering departments, and the core business processes supported by their ERP systems. It creates significant lag times for management to access, analyze and act on data from the manufacturing and development processes. Not having this data in real time could create problems with planning, inventory control, the supply chain or meeting customer expectations. Barriers to incorporating data from machines on the shop floor into ERP are dropping.…