Today’s technology and application leaders are pressured to deliver functionality that drives efficiency, innovation, and growth—while reducing costs. As a result, technology and application portfolio management (APM) are top business priorities. Learn about a framework for implementing an APM program that can enable your company to monitor and analyze the impact of application changes and reduce portfolio complexity.
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Acts of cyber aggression could lead to a cyber war or worse. Capitol Hill is giving attention to this security issue, and vendors are creating new offerings and expanding existing programs—creating new opportunities in the defense industry and opening doors for new players. Learn more about the blurring between information security vendors servicing the private sector and those in the defense and intelligence industry.
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Currently, India’s population is approximately 1.0009 billion. The middle class is large and still growing; wages were low, but now are some of the best in various industries; many workers are well educated and speak English; and investors are optimistic and local stocks are up. Despite political turmoil, the country presses on with economic reforms. But for potential investors, there’s still cause for worry—find out why.
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The increasing number of passwords actually decrease productivity and present a security risk when people get frustrated and write their passwords on a sticky note. This means the application of a single sign-on (SSO) solution provides greater security and improved user-friendliness and productivity. Learn how to increase the security and usability of existing and alternative authentication methods, and how the requirements for user authentication can be realized efficiently and at low cost.
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IT has long been one of the best ways to address business challenges. Yet significant obstacles at the level of IT infrastructure stand in the way. Siloed IT operations and rigid IT management processes can impede business agility. When IT partners with the business to act less as a technology provider and more as a service provider, business objectives can be achieved more efficiently and cost-effectively. Find out how.
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Hirotec has been supplying and caring for the assets of some of Australia’s biggest industries for more than 30 years. In 2003, Hirotec was on a strong growth trajectory and realized its IT system couldn’t support its expansion—but that deploying an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across the company would require staff buy-in. Now, with PRONTO-Xi, Hirotec has reduced invoice cycle time by 20 percent. Learn more.
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Engineering firm Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, Inc. needed to collaborate more efficiently across its 11 offices in the eastern United States. The firm chose ProjectWise collaboration software for engineering content management, content publishing, and design review, and integrated it with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, to manage business processes and documents in a distributed environment. Find out more.
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What makes your enterprise resource planning (ERP) requirements difficult for most vendors to satisfy? As a life sciences company, you have operational processes that set you apart from other manufacturing companies. And, your regulatory requirements, including 21 CFR part 11, aren’t like those of any other industry. The challenge is to manage compliance risks and compliance costs. Learn about an ERP compliance strategy.
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Three problems are common to most complex environmental modeling efforts: they’re uncertain, multifaceted, and hard to communicate. Overcoming these challenges is especially important when modeling the performance of proposed and existing radioactive waste management facilities. Graphical simulation tools can help represent uncertainties, integrate all aspects of the system, and ease the presentation of complex models.
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Today, all retailers that process, store, or transmit cardholder data have a fiduciary responsibility to protect that data. As such, they must comply with a diverse range of regulations and industry mandates. However, many retailers struggle with the task of implementing the proper policies and controls. Discover how log management and intelligence (LMI) can help you simplify and accelerate the compliance process.
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There’s a war going on, and many companies are fighting it—and losing. It’s a war to attract and retain great talent. While projected economic growth is fueling demand, companies of all sizes are finding it difficult to get and keep skilled employees. What can be done to stop this talent crisis? Organizations must make talent management a top priority. Find out how this simple tactic can lead your organization to victory.
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When it comes to US Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, safe change actions are critical. But what’s the best approach for file integrity monitoring and change detection? While there are many solutions on the market, continuous file integrity monitoring (CFIM) is winning over the competition worldwide. Find out how CFIM can handle your operational control monitoring requirements.
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If the auditors came knocking, would you be prepared? When they do come, you’ll need to be ready to answer some tough questions regarding your change management processes. Implementing and assessing change management controls for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance in the US can be a very expensive and time consuming process. Find out how you can reduce the SOX burden by improving the way you manage your change processes.
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Many companies spend an inordinate amount of time and money ensuring their documentation meets regulatory standards. But in order to streamline the document submission process in a cost-effective manner, companies should adopt document management technologies coupled with collaborative document transformation tools. Learn how these tools can help your company accelerate its submission-compliant document workflows.
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Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is a popular tool for the Windows platform that offers essential version control features and helps promote team collaboration. However, while it performs certain functions well, it’s not optimized for remote access, lacks many critical security features, and suffers from stability problems. Find out why many developers are now switching from VSS to SourceAnywhere Standalone.
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It’s an inescapable, undisputable fact that most organizations have conflict between IT security and IT operations. Having been given two distinctive—yet potentially contradictory—goals, in a sense they were destined to be at odds with one another. What does it take to bridge the gap between these two teams to achieve compliance? Can standardized processes and software tools help (or hinder) this effort? Find out here.
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Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 is frequently deployed in small or midsize applications. And while many customers view it as an excellent small network-attached storage (NAS) solution, they often move to larger, proprietary file server appliances when their needs expand beyond its capacity. This approach, however, adds more expense and complexity. But with Sanbolic’s Melio Cluster, capacity can be added as needed.
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Microsoft System Management Server 2003 and Operations Manager 2005 storage monitoring solutions provide the necessary tools to centrally manage and monitor Windows client and server infrastructure. Now, Sanbolic’s LaScala clustered volume manager and related products offer a complementary toolkit which enables administrators to centrally configure and assign storage assets in a storage area network (SAN) environment.
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Are you on top of data security compliance? Is your source code secure? Are you looking for a new approach that can help ensure these things are taken care of? With SourceAnyware Hosted solution—which provides 128-bit SSL encryption—your data is protected and your source code is secured from attacks. Find out how SourceAnywhere can help you lower total cost of ownership and improve your development team productivity.
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When you connect to the Internet, you do so through the Windows Socket (Winsock) layer. While this layer is an integral part of the Windows operating system and acts as an interface between your computer and the Net, it cannot distinguish the difference between good traffic and bad. MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL) technology helps by sitting on the Winsock layer and analyzing the traffic—before it gets to your computer.
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Managing IT assets is a vital corporate function—and a source of potential liability if not performed properly. By effectively managing IT assets, businesses can be assured that each IT dollar has been well spent. With an asset management solution, your IT staff can monitor application usage and budgets more accurately, and improve in-house IT support and performance—resulting in greater efficiency and reduced costs.
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Web analytics has never been an exact science—which can make the process extremely frustrating. How can you be 100 percent certain that the data you’re working with is always accurate? To deal with this and many other questions that will arise, businesses must gain a better understanding of how well their analytics tools work with their existing data integration solutions, and how using testing platforms will help.
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Accounting and enterprise resource planning software are not interchangeable solutions. How do you decide which option is for you? Outlining your business structure and considering four key facets of your selection process will help you determine which software meets all your business needs. You can find the right product for your business, whether you need a bookkeeping or all-encompassing business software.
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Developing a good disaster recovery plan (DRP) in today’s business world is a must. In fact, downplaying the importance of a DRP can be costly—especially if you’re a small to medium business (SMB) that is slow in adopting DRP. Recent studies have shown that 40 percent of businesses that have encountered a disaster close their doors within the following five years. To stay afloat, here are ten steps that should be taken.
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In order for a business to stay on top of compliance requirements required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)—and avoid financial penalties or possible jail time—it must take a good look at its IT environment and financial reporting processes. The collection, management, and analysis of log data are integral to meeting SOX requirements and as such, require a system that automates these processes across the IT infrastructure.
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Aerospace and defense (A&D) has unique security needs. Avoiding the unauthorized sharing of technical information and intellectual property is essential. Product development systems (PDSs) provide the secure, real-time collaboration A&D needs, including extended and secure collaboration of distributed product development processes. PDSs control access to intellectual property, mitigating information sharing risks.
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Improving the content of technical publications is possible with a product development system (PDS). A PDS solution can automate and optimize the technical publishing process and can end publication bottlenecks caused by launch delays due to poor process. A PDS solution allows for concurrent development of products and publications—keeping your engineering and publishing departments in sync.
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Microsoft Dynamics is a business management solution designed to allow your employees to customize and automate their Microsoft Office system user interface according to their preferences and work styles. Microsoft Dynamics helps your employees and your business work more efficiently—giving you a faster return on investment and an effective and profitable business.
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Microsoft development tools will help developers and independent Microsoft software vendors integrate Microsoft Dynamics GP with existing applications. This accounting and business management system includes many features and benefits, as well as guidelines to help developers choose the right tools for various development tasks and create custom applications that integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
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Color printing used to be reserved for only the most important documents, where the high cost was justifiable. As printing technologies have advanced, however, color printing has been added to the everyday office environment. Today, the demand for color printing is growing as more and more organizations discover that they can print in color as easily, quickly, and inexpensively as in black and white.
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Chemical companies struggle with outdated manufacturing and financial systems, often not reaching their profitable goals. How can they give customers high-quality chemical products while improving the bottom line? Industry best practices can help you gain control over every aspect of your business by increasing your visibility into operations, helping production go more smoothly, and reducing costs and lead times.
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Bridging the gap between an application’s problem domain and its code can be difficult, even for the best software engineers. Bridging these two diverse worlds—each with its own language—requires a finished application that creates an intersection between the two. By building a domain-specific modeling (DSM) language and generator using MetaEdit+, engineers close the gap and pave the way to better productivity.
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For independent software vendors (ISVs), software delivery creates big operational challenges. Integrating an application with the latest operating system and service pack causes headaches for customers and suppliers. However, pre-built server devices or appliances contain one convenient, ready-to-go system, minimizing configuration glitches and letting customers and suppliers step back while the appliance does the work.
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Reducing server management complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO) are key IT goals. There’s a new generation of automated management tools designed to enable provisioning, monitoring, and control of blade systems in infrastructure deployments. This means more work in less time, ensuring IT talent is responding to business needs—resulting in improved TCO metrics rather than time-consuming manual processes.
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There is no single antivirus engine on the market today that is the fastest and most effective at identifying viruses, spam, or other threats. According to a recent survey, 97 percent of organizations have antivirus software installed, yet 65 percent have been infected at one time or another since. One way to reduce the chance of virus infection is to install multiple antivirus scanners at the mail server level.
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Is it beneficial to use multiple types of virtualization software together? The answer: yes. Combining complementary virtualization technologies provides a stronger, more robust solution that reduces costs, maximizes return on investment (ROI), and minimizes the number of servers to manage. By consolidating these technologies, organizations can get the most out of the application, hardware, and operating system (OS).
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Customers, employees, and partners are an integral part of any business—each playing an important role in its success. But how is it possible to share vital information between them? In order to access information, understand trends, and build better processes, a system that enables multi-user collaborative technologies is required. Without these collaboration tools, business process management (BPM) cannot be successful.
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As the digital era evolves, media content companies are faced with a number of new challenges. One such challenge is that they can no longer specialize in one communication format. The advertising market is now a dynamic and complex forum making it difficult to manage multiple channel revenues. A standard, integrated solution, however, can facilitate the management of advertising revenues while increasing customer satisfaction.
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Just when you thought you had all your security measures figured out, along comes the portable storage device to make you question them all over again. With the popularity of portable consumer products—and their ever-increasing storage space—comes a greater risk of losing sensitive corporate data. To secure corporate data, companies must not only focus on perimeter security, but on internal security weaknesses as well.
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Benchmarking is a process where companies compare their performance over time against their competition. In doing so, they can identify where their strengths lie and where improvement may be needed. The point of benchmarking is to focus on areas that will yield the best return. For companies to succeed in their benchmarking efforts and gain a sustained competitive advantage, five key steps should be considered.
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When it comes to disaster recovery (DR) software, companies should think of it as an insurance policy—not just software that recovers lost data. Being prepared for disaster makes good business sense, but oddly enough, few companies are. Because Linux distributions don’t include DR tools, companies must look to a file-based recovery solution that can recover the entire system and eliminate the need to rebuild.
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"Wild West" is a metaphor often used to describe the wireless wide area network (WAN) business. But it s worse than that. In the Old West, everyone had a gun. In this business, customers are defenseless. What s going on? Well, for one, vendors are playing fast and loose with terminology that should mean something. Wireless is compelling, but how do you decide what s right for you—and who do you trust?
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Why do some customer relationship management (CRM) implementations fail? The answer: companies’ lack of understanding of their current CRM environments, and of what areas need modification or improvement. Companies with a clear understanding of what they need from a CRM solution—as well as of what CRM means to their business—are more likely to succeed. To clinch that success, some key elements should be assessed first.
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In business, planning plays a fundamental role in analyzing and forecasting key financial data. While forecasting future events is one benefit of planning, it can also be used to achieve a series of objectives, including regulatory compliance. In order to achieve these objectives, companies should consider implementing a unified customer performance management (CPM) solution—one that takes compliance into consideration.
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For most companies, e-mail is an integral part of the business workflow and a primary channel for communication. For these reasons, e-mails can be considered legal business documents and should be retained for a predefined period to satisfy government regulations. With an e-mail archiving system, message contents and attachments are stored in a read-only format, ensuring they are archived in their original state.
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Over the past few years, vulnerabilities have exploded across all types of platforms—leaving IT security and operations teams scratching their heads. Today, many companies use the scan-and-patch method for managing vulnerabilities—a reactive security process that should be avoided. By combining assessment and remediation, companies create a vulnerability management program that can rapidly respond to emerging threats.
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Although layer-two networks are a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditional wide area network (WAN) services, they have some major security deficiencies. One of the key drawbacks of layer two is its inability to handle identity authentication—which creates serious theft and vulnerability problems. With a layer-two data protection solution, however, you can mitigate these types of security issues.
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Storage area networks (SANs) are complex structures that contain an infinite number of configuration possibilities—making the process of configuring the devices to be installed into the SAN a lengthy one. To simplify the process, QLogic’s configuration wizard provides users with some basic tools to guide them through common SAN tasks, enabling them to easily build stable and secure SAN fabrics for their storage solutions.
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The days of storage area networks (SANs) built with hubs and based on private, arbitrated loops are gone. Today’s fully public switches—which include a variety of switch features—make managing large SANs a lot easier. The key to a flexible SAN is the switch’s ability to create zones, which allows the SAN to be partitioned into various groupings and enables SAN managers to allocate storage where it makes the most sense.
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The first step to a successful storage area network (SAN) implementation is preplanning. Architecting a SAN not only helps solve issues of storage consolidation, it facilitates day-to-day data center support and maintenance. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. With a sound implementation strategy, costly upgrades—and many headaches—can be avoided.
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Portable document format (PDF) files are used by businesses worldwide to streamline business processes and secure archives. In order to comply with ever-changing government rules and regulations, many companies have come to rely on the security and ease of use that PDF formats provide. With Print2PDF 7.0 Server Edition, documents are easily converted into secure, industry-standard PDF files that can be viewed by anyone.
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With data theft on the rise, many companies are forced to improve their network security. And although they spend millions of dollars every year on securing these networks, the focus has largely been on securing the access to the network rather than protecting the information itself. Secure information sharing (SIS) solutions integrate additional intelligence into the process—and protect your data without added overhead.
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Now that you have planned and assessed your new system, it’s time to explore the next phase of the integration process: design and pre-deployment testing. Part 4 of this 4-part e-book series provides a basis for the exploration of network design. In addition, it includes a report card that will help you select the appropriate design and validation software tools for your Internet protocol telephony (IPT) system.
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When deploying any new system, preparation is key—and Internet protocol telephony (IPT) systems are no exception. Part 3 of this 4-part e-book series provides some basic steps you can take to successfully deploy voice and data network services. A complete capabilities inventory has been included to help you ensure that every feature of your current system will be considered for inclusion in your new system.
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Chapter 2 of this 4-part e-book explores the Internet protocol telephony (IPT) life cycle, and discusses how understanding the key phases of this packet-based system can increase implementation success. By harnessing your knowledge about this system's natural rhythms, you will begin to establish key concepts that you can put into action—facilitating the management of the system and reaping its long-term benefits.
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As the era of traditional telephony draws to a close, the doors to the next generation in communications open. Chapter 1 of this 4-part e-book discusses electronic human voice communication and its importance in business today. It documents the underlying beliefs, philosophies, and observations of the future of telephony, and provides the basic concepts readers will need to guide them through the rest of the series.
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Data loss can be damaging to a business—hurting short-term stock prices, impacting customer relationships, and reducing revenues. As more companies conduct business via network communication, the need to protect their customer data and intellectual property becomes greater. With a data protection solution, organizations can secure their data in motion—without introducing unmanageable cost and complexity into the network.
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When it comes to security architecture, choosing a system that’s scalable and applicable to a broad set of security needs is a wise move. New security services for Internet protocol (IP) networks are emerging that enable new levels of scalability and manageability—while remaining completely transparent to the network. By applying this type of system, you build an optimal framework for future security applications.
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Spam considerably lowers user productivity, as it delivers unwanted, irrelevant, or anonymous e-mail messages. The best way to manage the incidence of spam is to measure it. The Spam Index—a tool for measuring improvement in spam control systems and for comparing spam control performance with competitors—is a method used by businesses worldwide to achieve lower spam levels and improve business performance.
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In this new era of corporate governance, risk avoidance, and responsibility, organizations are more than ever held accountable if their data is not properly protected. As such, many are finding new ways to address security risks, by developing multiple layers of defense to reduce points of weakness. Deploying data encryption technology is a good place to start—but the key is making the right choice.
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Heightened awareness of vulnerabilities in sensitive stored data has resulted in the increased application of encryption technology. To secure data at rest, a well-defined process for handling the keys used to encrypt data—as well as the keys used to safeguard the data encryption keys—is essential. With the proper key management controls in place, companies can ensure that data is effectively secured and recoverable.
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Imagine this scenario: an infected laptop within your company has accessed the network and is spreading malicious code to thousands of other devices. This incident could cripple any business, but with network access control (NAC) products, companies can rest a little easier. NAC’s ability to measure, enforce, and report on an array of security issues has gained it attention amongst security conscious organizations.
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As proprietary network hardware appliances become obsolete, unified network platforms (UNPs) are slowly gaining momentum. UNPs are the new paradigm for networking and security—operating on a single system that can be implemented on off-the-shelf hardware. With a UNP, organizations can design, build, manage, and maintain secure networks, without the limitations and expense of vendor proprietary hardware and software.
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Malicious hacking and illegal access are just a few of the reasons companies lose precious corporate data every year. As the number of network security breaches increase, companies must find ways to protect data beyond the perimeter of their businesses. But how do they build a data-defensible architecture that will protect data on an ever-evolving network? The answer: by first developing an in-depth defense strategy.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) often face the same challenges as large businesses—just on a smaller scale. One such challenge is finding a business solution that manages expansion and addresses complex reporting and compliance issues. Many SMBs are now adopting enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions—complete with tools to help them meet the current and future needs of their growing business.
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Wide area networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, enabling effective communications within the organization and with customers, partners, and suppliers. As more bandwidth-intensive applications are added to the mix, these networks are expected to handle the extra load—which can decrease its performance. Ensuring WAN usage is well-managed eliminates unwanted traffic and accelerates business activity.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) face the same challenges as large businesses when it comes to IT management—they have increasingly complex systems they rely on to drive their businesses and gain a competitive advantage. Operating and maintaining a complex IT infrastructure requires specific skills, but getting the right staff at an affordable price can be a problem. Outsourcing IT management may help to ease the strain.
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How can a budget administrator, burdened with the task of gathering data from hundreds of spreadsheets from all over the organization, manage this monumental undertaking? Additionally, how to avoid using a costly packaged budget application that doesn’t take the organization’s business rules into consideration? The solution: a spreadsheet automation tool that easily adapts to the organization’s unique corporate processes.
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Scanning technology has changed dramatically over the years with new, more powerful, and reliable imaging scan engines now surpassing the laser scan engines of yesterday. Although both laser and imaging technologies continue to improve, there’s a debate on which technology is superior. When researching data capture equipment, you may be asking yourself, “How do I choose the best scanner for my application?” Here’s how.
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For a lot of companies, making the decision to replace an existing business software system can be a difficult one. The process can be so unpleasant that many organizations may be reluctant to even get started, coming up with a number of reasons why they could probably get by with the systems they already have. If your company is struggling with this tough decision, you may want to ask yourself these ten basic questions.
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Choosing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package that’s right for your business can be difficult and time consuming. Finding a software provider and discovering what doing business with them will be like is as important as the overall functionality of the software itself. Before committing to a long-term relationship with any potential software provider, there are some really tough questions you need to ask them.
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For many firms, continually moving people to new projects under different leaders is the only possible way to operate. The formal boss on the org chart may only rarely get a chance to observe employees in work situations. This isn’t normally a problem; direction is provided by whoever is leading the project. Where it is a problem is when it comes to performance appraisal—there is no one person who can do that appraisal.
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Tackling the transformation to lean production is high-priority in the aerospace industry. After all, lean manufacturing eliminates waste from essential manufacturing processes and helps you measure up to your competitors. But how can you attain true lean transformation—and what specific steps does your company need to take? Take a self-rating test and see where your company really stands.
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The most effective project managers know that accounting for the effort, cost, and profitability of each person or project is the best way to succeed—and doing so is not as hard as you might think. The process will take you from where you probably are right now (the state we affectionately term “chaos”) to a prosperous state of order—and will also save your organization financial resources and valuable employee time.
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A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is now a standard business requirement. With origins as a system for sales teams, CRM has clearly evolved into a mandatory tool for providing benefit to the entire organization. However, methodology and training play instrumental roles in successful CRM implementations; if designed well, these critical components will ultimately ensure user buy-in and success.
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Poor customer experiences can happen at any touch point within your company. It could be employees responding to customers requesting information, placing an order, or trying to resolve a problem. It could be the inside sales team. Or it could be the collections department. But by deploying an advanced contact-handling application, you can improve customer satisfaction—at all touch points.
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“Get this to me ASAP. I can’t afford any delays.” Your customer service representatives hear these statements every day. Your clients are demanding speed and quality at every touch point: the days when they’d accept tradeoffs between product quality and timeliness of service are over. Organizations need to adapt to this reality—before their customers defect to the competition.
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The earned value management system (EVMS) is a method of tracking cost and schedule performance using work breakdown structure/earned value (WBS/EV) techniques. Formerly called C/SCSC (Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria) by the contract industry, an understanding of WBS basics is essential for any US contractor wishing to be selected for new major systems contracts over a certain funding threshold.
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Most project-oriented businesses are faced with poorly designed, archaic computer systems that have inadequate project reporting and accounting structures. This can limit the information provided to project managers for project reporting. However, properly designed work breakdown structure (WBS) systems give cost and general accounting the ability to rely on a simpler chart of accounts, while providing more project management flexibility.
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Just as back-office automation became critical for competitive success in the last half of the twentieth century, customer relationship management (CRM) is today’s imperative for success. However, the key to creating business value with CRM is remembering that business strategy and technology strategy are linked. Companies that believe they can implement CRM capabilities based on technology alone will fail.
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The process of implementing a new enterprise solution is incredibly complex. This process can send your organization down a long road of beneficial—and sometimes painful—change. The good news, though, is that if the implementation is done right the first time, you won’t have to travel that road again. The key question: how do you do it right?
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) need technology to survive in a competitive business environment. However, regardless of the business type, size, or industry, incorporating technology into existing frameworks involves risk—to productivity, customer service, operations, and the bottom line! The key to reducing risk and increasing productivity is thus the selection of technologies that will accommodate change in your business.
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.NET technology is a wake-up call, and some people are sleeping through it! Remaining competitive means mission-critical software systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, must be designed from the ground up for connectivity and integration. But software developers don’t advertise their shortcomings, and some ERP vendors—and by association, their customers—are being left behind.
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Customer-facing processes are challenging to manage because they are always changing. Conventional workflow automation and stand-alone business process management (BPM) technologies lack many critical components found in customer relationship management (CRM). However, converging BPM and CRM provides the responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, and manageability to achieve optimal results. The converged approach helps align priorities enterprise-wide, reduce risks, and unblock revenue growth potential.
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When businesses commit to implementing customer relationship management (CRM), they commit to realigning their entire organizations around the customer. More specifically, they commit to collecting the right data—and using it the right way at the right time. But if you’re the manager championing CRM in your organization, how do you create the CRM buzz and obtain executive buy-in?
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Choosing the right customer resource management (CRM) application involves looking at its ability to solve many business challenges—both expected and unexpected. Analyzing CRM applications for their problem-solving acumen can help your business successfully select a platform that improves the way you do business, drives profits, and reduces risk, while minimizing IT resource requirements.
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Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and receiving quality customer service is a major factor in their purchasing decisions. There are six key elements that can help distinguish your organization’s product or service from your competitors. By applying these key elements, you can unlock the lifetime value of your customers and build an outstanding referral platform for future growth.
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In the past few years, the number of county employees at the Prince William County Government in Virginia (US) has grown significantly, but with few additions to the administrative staff. Prince William County needed a system that would help its agencies process personnel action forms (PAFs) more efficiently, reduce mistakes, limit paper use, and provide a central repository for PAFs.
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The road to implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems is fraught with risk and littered with failure. Paradoxically, reams have been written by industry practitioners explaining why CRM projects fail, yet the same patterns and mistakes are repeated—over and over again. While there is no magic bullet, following some simple guidelines can help assure CRM success for your organization.
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Selecting a new enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution is an undertaking that requires careful planning and managed execution. And in fact, there are a number of common mistakes that organizations make. Failing to execute the selection process in an objective and structured fashion can be an expensive financial mistake—as well as a fatal hit to your professional reputation.
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We all know that computers, generally speaking, have not been as reliable as phones. And the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) has been, in some cases, justified. However, for VoIP the question now is not whether reliability can be achieved, but rather how much reliability you can expect from the options available to you.
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The average personal computer (PC) costs an enterprise $10,000 (USD) per year to own and maintain—five times the purchase price of the hardware and software! Is it possible to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology platforms? Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) manageability can be a crucial step in self-provisioning users and unburdening valuable network professionals.
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Enterprises of all sizes are adopting Internet protocol (IP) telephony for cost savings and productivity gains—but high quality voice service takes more than just buying the latest equipment. Is IP telephony right for your organization and your network? Get the straight facts from an industry leader—along with a 7-step assessment and deployment checklist for a successful implementation.
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La administración de un negocio familiar es más complicada que aquellos negocios cuyos dueños no tienen ningún parentesco, porque la familia dueña del negocio desempeña el rol central y dirige el negocio. La falta de una administración formal y efectiva es la mayor causa para problemas organizacionales.
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Channel partners are money-making sales and service arms for any vendor. Supporting partner leads can increase sales in difficult-to-reach markets, and expand customer bases in existing sectors as well. Greater revenues and larger market shares are vital to survival in today’s business world, but some simple tips can help maximize lead generation and open the door to closing more sales.
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Business strategy execution requires the control and automation of complex processes, and the ability to quickly analyze data relevant to the enterprise. Companies have to address these processes in a responsive, flexible way. However, this cannot be achieved simply by optimizing local activities. Multiple activities from different departments must be synchronized, toward the overall goal of increasing organizational profitability.
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Effective communication uses many senses, but visual communication provides huge amounts of information, and can convey all sorts of meanings. Face to face, we can rely on visual cues; however, the amount of information transmitted via distant communication is limited by cost and complexity. And when the costs of transportation rise, broader use of remote visual communications becomes increasingly practical.
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There is a considerable need to understand how technical performance and the problems within the technical infrastructure impact the capabilities of the business itself. The majority of companies can only measure specific asset and application performance, whereas many issues within the infrastructure lie at the transport level, where packet switching can present both great opportunities and major issues.
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Information management, which includes both data and content management, is an essential element of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Taking a service-oriented approach to information data can thus help you achieve greater value from your information assets. Implementing master data management (MDM) services can provide a multiplier effect, by delivering high-value business services over and above information integration services.
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Predictions of the death of software are overstated. In reality, businesses are becoming more reliant on technology, not less. What’s changing, however, is the number of options available for managing, delivering, and paying for software applications. Many independent software vendors recognize the benefits of offering software as a service--a delivery alternative that can present long-term benefits for all parties.
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In today’s fast-paced, dynamic business environment, organizations need timely, accurate information to make critical decisions about their businesses, and to respond quickly to changes in operations, competition, and customer needs. However, many organizations that have adopted business intelligence (BI) tools to address their informational needs are faced with critical challenges in deriving benefit from these technologies.
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By automating financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics AX links people, processes, and information. This document consolidates the core features and functionality in the solution, and is intended for use as a tool for users to familiarize themselves with the full scope of the solution.
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Organizations that implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system should evaluate software with an eye to the must-have features of the application. However, choosing the right software is just part of the solution. Businesses that intend to grow and compete must create an environment that encourages people at all levels of a company to take customer service seriously.
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Workforce planning allows an organization to determine if it has the right capability to deliver on business objectives, and enables it to maximize return on talent investments. By deploying a structured workforce planning process, organizations gain new insights and metrics about present and future workforce gaps. This will transform the talent management approach from reactive to proactive.
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Performance reviews are an essential and productive use of employee and manager time. A well-defined competency model can discover insights into individual, workgroup, and even entire workforce performance, helping enterprises gain true business advantage in their industries and marketplaces. Employee consultations and reviews, appraisals, and developmental decisions no longer need to exist as isolated business functions.
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The role of human resources (HR) professionals has changed dramatically in recent years, as cost control and compliance measures vie for their time. Self-service intranet applications help employees and managers perform key HR activities themselves, reducing the need for HR professionals to get involved in routine minutiae—and allowing them to play a strategic role in their organizations.
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Traditional business intelligence (BI) software has not been available to line-of-business managers, frontline employees, or external stakeholders, but that is no longer the case. New BI solutions unite transactional and analytical worlds. Knowledge workers and executives can now analyze operational processes in real time. Decisions can be made and entered back into operational systems combining BI and performance management strategies.
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The greatest threat to the security of the modern network is complexity. Threats to network security almost always play on missed details in the design of a network or a piece of software. These overlooked details enable much larger and potentially devastating security breaches to occur. However, this threat can be countered with a well designed network and vigilant safeguards.
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Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) has been adopted as the dynamic protocol of choice for pain-free management of network resources. The integration of the Domain Name System (DNS) and DHCP into a single network helps overcome traditional barriers to effective resource allocation. Indeed, combining DNS and DHCP enhances information security, thus providing a solution your organization can grow with.
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The Domain Name System (DNS) plays an important role in providing the information used by the Windows Domain locator service to connect and authenticate with Active Directory. But how can organizations with existing configurations using the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND)—the international DNS benchmark—be sure that migration to other server solutions will yield a dependable DNS solution?
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Domain name system (DNS) best practices are becoming more standardized. However, DNS services are often overlooked simply because they are so commonplace. The result is poorly configured services that are either not fully functional, or easily compromised. To ensure that the Internet remains a reliable medium for information and commerce, further implementation of secure and efficient DNS will be required.
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Small to medium businesses have typically built their own domain name system (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services, used Windows DNS/DHCP, or turned to a hosted service provider for these services. This approach may appear to offer tremendous savings, but contains many hidden costs and risks that are not always apparent until a catastrophic loss of service occurs.
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When Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) was created, the Internet was still mainly a vehicle for scientific collaboration. Indeed, the need for security has grown out of the increased use of the Internet as a commercial medium. That’s why new DHCP issues have come to the forefront that were simply not explored in the early days of the Internet.
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To understand the power of cache poisoning and pharming, imagine that you’re logging on to your Internet banking service. The page looks a little odd, but the address is correct, and it has the same fields as usual. You might enter your credentials without thinking twice. Unfortunately, you’ve just provided a criminal syndicate with the contents of your bank account.
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Organizations deploying next-generation business and communications applications are looking for ways to rapidly increase the use of existing Internet and core network resources. These network environments demand new management frameworks to simplify network configuration and deployment changes. However, existing point-based solutions do little to address issues of scale, usability, security, and network availability at the Internet protocol (IP) level.
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Increased complexity, coupled with the adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), demands additional management overhead for enterprise- and carrier-class networks. This management need is compounded by requirement for corporations to implement IP version 6 (IPv6)-compatible networks to ensure capacity and service over the next decade. This transition will require careful planning, and naming systems will play a critical role.
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Today, in addition to their usual reporting and operational duties, human resources (HR) professionals are expected to bring value to the company in a number of significant respects, ranging from launching operational efficiency initiatives to providing strategic leadership. And now, compliance with the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act has imposed a new set of responsibilities on the HR organization.
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Wireless technology has become exceedingly popular and convenient in both residences and enterprises. Networks are now expected to aid IT support, government services, and public safety applications. That’s why the architectural strategies used to implement wireless mesh networks can have a profound impact on the performance and financial success of metro-scale and wide area wireless mesh deployments.
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Data entry and error correction are key roadblocks to return on investment (ROI) from customer relationship management (CRM) software. Manual data entry is time-consuming, and reduces staff effectiveness by taking them away from potential sales opportunities. Automating data entry is one way to reduce missed contacts and incorrect details, and to increase the volume and accuracy of contact entry.
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Organizational growth can come in many forms. It can be sheer increases in number of employees, customers, patients, members or constituents; it can involve launching new products, or entering new geographies; it can simply be increasing transaction levels. Regardless of form, managing growth confidently means relying not only on an organization’s people, but also on its business systems.
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Many businesses owe their very survival to improvements that would have been impossible without radical changes to business process systems. However, many of the promises implicit in these systems—dramatic increases in business success, with minimal negative impact—have proven to be overly optimistic for many, and flat-out fantasy for some.
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If you’re like most small to midsized business executives, your primary focus is on growing revenue and controlling company spending. However, you probably use paper-based processes to deal with company expenses. Without an automated system, you have limited ability to actively manage spending—and can only hope that spending decisions remain within budget and in compliance with company policies.
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There are seven core operational measures that can be leveraged to fine-tune a company’s business processes and achieve a higher return on capital employed (RoCE). Even modest gains in these measurements can spur a significant increase in RoCE. If the level of performance against each core operational measure rises by just one percentage point, for example, RoCE can nearly double.
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Finance executives must meet a growing number of challenges if their companies are to continue being profitable. So how can they deliver strong performance in every aspect of their businesses? The answer: by deploying a corporate financial management system that expands the capabilities of their core activities—a system that extends its reach to automate other processes within the enterprise.
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There are several ways to virtualize the front office, with at least four different solution choices available. The soundest advice may be for companies to start the process, and evaluate the alternatives based on their ability to solve real business needs. It’s time that the personal computer (PC) find its place in the data center—not proliferated around the workplace.
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New developments in telephony solutions have left some small businesses reeling; smaller organizations incorrectly assume there’s a steep learning curve for new products. However, there is no real reason for any business to be left behind. One-size-fits-all telephony is a thing of the past, and new flexibility can level the playing field for any size of business.
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Acquiring and retaining customers is crucial to an organization’s long-term success and growth. Finding new customers is more expensive and labor-intensive than maintaining a current client base. Haphazard marketing plans can be costly and ineffective, but customer loyalty solutions don’t have to be expensive. There are customer retention tools that can help your marketing teams hold on to your existing customers.
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Administrative overload is a key problem in managing a human resources (HR) team. Health care rate hikes and not qualifying for high-end benefit packages are two serious concerns. Furthermore, missing filing deadlines can lead to legal fines and penalties. Outsourcing HR can be an effective way of providing high-quality HR services while avoiding risk, saving time, and protecting the bottom line.
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For today’s organizations, Internet access is a must-have. However, when they decide to open the door to the World Wide Web, the good—along with the bad—enters the network. Spyware and viruses can be distributed onto the network from untrustworthy web sites. In order to protect the best interests of the organization, an effective Web content filter is required.
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All organizations require the ability to create portable document format (PDF) files to maintain the interoperability, authenticity, and security of confidential information—while ensuring that the right person has access to this information. However, if your employees do not have an easy and intuitive way to do this, your organization may be at risk of violating compliance requirements.
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It has been estimated that two-thirds of all complex technology solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and performance management result in less than successful outcomes. Implementing a complex technology-enabled performance management solution is a worthwhile, but significant challenge. That’s why the implementation of technology must be a small part of a larger change effort.
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Setting up a performance management system can deliver immense value to your organization. But in order to successfully execute a performance management system, and to avoid critical missteps, you need to focus on the three important core processes that must be launched and navigated—before you launch the performance improvement process.
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Performance management systems have become an important tool in building an organizational culture of choice, and can deliver tremendous results. However, it’s not very common to have a comprehensive “road map” when embarking on a performance management system implementation—which can lead to serious mistakes in dealing with the people, process, and technology of performance management.
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Executives watch time slip away while they plod through payroll, benefits management, and other human resources (HR) tasks. This time is spent writing paychecks, negotiating with benefits providers, and updating employee records. But instead of squandering resources on "administrivia," executives can transform HR into a competitive advantage by outsourcing or streamlining non-strategic HR—thus providing increased focus on strategic HR.
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Formalized risk management is underused in project management, where the focus is typically on schedule and budget. This affects most aspects of a project, including evaluation, selection, planning, execution, and control. How many project decisions are made without formally evaluating the potential consequences? When budgets are tight and competition is fierce, this question is more relevant than ever.
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We all know about the three monkeys: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. But as project managers, we need to control our projects. In order to do this, we must ignore the advice of the three monkeys. We need to see the potential for cost overruns, hear about the risks, and speak about the likelihood of failure.
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Many companies find that traditional sales training methods have fallen short. The competitive levels of today's business environment demand new educational methods that can deliver advantage quickly and cost effectively. But how to cut through the clutter? Book learning, seminars, and lectures alone are too static! E-learning and web-based training are often irrelevant—or just plain boring. What to do?
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The client: a US-based provider of reusable rack rental, recovery, and closed loop logistics management for bulk shipping and display of live goods, from nurseries to retailers. Faced with growing demand for its racks, the distributor required an enterprise-wide application that allowed flexibility for growth, while reducing operational complexity and maintaining the company’s excellent track record.
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A software consulting service provider needed to develop a web-based interface having touch screen functionality to provide instant schedule visibility, eliminate double bookings, and fully automate the reservation process—including sending attendee invitations, managing catering
orders, and reserving equipment. The service provider turned to Rishabh for development services.
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A leading application service provider of business applications needed to develop a replica of enterprise resource planning (ERP) for veterinary practice. The application required customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), a financial accounting system, human resource (HR) management, and medical records management. Rishabh Software developed the solution using EJB, XML, Java servlets, JSSE, JBoss, and J2ME technologies.
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IT departments play a key role in complying with the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Without the right technological solutions to record and monitor access to networks, financial systems, and sensitive data, company management cannot ensure the integrity of the information in their financial reports. That’s why technology that helps with SOX compliance and internal control management is imperative.
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There is an ongoing arms race in the financial services industry to be competitive in electronic trading (e-trading) markets. Significant business risks exist, in terms of organizational reputation as well as the bottom line. The challenge is to minimize end-to-end latencies, and to ensure consistent performance levels, particularly in fast-moving markets—a challenge spanning both application and infrastructure teams.
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Typically, there are two approaches to managing public access and workplace workstations: the lock-down approach, and the reactionary approach. However, despite the variety of public access or corporate computer environments that exist, non-restrictive technology is applicable to all of them. With this technology in place, users can use workstations as they desire, but downtime and technical support costs are eliminated.
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Unfortunately, the portfolio management processes that experts have advocated for years—and that many organizations have implemented—often take the form of semi-annual or even annual meetings. However, this often raises balance or alignment issues only after millions of dollars have been spent. What’s needed is real-time information that can be used to conduct continuous, automated assessment of portfolio status.
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Business management solution users spend most of their time “heads down” in the business application, but they also need to use communication and desktop productivity tools. Thus, business solutions need familiar, easy-to-learn user interfaces. They need to be “process-centric” and role-based. And they need to provide a bridge between the worlds of structured business applications and unstructured desktop productivity software.
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Planning is a crucial management discipline that enables organizations to optimally allocate their finite resources, and achieve maximum potential. The more intelligently these resources are allocated in response to changing conditions and objectives, the better the business will perform. Indeed, improved business performance is why so many companies are aggressively evolving their planning processes and embracing planning best practices.
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Today’s business users require more from their business performance management systems. From dashboards to scorecards, production reporting, ad hoc analysis, financial applications, and key performance indicators, it’s clear that businesses need one system that offers broad, diverse functionality. They want the interface to be intuitive and easy to use, and they want the system to integrate with their productivity tools.
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Word processing software was introduced to improve employee performance, and has become an integral tool for every business. In much the same way, dashboards and
scorecards will become the tools for improving business performance management and strategy execution. That’s why its essential for managers to gain an overview of dashboards and scorecards, including their benefits, strengths, and integration.
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The UN Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC), the global product and services classification standard, has been revolutionizing purchasing and supply management across the world. Whether you’re deliberating on the need for a common product and classification standard for your company, or an advanced UNSPSC adopter, revisiting the basics can help you improve your purchasing and supply management processes.
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The fundamentals of business are fairly simple. Customers have needs, and preferences about the products and services that will fill those needs. Businesses, on the other hand, have products or services with features that offer value. Win–win business transactions provide products or services with the features that best satisfy customer needs. This builds lasting relationships—and long-term organizational success.
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One of the biggest “time-wasters” in not-for-profit organizations is the constant reentry of data from one system to another. For example, many organizations must manually reenter information from their fundraising applications to their accounting systems. This is error-prone, costs valuable time, and delays important reporting. The solution lies in finding efficient ways to share information—across the organization.
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Effective IP management requires proper allocation of address space for adequate address capacity as needed, as well as accurate configuration of DHCP and DNS servers. Along with flawless configuration and management of each of these foundational elements of Internet protocol (IP) address management, address managers must also integrate these management functions into the broader IT network management environment.
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Many companies are struggling to comply with a patchwork of regulations related to sensitive corporate information. As a result, companies are looking for new database security and auditing solutions to help prevent unauthorized access to confidential information—and to satisfy internal and external auditors—without the performance loss and insider security risk of traditional database management system (DBMS) logging approaches.
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The capacity for service-oriented architecture (SOA) to provide a framework for next-generation enterprise telecommunications services has become a reality through the maturing of Web services technology. Such communications services can now take their rightful place alongside collaborating business processes to allow enterprises to achieve a fully integrated SOA, an architecture that can grow with the business and grow with technology.
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XML gateways, a new class of networking device, manage message-level security, service-level agreements (SLAs), and performance in service-oriented architectures (SOAs). XML gateways specialize in application-level protocols rendered within the XML or Web services message itself. With the ability to rapidly inspect and process XML messages, they can perform security, transformation, routing, and SLA operations at wire speed in the network.
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There’s no universal solution for Web services security. Sometimes, access lists programmed into the Web services themselves are sufficient. Other times, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) may be more than adequate. However, when granular message processing and auditing is essential, dedicated extensible markup language (XML) and Web services security technology will prove necessary. Which options are right for you?
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Project portfolio management (PPM) is a tool-supported process for optimally managing an organization’s “portfolio” of projects. And although PPM can provide real value, many organizations are finding PPM implementations difficult. However, there are key approaches that can increase your likelihood of success, as well as an effective step-by-step process for implementing PPM within your organization.
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Client relationship management (CRM) technology can help capital-markets firms streamline investment banking activities, increase brokerage trade volume, and meet compliance challenges. As a nerve center for information about clients, prospects, institutions, syndicate partners, and other contacts, the right CRM system enables capital-markets firms to share intelligence, coordinate activities, and derive advantage from an integrated body of corporate knowledge and relationships.
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There are hundreds of anti-spam and anti-virus products designed to defend against unwanted e-mail. These solutions can take the form of software, appliances, or managed services. Managed filtering services are convenient and economical, and are also extremely effective in managing threats. In fact, most managed e-mail defense services block threats before they even reach the internal network.
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Many companies are finding they must build project management capabilities in order to meet business challenges in the future. They also understand that project management processes should be implemented consistently across the organization, leading to efficiency and better, faster, cheaper project delivery. Given the need for consistent project management, the critical question is how best to implement this environment.
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Effective correlation and accurate root-cause diagnosis have been key challenges for network and systems management solutions for many years. Indeed, these challenges have increased with the growing complexity of the software applications and services operating on top of the Internet and intranets. But at the same time, customer expectations of service quality and guaranteed performance remain as stringent as ever.
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Today’s n-tier infrastructures make significant demands on the problem management process. Isolation of performance problems in these environments is difficult at best, and traditional monitoring tools are not equipped to deal with the multiple dependencies and complexities they present. Indeed, even effective problem management processes may not be sufficient without improved tools.
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The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM), promoting a quality approach to achieving business efficiency in the use of information systems. The key paradigm shift that ITIL s ITSM best-practices taxonomy seeks to achieve is the movement away from management of silos, towards management of services spanning multiple silos.
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As telecommunications networks grow in size and complexity, enterprises and service providers are faced with an increasing burden on operating expenses. In particular, the amount of power consumed and heat dissipated within even a single rack of communications servers is now a very real budget consideration. Clearly, lowering these numbers is the concern of all communication platform designers.
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Monitoring the end-to-end performance of applications and services at all infrastructure tiers is the "holy grail" of IT organizations. But most companies use silo-based monitoring tools incapable of monitoring events and activities occurring elsewhere in the infrastructure. A "collaborative" approach for deploying such tools stands a greater chance of adoption than the typical top-down implementation method commonly used today.
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The most advanced business process management (BPM) applications bridge departmental and geographic boundaries, and manage the flow of documents and data according to sophisticated process rules. And while many would suggest that an on-demand BPM service offering would most benefit small businesses, a real case can be made that such offerings might be more valuable for medium and large businesses.
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Corporations share data with a variety of remote offices, trading partners, customers, and regulatory agencies. Sensitive data is transferred to and from entities around the world billions of times a day. Security breaches are frequently in the news, with reports of compromised customer data. However, business-to-business (B2B) workflow breakdowns are more likely to occur—and are potentially just as harmful.
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Industrial machinery and components (IM&C) manufacturers are challenged by global rivalry, industry consolidation, and shrinking margins. And with more manufacturers vying for business, customers are demanding customized products delivered on short lead times—all at lower costs. At the same time, manufacturers are struggling to extend their supply chains to incorporate offshore manufacturing. So where can they turn for help?
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How can a professional services firm grow profitably while providing clients with the services and project pricing they demand? The firm must rely on best-practice solutions to gain control over every aspect of business—from business development to resource planning to billing. Firms that plan and staff projects by relying on combinations of spreadsheets and management instinct will fall behind.
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Achieving both customer satisfaction and profitability is critical to the survival of your organization. Without customer satisfaction, the long-term prospects for your business are bleak. And without profitability, your business cannot exist. Profitable-to-promise (PTP) solutions allow you to determine the profitability of individual orders by integrating supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) processes with your financial data.
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There was a time when companies went with one platform, and stuck with it, hiring IT staff with that technology in mind. That time has passed. Today, heterogeneity is the name of the game, with orga¬nizations having combinations of legacy software and distributed systems, across multiple platforms and applications. But while heterogeneity brings multiple benefits, it also involves serious risk.
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Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly expecting more from logistics service providers. As a logistics company, you need to streamline operations and drive costs down. You need to be able to broaden your offerings and provide the services that customers want. Above all, you need to integrate your warehouse with your customers’ operations to provide detailed visibility into inventory and processes.
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Quocirca conducted two surveys separated by twelve months that looked at the data management infrastructure of UK and Irish businesses, and how this was linked to their ability to respond to the whims of the regulators. In the year between the two surveys, a lot had changed.
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Since there are multiple vendors offering hosted customer relationship management (CRM) applications, the buyer’s toughest decision is finding a vendor that offers the many benefits that come from a workflow engine similar to those used in multimillion-dollar CRM deployments. Truth be told, CRM alone is not enough, as not all providers have a workflow engine which enables full process automation.
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Traditional document management systems are geared toward control, discipline, and orchestrated workflow. Contrast this with the untamed world of ad hoc processes that drive so many of our activities. In this environment, teams are dynamic and agile. Imposing structure and formal processes almost always results in confusion, resentment, and lost productivity. The needs of distributed teams require a different approach.
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Given ever-increasing regulatory pressures, document life cycle management is clearly an issue every enterprise must resolve. Until now, documents stored on local machines and e-mailed outside the organization have presented a particularly thorny challenge. Fortunately, new technologies make it possible to extend document life cycle management to the desktop and enforce document retention policies across every computer in the enterprise.
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Documents provide tangible evidence of decisions and agreements. They contain crucial intellectual capital. And they make key contributions to your brand. As a result, your organization invests significant resources to create processes for protecting critical documents and managing associated business risks. That’s why your document security services need to work within your environment to enhance existing security processes and technologies.
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To many executives, health insurance cost increases are as predictable as death and taxes. That’s why best-in-class organizations are embracing strategies which optimize benefit cost per employee. To succeed, these companies focus on wellness programs, clear communications about benefits choices, and benefits automation as part of an integrated system. And to compete effectively, other organizations will need to follow suit.
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Significant management issues posed by multisite manufacturing environments include optimizing resource use at each site and delivering the lowest possible cost for each stage in the product manufacturing cycle. To facilitate meaningful results in achieving these requirements, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software must thus provide the right tools for ensuring that multisite processes come up to “best-in-class” standards.
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Lean manufacturing strategies and ever-lower tolerance for late deliveries are putting pressure on manufacturers to ensure that facilities and equipment operate at peak performance. While some companies are struggling to execute preventive and predictive maintenance procedures, better performers have implemented holistic asset management strategies enabling them to proactively ensure the health of plants, factories, and equipment across global manufacturing networks.
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Even though the technology has been around in some form since World War II, chances are that you think of Wal-Mart’s supply chain initiative when you hear the words “radio frequency identification,” or “RFID.” Wal-Mart is already seeing a return on their 2005 investment. But does RFID technology make as much sense for asset management as for supply chain management?
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While the idea of enterprise-wide data management is conceptually simple, it is extremely difficult to implement in most organizations, due to differences between heterogeneous databases and applications. However, conventional integration software is not required to achieve consistent management of customer data. In fact, integration appliance technology can greatly simplify and reduce the cost of master data management (MDM).
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The source code for mission-critical software products is almost never provided to users by the supplier. All the end-user has is a copy of the compiled source code—in other words, the object code that can only be read and executed by the computers concerned. That’s why professional escrow is becoming an essential component of operational risk management.
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Today’s software developers face requirements that were previously unknown in the industry. Businesses now demand reduced time-to-market, lower costs, and greater stability. And although collaboration is key to addressing these issues, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Thus, an automated change management system can help you increase the predictability, reliability, and speed of the software development cycle.
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Enterprise impact analysis is the heart of the incident management process. Unlike threat-based risk assessments, this analysis focuses on the business impacts, regardless of the cause. Delving into the functions of enterprise elements, the analysis evaluates how any interruption will affect normal functioning. It also provides a framework for determining what’s relevant—and what isn’t relevant—to managing the incident.
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For most companies, changing accounting software is a daunting challenge. Not only is transitioning the accounting function to a new software package tricky in itself, but it is usually catalyzed by one or more business challenges that are (hopefully) solved by the new system. Knowing that, how can you minimize the risks involved in selecting a new accounting application?
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The benefits of e-learning have been amply demonstrated and extensively documented. However, less attention has been paid to the business benefits of implementing learning management systems (LMS). The misconception is that LMS and e-learning are irrevocably linked. But that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, an LMS can provide real benefits, in the broadest—and most critical—business sense.
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To respond to the demands of today’s highly competitive global environment, traditional linear supply chains are evolving into complex, global ecosystems. These “pull” (demand-driven) environments working in conjunction with traditional “push” environments are known as adaptive supply chain networks (ASCNs). ASCNs allow all supply chain stakeholders to share knowledge, make collaborative decisions, and sense and respond immediately to changing conditions.
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Vendors of electronic report distribution and content management solutions typically emphasize the paper and related printing cost savings their products provide. But in fact, the real value of these technologies far exceeds these savings. Maximum benefits from electronic document and report management technologies derive not only from cutting obvious costs, but also from enabling dramatic improvements in business processes.
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In 1999, specialty chemicals manufacturer Rohm and Haas Company wanted to move to a new platform to simplify the complexity resulting from over 300 disparate information technology (IT) systems. First, Rohm and Haas wanted to adopt common global processes to increase efficiency, and implement smart sourcing strategies. Second, management needed a better way to see customer trends and evaluate competitors.
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The ability of BASF AG—a leader in the chemicals industry—to proactively manage unexpected situations is key to its competitiveness. With its complex supply network dealing with unanticipated events is all the more critical. To address this issue, BASF implemented the SAP Event Management application to monitor ocean-freight logistics, from receipt of initial orders to final delivery of products.
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Recent changes in accounting standards and compliance, along with greater emphasis on managing risk and value, have introduced new key measures of bank performance and made it more important to coordinate the internal and external reporting of financials and risk. To meet these challenges, banks must do their utmost to more fully integrate their accounting data and processes.
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A decline in customer loyalty has put a great deal of pressure on financial institutions of late. Thus, as banks tailor products and services to meet customer demands, they must also boost revenue. That’s why it’s essential to target your most profitable customers with real-time insight that helps you drive revenue, increase profitability, and build long-term relationships with those customers.
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Banks face many challenges in today’s dynamic financial services marketplace. Banks must continuously enhance capabilities for risk and financial management to address market, credit, and regulatory environments that are increasingly complex. Thus, process support for your business strategies is crucial—which is why integrated tools are a must-have for financial accounting, cost controlling, risk management, asset-liability management, and profitability analysis.
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No matter how unique a project may be, project quality is always the top concern for both the software services providers and the clients—on time and within budget. Indeed, there’s a good chance the customer will be satisfied if these fundamental goals are met. Thus, successful projects are fostered through mutual trust and cooperation between outsourcer and client.
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On any given day, your interactions with a few strategic customers will make a huge long-term difference. But which few customers? A new type of analytic application, customer value management (CVM), answers the need to identify, analyze, and predict customer behavior. Using CVM enables companies to shift from campaign-centric to customer-centric analysis, and develop more individualized and profitable customer relationships.
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To realize the benefits of enterprise performance management (EPM), the focus needs to be on facilitating collaboration between senior management and business unit management. In practice, most organizations do not programmatically incorporate two-way communication into the planning process. Yet this is where many organizations find the greatest benefit in improving business performance—and the most difficulty in making the change.
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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a driving force for future functional use within organizations. However, these functions must be viewed as being shared services for all processes. Functional re-use will be the main means of ensuring that organizations can respond rapidly and effectively to market dynamics, and that improvements to specific functions will have the optimum impact across the whole organization.
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When BellSouth and SBC merged to become Cingular Wireless in 2000, four issues concerned everyone: centralizing the storage of business information; improving access to, and reporting from, performance management processes; streamlining and standardizing analysis tools; and integrating data sources with different systems and platforms to create a "single version of the truth." The solution: OutlookSoft’s unified business process management application.
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A diverse company with multiple business units, US Sugar was looking for relief in the financial reporting and budgeting areas. Defining the related metrics and ensuring they were consistent enterprise-wide was thus a critical need. US Sugar required a comprehensive planning and performance management solution that would enable financial reporting, monthly forecasting, cost allocations, consolidations, actuals analysis, and strategic planning.
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Hosted private branch exchange (PBX) phone solutions are changing how small to medium businesses (SMBs) serve their customers, grow their business, and support their employees. Delivering the professional phone system capabilities large businesses use at a lower cost, hosted PBX is helping SMBs save money while putting their customer services on a par with much larger organizations.
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Professional services firms are not like other businesses. They have unique ways of working, unique challenges, and unique opportunities. While progressive project-based businesses have already embraced professional services automation (PSA)—achieving results and return on investment along the way—there are still many firms that have yet to fully automate their key business processes or integrate their knowledge base.
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Business process management (BPM) is ultimately about people, not technology. While technology enables BPM, it is people who lead, manage, and participate in business processes. However, BPM vendors have not traditionally focused on human-centric needs. A human-centric perspective can transform BPM from a cold automation system into an intuitive, user-friendly tool that eliminates redundancy and accelerates how work gets done.
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Business process management (BPM)—the discipline of modeling, automating, managing, and optimizing business processes—is one of the hottest market segments in the software industry today. Its rapid growth is driven by the increasing recognition that success is driven by the efficiency of your organization’s business processes. But what exactly is a business process—and how can BPM improve it?
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A full member of the Barclay’s Group, UK-based FIRSTPLUS Financial Group specializes in personal loans and loan refinancing. As with all businesses that experience rapid growth from the outset, its critical processes had evolved without much structured planning. That’s why FIRSTPLUS needed a strategic business process management (BPM) solution for structural process implementation and automation across different areas and functions.
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Bernstein AG, established in 1947 and headquartered in Porta Westfalica (Germany), builds and sells components and systems for industrial automation peripherals. In 2002, it began the task of selecting and implementing a flexible, web-based business process management (BPM) system. One of the most important technical requirements was the universal integration of the BPM suite into its existing IT infrastructure.
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The Biological and Biotechnological Research Council (BBSRC) is the UK’s principal public funder of basic bioscience research. BBSRC needed an automated business process management (BPM) system to handle grant application processes more efficiently. In particular, the chosen solution had to manage the complexities of the grant application and grant round processes, with 6000 applications within a 12-month period.
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To automate processes, business users and IT must work together as a team. The combination of technology infrastructure, process flow, and business requirements all needs to be translated into a process map to enable automation to occur. This process discovery effort, and adjusting the process map to manage change, is the most significant challenge of business process management (BPM) projects.
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Business process management (BPM) provides adaptability and agility to service-oriented architecture (SOA). The central nervous system in the architecture, it orchestrates the services provided by different applications that excel at what they do. And the more powerful the BPM solution used to manage these processes, the easier and more cost-effective it will be to adapt to unique business requirements.
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Any technology tied to the financial health of a business generates heated debate, and customer relationship management (CRM) is no exception. CRM has been bolstered, burned, praised, and maligned. One of the most animated arguments has centered on the “where” of CRM: whether to deploy the technologies in-house or “rent” them, outsourcing their implementation to an application service provider.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) applications have evolved from risky eighteen-month IT projects into productivity tools that any size of business can deploy. Indeed, many mid-market companies have chosen to roll out a “hosted” solution, whereby the solution is accessed over the Internet. However, going through the selection process has become more cumbersome recently, with more options available than ever before.
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There are many articles on customer relationship management (CRM) and its benefits. These articles are usually targeted towards large organizations, and don’t focus on the needs and objectives of small business owners. However, it’s essential for small business owners to know what CRM really is, and why and how CRM can help retain existing customers and help their business grow.
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Manufacturing analytics is fundamental to enabling an enterprise to run at peak performance. For management to achieve this condition, it needs to have an underlying data collection and management system that looks to the total enterprise. Data collected at the packaging line must be available and compatible with financial and operational data, so that maximum value can be achieved.
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The high capital costs of conventional application environments is a major problem for businesses. Some virtualization platforms provide a solution, but many data center resources that could benefit from dynamic management are simply not appropriate for virtualization. To address these issues, organizations need strategy that build on the capabilities of virtualization platforms as part of a comprehensive data center solution.
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An information-rich, well-published web site sells your products and services to potential clients around the world, 24x7. And multilingual content optimizes the effectiveness of your site by communicating with your customers in their language. However, many multilingual web sites are not as effective as they could be, simply because potential customers cannot find them through search engines.
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Installing software and patch updates can be frustrating and time-consuming for IT staff and users alike. But it's critical to update your computers regularly to keep security filters current. This need increases exponentially if your users are mobile and geographically dispersed. Should this continue to be the responsibility of your IT staff? Or should you outsource this function to a managed service provider (MSP)?
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Customizing third-party “vendor” source code is becoming increasingly common. But managing the incorporation of vendor application releases alongside customizations requires an additional layer of software configuration management (SCM) to integrate subsequent vendor releases. Traditional branch-based SCM tools require an unnecessarily complex branch-and-merge process. However, there is a more intuitive and efficient parallel development model for managing customizations to vendor code.
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Most software configuration management (SCM) systems rely on metadata annotations to support basic system operations, such as computing the contents of software configurations. With AccuRev, configurations are first-class objects called "streams," whose contents aren't defined in terms of metadata annotations at all. AccuRev relies on the chronology of SCM operations, enabling users to leverage the incremental nature of the process.
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Just behind fire and the wheel in a list of the world’s greatest inventions comes information lifecycle management (ILM). Without a doubt, ILM will revolutionize every facet of the computing landscape. And along the way, it will probably generate more hype than all the high-tech buzzwords of the past five years combined. But does it solve a real problem?
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A new trend is emerging in the world of storage management, and it’s called information lifecycle management (ILM). Just what it is, however, varies significantly from vendor to vendor. Generally, ILM is a strategy for policy-based information management. Its mandate: to provide centralized management of all information assets, aligning storage resources with the value of the data residing in them.
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While open innovation is a hot topic, capitalizing on opportunity requires a holistic strategy—not just increased collaboration. Companies must have repeatable, compliant, and responsive business processes. These processes must be supplemented by a global information infrastructure that provides a single source of the truth, along with alignment across departmental silos, and solutions that evolve without coding.
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Product roadmaps can mean the difference between success and failure in product delivery. Done correctly, they can help win large customers, and guide strategic planning efforts. Unfortunately, most product roadmaps are created under pressure when company management makes a last-minute request. As a result, they don’t have the impact they should, and can be a source of product management misery.
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To function as a business partner, IT must deliver service at predictable levels—and also contribute to enterprise strategy, by planning for services that enable growth. That’s why IT needs end-to-end infrastructure views that reveal issues as they happen, and track trends that predict future needs. But how can IT create unified views of the environment without draining critical resources?
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Information technology (IT) executives are beginning to seriously re-evaluate their highly hyped, service-oriented architectures (SOA) strategies—and consequently, their IT outsourcing, hosting, and enterprise system management strategies. However, creating long-term strategies is complicated by the wide range of available service delivery models. That’s why it’s vital to uncover the important concepts—and decision points—relating to these different delivery models.
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By nature, outsourcing is highly imitative, with organizations attempting to duplicate the imperfectly observed successes of others. Indeed, the myths and simplistic beliefs revolving around outsourcing—along with the usual technological, organizational, and cultural barriers—seriously impediment the effectiveness of collaborative models. The key to successful collaborative teamwork in offshore outsourcing lies in understanding and leveraging project management best practices.
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Application software companies often find themselves in positions where their products and services depend heavily on software that they may not be equipped to optimally engineer. This typically results in misallocated resources, inferior products and services, and ultimately business decline. Companies need to know when to outsource critical integral design, development, and delivery requirements that they cannot effectively meet themselves.
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Organizations often see a significant gap between their strategic plans and their ability to execute them, and many try to implement scorecards to solve precisely this problem. Unfortunately, most organizations look solely at the warning lights (how close are expenses and revenue to budget) rather than focusing on where they want to go—and how they’re going to get there.
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There is much discussion in the marketplace about outsourcing management and governance (OM/G). Many organizations mistakenly assume they understand the science of effective OM/G, but that’s often not the case. OM/G is a critical discipline enabling companies to achieve the intent of their outsourcing deal. In fact, without it, value leakage of 15 percent or greater is the typical result.
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Large-scale, complex outsourcing deals have produced equally complex management issues. Indeed, the leading cause of missed expectations in outsourcing is poor governance—after the deal is signed. For this reason, executives can benefit tremendously from outsourcing management tools, including third party vendors. Where and how do they work? And what is the cost in terms of time and money?
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Organizations undertaking information technology and business process outsourcing typically are very focused on "doing the deal." This involves assessing service providers, determining geographies from which to source services, developing contracts, defining service levels, and a myriad of other tasks. Yet arguably the hardest part of outsourcing occurs only after the deal is done—performing ongoing outsourcing management and governance.
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IT managers understand the difficulty of demonstrating returns on investment for technology projects. The issue is particularly acute for large multiphase deployments, such as IT infrastructure library (ITIL) implementations: massive projects which are hard to sell to management, and which promise returns many years in the future—after significant investment. So how do you get management to buy into your vision?
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When Katrina hit in 2005, Murphy was among the many companies impacted by the devastation. Although its servers sustained no physical damage, they were inaccessible, and Murphy could not reach or use its data until the waters receded and the servers were moved. After retrieving the servers from New Orleans (US), the company went directly to Virtuozzo for an evaluation.
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Historically, IT administrators have provisioned new servers with every new application, resulting in a large number of servers with utilization rates of 10 to 15 percent or less, commonly known as server sprawl. Server sprawl is responsible for a range of costs, including infrastructure, hardware, software, and management costs. So why hasn’t hardware virtualization solved your server sprawl issues yet?
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Today’s $12 billion (USD) knowledge management (KM) market provides comprehensive solutions to large organizations. However, implementing such solutions requires significant resources and depends on behavioral changes by employees. As a result, KM efforts often fall short of their goals. Shifting focus to end user features offers significant benefits to government organizations and their employees—and improves the odds of success.
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Performance reviews are typically based on the definition of what an employee was originally hired to do. However, appraisal systems fail to address the fact that jobs change as the business environment evolves. Performance management systems should thus deal with critical focus areas rather than basic functions. Appraisal without these objectives in mind risks being a total waste of time.
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Project portfolio management (PPM) is a hot topic, and there’s no shortage of related advice. However, much of the current advice is incomplete—or flat-out wrong. Before purchasing a tool, buyers should familiarize themselves with established theories for valuing projects. Armed with understanding, they can avoid getting "burned" by the unsuitable PPM tools that are being pushed in the marketplace.
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AstraZeneca, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, undertook an initiative to integrate
demand flow technology in logistical operations, leading to a major supply chain management (SCM) project at its packaging plant in Wedel (Germany). With an existing SAP technology platform, AstraZeneca project leaders opted for the mySAP SCM solution and the SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization component.
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Large or small, every company can profit from streamlined processes, insightful business intelligence, and systems that are flexible enough to grow with changing business needs. SAP Best Practices for Automotive comprise preconfigured business scenarios that cover the most important requirements of the automotive supplier industry, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), supplier relationship management (SRM), and a business information warehouse (BW).
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If you deal in goods, services, or intellectual property included in the US Munitions List, you must ensure that all related transactions conform to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). To answer this challenge, you need a solution that automates core ITAR processes—a solution that stores all your licenses and related documents where you can keep tabs on them.
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The airline industry is constantly undergoing change, and the ability to adjust swiftly is imperative. The need to improve safety while offering competitive prices is an ever-present challenge. That’s why the industry requires solutions in every crucial aspect of business—from accounting and finance, route profitability, human resources (HR), materials management, and enterprise management, to customer relationship management (CRM).
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The warehouse management system (WMS) concept has matured into a collection of time-tested technologies that reduce inventory costs and increase overall inventory management efficiencies. By implementing WMS technology, organizations can achieve a higher return on their software dollars and provide better service to their customers. A WMS can provide organizations with tangible benefits that improve warehouse operations without adding headcount.
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Outsourcing is increasingly embraced by manufacturers seeking ways to reduce costs, increase agility, and enhance market competitiveness. Yet poorly managed distributed manufacturing operations compromise visibility and quality control, which in turn erodes execution, management effectiveness, and profitability. To truly optimize the value of outsourcing, business systems and procedures must be deployed that create a collaborative, transparent information environment for manufacturing.
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Superior order management can provide you with a competitive edge across the board. To move closer to order perfection and a truly loyal customer base, you must cost-effectively eliminate the issues preventing on-time, accurate order fulfillment. This involves every process, including planning and forecasting, acquiring and creating accurate orders and contracts, handling order changes, and resolving fulfillment and post-delivery problems.
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When business uncertainties are frequent and compliance with regulations is mandatory, it can be a challenge to keep information technology (IT) synchronized with strategy for maximum business value—while reducing IT cost. An IT portfolio management framework, coupled with an IT governance framework, can provide visibility into projects and IT assets, keeping them aligned to business objectives at all times.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than a product—it’s a philosophy. That’s why, when it comes to CRM systems, it’s important to understand all the benefits of an integrated application before beginning the selection process. After all, just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a CRM solution is only as good as its implementation.
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One of the most important aspects of any business management application, including CRM applications, is its underlying architecture. An application’s customizability, adaptability, portability, scalability, and extensibility are all functions of its architecture. A well-designed architecture will thus accommodate growth and adapt to business changes—without affecting the performance of the application or requiring an exhaustive re-implementation.
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Today’s manufacturers are feeling pressures from many directions. Dynamic market needs, increased compliance requirements, more distributed manufacturing operations, and the transition to new technology are all manifested on the plant floor and throughout the enterprise—often leading to pleas for technology solutions. Integration and data utilization are thus the key issues to address in order to improve responsiveness and performance.
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Only a handful of firms have undertaken the challenge of integrating their supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) processes. A big reason for this is the practicalities of everyday business. But in today’s era of technology-fueled competition, leading companies in nearly every industry are seeking an edge by focusing on strategies enabling SCM and CRM to coalesce.
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You have convinced upper management that flow manufacturing will enable your company to leapfrog the competition. You have appointed a flow process leader, and selected a line for your flow pilot. Now it’s time to physically perform your first line implementation. The big question is, what exactly do you need to do to make the transition from discrete to flow?
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With tight budgets and spending restrictions affecting education, there has been increased interest in using a tool that has achieved significant success in the business world—customer relationship management (CRM) for schools. This approach involves taking a "customer-concentric" view to develop strategic plans. The key, however, is to take advantage of these capabilities without creating additional "information technology" overhead.
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In the automotive industry, purchasing has become a critical business component. Some experts estimate that a 4 percent reduction in sourcing costs can add as much to profits as a 10 percent increase in sales. With intense global competition putting constant pressure on vehicle prices, many companies see improved sourcing and procurement as key to increasing margins, profits, and competitiveness.
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Sermatech Manufacturing Group, a producer of precision components for the aerospace industry, was at a crossroads with its business management software. Its original 1980s software was outdated, and it needed a more robust system to guarantee company-wide access to real-time operations data. After researching numerous enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Sermatech turned to Enhanced Systems & Services’ Finesse ERP system.
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The pressure to generate demand for consumer products is constantly increasing. Whether managing customer relationships, achieving increased sales, or introducing new products, the area of marketing expenditure is complex and prone to error. That’s why you need a solution drawing together all the activities needed to analyze, plan, sell, execute, validate, and evaluate your products in a closed-loop process.
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Enabling lean manufacturing and six sigma principles to improve operations requires a nontraditional approach. The old idea that lean manufacturing and six sigma principles don’t require IT isn’t valid anymore. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) applications are critical for enabling holistic, lean manufacturing operations, and work hand-in-hand to better enable consumption—not forecasts—to drive replenishment.
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To better understand record management (RM) challenges related to regulatory compliance in the financial services and health care industries, it is important to know why the laws and acts were written and codified. This knowledge will help organizations understand why the RM team is creating and maintaining new records, and how report management can ease RM compliance challenges.
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There continues to be a wide variety of different approaches to building a solid data management solution for your organization, and just as many consulting firms across the globe willing to help you build them. However, it’s imperative for each data management solution to specialize to the unique needs of your organization’s business users, across varying functional areas.
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Quaker Oats has been an icon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (US) since 1901. In 1979, Quaker sought a system for the storeroom function and purchasing department, and selected CHAMPS. In 1991, the company implemented the CHAMPS maintenance management functionality. Its internal team interfaced CHAMPS with the existing accounts payable system, for seamless data transfer between the maintenance and accounting departments.
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There is a common perception that supply chain automation has created an environment in which transactions move quickly and efficiently in industries such as the retail supply chain and high-tech manufacturing. However, this perception is challenged by a recent research study, based on interviews with 400 management representatives of medium to large organizations in the USA, UK, Germany, and France.
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Most organizations have already taken steps to extend IT access to employees in remote locations. The questions is, should they continue to extend this process—and how? Mobile technology benefits are often difficult to measure, but the costs of hardware, software, and services are often of such a magnitude that the benefits need to be tangible to justify the cost.
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Technology decision-making in larger organizations is about making existing IT platforms as efficient as possible. However, there are weaknesses in the day-to-day operation of such environments, particularly in storage and information management. Positioning information lifecycle management (ILM) in the context of infrastructure management provides an understanding of where we are today—and of how much further there is to go.
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For many organizations, there is a disconnect between strategy and day-to-day activities. Strategy, resources, and risks are discussed at the executive level, but day-to-day activities and performance metrics are not connected to them. As a result, organizations can measure performance, but can’t manage it. The key to breakthrough performance management is tying performance metrics, resources, and risks to strategic objectives.
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As companies demand more from their decision support systems, unified business performance management (BPM) will play an increasingly important role in planning and decision-making. Thus, predictive analytics, applied with BPM, bridges the gap between real-time activity monitoring and calculated execution. Before embracing predictive analytics, however, companies should know that only a unified solution can help capitalize on this promising technology.
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Integration projects that attempt to fuse processes with application and system interfaces are likely to fail. A more pragmatic approach involves service-oriented architecture (SOA), where integration is determined by business requirements rather than technology factors. However, SOA alone is insufficient. Composite adapter services provide a layer of abstraction between service requestors and service providers, enabling cost-effective and versatile enterprise integration.
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All organizations, across all industries, have one thing in common—a deluge of customer data idling somewhere waiting to be monetized. Most likely, the similarities end there. The accuracy, depth, and accessibility of data are as varied as the products and services offered by organizations. The use of this data is what separates successful organizations from those who go bankrupt.
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Organizations of all sizes are tasked with increasing efficiency and revenues in a timely manner. Naturally, this leads them to consider automation. The critical question then becomes: is it more beneficial to build a time and expense management solution or to buy one? Overwhelmingly, organizations have proven that buying a solution results in greater value and success.
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IT today is often caught between a rock and a hard place: its budget has been reduced, while expectations remain undiminished. Moving beyond this paradox requires fresh approaches to IT management and governance. Today’s IT operations must remain aligned with strategic organizational priorities, deliver promised results with control and predictability, and transparently report problems in time to act on them.
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Pulse is a global leader in the design and manufacture of electronic components. With its far-flung design centers, manufacturing facilities, and customer care centers, Pulse sought to adopt a global supply chain management strategy, integrated with demand planning and manufacturing operations. The benefits, Pulse reasoned, would include faster order response time, lower inventory costs, and more intelligent planning and scheduling.
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Switzerland-based Firmenich has been researching, studying and creating fragrances and flavors for more than a century. As part of an ongoing project to cut cost and increase throughput and margins, Firmenich sought a supply chain management application to eliminate information silos and automatically address other issues such as excess inventory, load imbalances, customer service, forecasting, and other, potentially expensive inefficiencies.
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In 1988, Gulistan Carpet, one of America’s leading carpet producers, implemented a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to understand its business planning issues. But management soon realized this was not enough, and wanted to find a way to link this information with actual plant floor production operations at its three main plants. For a solution, it turned to Adexa, Inc.
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The markets served by Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), India’s largest consumer goods company, require flexible planning, production, and distribution scenarios on the manufacturing side of operations. In 2000, HLL identified improved supply chain management as a critical business priority. It sought a solution that would increase supplier and distributor responsiveness, reduce inventory buffers, and optimize planning and scheduling.
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Despite its success and profitability, Samsung’s network division—operating in a rapidly changing, highly volatile sector of the technology industry—nonetheless faced a continuous series of internal manufacturing challenges. In 2000, recognizing that it faced multiple opportunities for improvement, Samsung initiated a strategic campaign to revamp its supply chain management efforts. It turned to Adexa for a solution.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is the first and foremost strategy and corporate philosophy that puts the customer at the center of business operations so as to increase profits by improving customer acquisition and retention. It involves identifying high-value customers and automating processes so that sales, marketing, and service efforts will be more efficient and effective. However, to ensure the success of a CRM initiative, upper management must have a clear vision and establish a customer-focused culture.
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In the UK, government IT has a poor track record. Too much money is wasted on complex projects which fail to deliver the anticipated benefits. However, it is possible to deliver IT projects successfully in the public sector if sensible business and technology strategies are combined within strong project management frameworks to promote a spirit of mutual understanding and respect.
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Wholesale distribution operations are becoming more complex, with ever-changing customer requirements, global and electronic marketplaces, multiple distribution channels, and compliance initiatives adding to the perennial challenges of accurate delivery. Traditional warehouse management or enterprise resource planning solutions are simply not enough. Operational efficiency is the key to increasing inventory turns, improving order fulfillment rates, reducing cycle time, and eliminating charge-backs.
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Achieving operational excellence is fundamental for Yanacocha, the largest gold producer in South America. In 1999, Yanacocha decided it needed an online system linking its principal management areas (operations, maintenance, logistics, finance, and human resources), in order to optimize efficiency in administering its assets. It turned to Mincom Ellipse as its corporate management system, allowing standardization of its operations worldwide.
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E-mail is more important to companies than ever, since sensitive information is e-mailed both inside and outside the organization. However, growth in overall e-mail volume, driven by more sophisticated spamming attacks, as well the need to ensure content is suitable for purpose, means that we now must reconsider how we view e-mail management within the organization.
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Utilities have always held information about their assets, but traditionally this has been held in different parts of the business and not integrated into single coherent systems. Good asset management is increasingly about being able to feed information from business processes across the company into an asset management system, and using information from that system for financial and operational improvement.
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IT management and governance systems have entered the mainstream, joining enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human resources, and e-mail as part of the standard enterprise applications landscape. This has led to fundamental changes for leading chief information officers: their first consideration is now to make sure their own organization is systemically supported before systemically improving their customers’ organizations.
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Remote working is not new, but increasing dependence on instant IT access has led to increasing demands for mobile data services. Certainly, these services can be complex, and it is valuable to be insulated from the effects of rapid change. But ultimately, mobile access should be considered as just one aspect of IT usage, rather than as a separate entity.
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Many technology sales cycles get bogged down in the IT department. But while it is unlikely that a sale will get anywhere without IT management buy-in, IT approval is no guarantee of success. Getting a “yes” requires accessing and influencing other decision-makers, especially in the finance department. And along the way, there are plenty of others who can say “no.”
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Given the challenges facing governmental human resources (HR) departments, HR organizations need to take a hard look at their operations, and face the realities of what works—and what doesn’t. Shared services are the largely predominant organizational structure for delivering HR, and public sector HR executives must determine what must be done to take their organizations to the next level.
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Over 90 percent of human resources (HR) professionals rate employee performance management (EPM) as a top priority. Yet considerably fewer have EPM systems deployed within their organizations, mostly because of concerns about presenting a persuasive case for such projects to executive management. However, a structured approach to selecting, planning for, and implementing an EPM solution can help alleviate those concerns.
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Do you spend all your time chasing new customers instead of taking care of the ones you already have? Most customer relationship management (CRM) projects focus on customer relationships but fail to address customer experience as a loyalty driver. In part two of a two-part series, learn about best practices recommended by customer experience management (CEM) experts, and how they can help you improve long-term loyalty.
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St. Marys Paper Ltd. is a pulp and paper mill located in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (Canada). In 1989, it implemented a CHAMPS computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to help reduce costs and improve efficiencies. In 1998, St. Marys decided to investigate potential vendors for a maintenance system upgrade. After reviewing several vendors, the mill again turned to CHAMPS.
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No longer are customers simply sideline participants. Organizations are empowering them with a wealth of knowledge to engage in more informed decision-making. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution that encompasses all aspects of your business gives customers unprecedented visibility into the actions that impact them. Ultimately, this leads to greater accountability within the organization, and greater satisfaction among customers.
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How you decide to deploy and implement new Internet provider (IP) telephony infrastructure, as well as new applications or services to end users, will vary greatly based on the scope of the project and the degree of complexity involved. However, whether you are deploying to small remote offices or to large core sites, it is vital to establish standardized procedures.
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Enterprises looking to understand their Internet provider (IP) telephony implementation costs must go beyond simple analyses of return on investment. A total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis is required to help drive the bigger picture, as it considers both tactical and strategic goals, including management of the overall IT budget (annual operational and capital expenditures), risk assessment, and strategic objectives.
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The importance of resource selection is undervalued in the software industry. But in fact, the resource selection process is directly related to software development mission success. The in-house interview process typically fails to achieve comprehensive in-depth skills assessment, and is not cost-effective. However, you can improve matters by integrating external technical skills assessment expertise into the hiring process.
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Located in Algona, Iowa (US), and founded in 1989, Sbemco is a world leader in custom safety floor matting. As business grew, however, the company needed to strengthen back-office systems to provide more visibility into the supply chain process. The company accomplished this by transitioning to Exact Macola ERP and integrating it with Exact e-Synergy, a web-based business management solution.
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Relationship marketing is about understanding customers’ needs and building a marketing strategy around them. The nurturing process helps businesses define the process of generating better leads through a clear set of principles, tactics, and related metrics for attracting new customers. Enterprise marketing management (EMM) has also emerged as part of this process, and is critical for marketing consistency and discipline.
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The Internet industry is intensifying day by day as it becomes the basis of communication for businesses. With the introduction of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), communication costs have been greatly reduced, and the Internet industry is thus introducing variant services to consumers that were unthought of before. One of these emerging ideas is direct inward dialing (DID).
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Current enterprise resource planning (ERP) system implementation methodologies give too much attention to the ”hard core” technical side of the project, and too little to the organizational change needed to complete the project successfully. Because of the complex nature of these projects, different experts are required—not only ERP or IT experts, but also experts in managing organizational change.
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Document and records management software has many benefits that can appreciably improve organizational efficiency. Since these applications are complex systems that represent a solid investment, organizations should carefully evaluate their current and future needs beforehand.
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Companies spend staggering investments to make and keep their offerings competitive. By providing a centralized location to store account history and detailed contact information for every buyer and automating what had been manual tasks, sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) have begun to positively impact sales efforts.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is growing in importance as a competitive tool. However, a successful CRM solution must consider many factors, including a well-defined implementation strategy, the people factor, and the need for integration with the incumbent enterprise resource planning solution. If these conditions are met, CRM can have a dramatic impact on internal processes, customer satisfaction, and company profitability.
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Customer churn rates are higher than ever: although businesses say they are devoted to loyalty, their management systems and budgets do not support that claim. But in a landscape of similar products, cutting down on defection—or churn—is vital. There are in fact four steps to improving loyalty and retention which, if focused on the appropriate customers, will improve profitability.
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Customer churn rates are higher than ever: although businesses say they are devoted to loyalty, their management systems and budgets do not support that claim. But in a landscape of similar products, cutting down on defection—or churn—is vital. There are in fact four steps to improving loyalty and retention which, if focused on the appropriate customers, will improve profitability.
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In today’s world, current and future customers are interested to know whether or not you have implemented a quality control system. Some customers will demand International Organization for Standards (ISO) certification, and others may just ask about it. Whatever their requirements, having a quality control system assures your customers that the products and services you offer are of high quality.
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Essai is a leading US manufacturer of semiconductor test products. But Essai needed a solution that could support rapid business growth, maintain stringent quality requirements, and support the development and design of high-mix products. Essai worked with Microsoft Certified Partner Oztera, which implemented Microsoft Dynamics NAV 3.7 and customized the solution to achieve complete automation of all business processes.
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Webcom Limited is a Canadian book manufacturer specializing in custom book production. Its heterogeneous IT infrastructure was resulting in discontinuous information flow, which impeded staffers’ abilities to collaborate throughout the steps of a book’s production. But when Webcom Limited migrated to an integrated Microsoft business management system, it saw a 33 percent improvement in the automation of job production workflow.
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The Yosemite Association is a US-based not-for-profit organization that was operating disparate financial systems that didn’t integrate data across the organization, resulting in data it could not trust. It chose to implement an integrated business management software solution based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The organization has now gained better management of its financial information, with access to reliable, real-time information.
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Analysis and reporting services are an important part of the enterprise resource planning process. Microsoft Dynamics NAV has been designed to give users options for optimal analysis and reporting, and to leave room for partners to provide customized solutions. With the correct reporting tools and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, practical analysis and reporting is available and adaptable to individual users’ needs.
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The recent explosion of virtualization as a technology coincides with the trend of consolidating systems on to less, but more powerful, hardware. With more robust hardware, consolidation makes cost-effective sense. And given the reduced management overhead and more efficient hardware use, virtualization makes a great deal of sense indeed. However, it’s also important to be aware of its dangers.
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Like many health care providers, Wisconsin (US)-based Aurora faces pressures to improve care quality, while monitoring its bottom line. Asset optimization remains elusive for most such enterprises, but Aurora devised a plan to use a centralized service management call center to facilitate service requests, and dispatch resources. Aurora was thereby able to attain higher efficiency, and still strengthen service levels.
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In order to achieve success, all business software projects have to surmount requirements risk, technical risk, and planning risk. Many software developers have thus adopted an iterative delivery methodology, finishing first the essential features, and then those additional features which deliver the most value. Some fundamental insights will provide a better understanding of how to set up iterative delivery projects.
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Two models exist for implementing project portfolio management (PPM) systems: the engagement profitability model, and the budget alignment model. The former uses projects and programs as vehicles for managing revenue-generating engagements. The latter is an operational environment where project value varies, and project costs constitute an expense overhead. PPM can align these models to shorten engagements through standard implementation plans.
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When a project management office (PMO) operates well, the impact can be extraordinary. All too often, though, the PMO doesn’t become a clear asset. In order to avoid the worst-case scenario, PMO team members often become internal advisors with marginal impact and no authority. What can be done to avoid this? And what are the keys to successful PMO implementations?
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The most realistic and attainable approach to IT governance is a "lean" approach via project portfolio management (PPM). The lean approach requires a light footprint life cycle, rapid implementation of proven practices, and centralized data. It is based on simplicity and achievability, building on what works while establishing headroom for continuous improvement.
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We have all heard the phrase: “garbage in, garbage out.” When any company evaluates a customer relationship management (CRM) system, this is always one of the first expressions to come up. And yet we see company after company for which this is the exact problem. How can you make sure that this doesn’t happen to you?
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Making the leap to customer relationship management (CRM) doesn’t have to be a difficult process. But many companies have difficulty knowing how to get their CRM initiative off to the right start. There is, however, a simple, step-by-step process which will help guide your CRM implementation project in the right direction, even if you’ve never implemented a CRM system before.
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Your company has just selected a new customer relationship management (CRM) system for your company. Congratulations should be in order. However, your work has really just begun. You know that in order for your CRM initiative to be successful, you’ll need buy-in from your users. What steps do you need to take to ensure buy-in and achieve real implementation success?
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It may come as a surprise to you, but every organization that brings a product to market already has a product lifecycle management (PLM) system in place. And the choices as to which software tools or system an organization should employ in its initiatives should be entirely based on the review and assessment of its current PLM system.
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In order to support the requirements of voice deployments, next-generation networks must be capable of supporting a service equivalent to the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN), in terms of reliability. Furthermore, these networks must be capable of carrying voice services even under heavy load, while maintaining the integrity of the voice calls, under even the most extreme circumstances.
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The history of telecommunications management is rife with examples of good technology failing to meet business requirements. Historically, while business has needed management of service definitions, technology has focused on element management, leaving a gap between what is desired and what is possible. If operational expenses are to be lowered, this gap must be closed.
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As Internet and IP technologies are increasing service expectations, the number of resources available to create, deploy, and manage new services have reduced. The result is that expectations for new services are outpacing the ability to deliver them. We explore the limitations of traditional voice service architecture, and propose a new architectural solution to address these shortcomings.
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Bandwidth managers can provide the basis of a large-scale solution for a quality of service (QoS) that can support public switched telephone network (PSTN)-grade services. A key aspect of the solution is the ability to be integrated with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) traffic engineering capabilities, to provide a highly scalable, resilient, and rigorous solution for end-to-end quality of service.
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End-to-end performance monitoring on signaling and bearer links, and on inter-networking between service and transport provider domains, are the most complicated and necessary areas of a new management networks paradigm. The testability of next-generation networks (NGNs) and their components should thus be addressed in the context of the performance and fault management functional areas of the telecommunication management network (TMN).
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Given the types of overload scenarios encountered within traditional networks, similar traffic principles requiring overload management will be required within (NGNs). What, then, are the characteristics of overload protection within real-time communications servers? And what types of overload management methods are available for optimizing server performance?
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Network-level behaviors can impact the determinism of call admission control decisions for a particular bandwidth management deployment. However, different network routing and forwarding models can have different impacts when used in conjunction with the bandwidth manager. We examine these models, considering their ability to provide the deterministic admission control capabilities available within the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
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Leveraging corporate knowledge and intellectual property (IP) across the organization is a complex challenge. But an IP management system can help cut through the complexity, capture inputs from all relevant sources, and offer control over the entire process. The solution should be comprehensive, while conferring the right mix of process control and flexibility. (Part Two of a two-part series.)
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A company’s IT assets account for the largest portion of its overall IT budget; properly managing and accounting for these assets is therefore crucial. By implementing an effective IT asset management program, companies can view every asset in their enterprise, allowing them to control and manage IT assets, eliminate waste and redundancy, and comply with ever-tightening government compliance regulations.
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Product lifecycle management (PLM) implementation strategies are in many cases unique from company to company. However, it is not uncommon for companies to encounter some of the same obstacles or pitfalls along the way. Understanding where these nasty little pitfalls lie will hopefully help you steer clear of them, and improve your chances for PLM success.
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In the converging network and security infrastructure, relating what is reported from security products to what is observed on the network is critical. Q1 Labs’ network security management product, QRadar, combines network behavioral analysis with vulnerability assessment and security event correlation into one platform. Ultimately, this convergence reduces IT acquisition and operations costs, and enhances responses to network security incidents.
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When selecting or implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, a mistake or error in judgment can be extremely costly. That’s why you should be aware of the ten basic steps to a successful CRM implementation. Even if you’ve already identified the reasons why your organization needs a CRM system, where do you go from there?
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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can range from simple contact managers (for a few hundred dollars) to multimillion-dollar enterprise applications that take years to implement. This is why over-buying a CRM system can be one of the most costly mistakes a company can make. But where should you start your research? And what steps should you take after that?
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In the future, companies will partner for competitive advantage, building supply chains excelling in every aspect of their operation. But companies excelling in their own fields may find themselves excluded from these supply chains if their technical foundations are incompatible with popular standards. Technological adaptability is paramount, and Lawson’s M3 Enterprise Management System was developed with this imperative in mind.
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Imperfect product data can erode your gross margin, frustrate both your customers and your employees, and slow new sales opportunities. The proven safeguards are automated data cleansing, systematic management of data processes, and margin optimization. Real dollars can be reclaimed in the supply chain by making certain that every byte of product information is accurate and synchronized, internally and externally.
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Too often, project-driven organizations are faced with a difficult choice: they can choose best-of-breed business applications and integrate them at great cost, or choose a fully integrated solution that lacks functional depth in key areas. Success management of your business and its projects requires integrated tools that also provide deep functionality.
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In order to meet new performance targets mandated at the federal and state levels, the Department of Human Services in Chemung County, New York (US), deployed Salient Performance Management, a performance management solution from Salient Corporation. This solution helped streamline operations, allowing caseworkers, units, and entire agencies to meet and exceed the targets.
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Sales and operations planning (S&OP) provides the visibility and agility to improve product management and promotional planning, minimize unnecessary buildups of inventory, and predict revenue more effectively. S&OP works because it develops a well-coordinated operating plan in support of your customer demand, your business plan, and your strategy. So what is S&OP exactly, and how does it work?
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Technology and process upgrades at forward-thinking companies confirm supply chain excellence as a more widely accepted element of overall business strategy. To remain successful, companies need organization-wide buy-in to supply chain excellence, with key trends in mind: demand planning as an imperative; globalization; increased competition and price pressures; outsourcing; shortened and more complex product life cycles; and collaboration between stakeholders.
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Implementing technology without the proper people and processes in place only means bad service is delivered faster. Indeed, the employee brain trust is critical to succeeding in today’s knowledge economy and customer-centric environment. Yet according to numerous industry analysts, a staggering 55 to 70 percent of customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center projects fail to meet their objectives. Why?
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There’s a buzz in the automotive industry around the concept of “strategic workforce management”—getting the right people, for the right job, at the right time, to improve overall business results. Strategic workforce management goes beyond the traditional role of human resources: it’s a strategic initiative and competitive weapon to help today’s automotive companies drive corporate goals and objectives.
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Every core business process and strategic initiative requires a human capital management (HMC) business strategy for execution; improvements made in HCM systems and processes can notably impact an organization’s bottom line. Mentoring programs and other models for integrating work and learning are exciting avenues for stimulating professional growth, career development, staff morale, and quality of care within the workplace.
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The US Sarbanes-Oxley Act has significantly impacted budgets, personnel allocation, business processes, and documentation. But leveraging a technology solution can smooth the overall compliance process. By investing in a content-centric business process management solution, organizations can automate and improve their compliance. This leads to an effort that is more effective and more efficient, and that ultimately saves money.
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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is the world’s largest financial services post-trade infrastructure organization, having cleared and settled more than $1.4 quadrillion (USD) worth of securities in 2005. In the highly competitive financial services industry, the secure processing of transactions is vital to DTCC's success, which is why DTCC integrated security testing into the application development processes.
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Corporations striving to comply with data security laws and regulatory initiatives must implement anti-spyware measures. Businesses who fail to take reasonable physical, administrative, and technical measures to prevent the unauthorized acquisition, alteration, or destruction of valuable information, risk costly and disruptive legal proceedings. And courts and responsible agencies will freely second-guess such decisions in the event of a data breach.
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At first glance, spyware and computer viruses appear to have much in common. But in fact, spyware is a unique challenge. Unlike viruses, the motivation behind spyware is financial, which has driven rapid technical innovation and broad distribution. The first line of defense is education; understanding the unique threat spyware poses is the first step in a plan for protection.
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If you’re evaluating customer relationship management or sales force automation software, this Forrester report is a must-read. Featuring ratings on eight leading vendors based on over 150 criteria, the report is valued at over $795 (USD). Get your free copy from Maximizer Software, top-ranked in Forrester’s “current offerings” in areas such as product functionality breadth, setup, usability, integration, and cost.
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Most retailers can no longer compete on price alone; however, integrated retail solutions built on Microsoft SQL, and OPOS and ART Data Model standards offer a competitive advantage. They support holistic systems that integrate point of sale, enterprise, and even warehouse management functions, to deliver better service to customers.
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The current focus in operational risk management is on enterprise-wide data capture across loss events, key risk indicators and self-assessments, with follow-up actions based on triggers. A system should satisfy regulatory requirements, such as Basel II and the US Sarbanes Oxley Act, and be built in a manner that minimizes the impact of changing business management functionality.
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Southern Pump & Tank Company (SPACTO), is a value-added distributor specializing in liquid handling equipment for the petroleum and industrial marketplaces. By using SAP Service Management to track equipment at its customers sites, receive incoming service calls, dispatch work, and track labor and materials, SPACTO was able to lower inventory by 28 percent, and reduce slow and non-moving items by 70 percent.
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This Business Engine white paper provides a technical account on the process behind scoring, selecting, and scheduling the technology portfolio. The document offers additional insight into weighting criteria that should be considered as part of the portfolio management and optimization process. The document further provides insight into considerations for alignment, and how to know if the portfolio is in fact properly aligned with business objectives.
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Increased risk from unprotected user files and remote data is causing companies to re-evaluate their current remote backup processes. Managing remote data poses unique challenges, especially given the variability of networks, computing platforms, lack of trained IT staff at remote locations, and other issues. What are the issues, requirements, approaches, and best practices for effective remote data management?
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Human and intellectual capital management systems do not work in isolation. They need to be integrated with larger systems. Meta4 uses Internet and portal technology to integrate with Web and Internet standards. Learn how Meta4’s technology platform meets the execution, deployment, and integration requirements of different applications, and about Meta4’s development, maintenance, and upgrading cycles.
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Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a term that is still not well understood by many enterprise executives and managers; however, it requires direct interaction between these two areas. The relationship between enterprise resource management (ERP) and SOA is a meeting point for these areas. Business owners, executives, and managers can lead their enterprises to greater profitability and efficiency by understanding SOA.
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To comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), businesses need to be forthcoming to shareholders. Earned value management system (EVMS) is a set of best business processes and tools for enterprise project planning and control. Early warning signals and reliable information from an EVMS helps management ensure that material changes in the financial condition or operations of projects are communicated as required by SOX.
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The lifeblood by which executives in professional services organizations (PSO) manage their businesses has traditionally centered on the concept of realization, measured through metrics. Predictive Service Execution enables firms to deliver consistent and timely services while maximizing cash flow, engagement profitability, and customer satisfaction.
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Project portfolio management (PPM) has become a critical component in the IT business lexicon. It provides structure and consistency to the process associated with the planning, prioritization, management, and control of project portfolios. By using PPM, IT departments can align their IT and business strategies and improve performance in project-based work, and enhanced corporate governance.
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The goal of any support function is to become a "partner" to customer-facing business units of the enterprise. A strategic project management office is an indispensable part of the planning team. It is crucial to mature your PMO, so it can support each area of the company including governance and portfolio management, and benefits and cost management.
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Technology changes have allowed an alternative to the client-server model to emerge, specifically the application service provider (ASP), in which the vendor hosts the software on its server and charges a monthly or annual fee per user. The growing acceptance of ASPs has accelerated the growth of professional services automation. This paper compares the client-server and ASP models and outline ths benefits that companies are realizing from PSAs.
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It is essential for users to be able to create and deliver secure, professional-looking e-mail communications which present a consistent corporate image. PDF software meets these needs. However, when considering PDF, users must determine if the solution enhances communications for all network users, and whether the solution integrates PDFs with other software packages, including e-mail, accounts, and customer relationship management systems.
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Many companies strive to effectively measure and analyze their service operations. But while management struggles to measure too many (or too few) metrics, they often overlook the basic measurement question: what to track, and how? By using the concept metric perspectives to define what data provides the most insight, you can move closer to a comprehensive metrics strategy.
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The shift from traditional application design to service-oriented (SOA) principles utilizing XML and Web services promises increased IT agility and reduced technology costs. However, without effective production-caliber infrastructure, the benefits of SOA and Web services will go unrealized. A modular solution that ensures extreme, fine-grained control over XML message handling can deliver the effective performance and policy compliance for every message.
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One of the biggest challenges a project manager faces is the difficulty of tracking project progress once a project has been started. It can be difficult to keep track of each task and assignment as they are started, completed, or delayed. Fortunately, there are now new tools and methodologies, made available through PSNext 1.6, that help manage projects.
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Hiring and retaining top talent is the driving concern of human capital management (HCM) professionals today. This Aberdeen Group report, compliments of Lawson, reviews and analyzes data on human resources (HR) business pressures, technology directions, use of outsourcing and distinguishes the difference in workforce management strategies and their success levels.
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The high price and complexity of traditional, installed, on-premise enterprise software has left small and medium businesses (SMB) unable to obtain true integrated customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. On-demand, software as a service is changing all that. The lower costs and the short implementation period for an on-demand customer relationship management solutions make it lucrative for smaller businesses.
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Choosing an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) vendor can be a daunting task, especially for the price conscious consumer who lacks the budget for intensive research. A true CRM vendor should have pre-integrated sales, marketing, and customer support. Look for easy access to software free trials, and beware of hidden fees. Ultimately, researching the alternatives can save your company up to 50 percent of a solution’s total cost of ownership.
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Because of new compliance and regulation, HealthSouth Corporation, one of the US largest providers of health care services, needed a comprehensive view of its security risks, automated reporting on compliance to ensure published security standards, and to prioritize the remediation of critical risks. Through Preventsys Security Risk Management System, HealthSouth was able to audit it facilities remotely, and reduce overhead costs.
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Alltech, a multinational biotechnology company providing natural solutions to the feed and food industries, needed to turn the data in its system into useful business information. Exact Business Analytics allowed Alltech to improve the management and distribution of business information. It eliminated approximately 1,200 different reports and turned Alltech’s 60 distinct databases into a valuable business asset.
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Human resource management systems (HRMS) and payroll vendors are entering the software as a service (SaaS) market en masse. Though much as been written about the benefits of SaaS, only now are the short and long term ramifications of SaaS being discussed. As long as the purchaser is fully informed, then a decision can be made that best meets the needs of the enterprise.
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To successfully obtain the budget and organizational support for an electronic documentation management systems (EDMS) and electronic records management system (ERMS) project you need to know the pain points of all the departments in your organization. By asking the right questions of each department you’ll be able to develop your business case and create a persuasive analysis on the cost benefit for EDMS/ERMS.
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Almost everything you know about human resources (HR) outsourcing is about to change. The future is about single-source integration, and there are key new technologies that herald this era: unified service for HR, time, payroll, and expense tracking; management dashboards; streamlined employee interfaces; synchronous data with a single database; and empowered reporting.
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There is a presumption that enterprise performance management and business intelligence initiatives must be supported by data warehouses. Conceptually, the data warehouse provides a central point where a copy of data from multiple locations is stored and optimized for reporting. In practice, however, it is possible to access powerful business intelligence, analytics, and reporting, without relying on a data warehouse.
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As much as 80 percent of day-to-day business activity is taken up by digitally-based messaging. Integrating telecommunications with your messaging environment is crucial. Second generation IPT leverages data networks, and increases productivity through voice application integration. It integrates directly with customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning systems, Lotus Notes, and Outlook, Word, and Excel, to digitally capture information for compliance and traceability.
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Almost $75 billion (USD) is spend on trade and promotion funds every year. Unfortunately most enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are not equiped to handle the complexities of promotion causing false reports and inaccurate invoices. Small and medium businesses (SMB) have had limited choices, until now.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires pharmaceuticals and medical device companies to comply with numerous standards. Medical device manufacturers have long embraced enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), but primarily use them to achieve operational efficiencies. However these systems can play a significant role in their abilities to comply with strictly FDA regulations.
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Changing business scenarios, collapsing traditional barriers, and globalization are creating new challenges. Furthermore, mergers, acquisitions, and changes mandated by regulatory compliance are driving business change. The current competitive environment demands collaboration in real time, and organizations need a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that adjusts business processes and applications according to market requirements. Standards and best practices for adoption are crucial for a functional SOA.
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Internet-based supply chain management solution provides Mitsui with technology that connects its entire global supply chain - from a single desk-top location. This solution, SCM Live™, links Mitsui’s trading partners and customers - while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Business process management (BPM) is not another form of automation, or another rocket science, or a revolutionary new philosophy. It helps discover what we do, and then manages the lifecycle of improvement and optimization in a way that translates into operations. Based on a solid mathematical foundation, the BPM breakthrough is for business people.
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Adopting on-line payment systems can help businesses improve cash flow and save time and money. Inovium’s integrated, web-based account receivable management application for electronic invoice payment presentment is one such system.
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Any company efficiency improvements are going to involve business process management (BPM). BPM ensures process consistency, optimizes business processes, and ensures compliance. The result is not only cuts in cost and time, but it adds a price value and creates a price advantage which helps companies enhance their competitive edge.
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Cada módulo cuenta con múltiples funcionalidades que facilitan la operación de los procesos lo que permite su adecuado control y administración. Entre los módulos se encuentran: Punto de Venta, Activos Fijos, Asistencias, Warehouse Management System, auto transporte, Vales, Tesorería, Servicios, Servicios internos, Recursos Humanos, Producción, Proyectos, Precios y Costos, Planeador de Ordenes, Nómina y otros.
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By integrating data from disparate systems and delivering data in a management dashboard on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone, Persistent enabled service engineers to collect and update data related to tire usage. This solution seamlessly integrated approximately 1,000 dealers in more than 15 European countries to central data servers and a CRM solution. The result? Improved customer end acquisition and satisfaction.
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Companies implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system to balance increasing revenue, decreasing costs, while enhancing the customer experience. However, many implementations fail to do this. Companies, however, can meet these goals by implementing a customer-centric CRM. In this system, all business processes throughout the extended enterprise are optimized around customer life cycle care, which builds stronger relationships.
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Although cost reduction, decreasing response time, and increased revenues are all standard corporate drivers, they are predicated on the changes and improvements of business processes. For companies to reach the next level of productivity and efficiency, and to meet the new wave of stricter government regulations, they urgently need to streamline business processes.
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Global manufacturers want an integrated view of the shop floor. In response, manufacturing execution systems (MES) have emerged as a powerful tool for integrating plant-floor data with information provided by applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). MES can connect the world, and it has an exciting future when combined with promising technologies such as business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA).
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Lean supply chain management and lean sourcing strategies are relatively new to the apparel industry, generating more talk than broad implementation to date. In this the final paper of our “Lean Is Fashionable” thought leadership series, we define a lean supply chain action plan with five concrete steps for building a collaborative infrastructure between your company and other members of your supply network. These represent an eleven year culmination of our and our customers’ real world experiences in implementing lean supply chain strategies that are designed as a road map to achieving a more collaborative and profitable future.
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Aberdeen research shows that developing innovative products is a top priority for manufacturers today. Such manufacturers must understand how enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, like Arena Solutions, support innovation.
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Contractors and subcontractors are both exposed to risk within a project. Thus, it is equally important to both parties that formalized risk management be carried out, not to eliminate project uncertainty, but to understand the potential impact of risk events and to plan risk responses.
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This white paper examines how Pertmaster can reduce exposure to project cost risk throughout the project lifecycle by using a combination of a high level cost estimate analysis and a detailed schedule-based cost risk analysis. Contingency and management reserve is also discussed.
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Upgrading to CRM solution increases value of relationships for financial services firm. ScotiaMcLeod (www.scotiabank.com) is the investment arm of Scotiabank, one of Canada's largest financial organizations with over $280 billion in assets. ScotiaMcLeod's financial advisors specialize in helping individuals and small business customers plan financial solutions for trusts, estate planning, borrowing and banking services. ScotiaMcLeod has more than 800 financial advisors working in 84 branches across the country. According to Chris Carter, Associate Director and Branch Manager for ScotiaMcLeod's North Vancouver office, the financial services sector is a people-driven business where customer service is critical to success.
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A good business intelligence system should allow IT and business users to break through irrelevant data to find what matters. Users should be able to access all data and understand what happened and why. Learn how purpose-built Web services architecture, and Web-based development and deployment is used by Cognos 8 BI.
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The competitive drivers of the twenty-first century are time and service (responsiveness and flexibility). Many small and medium enterprises (SME) have implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) as one of the technology tools to improve their performance. This whitepaper on supply chain management (SCM) for SMEs highlight the crucial role and importance of supply chains to SMEs, and distinguishes the different roles of ERP and SCM.
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Spending money to save money makes sense in the context of large capital assets, including facilities, fleet, plant equipment, and even computers. A lack of preventative maintenance affects the shareholders of all companies. Aging assets and reactive maintenance can be financial drains. A complete preventative maintenance program consisting of better business practices and simple tools such as computerized maintenance management software (CMMS) or enterprise asset management (EAM), can help companies realize immediate savings and boost profits.
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As apparel and textile companies move to outsourcing production—relinquishing direct control in favor of a more cost-effective manufacturing model—a lean supply chain may appear to be the next logical step for further implementing cost and operational improvement. Not so, however. You can’t have a lean supply chain without lean manufacturing. Regardless of whether you or your partners engage in production, lean manufacturing is the lean engine that drives lean supply chain efficiencies. Accordingly, the business requirement for stability in a constantly changing demand environment motivates the fashion industry’s search for lean supply chain management principles and practices.
Intentia, in cooperation with industry experts, have written a series of thought leadership white papers on the concept of implementing lean supply chain in the fashion industry. The second of this series, From Lean Manufacturing to Lean Supply Chain explains how lean manufacturing relates to lean supply chain management and where it differs and sometimes conflicts.
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Does it really make sense to spend money to save money? The answer may surprise you when it comes to maintenance of large capital assets including Facilities, Fleet, Plant Equipment and yes, even computers. It makes even more sense when you consider that today more and more companies are adding a new line item in their financial statements called "Deferred Maintenance Revenue Write Down". A lack of preventive maintenance affects the shareholders of all companies due to aging assets and reactive maintenance practices.
A complete preventive maintenance program consisting of better business practices and a simple tool such as a Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) package can streamline the process and result in immediate savings in both time and money. So how do you justify the initial investment and where can the cost savings be seen across the enterprise?
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ECS Imaging, Inc., the world’s leading authorized value added reseller for LaserFiche, has been designing complex network and imaging systems since 1990. Specializing in LaserFiche’s industry-standard software, hardware, scanning services, on-site training and turnkey document imaging services selected by over 1,400 government agencies and 17,000 sites worldwide, ECS imaging helps organizations reduce costs and improve efficiency through cost-effective and innovative technological solutions.
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Business Bank of California, a subsidiary of Business Bancorp (NasdaqNM: BZBC), has served California businesses since 1984. With assets of more than $620 million, Business Bank of California is ranked fifth of 25 locally based banks in the Inland of Southern California and offers retail banking, commercial, construction, and SBA lending. Business Bank of California operates in 15 locations in California. The branches are strongly focused on providing high-quality, personalized services to small businesses, professionals and consumers.
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Workflows can increase efficiency, standardize processes, reduce costs, and increase return on investment. The key is to understand your customer, your products and services and your business processes. Learn how easy-to-design workflows can help ensure that best practices are carried out consistently and efficiently. Streamline daily tasks and make learning new operations simpler. Workflows help you reduce churn, boost productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
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Packaged enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can be expensive and resource-intensive to implement, but they are critical to business. Disruptions due to application failures, performance problems, or unavailability come at a high price. ERP systems are highly change-oriented and must adapt; as a result, ERP teams are struggling to keep up. This white paper focuses on the issues surrounding the automation of the application life cycle for ERP systems. IDC conducted in-depth interviews with fifteen large PeopleSoft customers to better understand their challenges and needs.
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Effective planning is integral to the success of a bank. It helps define and ensure the achievement of the organization’s objectives. Understanding and implementing the planning cycle, which leverages forecasting, operational metrics, and multidimensional analyses can help management determine the feasibility of a strategy. An enterprise-wide, integrated planning and forecasting environment that reaches business units, products, customer segments, and geographies can align non-financial performance targets with high-level financial targets and help banks meet their goals.
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Companies invest in information technology (IT) because they believe it will maximize their performance. The more a company knows about its customers, markets, supply chains, and internal operations, the more effectively it can pursue growth and profitability while avoiding risk and regulatory exposure. Unifying disparate systems with business intelligence (BI) systems, however, is not enough. For companies to truly differentiate themselves, they need to transform BI into business performance management (BPM) systems to leverage information discovered by BI and use it externally.
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Fashion companies need to respond quickly and strategically to major changes occurring in today’s global supply chains.
Implementing a lean supply chain management strategy can enable cost savings and more efficient operations by realigning process according to a demand-driven model.
Lean supply chain management uses Web-based technologies to create and maintain dynamic supplier networks. Such networks are able to deliver the highest customer value at the lowest cost. It also lays the groundwork for the next level of hands-free, wireless radio frequency identification-enabled processes.
Intentia, in cooperation with industry experts, have written a series of thought leadership white papers on the concept of implementing lean supply chain in the fashion industry. The first of this series, “Lean Is Fashionable”, explores the impact of lean practices in the fashion and apparel industry during a period of momentous change.
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The term "business intelligence" (BI) has emerged over the last ten years as a catch-all for a wide range of financial, analytical, and reporting systems that companies use to steer their business toward higher profitability and sustainable competitive advantage. Fewer and fewer companies deny the need for BI in today’s ever more competitive world, and numerous, increasingly sophisticated technologies have emerged to support this trend. Yet, despite the technological advances, failed BI implementations litter the landscape. What steps can companies take to insure the successful integration of effective BI into the daily management of their operations?
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The transition to IP A wireless carrier s national or regional next generation core network will be an all-IP network in the sense that IP will be the network layer (L3) protocol. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) will be the transport protocol for all IP-based services, applications, and control and management traffic in the network. Learn more in this white paper.
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Companies typically manage their proposal generation efforts using word processing documents, e-mail, and spreadsheets. However, more efficient and effective ways now exist that enable companies to collaborate with all interested parties. Online collaboration with a knowledge-based application streamlines processes, improves quality, and saves time, eliminating error-prone manual processes and redundancies.
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Availl, Inc, the leading solution provider of sales, supply chain management, and logistic services for the aviation industry. Learn how it used Click Commerce Service Parts Optimization solutions to extend its inventory planning capabilities, enable comprehensive demand forecasting, and provide Web-based visibility into global inventories.
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Delta is the world’s second largest airline in terms of passengers carried and the leading US carrier across the Atlantic, offering daily flights to 502 destinations in 88 countries. With $1 billion (USD) worth of parts inventory at one time, Delta needed a supply chain system to aid the company’s maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) activities. Learn how Delta implemented a full MRO technology suite from Click Commerce, that focuses on supply chain management, configuration management, technical documentation, planning, and execution.
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Jabil Global Services, a subsidiary of Jabil Circuit provides repair and warranty solutions to companies in computers, communications, medical equipment. To meet the demand for next day and same day returns, it needed to replace its in-house operations management system with a scalable and robust system. Learn how it used Click Commerce’s reverse logistics and depot repair solutions to manage its advanced exchanges and warehouse fulfillment, and credit receiving processes.
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Microsoft’s US Partner group manages relationships between the company and its 12,000 Microsoft Certified Partners. It needed an integrated solution for partner relationship management to reduce redundancy and replace the personal spreadsheets and custom tools its account managers were using. Learn how Microsoft deployed PartnerCentral by Click Commerce and implemented a single tool to manage all aspects of Microsoft’s partner relationships.
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New technology in enterprise asset management (EAM) is changing the way multinational companies manage joint venture operations. With new growth opportunities in China, many corporations are looking at how to best take advantage of the low cost base and enterprising labor force. Learn how an American and Chinese joint venture at the Daning Coal Mine used Trans-lingual EAM to remove the language barriers to protect their $84 million (USD) investment.
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Tellabs is a $1.3 billion (US) corporation that designs, manufactures, markets, and services optical networking, broadband access and voice quality enhancement. Tellabs was faced with a high volume and high cost product returns process. Improper documentation, lengthy processing times, and insufficient returns documentation was affecting customer service and limiting profitability. It worked with Click Commerce to implement their product returns application. The solution provides an efficient and transparent process, which allowed the business to be realigned for significant savings and improved customer satisfaction. The savings include reducing in-transit inventory by $1.76 million (USD) per month and reducing spare parts stocking levels from $7.5million to $1.9 million (USD).
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Dillen Products, Inc. is a major supplier of plastic planters and trays to the grower segment of the horticultural market. Dillen needed a better way to manage its increasingly diverse inventory, meet the labeling and distribution demands of its major retailers, and integrate its warehouse management system (WMS) quickly and seamlessly into existing supply chain and financial systems. Dillen implemented Click Commerce’s WMS to offer customers a stable and reliable solution that is easy to install and support, while providing the flexibility and scalability necessary for future growth without the risk of major future investment.
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Invacare is the leader in the manufacturing and distribution of innovative home and long-term care medical products. For Invacare, warehouse management was a complex program, involving thousands of pieces moving through distribution centers, controlled by manual business processes. A typical customer order could vary greatly, ranging from a single carton to 4,000 cartons. The company needed to implement a new system that could handle orders equally well, regardless of size. Invacare implemented Click Commerce’s Warehouse Management Solution to meet the unique requirements of its warehouse operations.
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Organizations are overwhelmed with how to begin implementing identity and access management (IAM)
solutions. They are scratching their heads and asking, "Where do I start?" Even after implementation, security and information protection must be continually improved while ensuring compliance with regulations. Auditors continue to ask: "Are the right controls in place?" "Are they effective?" Download this white paper to learn more about defining the steps necessary to understanding and deploying IAM, giving enterprises a roadmap to an effective IAM program.
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Rapid market fluctuations; changing customer and channel requirements; pressures from shareholders, executives, and partners; and continued competition are forcing high-tech companies to re-examine not only what products and services they sell, but also their processes and tools for developing, deploying, monitoring, and managing products and services. To deal with these challenges, product managers need to leverage product management processes and tools. This white paper introduces the concept of enterprise product management and the process of requirements gathering automation; the product management continuum; and the creation of a collaborative environment.
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Extending supply lines overseas brings new commercial and operational challenges that are far more complex than ever before. Enterprises are exposed to an entirely new universe of costs and liabilities, operations, and resource and management needs. Next generation global cost control systems can help organizations overcome these challenges. These systems help enterprises understand the real time cost impacts and financial liabilities of global sourcing initiatives--while protecting profits.
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Disintermediation is the process of removing redundant intermediaries from a systems management infrastructure. Once vital to systems monitoring, proprietary agents are now made largely redundant by native management tools, emerging standards and agentless monitoring architectures. Centauri makes disintermediation possible by providing a low-cost event management solution that unifies performance data and event messages under a common umbrella. This paper describes how you can take advantage of the disintermediation opportunity and minimize the risks of migrating from working proprietary data collectors to a new native-agent based solution.
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There are potential benefits of operating business process management (BPM) side-by-side with business service management (BSM). BPM and BSM are emerging technologies: BPM is concerned with the orchestration and management of effective business processes, while BSM focuses on the operational effectiveness of the enabling IT services. These technologies are mutually beneficial to one another. This white paper is intended for managers interested in implementing robust BPM solutions in IT-dependent business scenarios or managers looking to lay down a basic foundation for effective on-demand utility computing. It addresses the partnership between Fuego and Proxima Technology, vendors in BPM and BSM solutions.
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A balanced scorecard is a measurement system for management that provides real insight into the status of a business or some part of it. Developed by Kaplan and Norton in the early 1990s, balanced scorecards provide a control system that helps ensure the right balance between different, and often times conflicting, perspectives. For example, an insurance company may increase profitability by offering incentives to claims assessors for taking a tough stance on payout, but will soon find dissatisfaction among its clients that may lead to lost business. Scorecards help ensure this balance and are an improvement over more traditional single dimension approaches that tend to be based purely on expense management and business growth.
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As more business processes exist in an electronic universe, the need to manage the IT services that enable these processes increases. Business service management does this and achieves the IT alignment with the business necessary to ensure service improvement activities are prioritized with business objectives. Business service management applies the adage that if you improve IT, you improve the business. This paper presents an overview of business service management concepts and describes how Proxima Centauri provides a solution for this. It also describes how Six Sigma can be used as an underlying quality improvement process to eliminate the associated costs of poor quality.
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An overview for CIOs of the provision and management of IT services at a level that addresses the risk management issues raised by the Basel Committee's New Capital Accord expected to become effective during 2006. Because of the dependence financial institutions have on IT services, the accord requires adequate provision to assure the availability of these services. Centauri Business Service Manager is presented as the solution: one that allows a CIO to assess current risk levels, measure ongoing risk and support a process of ongoing improvement to reduce this risk. Furthermore, Centauri provides the financial institution with a cost-effective balanced scorecard to improve decision-making.
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Industry analysts, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), recently conducted research to understand how widespread the acceptance of Six Sigma is for managing IT service quality. This research, which was targeted primarily at enterprises, showed that 65 percent of those surveyed acknowledge the relevance of Six Sigma for IT-based service management. While many IT organizations have yet to adopt Six Sigma for service management, 80 percent stated that they have plans to do so. This research suggests there is a growing interest in Six Sigma.
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The decision to use external resources on a project of any size or focus can be a tough one for a company facing the need to look outside its trusted staff to make something happen. "Can the appropriate skills be found at an acceptable cost?" is the first question. Indeed, defining your service needs, and then developing and maintaining a proper relationship with the provider you've hired is one of the most important things you can do to increase your success potential.
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Today, entrepreneurs running small-to-medium sized businesses face daunting tasks that just a few years ago were not existent. The complexities of the business world have created new risks, a myriad of regulations, and complex reporting requirements that can overwhelm any organization. Owners and managers of all enterprises, even smaller private businesses, need to be cognizant of both the spirit and the letter of the law. How does a smaller organization, with limited resources, cope with all of this? How do they stay abreast of the additional changes that are on the way? In this guide, Pete Russo of the Entrepreneurial Management Institute at the Boston University School of Management outlines the pitfalls and steps, but also looks at effective solutions for private companies.
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Active Execution Management captures radio frequency identification (RFID) and electronic product code (EPC) data and integrates it into the supply chain business process. AXM associates individual EPC events (the observation of an EPC tag at an RFID reader) with the supply chain transaction that is currently being executed and then determines if that supply chain transaction is executing as planned. AXM is able to make this determination by comparing key performance indicators of the supply chain transaction with the characteristics of the EPC event. The paper describes multiple business cases, such as promotions management, deductions management, complex international shipments, and spoilage management, and shows how RFID data can be leveraged to improve supply chain performance.
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The past decade saw the emergence of the storage area network as a way to centralize, consolidate, and virtualize deployment and management of storage resources. This architecture was developed to address complex problems that arose as storage moved from a central point (the mainframe-based data center) to a distributed model due to growth in departmental systems and applications.
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Here's the dilemma. Your largest customer has mandated that, to continue doing business with you, product shipped to their distribution centers must be encoded and labeled with RFID tags. None of your other customers have expressed a need for this requirement in the near term future. You can't afford to lose the business and revenue; nor can you justify a full-blown RFID implementation costing several hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is not a business nightmare. This is reality. This white paper looks at a compromise position offered by 3i Infotech and its warehouse management solution, ORION™ Enterprise WMS. This position is aptly described in the industry as the slap'n'ship approach to the RFID dilemma. This paper looks at the advantages and disadvantages of slap'n'ship and how ORION™ Enterprise WMS can preserve and maximize your initial foray into RFID.
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With product lifecycles accelerating and pricing pressures increasing, organizations must focus on delivering unique customer experiences to differentiate themselves from the competition. Customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning technologies play a critical enabling role.
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Application Service Provision (ASP).There has been a trend in recent years towards the use of remote software services through application service providers. These are companies who make software applications available via the
Internet to users who, rather than buying software, pay rental fees for it. The software does not have to be installed locally, the application being available through any web browser, and all support and maintenance is handled by the service provider. CMMS vendors are not the only ones offering these solutions. CAD modelling, engineering design, finance packages, purchasing, ERP
and even your company Intranet can now be rented. This is an expanding sector and the signs are that major growth is about to take place. Earlier problems with slow data
transfer speeds, communication costs and data security have largely been eliminated and this has made ASP a very attractive proposition. This is clearly illustrated by the
proliferation of systems that have become available over the last three or four years with most of the major CMMS vendors now offering an ASP option.
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When The Clientele Group of Epicor Software Corporation was faced with scalability and performance limits in their CRM software, they redesigned their application around the Microsoft® .NET Framework. A server architecture based on SQL Server™ 2000 and XML Web services removes their scalability limits, and supports multiple client applications. A smart client built with Windows® Forms gives customer support personnel a responsive application that is easy to deploy and update. A Web portal built with ASP.NET Web Forms gives authorized customers access to the same records as customer support sees internally. The new architecture can support 500 users on a single dual-CPU server, and offers many ways to scale up and out.
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SKF (AB Svenska Kullagerfabriken) was founded in 1907, with headquarters and a laboratory in Gothenburg, Sweden, and an R&D center in the Netherlands. SKF is the leading global supplier in its field, offering products, customer solutions, and services for rolling bearings, seals and specialty steel, claiming 20% of the world market share. SKF has 80 manufacturing sites employing about 40,000, and an additional 20,000 distributors in 130 countries worldwide. Revenue in 2001 reached 24.6 billion U.S. dollars, and for the first 9 months of 2002, SKF Group’s revenue showed 25.3 billion, grossing 2.04 billion.
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When it comes to marketing, sales and customer service there’s no question that the second approach delivers higher value—especially in an age when companies are combating unprecedented competition while being forced to do more with less. The reality is this: choose the second example or risk being second best.
This white paper explores why actionable business intelligence is so critical in today’s business environment and how Maximizer Software’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution can be used to deliver actionable intelligence when and where it’s needed most.
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This CRM spotlight will help you understand specific ways your organization can adopt a four-phase approach based on sales effectiveness best practices that can be automated using Maximizer Software’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution to boost your bottom line and remain competitive year after year.
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Metro Canada Logistics, a third party provider of warehousing, transporatation, and related logistics services streamlines accounting processes with the help of Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains.
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To store its wealth of transactional data, Trail Operations employs an ERP solution comprised of JDEdwards, Process Data Historian (PDH) and EtQ systems. To ensure proactive rather than reactive business decisions, it is imperative that management at Trail Operations have reliable and timely access to this data. While their ERP solution met all of management’s data capture requirements, its cumbersome reporting capabilities proved inhibitive to providing the key performance indicator (KPI) information necessary for quickly recognizing trends and driving improvements.
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Hearing confusing messages from your customer resource management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors? You may be dealing with dozens of software vendors and system integrators, each one praising the benefits of his solution. Among these proposals, one claims not only to efficiently manage the entire customer life cycle, but also to take full advantage of your previous technology investments. Your incumbent ERP system vendor also has a CRM solution, and praises the benefits of the tight integration of both systems. The question then is, how do you know whether this solution is the best for you? Request your copy of Integrating CRM with ERP compliments of Baseline Consulting. The report gives you the criteria to use when formulating your strategy of integrating CRM with ERP, best practices of CRM implementation, dealing with ERP integration, and how to integrate CRM with ERP impacts the value chain.
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This paper examines key issues for CFOs and CEOs in managing ERP systems in the new world of SOX, IFRS, Basle II. While most IT management attention seems to be on document retention, reporting quality, and security, there are broader issues to be considered toward ensuring good governance and compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, IFRS and Basle II.
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The process of outsourcing software development offshore has come a long way since the mid-to-late 1990s, the heyday of Y2K remediation. Offshore vendors who cut their teeth on Y2K and legacy applications developed best-in-class quality processes and evolved to look more like the large US-based systems integrators. At the same time, thousands of new services firms entered the market to serve the needs of specific industries, address particular business processes, or offer specialized technical skills.
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GNX Supplier Performance Management is a web-based application that enables companies to establish, track and report performance metrics for a large supplier base, with a collaborative platform to proactively resolve and avoid problems.
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GNX ProductVine is an enterprise software suite that enables retailers with private brand food programs to seamlessly integrate and manage all elements of brand integrity, regulatory and food safety compliance, and new product development and introduction, with an automated, web-based process.
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Corporate governance concerns, exacerbated by a weak global economy, have driven shareholder value to drop sharply in recent years. Boards of directors have intensified their pressure on CEOs to create execution-centric organizations and restore shareholders’ and analysts’ confidence. In this era, CEOs are looking to their information technology organization (ITO) to strategically and efficiently deploy technology solutions that enable business process innovation, resulting in world-class products and services on planned costs and release dates. Find out how your organization can develop skilled IT architects deliver total business solutions.
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The pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, regulated, and in a permanent state of change. Customers demand instant attention, while suppliers require comprehensive leading edge services with regard to their products. Regulatory authorities require that the industry keep up to date with regulations, following them to the letter. Competitors are always inventing new ways to gain market share, while e-business presents new opportunities and challenges. All the while the pressure to reduce prices and to shorten order cycles is high. Pharmaceutical wholesalers comprise the lifeline within the pharmaceutical industry, providing continuity of supply and facilities for storage. They also offer a range of supporting services, such as information technology systems and product withdrawal notifications, which form an essential part of the total healthcare package. These companies and institutions all operate in an environment where speed and efficiency may mean the difference between life and death. However, the industry has a number of specific requirements that are critical for achieving success in the distribution sector.
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When your company’s ERP is implemented and running smooth (or maybe not) it’s now time to give your c-level management a bird’s eye view of how their company is running. C-managers are often not at ease with even the simplest use of computers. But in this information age those that don’t USE and LEARN from their corporate data put themselves, and worse, their company’s livelihood at risk because they may not know the pulse or health of their business.
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The government of Mesa County, Colorado, had been using an in-house, nonintegrated HR and payroll solution that was slow in processing reports and required manual reconciliation of workforce data. The solution also lacked the sophistication needed to manage the government’s payroll and reporting demands. The organization recognized that a change was necessary to improve the workforce-related information that upper-level management had at its disposal.
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With 10 remote office locations spread across nine states, Amerisure was in need of a communications platform that would enable the company to enhance the distribution of information to employees. Employees located in satellite offices, with no direct access to the home office, can feel disconnected from corporate headquarters’ operations and activities. Amerisure needed to communicate to employees in a timely manner that would allow the flow of accurate, important information, whether that data be employee-specific, such as salary, job, or benefit information, or company news and updates. In addition to a centralized communication platform, the company wanted heightened management of its workforce through the use of business intelligence tools that would allow it to track trends and have improved monitoring capabilities for each location.
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You can blame your sales people all you want, but if the lead data is bad, they’re not going to bring in business. You can blame your product managers for ineffective promotions, but if the target lists are redundant, the pitches fall on deaf ears. You can blame your customer service representatives for low satisfaction scores, but if customer data is missing, then no wonder the complaint resolution pipeline is backed up. Think it’s your customer resource management (CRM) system? Think again. It’s bad data, and it’s costing you millions. Request your copy of The Bottom Line on Bad Customer Data that delivers detailed advice from Jill Dyche, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, about what you can do to address the impact of bad data on your company. The report gives you insight into how bad data is impacting your company and what you can do about it. How to identify where the bad data is and quantify its impact, and different approaches to determine the sources and causes of bad data are all offered in this paper.
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US companies spend approximately $300 billion (USD) annually on asset maintenance and operations, with 80 percent going to fixing asset failures. This situation can now be drastically improved with the advent of enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions that incorporate closed-loop diagnostics. This best-of-breed maintenance functionality extends the boundaries of traditional software by providing specialized failure analysis features that are fully integrated with core business processes. This paper examines how EAM solutions can support closed-loop diagnostics to provide a number of significant benefits.
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This workbook is designed to help firms that are in the process of investigating their need for more advanced business management and accounting software. Companies have a wide variety of potential software and system needs based on their size and industry. Determining exactly where a company stands in terms of needs and current technology will be necessary for deciding the exact approach it should take toward upgrading. This document has two types of information designed to make this process easier: interactive self-assessment tools and educational text based on IDC research covering the small and medium business (SMB) and enterprise applications markets.
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This white paper reviews the need for broader financial management solutions that enable the finance function to deliver greater transparency and visibility of business information. It also covers the growing requirement to improve both the efficiency of financial management and reporting processes, whilst at the same time maximizing the effectiveness of corporate performance activities.
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The task of managing and maintaining today’s IT infrastructure has become vastly more complicated and complex as IT has become more critical to business success. The response from a technology perspective has been the introduction of services oriented architectures that enable IT to be responsive to the business needs but also live within their economic constraints. But the very technologies fueling this success create significant problems. Even small changes can cause major disruptions in today’s highly interactive and interdependent applications. Unfortunately, the pace of change means traditional testing architectures with lengthy development and testing will not work. But the testing must be done. Worksoft’s Certify is discussed as the test management repository and framework solution to this testing problem for XML-based applications.
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Since our research-driven beginnings, Johnson & Johnson Advanced Sterilization Products (ASP) has continually improved the new product development (NPD) process. Detailed process mapping has revealed three tiers of business metrics, starting with drivers and moving up through execution metrics to business performance metrics. When driver metrics improves, so does business performance. Six Sigma tools helps identify specific metrics at all tiers and the causality linkages among them. Each NPD process step at ASP results in a deliverable, and each deliverable relates to a trade-off triangle (cost-time-resources) and, ultimately, to investment dollars. To track performance, ASP calculates how actual NPD decisions and what-if scenarios affect deliverables, alter investment triangles, and thereby influence business results. ASP uses similar process and tools, including the investment triangles and Six Sigma QFD, to make idea management decisions. The IDweb real-time software environment enables both the NPD and idea management processes at ASP. By deploying the strategic planning, idea management, portfolio and pipeline management, process management, and resource management modules of IDweb, ASP has increased throughput by 20 percent and reduced cycle time by 40 percent.
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Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is fast replacing ScanCode technology in asset tracking and inventory management. Traditionally, asset tracking and inventory management in retail supply chain or manufacturing or service units depended heavily on manual scanning of bar code printed on each item at every strategic point. This white paper focuses on details of RFID technology and how you can automate asset tracking and inventory management of your enterprise using it. The white paper takes aid of a case study on how FicusSoft has developed and successfully implemented RFID integrated asset tracking and inventory management solutions for a reputed manufacturer of ultra-sensitive instruments used in the field of biotechnology and pharmaceutical research.
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Read about how QAD JIT Sequencing (JIT/S) is helping automotive suppliers execute JIT delivery of custom configured products to their customers. Results: reduced inventory levels, improved order management and cost avoidance caused by expediting activities in the supply chain.
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There is a real cost associated with buying and using a customer relationship management (CRM) software system. Licensing, implementation, integration, and adminstration, are just some of the challenges companies face. Learn the secrets of twenty-one experts in CRM, IT, business and management consulting on getting real value from CRM software.
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In this guide you will find out how to test, purchase, install, and use a thawte Digital Certificate on your Microsoft Internet Information Services (MS IIS) web server. Throughout, best practices for set-up are highlighted to help you ensure efficient ongoing management of your encryption keys and digital certificates. We will also touch on the role of thawte as a trusted third party and how using a thawte digital certificate can benefit your business by addressing unique on-line security issues to build customer confidence.
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In the relentless pursuit of profitability and competitiveness, more and more companies are turning to lean manufacturing to reduce or eliminate waste in their production processes. Once confined to the automotive industry, lean principles are becoming standard operating procedure in many industries today. The reason is simple: When implemented with a good performance management system, lean principles have a proven track record of operational and strategic success, which ultimately translates into increased value to the end customer. This paper illustrates how IFS Applications supports lean principles, particularly in the many manufacturing environments that require both rate-based (takt-driven) and order-based shop-floor execution.
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In the present context of business, it is becoming essential for the business world to provide electronic commerce in addition to their good old business model. An electronic commerce application adds lot of value to business models and helps overall growth in the different areas of business, business management, tracking, and customer support. Customers find it’s much easier to access the products and services of a corporation through an e-commerce application and corporations find it easier to reach their customers.
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Customer demand has pushed customer relationship management (CRM) business solutions to higher levels of technological innovation and integration resulting in more user-friendly and cost-effective solutions that deliver measurable results to both the users and the organization. In this paper we outline how CRM has matured both technologically and as a strategic business initiative to deliver organizational CRM success supported by real ROI.
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Component event management promises an answer. Component event management is a methodology to systematically detect and resolve component events in the most timely and efficient manner possible. This paper will introduce the philosophy of component event management and introduce a new category of software that is being developed to help implement this concept and improve business performance.
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Companies are going global because the risk of not doing so greatly outweighs the comfort that staying domestic brings. According to a World Trade Organization (WTO) report issued in October 2004, "Despite the rise in oil prices the volume of world trade is likely to grow by 8.5% in real terms by the end of 2004." The liberalization of trade, the reduction of tariffs, the elimination of quotas, the continued rise in China as an industrial force, and the rise of outsourcing as a cost reduction opportunity, all create an environment that is full of opportunity and fraught with hazards. The ability to effectively manage global commerce will be a key strategic competitive differentiator. Global commerce management (GCM) is what is required by companies to win in this tougher, more competitive environment.
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Client processes and risk control contextualization can be greatly improved through investigation process design, process execution, and file management issues. Learn how BPS Server uses process templating concepts, separates fact management activities, and uses COSO centric mechanisms to accomplish this. This the second part to Risk, Risk Mitigation, and Functional Requirements in Dynamic Compliance Environments. This is part two of a two part white paper. Part One Risk Mitigation and Functional Requirements in Dynamic Compliance Environments.
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Productization of services is accomplished by associating tangible features with intangible service offerings. Tangible features may take the form of personnel, collateral, methodologies, pricing, facilities, or other attributes. Automation tools like enterprise service automation, database, and project management tools serve as enablers to service productization. By associating tangible features with intangible services, the professional services firm can build client confidence.
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To survive in today economy, every enterprise must put the reins on spending across every location and category. Rogue spending infiltrates even the most disciplined distributors, and is even more apparent in organizations with remote locations and employees. Vendor lists grow like weeds. There is confusion over who manages what service area, and manual approval procedures for requisitions and invoices are cumbersome. The ability for an enterprise to effectively source, procure, and manage its spend must keep pace with the demand for promptness and compliance in supplier relationship management (SRM).
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Strem Chemicals, which manufactures and distributes specialty chemicals, implemented ProcessPro’s Warehouse Management Solution (WMS). The solution helped them streamline their processes and reduce operational costs, by reducing their overall shipping errors, eliminating the label planning function, and eliminating the dual recording of a majority of their inventory transactions.
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than just software or a set of processes--it's a business culture solidly focused on winning and keeping the right customers. A good CRM solution builds value to your business. Learn about the value of an integrated CRM suite.
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This document describes how SAP’s mySAP supply chain management (SCM) software can help a company transform its sequential supply chain into an adaptive supply chain network to remain competitive and successful.
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Companies are moving away from the linear production path of the supply chain to embrace value cycle management (VCM). VCM is the optimization of supply chain functions across all levels of suppliers, partners, and customers through the integration, collaboration, and synchronization of technology, data, and people-centric processes. Learn how companies can employ VCM to make business processes smoother, more productive, and more profitable.
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The MMOG was a self-assessment process developed by the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) to provide consistent methodology for evaluating supplier performance, identifying weaknesses, and focusing improvement efforts. The Global MMOG/LE incorporates the Odette Logistics Evaluation (OLE), developed by AIAG’s European counterpart, to provide a single global standard for self-assessment. The MMOG is a proven tool for supplier development and provides a recognized industry standard for suppliers who have been asked by customers to complete a self-assessment. Although it was developed by the automotive industry, QAD believes it can be a helpful benchmark tool for customers across many verticals.
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This case study shows how Cephalon, a biopharmaceutical company, adopted the QAD MFG/PRO enterprise solution to address the management problems for their global spread manufacturing sites, packaging site, and workers. Read how it improved visibility and synchronization across global operations, improved inventory tracking, and better leveraged knowledge of enterprise assets.
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This UltiPro Workforce Management technology white paper offers an overview of UltiPro’s technical architecture, and is primarily intended for information technology executives and professionals who want to better understand UltiPro’s technology advantages. After reading this white paper, the reader should have a clear understanding of the modular design and underlying technology of the UltiPro Workforce Management solution and the key benefits to the information technology (IT) organization.
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This document provides system administrators and technical professionals an overview of how Surado SCM SQL Enterprise CRM Solution can be used in a High Availability Environment. This document assumes that you are planning on installing the Surado SCM SQL System on Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 Advanced Server and will be using Microsoft's SQL Server as the primary database.
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This white paper introduces customer self-service and how using Surado Web Self-Service can increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and increase return on investments (ROI). The key is to understand your customer, your products and services, and the tools available to deliver service to maximize customer satisfaction and reduce customer service costs. This paper will discuss the various self-service options available, how to utilize best practices, delivery technology and how customer self-service is tied to the "big picture" of customer relationship management (CRM).
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Small to medium businesses (SMB) want to stay competitive, increase revenue, and remain profitable at the same time. This can be a challenge. Whether companies find this challenging because of a slow economy, market saturation, or other reasons, many companies are re-evaluating business strategies and internal processes to overcome these obstacles. For many successful companies, creating a customer-focused business strategy was the first step. Learn how leadership and customer relationship management software can help breed corporate success.
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Contemporary firms must recognize a fundamental shift in the management of distribution activities as a strategic driver of their competitive success. Instead of the traditional focus on pushing products to customers through distribution channels, there is a need to migrate toward adaptive distribution networks. Such networks focus on managing the flow orders from customers by providing them with high levels of convenience while preserving attention to responsiveness and total distribution costs.
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Primarily due to rapid development of technology in the past thirty years, the market structure throughout the world has changed considerably. Local markets have become accessible to foreign manufacturers, who are able to perform well in their newly established territories in part due to their superior application of technology. In this light, most companies, including small and medium size, have embedded globalization in their expansion strategies, consistently seeking for new markets abroad. Consequently, local manufacturing companies are facing global competition, forcing them to adopt new concepts with respect to people, process and technologies. This document describes these approaches to production planning in detail as well outlines a software solution. The software solution (Production/3) combines both pull and push techniques and enables small to medium size organizations to fully automate their production system while retaining their investment in their legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
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Asset life cycle management is an increasingly important strategic initiative for asset-intensive industries to explore. Innovative organizations can use their assets for competitive advantage and thereby improve the profitability of their business. Learn how advanced asset life cycle management strategies can contribute to organizational agility, security, and flexibility, and improve responsiveness in a demanding marketplace.
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Nearly half of all new products do not justify the resources it takes to launch them—they fail in the marketplace. Product lifecycle management (PLM)—a powerful IBM e-business on-demand enabler—is a strategic approach to creating and managing a company. Learn how to improve supply chain communication and business process, and innovation by linking technology islands together and break down the barriers between function silos.
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What differentiates highly successful companies from the ones that struggle, or worse yet, don’t make it? What do companies like Microsoft and Boeing have that ensures that they maintain their market leader status? They deliver their products, services, and images differently, but consistently. They have spent a great deal of money, research, and effort to determine their optimal business flow, and they follow business best practices that put in place “systems” that guarantee their success. Small businesses can also gain the competitive advantage by implementing best practices. Learn how Advantage can model, facilitate, and enforce those best business practices for small businesses.
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E-mail marketing is experiencing dramatic growth as marketers in virtually every industry begin to take advantage of this power technique that helps to increase revenues and reduce sales costs. Learn how to take full advantage of this high-response, low cost marketing technique by learning the characteristics of this unique medium through proper management to generate metrics and facilitate future successes.
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Product lifecycle management (PLM) enables companies to manage all information regarding a product, from the initial design and engineering through to manufacturing, sourcing, support, and run down. Traditionally, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have successfully managed manufacturing-related information, but have at best, limited integration to the engineering systems such as product data management (PDM). Learn how the Vantage manufacturing solution offers a complete end-to-end solution that manages all aspects of a product's life.
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Enterprise performance management (EPM) is the validation of perceptions. It is the ability to analyze business conditions and provide visibility into day-to-day operations to enable more effective and timely decision-making. Learn how to link strategy and execution to encourage the continuous improvement with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
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Simulation can remedy one time and ongoing problems in the warehouse. Learn about the technology of computer stimulation and how it can benefit senior management in the logistics, distribution, and warehousing industries. This paper will describe the benefits of simulation as an analytical tool and the industrial lessons learned from failed simulation projects.
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National Equipment Services (NES), a leader in the equipment rental industry, experienced the concomitant growing pains associated with 47 acquisitions spanning an 18 month period beginning in 1998. In this case study, learn how NES saved $250,000 annually in payroll and administration costs.
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The Container Store’s growing employee base rendered communications with employees, updating manuals, managing paperwork, and obtaining relevant benefits reports more time consuming and complex. Ultimate Software’s UltiPro Workforce Management solution streamlined the management of payroll and benefits, while reducing administration.
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This case study describes the complexity of human resource management systems (HRMS)/payroll management when merging two organizations and how Ultimate Software’s UltiPro Workforce Management software helped solve the new challenges arisen from the merger.
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This case study shows how Morrison Bowmore Distillers (MBD), a fast growing Scotch whisky industry, used SSI’s Tropos enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to future-proof its business and replace its inadequate system and packaged software application. Learn how it saved hundreds of thousands on inventory and headcount, and enhanced financial management and its ability to support expansion.
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Eastern Foods, Inc. produces fresh goods for one of the most widely dispersed populations in the world. The leading supplier of salad dressings to airlines, Amtrak, and the cruise ship industry, Eastern is nationally known for Naturally Fresh dressings as well as premiere meat sauces and dips sold in stores and distributed to the food service industry. The job has never been easy – but it has been made easier in recent years with the implementation of Ross Systems’ iRenaissance suite of business applications for both front and back office operations. The flow of information, necessary to make critical decisions and ensure high levels of service, now travels quicker than the fast-paced industry it serves. The plant scheduler has been able to reduce the number of daily individual production jobs by as much as 20%, as well as reduce the number of changeovers, resulting in higher capacity utilization and throughput. Visibility to the forecast and orders allows for better management of the scheduled cycle of product runs, which must be closely coordinated with inventory to ensure supply is both adequate and fresh. Cycle schedule compliance has improved from 88% to 95%.
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In the mid-1990s Heinz was managing their product specifications, formulas, and quality information in the same manner as most companies. Their product information was stored in a variety of disparate systems, spreadsheets, text documents, and paper forms. Learn how it was able to continually leverage product information across the entire life cycle.
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Wilden began to investigate several customer relationship management (CRM) packages in the market including: Maximizer Enterprise, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Pivotal and Oracle. The Company knew it would require some customization assistance from the vendor but it also wanted the capability to manage the new technology in-house. Maximizer Enterprise was the only one that was flexible enough-it fit their sales channel model and had the knowledgeable Professional Services staff that the Wilden team felt comfortable with - along with the overall package to fit within their budget.
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Since they implemented Maximizer Enterprise, the sales people have found it easy to learn, and the marketing department has taken advantage of its flexibility to customize it to their business and marketing needs. Having recently upgraded to Maximizer Enterprise 7 with the implementation, installation, and training services of Certified Multiactive Business Partner, Wintec Group, the users and administrators have seen increased reliability and speed in the daily use of its customer database.
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In 1996, Davis Controls, a licensed assembler of instrumentation and control products, implemented Exact Software’s Macola Progression solution. The subsequent 50 percent increase in their sales convinced the company to deploy Macola Enterprise Suite (ES). Macola ES’s integrated business process management (BPM) tools have led to improved productivity.
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Learn how SunGard Treasury Systems, a provider of Internet-based treasury management solutions to global corporate, government, and financial services organizations, consolidated its disparate databases into one centralized database for company and customer information.
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Learn how Boeing Autometric, a software and technical solutions provider for modeling, visualization, simulation, and analysis to customers in the defense, telecommunications, and commercial mapping industries, implemented a solution to manage customer communication and information.
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Learn how Eastern Plastics, a small precision plastic machining, design, and assembly company, implemented an integrated solution and document management system to aid in its growing, international business.
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Learn how Cubic Defense Systems improved their overall product quality and government compliance, while conforming to support mission-critical processes by using Cincom's integrated quality management solution.
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