When the economy slows, many businesses react by retrenching and cutting costs. While cost reduction is important, companies often overlook equally critical strategic decisions—opportunities to use business information to strengthen product and service offerings and emerge ahead of the competition. Find out how you can use business intelligence (BI) to avoid the most common mistakes companies make in a down economy.
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An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is your information backbone, reaching into all areas of your business and value chain. That’s why replacing it can open unlimited business opportunities. The cornerstone of this effort is finding the right partner. And since your long-term business strategy will shape your selection, it’s critical that your ERP provider be part of your vision.
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Aligning your business plans with your method of execution requires more than a peek at financial metrics. Initiatives, tasks, people, and metrics must be aligned with corporate goals. Find out how strategy management software, alone or as part of a performance management solution, can provide clear visual links between individual initiatives and broader goals, and ultimately enhance your business’s overall performance.
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Big-name vendors are competing with those that have long catered to midsized enterprises. With a little savvy, midsize companies can make the dynamic enterprise resource planning (ERP) market work to their advantage. Learn the industry’s top 10 strategies to grow your company and revenue by upgrading from an out-of-the-box finance solution to one that better connects systems and processes throughout your business.
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A failed software implementation can cost companies millions in wasted time and money. To ensure your software selection project isn’t a sorry statistic, use the right metrics to gauge your success. Time, budget, and functionality aren’t enough--focus your efforts on requirements analysis and definition. Take measures to ensure your software meets your needs, and discover how to perform accurate requirements analysis.
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Is your organization just beginning an enterprise resource planning (ERP) project, in mid-installation, or trying to recover from a failed or stalled implementation? Download this white paper to learn some strategies for successful ERP software implementation, including common ERP pain points (and how to avoid them), key considerations for new ERP projects, differentiators of best-in-class ERP implementations, and tips to make your ERP implementation more successful.
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Accurate forecasting requires many different views of the business. Increasingly, the finance department must make the links between forward-looking data from core operations and explain to stakeholders how this will impact the balance sheet and cash flow statement. How can chief financial officers lead the effort to make their operational and financial planning more agile, detailed, reliable, and efficient? Learn more.
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When conducting a mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) system comparison, there are several key questions that you should ask: How much should ERP software cost? What IT resources will be needed to implement it? But don’t stop there. The seas of ERP are vast, and navigating through the current market is not simple. Equip yourself with these questions before evaluating and interviewing vendors.
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The implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to automate business processes is a strategic investment. Buying the right system and choosing the best vendor for you are critical to a successful ERP implementation. As a decision maker, you need to quickly identify your ERP requirements, effectively communicate these needs to vendors, and successfully compare various product alternatives. Learn how.
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The old approaches for collecting, assimilating, and delivering business intelligence (BI) data have not kept pace with today’s increasing demand for rapid decision making. Many companies use static reports and ad hoc queries, but fewer companies use dashboards and portals—which often lack the interactivity required for navigation and visualization of business data. Learn how a next-generation dashboard solution can help.
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This document analyzes the cost of ownership for a typical on-premise small and medium enterprise (SME) business management system, and compares it to the cost of an equivalent SAP Business ByDesign implementation. It uses a mixture of different on-premise systems rather than any single vendor's product. Although there are many similarly equipped business management products available, they all compete closely on price.
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Today’s manufacturers face rising costs, increased competition, and changing customer requirements. If their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are not up to par, these companies face dizzying levels of complexity, duplicated effort, and poor product quality and customer service. Learn how to tell whether your ERP system is killing your business, and how a new approach to business systems can help you thrive.
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Business process management (BPM) software implementations are now moving into the mainstream. Many early adopters are already using BPM to foster business innovation. You can benefit from the knowledge gained by BPM leaders and innovators, and their prerequisites for BPM success. These findings can serve as best-practice guidelines for your BPM initiative, so you can derive maximum value from your BPM investment.
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It’s the software industry’s dirty little secret. Over 65 percent of software implementations fail—wasting untold amounts of time, money, and resources. Learn from a panel of experts how to make sure your company doesn’t suffer these kinds of losses. Of course, making the right ERP selection goes a long way in avoiding major implementation pitfalls. That’s why Lessons from ERP Implementation Failures gives you the right approach to finding an ERP system that meets your company’s special needs. Learn the lessons of ERP implementation failures—and get a plan for successful ERP selection—all from the experts who have been there.
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This paper from Saugatuck Technology discusses relevant criteria for evaluating SaaS solutions targeting small and midsize firms, and raises key questions that should be asked. It is important to ensure that a SaaS solution is well aligned with business requirements, and can accommodate change and growth. The paper also provides an evaluation template for executives to use in conducting evaluations of SaaS solutions.
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Though most companies know about the benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP), many lack awareness about how to evaluate products or when the time is right to upgrade change solutions. Moreover, they may not be up to date with the latest ERP features, market trends, and other essential information. Focus’s ERP System Market Primer offers necessary background knowledge on ERP to potential buyers and sales executives.
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This white paper features insight from the UNIT4 group about issues facing companies that need an adaptable financial system but not necessarily a full-blown enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Also included are TEC’s suggestions for identifying financial system functionality that supports your organization’s changing processes, and a checklist for soliciting such information about enterprise software solutions.
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions are large, and complex by nature, making them very difficult to evaluate and compare. So how do you select the ERP solution that’s best-suited to your firm? In this guide, Focus Experts Dana Craig, Jonathan Gross, Tim Hourigan, Michael Krigsman, Tom Rogers, Bob Swedroe, and Chintan Tyagi share their top 6 best practices for selecting ERP software.
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For IT departments drowning in complex and expensive software maintenance chores, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model can ease the burden. SaaS reduces complexity by outsourcing most of the infrastructure needed to run software applications, and reduces costs by charging only for what is consumed. But you can also adopt a hybrid SaaS model, in which some systems are outsourced and others are kept in-house. Learn more.
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Making a list and checking it twice is a particularly good practice when picking a finance and accounting software solution. If you don’t find the right product for your company, you’ll just pay for the mistakes on the back end. But first you need to know which features your small to midsize business must have and which you don’t want. Get some tips that will help you create your finance and accounting checklist.
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