Insight is the power to see into a given situation. As such, it requires a combination of experience and analytics to enable better decision making. Insight helps small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) uncover opportunities and expose shortcomings, thus establishing the basis for corrective action. Read about continuing on the path toward greater insight and developing a long-term business intelligence (BI) strategy.
Read More
|
Any project represents significant effort in terms of justifying resource allocation and expense. Project failure may not only diminish or eliminate expected benefits, but also damage existing tools and processes. There are ten key steps for project success; many of these steps occur concurrently, and are important focal points for teams and executives contemplating initiating projects.
Read More
|
The concept of getting business requirements right sounds straightforward. However, flawed requirements trigger 70 percent of project failures. The larger the number of stakeholder groups involved, and the more complex the processes, the more likely a project will fail. Success in large projects is not just about completeness, but also about getting complete requirements information early in the development process.
Read More
|
Ask any three people in an organization why they budget and you’ll get three different answers. But no one says they budget in order to direct the way in which their organization will achieve its strategic goals—the intended purpose of the budget. For budgeting to become the relevant process it was meant to be, this gap must be fixed.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
As management visionary and author Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” No statement rings truer—especially when it comes to security risk reduction. By having an accurate depiction of your network, however, you can identify real-world security threats and learn how to evaluate your organization’s ability to respond to them. Find out how, with these seven essential steps.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
In today’s competitive global business environment, nearly all firms work hard to analyze alternatives and create strategies that enable competitive advantage. But 9 out of 10 companies fail to implement strategy effectively. How can you communicate the strategy effectively and assure that the entire company is aligned behind it? Discover how business performance optimization systems can help you make better decisions.
Read More
|
Now that technical aspects of delivering information to the business intelligence (BI) user community are understood, BI vendors are focused on market expansion through key initiatives, including advocating ‘BI for the masses.’ However promising expanded BI use may be, a careful and balanced discussion of the specific business and technical preconditions for capturing the business value of BI investments is needed.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|
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.
Read More
|