ERP market is today addressing deep technology challenges, focusing less than business process innovations. Why??

Because the customer is not ready for yet another roller coaster rides of ERP revamp and other extensions. Instead, the focus is now on changing the building foundation without disturbing the existing buildings ( aka SAP HANA). The promise is more towards achieving more results using the same systems, but with faster processing capabilities. While there is merit & advantages in this pursuit, what's in it for Small & Medium Enterprises?

The SMEs' needs have grown multi-fold and they are now slowly becoming the focus markets for the large vendors. They are the ones who are now thinking about implementing scalable, robust solutions not just for 2015 dec, but to help them through the next 10 years, until 2025.

So are there any integrated enterprise solutions that can be implemented, stable and scalable to support the unknown market conditions in 2025? Yes, there are..stay tuned for more updates on this topic.

SME: ERP Offerings

The Small & Medium Business segment is the target for many leading enterprise solution vendors. However the pricing challenge in front of the customer leaves him or her in two choices;

1. Continue to use the existing solution or a suite of complex legacy applications

2. Embrace the change, select the best ERP solution, off course price is always the major decision factor

In the opensource market, http://openbravo.com ,  https://www.odoo.com/ and https://www.compiere.com/ appear to be in the limelight these days. Each of these solutions have key differentiators like 

1. openbravo: A ready solution for the retail industry. However, a cloud based horizontal ERP  solution for the industries.
2. odoo.com: Erstwhile OpenERP solution that changed its name to odoo.com. A phenomenal make over solution that offers applications that can be installed on the fly --similar to the cell phone applications. Off course these are packaged differently for pricing
3. compiere: A more robust platform, suitable for manufacturing - offers more mature solution compared to the other 2 vendors

Almost all the 3 solutions offer analytics as an inbuilt or add-on feature. Apart from the above, the SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft continue to serve the SME segment and have their own solutions, but expensive than the opensource solutions.

The next one year should see consolidation of few solutions in this space. let me know if you have noticed any other significant developments.

Online survey for opensource ERP solutions

I have been researching the open source ERP solutions for sometime now. I am conducting a short survey on this topic and would like to seek few minutes from you to provide feedback. You may be an ERP consultant/Entrepreneur/ Industry Analyst/anyone else following the ERP trends.

I have recently completed the survey. If you would like to provide your response, please follow this Survey Link

-Thank you

Give what the customer wants

Competition for the fast foods is always very intensive. Every 5 years, there is a major disruption, new players get in, the old ones try hard to retain the customers...

See what McDonald's is doing to hold back its customers, especially the target customers in the breakfast category;

http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=AP&date=20140310&id=17420866

Open Source ERP for Small and Medium Business

When it comes to ERP for small and medium business, there is no one solution that has been immensely popular in this category. The most popular word of mouth, Microsoft Dynamics has at least 2-3 internally competing solutions which is confusing. The other popular solutions like the Sage, Epicor, Infor and others are mature, stable solutions which have not really made real impact. NetSuite has successfully dislodged SAP Business ByDesign; However, NetSuite is a mature and stable solution which is perceived as a competition for SAP and hence loses interest from majority of the SMB. SAP Business One, like many other SAP solutions, looks very cool in the sales cycle. However, a lot of customers have observations around the functionality gaps and the high services costs for customization and extension of the solution.

What other ERP solution(s) are the Small & Medium businesses buying? There is no one conclusive research or reference materials that provides the answers. But given this industry segment has its own limitations and requirements(ranging from simple to complex), the playing field has a large number of small to large players. However, the market is not lucrative for large players like SAP or Oracle since it brings in low revenues that require significant product management and selling efforts.

The open source based solutions like OpenERP, OpenBravo, OpenTaps and others have made significant inroads in to the SMB. It is interesting to see how much success they can achieve in the next 1-3 years.

SAP HANA - The next big migration wave

The world's fortune 1000 or 500 companies have either SAP, Oracle or the next best ERP solution. Organizations now recognize the importance of social media and have been streamlining their IT strategies to support rapid decision making to include social media in the enterprise landscape. Big data based solutions have now begun to receive good reception from large, medium and other specialty industries.

SAP HANA has been positioned as a game changer initiative/solution to enable rapid processing of the organization data across SAP, social media and other unstructured data. Also, HANA disruptive architecture in enabling in-memory processing of large data, single source of data (eliminating multiple databases within the SAP landscape) is expected to improve user experience and reduce the complexity in the overall solution landscape. A completely implemented HANA solution, when implemented, will replace the conventional RDBMS (like Oracle, MS SQL, etc). The business user gets the immediate access to all BW/BI reports, there is no need to wait for the daily/weekly refresh cycles.

In all SAP HANA sounds like a game changer, both for the customers and SAP. While HANA has been around for few years, the high cost deterred majority of the customers in taking that initiative. With SAP's continuous efforts in enabling HANA on all its solutions, reducing hardware and software costs have prompted interest in this solution.

The next 2-3 years will be the real testing period for HANA. 

Manufacturing jobs coming back to America?

Read the below link about how Wal*Mart is planning to increase their spend on the US manufactured merchandise. It will be interesting to watch how the retail industry and the consumers are going to like it. But it will be nice to see some jobs coming back to America.

Made in USA