Lawson Standing Vertically in a Flat Economy

What About Food and Beverage?

As someone smart once said, “People have to eat and drink in both good and bad times”, so the F&B sector should not be that badly affected by the downturn. Sure, the premium brand manufacturers will likely suffer, but the low-price and private label items might even flourish.

In late October, Lawson made two announcements at the InterBev 2008 Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, Nevada (NV), United States (US). This was the validation of Lawson’s vertical strategy that was professed at its CUE 2008 user conference, and was soon delivered with the Lawson Tracer product. These industry-specific modules all have features that are unique to the F&B industry or are solving that industry’s specific business requirements.

Industry-specific Analytics

The Lawson M3 Analytics for Food & Beverage module helps F&B companies access meaningful business intelligence (BI) to improve decision-making without having to painstakingly develop analytics tools in-house. In fact, industry-specific BI solutions that can be up and running to provide value within days and weeks are Lawson’s attempt to mitigate the current economic crisis for its customers.

Thus the Lawson M3 Analytics for Food & Beverage application includes 70 pre-configured key performance indicators (KPIs) and 50 pre-built scorecard reports commonly used by F&B companies. Sample KPIs include day sales outstanding (DSO), inventory turnover, delivery performance, and gross margin percentage. Sample scorecards highlight critical data such as sales vs. budget, supplier performance, production variances, and customer debt.

This selection of metrics is engineered to meet the specific needs of an F&B company management. It includes what the executives and middle managers need, and does not include KPIs that are meaningless (which is of course the case with a more generic, “one size fits all” approach). The analytics set also includes KPIs not seen in other industries, like yield. Such a comprehensive approach to business evaluation has been essentially beyond the reach of all but the largest F&B companies until now.

Lawson Analytics for Food & Beverage helps F&B companies benchmark, measure, and improve performance in the following five key areas: sales, finance, procurement, production and the warehouse. With virtually all manufacturers currently concerned with burning cash, they need their existing systems to deliver more value faster, specifically in terms of improving cash flow and slashing costs. Lawson’s industry-specific analytics should help provide answers to those critical questions such as “what and where are our inefficiencies?”, “where are we losing cash?”, or “which processes are slow?”

The application enables tracking of multiple performance metrics by individual products, customers, and account managers to help decision-makers identify underperforming operational areas in time to take appropriate action. It also helps F&B companies eliminate unnecessary reports so decision-makers receive only the right information at the right time.

Industry-specific Planning Tools

In a related announcement, Lawson also announced the availability of Lawson Stock Build Optimizer and Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage. These new applications aim to help F&B manufacturers improve long- and mid-range production planning to ensure that the right amount of the right products are available at the right time to meet seasonal and promotional peaks in demand. F&B companies traditionally have to choose the lesser of two evils:

1. Losing sales if they don’t produce enough products to meet demand spikes, or
2. Writing off perishable products if they produce too much.

Lawson Stock Build Optimizer helps companies visualize their overall plan for building and maintaining an inventory of finished products. The F&B industry has two relatively unique requirements: it is deal- or promotion-driven with both customers and F&B manufacturers having a history of impacting the timing of transactions based upon promotions. This module allows the supply chain to be leveled to eliminate problems in timing. Stocks need to be built up in advance of the promotion period, stock-outs need to be eliminated, and inventory investments minimized.

Lawson Stock Build Optimizer then offers tools that allow manufacturers to perform multiple “what if” scenarios to simulate the consequences of different long-range planning decisions. These models, which can account for a wide range of variables from production capacity to ingredient costs, help planners refine master production schedules (MPS) across multiple manufacturing sites. For example, planners can use these models to evaluate the benefits of building stock in advance to support demand spikes, versus using overtime or subcontractors to meet seasonal demand for products such as holiday chocolate assortments.

For its part, Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage should help F&B manufacturers improve mid-range planning decisions as they balance changes in demand and supply availability during production. Companies can visualize their total coverage days for each product to guide production planning decisions for the next few weeks or months.

The application then captures and provides a full view of production variables, such as changes in customer orders, delivery schedules, employee shifts, and aging inventory. This allows planners to conduct “what if” modeling before deciding how to prioritize production for specific products and orders to help avoid stock-outs, inventory write-offs, or the need to temporarily open additional production lines.

Both Lawson Stock Build Optimizer and Lawson Planning Workbench for Food and Beverage are configurable to users’ specific needs. Both applications also offer simplified installation and support through integration with the Lawson M3 Enterprise Management System [evaluate this product].

Dear readers, what do you think? Is this a well thought-out value proposition from a vendor to help its F&B customers during bleak times or merely a vendor’s repackaging exercise to cash in on the current economic crisis? Should virtually all vendors try to come up with similar industry-specific initiatives and thus justify their existence and customers’ investment and trust?

What are your opinions about whether these new products will help F&B manufacturers analyze an increasingly complex set of supply chain variables to help them optimize production plans, lower inventory costs, and enhance customer service? What steps are you taking in these regards?

Ramco OnDemand ERP Certification

First Impressions
The forms layouts and many of the detail screens allow for data field relocations and reconfigurations via drag and drop. The default color schemes are easy on the eyes, and screen layouts are ergonomically designed. A user can take more frequently used fields and bunch them together; fields that are not used can be squeezed to insignificant size.

The product handles everything from the sales quotation to the final shipment, including all financial, inventory, and manufacturing aspects. We noted good functionality in the sales and purchasing areas.

Inventory management is thorough and supports multiple locations (such as warehouses, and even multiple aisle and bin locations for a product).

In the fulfilling of a production order, Ramco demonstrated that material would be drawn from the nearer warehouse and bin location according to first in, first out (FIFO); last in, first out (LIFO); and other rules. Full lot and serial number support were included.

Choosing an ERP Product
If your organization is making the transition from a small start-up operation to a medium sized organization, then Ramco’s SaaS product offering might be a smart choice since it includes standard accounting functionality, such as A/R, A/P, costing, and sales. More functional purchasing, HR, and CRM interfaces, as well as an advanced planning tool, are currently under development and should be available soon.

The manufacturing scheduling functionality is work area–based, where mixed types of the same machines can be pooled together to add to capacity. Work center reports are available to show how much of the work center capacity is remaining. The product’s material requirements planning (MRP) and master production scheduling (MPS) interfaces are easy to use, intuitive, and what other vendors will have to compete against for the same class of product.

Being a SaaS product, all of Ramco OnDemand ERP’s functionality is global. Accepted customizations become global on demand enhancements. These enhancements, patches, etc. when implemented, become effective immediately.

Where Does On Demand Fit?

The Ramco on demand SaaS product appears as an excellent entry point for emerging businesses such as light manufacturing. For light manufacturing or small shops, SaaS is a money saver, and coupled with Ramco’s virtual machine access facility, provides an economic ERP solution. For the aerospace or automobile industries, where deeply nested multi-level bills of material (BOMs) are the norm, the product is usable, though in these industries, reporting by machine within a work-center obligates more data capture and more drill-down reporting.

Ramco OnDemand ERP cannot be used by manufacturing organizations that require the ability to track global efficiencies by work center, since this functionality is not yet available in the product. However, for companies looking for a robust scheduling and work order planning tool, which allocates materials to specific work orders, Ramco’s SaaS ERP product offering can satisfy such requirements effectively.

Because the product is SaaS-based, the client is saved from performing backups and system maintenance, and from up-front licensing fees. At this time, costs are per seat, and an amount is charged for data storage and by quantity of business transactions.

Ramco OnDemand ERP is configured to your business requirements and typically takes less than a week to deploy. As your business grows, the solution can be scaled up to accommodate multiple locations, currencies, and business units. The application stays tuned to your business all the time.

Ramco OnDemand ERP integrates multiple functions and systems into one solution and gives you total visibility and control of operations. In the process, it helps you focus on growing your business.

As a virtual machine application, no separate processor is dedicated to running the on demand application. Contrarily, the virtual machine solution is termed evergreen, in that multiple virtual machines share a real computer on an on demand basis, and allow for lower operating costs. These lower operating cost benefits are passed on to the clients.

For more information, please visit TEC’s vendor showcase. Please click here to understand the application’s support concepts, and here for product details, where a demo can be viewed.

Five Steps to Business Intelligence Project Success

Successful business intelligence (BI) projects encompass more than implementation of a solution on time and within budget. True success should be measured by how the BI solution improves the organization's overall performance through increased efficiency in reporting, planning, financial functions, and performance measurements. This will help ensure organizations' BI projects fall into the estimated 30 percent success rate.

Much has been written about measuring return on investment (ROI) for BI, and the general conclusion is that gaining tangible insight into the initial benefits is not easy. Identifying long-term benefits becomes more practical as planning and analysis, compliancy, and forward-looking approaches become more mainstream within organizations. To gain insight into how to implement a BI solution successfully, organizations should benchmark the success of other organizations—including their implementations and use of BI—against their own current initiatives. It is equally important that organizations learn from other organizations' failures—and avoid repeating them.

This article identifies and explores five steps organizations should take to avoid the common pitfalls encountered by many businesses when implementing a BI solution. These steps also provide an overview of items that need to be considered before implementing BI within an organization or business unit.

Step 1. Identifying the Business Problem

Identifying the BI business problem is the first step to ensuring a successful project. Once an organization knows what is broken, not only can it start to find ways to fix the problem, but it can also identify the proper resources, create user buy-in, and prioritize how to tackle the project. To produce an ROI, a BI solution needs to address specific business problems. Otherwise, implementing an ad hoc query tool, an online analytical process (OLAP) cube, or a dashboard will not result in lasting benefits.

Unfortunately, it is common for BI solutions to be pushed onto a business unit in order to meet an IT objective rather than an organizational need. Sometimes organizations get caught up with general initiatives and lose sight of the actual benefits BI provides in terms of performance management, collaboration, workflow, process improvement, etc.

To attain buy-in, the user community should be a part of the problem identification process. An implementation decision that comes from management still requires input from users as to what their requirements are, and this information can make the difference between the implementation of a tool that works as a value proposition and an implementation that may be seen as useless.

Step 2. Determining Expectations of Use

Once BI is implemented within an organization, its usage usually grows beyond initial expectations. For example, an organization may assume that its BI solution will be used by 10 to 20 users, when in reality over 400 users query data on a monthly basis. Because the initial design of the platform will have been based on a low number of potential users, the system may not be able to sustain such a high number of queries, and will most likely "crash" (fail), causing users to lose faith in the new system and potentially revert to their pre-BI environment for stability. In addition to lacking confidence in the new system, the organization may see the challenge of getting an unstable system up and running as not worth the effort, delays, and time required.

With unrealistic expectations, frustration may cause the organization to rethink its use of BI. Generally, once BI adoption occurs within one part of the organization and other departments or business units see its benefits, adoption begins to spread throughout the entire organization. For a BI solution to meet these increasing needs, organizations should anticipate the use of BI before implementation of a solution.

Another consideration is the type of BI tool use. For example, if a sales manager needs to increase sales and therefore wants to analyze trends, product distribution, and sales performance, creating a set of static reports will not be helpful. A data visualization tool to manage these items and to develop a plan based on trend analysis will more likely produce the appropriate results.
Step 3. Understanding Delivery of Data

The BI solution's ability to collect the right information for reporting and analysis is essential if it is to deliver value to organizations. Although identifying the data required is time-consuming, it is the backbone of BI. Additionally, determining how data will be delivered, what the appropriate data cleansing activities should be, and whether the data is to be delivered in batch or in real time, should all be defined in advance. If data is not cleansed or delivered when needed, then the front-end BI tools will not provide the proper value to the organization. BI solutions impart value through the analysis of data, so it is essential that data arrives when required, in the proper format, and at the right time.

In addition to extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, data quality and data cleansing need to be inherent aspects of the delivery of BI within the organization. In reality, short of an organization-wide master data management (MDM) initiative, the responsibility of providing accurate data will fall on the shoulders of the business units implementing BI.

Some organizations are misguided and think that their BI solution will provide the tools to fix their data problems. BI solutions can provide ongoing data quality processes, but these are not innate to software offerings. Some vendors' BI tools include enhanced data quality and integration features, and other vendors assume this responsibility should fall to the organization. Organizations should implement data management structures to minimize frustrations that result from data issues.

Step 4. Rolling Out Training Initiatives

Deciding when to roll out training contributes to project success. Training initiatives should begin right before or during the implementation phase. However, in many organizations, training is rolled out months before actual implementation, creating hype among the employees about the new system and what they will be able to do with it. By the time implementation actually occurs—sometimes months later—the initial excitement and buy-in has subsided, and more importantly, users have forgotten their newfound skills. To build momentum again, training needs to be repeated—wasting time and money.

Buy-in related to change is never easily achieved within organizations. Users become attached to their current processes, whether or not those processes are productive. Buy-in does not occur immediately upon showing users the inherent value of BI because it means the entire way they do business will change. Creating a training program—and delivering that training in a timely fashion—helps users apply their newfound skills immediately, thus helping to increase user buy-in.

Step 5. Choosing a Vertical- or Horizontal-based Solution

Organizations should identify whether more value will be provided by a vertical solution that is built specifically for the organization's industry or department, or by a horizontal solution that can grow with the organization. For example, does the organization need a generic reporting, querying, and analysis tool that will extend across the organization, or does the organization need to develop a process and compliancy that will adhere to the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards? The answer to this question will help the organization define which type of solution will best meet its needs.

In addition, anticipated use of BI in the future may help determine whether a horizontal or a vertical solution will best meet the organization's needs. Organizations that must adhere to compliance standards should take advantage of vertical-based solutions, because vendors have developed solutions that meet specific compliance requirements. Horizontal solutions need a large degree of customization to bring them up to par, leading to extra time and money spent on developing the solutions.

Organizations in key vertical industries should strongly consider vertical-based solutions that will meet their needs, out of the box. Vertical-based solutions are likely to meet the general requirements of a specific industry or department, but since horizontal BI solutions do not base themselves on specified data models, they may be more versatile to the changing demands of the organization. Therefore, if an organization anticipates rapid BI growth across the organization, having the ability to develop solutions based on individual needs may be more beneficial. This relates to identifying the business problem and anticipating the future needs of the organization.

IBM & ILOG Matrimony: Good for BPM, Uncertain for SCM

Also, more than 500 independent software vendors (ISV’s) rely on embedding ILOG’s business rule management systems (BRMS), optimization, and visualization software components into their products. These ISV customers, some of which are leaders in their respective markets, embed ILOG’s software engines to create their own differentiating products and services and improve their competitive edge.

To be more precise, ILOG provides various tools within the realm of BRMS (for managing business change), optimization (for making complex decisions), and visualization (to create diagrams, charts, maps, etc.) for other ISVs to embed in an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) fashion, whereas its more nascent supply chain management (SCM) applications are aimed at end-users (companies).

One day before the acquisition, ILOG, which is listed on NASDAQ & Euronext, reported its fiscal 2008 results, in which 2008 fiscal year revenues of US$181.0 million were up 12 percent compared to US$161.5 million in fiscal 2007. Still, the ILOG executives acknowledged a challenging environment and slowing down of its many businesses, especially in the embattled financial sector.

What’s ILOG’s Dowry?

The deal, valued at approximately US$340 million, is expected to close by year-end 2008. By acquiring ILOG for Euro 10 per share, at a premium of 37 percent over the ILOG’s market capitalization at the time, I believe that IBM has gotten a good deal for a member of the Cape Horn Strategies Sustained Success Honor Roll.

This esteemed membership is comprised of all software companies that are listed on the NYSE, AMEX and NASDAQ stock exchanges that have six (or more) consecutive years of measured profitable growth. ILOG is recognized as belonging to the group of only 23 out of 482 public software companies with seven consecutive years of profitable growth.

In fact, ILOG, with over 850 employees in the following nine countries: US, France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom (UK), China, Japan, Singapore, and Australia, has a stable recurring revenue stream from several hundreds of ISV’s royalty arrangements to embed its products. Indeed, it is quite difficult to think of how many vendors involved in some optimization or intelligence area are not leveraging ILOG’s optimization, visualization and rules engines (and thereby not reinventing the wheel themselves).

Most importantly, IBM has had partner and OEM agreements with ILOG for over a decade (since 1996). The giant incorporates ILOG’s network visualization technology into its Tivoli Netcool and WebSphere Business Events products, and it also uses ILOG’s manufacturing optimization products at its semiconductor wafer plant in Fishkill, New York, US.

Moreover, ILOG’s business rules capability is embedded within IBM WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Application Server. It is interesting to note here that IBM also partners with ILOG’s foes Fair Isaac Corporation and Corticon Techologies for their BPM and rules management capabilities. Last but not least, ILOG BRMS engine also runs IBM’s InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) Server and IBM FileNet enterprise content management (ECM) offering [evaluate this product].

As another marquee partnership, SAP uses ILOG’s optimization engine embedded within SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (SAP APO) and possibly within other SAP SCM suite’s applications [evaluate this product].

Former Manugistics (now part of JDA Software) has also embedded ILOG algorithms in several products, most notably in the strategic network design product. i2 Technologies (ironically, also soon to be part of JDA Software) did as well dating back to the Intertrans Logistics Solutions Limited (ITLS) acquisition 10 years ago. However, for some of the most complex SCM products (i.e., inventory optimization and manufacturing scheduling/sequencing), both Manugistics and i2 have developed proprietary algorithms (oftentimes heuristic-based ones).

BPM Is in Play Here, Duh!

Software tools, rather than enterprise applications, are primary targets of IBM purchases. It is thus not a big revelation here that IBM has acquired ILOG primarily for its market-leading business rules generation capabilities. Business rules engines are at the core of any service oriented architecture (SOA), complex event processing (CEP), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and/or BPM infrastructure, because they enable change of the underlying logic of business applications to nimbly adapt to new business conditions (environment), risk management policies, or local regulations.

IBM plans to much more tightly combine (than it has been done so far via ILOG extensions) its BPM, business optimization, and SOA technologies with ILOG’s BRMS software. When completed, the acquisition should strengthen IBM’s BPM and SOA positions by providing customers with a full set of rule management tools for complete and near-real-time business information and application lifecycle management (ALM). The unified business process modeling & design, process execution, BAM & analysis, and human interaction & collaboration capabilities will be able to work across a variety of platforms, including IBM’s WebSphere application development and management platform.

With more than 6,550 client engagements worldwide, IBM is a worldwide leader in the SOA and BPM markets. This leadership is further illustrated by a community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 150 universities incorporating IBM’s SOA and BPM curricula, and more than 6,000 IBM Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices.

Business Intelligence Podcast

TR: Good question. So, what is business intelligence overall? It's taking the various disparate pieces of data that small and midsized companies produce, and trying to provide some type of insight or ability to determine what is the most important data to make intelligent decisions on. What business intelligence does is, it'll interact with different business applications, and by virtue of different tools like reports or dashboards or scorecards, be able to help guide an executive through all the morass of different data to the data that's most important, so that he or she can make more intelligent, more effective decisions on a daily basis that help build and run their businesses.

Small or midsized companies pride themselves on being much more agile, much quicker to make decisions than their big company counterparts. So, not only more effective decisions, but time to decisions is important in terms of differentiating small companies to work more quickly and [to be] more agile against their large enterprise counterparts.

What we find, according to Gartner, is that in this recent survey of one thousand [chief information officers] CIOs from midsized companies, that the top technology segment that they planned on purchasing in the coming year was business intelligence. That was the same from the previous year as well. So business intelligence is becoming a hot technology for small and midsized companies, precisely because it gives them an ability to differentiate themselves from their competition given the greater insight into the data, and making more effective decisions.

LW: Todd, what do you feel has changed in the market to explain why business intelligence is becoming so hot for small and midsized companies?

TR: Well, the last three or four or five years, you've seen small and midsized companies purchasing and implementing some type of business application. It could be an [enterprise resource planning] ERP system [or] a [customer relationship management] CRM [system]; it could be supply-chain, something that helps them in terms of just the transactional aspects of their business. Those business applications are producing a significant amount of data, and now the [chief executive officer] CEO, the VP of sales, or head of marketing, is left with determining, of all this information, “What is most important for me, and how do I get a pulse of my company's business on a daily or weekly basis here?”

Why business intelligence has become important for small or midsized companies is [because of] three reasons: Number one, business intelligence will interact with and be integrated with applications like ERP or CRM easily, so it's a low-cost way of integrating into existing IT infrastructure for that small or midsized company CIO's responsibility. Secondly, business intelligence provides that insight into the company's business that other business applications don't. So ERP or CRM can tell you transactional elements or who the customers are, but it doesn't yet tell you about who are the most important customers, how do you segment those, and how do you create marketing campaigns. The third reason why business intelligence has become important to small or midsized companies is finally, with the advent of mid-market–specific products that companies like Business Objects have launched, you now have product that is much more accessible in terms of pricing and ease of use, so that you no longer have to be an expert in business intelligence.

Even small or midsized companies that are migrating from simple spreadsheets now can use business intelligence. The great thing about this is we've now seen a democratization of business intelligence. It's no longer just the domain of the privileged few enterprise companies; now small and midsized companies can use that to build and run their businesses.

LW: And what are some of your customers' biggest pain points in terms of business intelligence and issues that they help them resolve?

TR: The customer's biggest pain points are twofold. Number one is, “Help me with my blind-spots. Tell me what I don't know. What are the things that are going to come back and bite me so that I can be better prepared for that?”

Second big pain point is, “Don't tell me just historically what's happened in the past; I don't need business intelligence to just be a rearview mirror perspective. What I need is business intelligence to help be a dashboard, a view into the future that, if I do these things, here are the implications. If I do these different initiatives, here's the potential positive impact it could have on my business.”

So business intelligence will help identify either trends or areas where it can provide an alert to executives about what their potential blind spots could be. Now, they could be negative blind spots, like hey, certain suppliers are no longer supplying you with your inventory; you've got stockouts, and you're losing revenue here. Or they could be positive blind spots, like, you've had a significant uptick in the acceptance of marketing campaigns or of a new product, and if you sold more of these things, you'd have greater top-line revenue.

The other aspect of how business intelligence helps is, it's not only just a historian telling you what's happened in the past. With things like dashboards or scorecards, it allows a company to look more into the future and take a proactive look, with planning and budgeting of technology that allows a company to say, “Over the coming year, if I launch this product, or if I go into this new market, what is the potential upside revenue? What's the impact upon my profit margin? How would I compete relative to others there?” It helps them build and run their business in the future.

So we cannot only be a historian and looking at the past. What the CEOs care about as well is, “Use business intelligence as a tool to build my business here for the next two or three years as well.” And that's partly why you're seeing such a surge of interest and use of business intelligence in small and midsized companies.

LW: Can you give me one or two examples of small or midsized companies who have used your products, and what type of benefits have they experienced?

TR: Yeah, I'll give you two examples here from different industries. One is from a health care provider, another one from an insurance vendor.

The health care provider, so that we can share the details with you, is a company that acquired 200 additional locations—everything from small hospitals to outpatient branches there. Their biggest challenge was to aggregate all the patient data and history so that if a patient comes in, the doctor has all the information about the patient's conditions, previous medications, [and] reactions to [them]. One of the things that they said is that now that they have armed the physician with all the informational ammunition, they're now able to not only provide greater quality of patient care, but what they've said is [that] business intelligence literally helps save the lives of patients.

Now the question is, how do you measure the type of [return on investment] ROI of saving more patients' lives? But that's a real-world example of how a midsized health care provider can use business intelligence to provide immediate human benefit.

Another example would be an insurance company, based out of the midwest of the US, where they have a number of different field agents that do claims and [that] need to provide the updates on a daily basis back to corporate headquarters. What business intelligence allows them to be able to do is to track the different claims; identify where those claims are coming from; and that would help not only in speeding [up] the type of service and the number of field agents that they need to help provide greater customer service out there in the field, but also [to] determine the type of policies that they need to write to not only provide full coverage to their customers, but also make sure that they're profitable policies. And as a result of this insurance company using Business Objects' mid-market offering, they're now able to see a 10 percent increase in [the] number of policies, and the average profitability per policy has increased about 5 percent. That may not be a big number on a percentage basis, but with literally thousands of policies, you see a significant impact to the company's bottom line.

How Project Portfolio Management Can Deal a Winning Hand to the SMB Project Manager

As organizations fight tenaciously for every inch of market share, IT departments have had to deploy technology that assists these dynamic organizations to remain competitive. One of these technologies is project portfolio management (PPM): a set of processes to analyze, recommend, authorize, activate, expedite, and monitor projects to meet organization improvement goals. Figure 1 provides a visual of these processes and how they flow during a project.



According to The AMA Handbook of Activity Administration (2nd edition), PPM, if acclimated to its abounding potential, can abetment organizations to apprehend the afterward goals:

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an estimated 2030 percent abridgement in the time it takes to advance new products

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cogent advance in commutual projects on time and on budget

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improvements in analysis and development (R&D) productivity

How Organizations Should Abutment PPM

To abutment a PPM system, organizations accept to accept an centralized action for anniversary of the following:

1. Governancethe controlling role in the controlling process, usually conducted by a C-level controlling who determines

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what projects to accept or reject, as priorities are determined

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if to actuate projects, and establishes their achievement dates

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what assets are appropriate (both basic and human), and sets the activity budget

2. Managementthe action that monitors a activity to ensure it is accomplishing its declared goals and that it is active on time and on budget. Such ecology is usually the albatross of the activity administrator (PM) and the activity administration office.

3. Administrationthe administration and afterlight of activity portfolios according to their deliverables and assets (planned and used) in adjustment to certificate the activity status, agenda key milestones, and ensure adherence to the agenda for activity deliverables. Usually the authorization of the PM.

The Democratization of PPM

Long afore the agenda age, British biographer G.K. Chesterton wrote: "You can never accept a anarchy in adjustment to authorize a democracy. You accept to accept a capitalism to alpha a revolution."

This absurdity holds accurate if you accede the avant-garde business landscape, which has apparent the controlling action transform from getting the albatross of a simple scattering of top-level executives, to cover a greater amount of humans beyond abounding departments and levels aural the organization. To a ample degree, this transformation has occurred because of the ever-increasing amount of methods accumulated abstracts is calm and candy to acquiesce greater afterimage for administration and to abutment the business process.

The boilerplate baby to average business (SMB) has abounding of the aforementioned cardinal needs as Fortune 500 organizations accept for processing abstracts into information. Accede an SMB's charge to accommodate technologies to abutment its accomplishment and accumulation alternation issues, which affect the organization's adeptness to accomplish revenues. These SMBs may advertise to beyond organizations, which demands greater affiliation with these organizations' business processes and systems. The requirements accept an appulse on aggregate from artefact architectonics to engineering, to sourcing and procurement, to sales and distribution, accompanying with greater acquiescence issues and authoritative concerns.

The mid-market has limped forth with adamant systems and processes that were developed on platforms and architectonics now about 20 years old. As a result, organizations accept had to actualize a array of ad hoc letters by application spreadsheets, abounding with the constraints of inaccurate and changeless data. If managing projects, spreadsheets are a poor way to clue changes, as they leave no analysis trails, and they are an bare average for interpreting data.

Until recently, PPM was viewed as a solution only larger organizations could benefit from, the logic being that PPM was time-consuming and costly to deploy. For SMBs, the cost of software licensing, hardware, and consulting services, as well as disruption to a business's day-to-day operations during implementation of PPM, were simply too high.

So what alternatives to using spreadsheets, with all their inherent flaws that risk the loss of valuable revenues to increasing global competition, do SMBs have?

The Hosted PPM Alternative

Many PPM vendors that originally sold on-premise solutions have made a transition into the on-demand marketplace. The primary reason for this change is that they have realized the potential value of this untapped market space, as software as a service (SaaS) offers a number of advantages to the client in the SMB market:

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No software needs to be installed.
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No infrastructure is required to support the application.
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The SaaS vendor manages all network issues and all software version updates.
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SaaS applications result in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). On-premise software can cost a substantial amount in implementation fees and user support.
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SaaS applications allow scalability. Many of the features designed for an on-premise PPM system may be too robust for the small business user. But users can derive the benefits of a PPM system with an on-demand application, even if at first they are using only the parts of the software they require. Features and functionality can be added later, as users become more familiar with the application.

A Snapshot of Some PPM Solution Providers in the SaaS Space

1. Genius Inside

Established in 1997 and headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, Genius Inside creates and sells enterprise project management solutions, known as Genius Project.

With over 70,000 North American users and close to 400 installs worldwide, Genius Inside also has a vast network of resellers, and the company is a certified IBM Business Partner. The software is designed for the Lotus Domino Collaboration server, and has won numerous awards, such as the 2008 Lotus award for Best Mid-Market Solution. The product is a comprehensive set of integrated applications across ten modules.

Genius Project: Features and Benefits

* User-friendly software with a customizable user interface.
* Numerous standard templates, such as Project Management Institute (PMI), PRINCE2, and Six Sigma, which easily integrate to an organization's existing processes within its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as procurement, accounting, etc.
* A complete project management solution, including portfolio management, project tracking, cost and budget tracking, planning tools, etc.
* A resource management system, with user-friendly and customizable time- and tracking-sheets, advanced reporting, process and workflow support, a document management system, and the ability to use rich collaboration.
* A cross-industry solution that can be used in both process and discrete manufacturing environments, and that is scalable to both large global locations and small offices having two or three users.
* Reports that can be exported to MS Project, and vice versa.
* Project information work breakdown schedule (WBS) that can be displayed in Gantt chart format.
* Multi-project milestones and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be displayed and that support rich analytics using online analytical processing (OLAP) tools through a business intelligence (BI) interface.

Innovations in Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) 2.0 may have been overshadowed by all the excitement around its cooler cousin Web 2.0, but it cannot be ignored. It is time to take a down-to-earth look at a few recent advances that are making BI more accessible, affordable, and relevant to businesses than ever before. The most observable changes in BI over the past two to three years have occurred in the vendor landscape. "Megavendors" (such as Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and Oracle) are rising above independent vendors (Business Objects and Cognos). In addition to IBM's acquisition of Cognos, Oracle's purchase of Hyperion, and SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, the BI road map of the software giant Microsoft poses a threat to all vendors in the small to medium business (SMB) market. Behind the myriad changes in the BI marketplace, major innovations in BI technologies have been afoot.

In this article, we look at three recent advances in particular: search technologies, software as a service (SaaS), and operational BI. In order to understand how these technologies are being implemented and made available to organizations, we must look at the vendors that provide them. A complete survey of all vendors in these technology brackets is practically impossible; what we illustrate in this article is simply that innovation is still very much alive and well in BI.

The traditional BI solution comprises a data warehouse or data marts (individual business area–specific data stores for reporting and analysis) as its foundation. Data warehouses are designed for high performance in querying operations, and often contain summaries based on business needs. Extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes bring data from operational data sources into the data warehouse periodically, the frequency dependent on latency needs. Between extracting data from sources and loading them into targets, data cleansing and data summarization are activities that take place in an ETL process. Online analytical processing (OLAP) provides high-performance access to data in the data warehouse through the creation of cubes, which are data structures that aggregate data across multiple dimensions and provide the business user with an analytical environment. Reporting and querying environments provide access to canned or ad hoc enquiries into historical data in the data warehouse/marts.

These technologies have grown over several years, and although BI is now a mature field, new ideas and approaches are still being developed, as business models change and evolve around the world.

Searching for the Truth

"One version of the truth," albeit a redundant phrase, has been almost synonymous with BI. Getting to that one version, however, requires search and query operations. Every BI environment is data-intensive, and each action (whether a simple report or a complex analysis involving multiple dimensions) involves sifting through gigabytes (often terabytes) of data in order to arrive at an answer to a business question.

Searching in traditional BI environments involves creating structured data sources (data warehouses, data marts, OLAP cubes) and applying query mechanisms that understand the data structures. For instance, structured query language (SQL) and multi-dimensional expressions (MDX) are common ways of querying data that is stored in a data warehouse or OLAP cubes.


Innovations in the search space include high-performance searching across unstructured and disparate data sources, new storage mechanisms, new approaches to user experience, and advanced multilingual search capabilities. The existence of structured and unstructured content and the high cost of maintaining a data warehouse and ETL processes are very real in organizations; new and innovative ways to search heterogeneous data are essential.

Endeca's MDEX TM technology promises a platform in which searches across data stored in relational databases, data warehouses, and unstructured content become possible. The technology is based on self-describing records where every field is an attribute-value pair. With this flexibility, a little known fact stored in a document can become part of an analysis instantaneously. The guided summarization–based search assumes that the user does not know in advance what kind of queries can be asked. The approach widens the BI audience in an organization, as the user does not need to have a detailed understanding of underlying metadata or data models.

FAST is yet another innovator in search technology. FAST's Contextual Insight uses entities that define the scope of a search. The search combines these entities (such as name, location, etc.) to arrive at an answer to a user's question. FAST also supports a natural language processing component and advanced linguistic features. Companies that deal with large documents (publishing, news, media, etc.) in multiple languages can benefit from FAST's advanced language capabilities.

Information Builders combines the search technology of Google Appliance with its own BI data integration technologies. WebFOCUS Magnify allows the user to use the universally familiar keyword search to combine an organization's Web content with its enterprise data. This can provide insight into online business activity in conjunction with BI built on historical enterprise data.

SaaS: BI à louer (for Rent)

The high cost and prolonged implementation time involved in BI projects has made BI unaffordable to many SMBs. For companies facing challenges in implementing BI, SaaS eliminates the need to build data warehouses and OLAP cubes. For companies that have BI solutions in place, SaaS makes new BI functionality available to users for a low cost and minimal implementation time.

In order to get BI using the SaaS model, data from various sources are sent to a hosted service, where ETL-type processes bring the data into a structured representation. Once an initial load of an organization's data is completed, customers of the hosted service provide incremental updates of data.

SAS Solutions OnDemand offers analytic services specific to higher education, financial services organizations, and marketing. The OnDemand Business Intelligence package provides extensive reporting and analysis capabilities based on both relational data and OLAP cubes. SAS also offers a leasing option to use its application in house.

Business Objects OnDemand includes a data warehouse and ETL process. Those familiar with Business Objects will recognize the universe, which is available as the business interface to the data warehouse. Crystalreports.com serves as the client interface that hosts various report types and dashboards.

Oco's On-Demand Business Intelligence makes it possible for users to benefit from two proprietary technologies: Connect for ETL and Intelligent Data Schema for the process of mapping business entities into data warehouses. Retail-specific solutions are also offered on the SaaS model.

Host Analytics provides a business performance management service, which can also be purchased as a license. Individual services such as this can be options for companies that are looking to augment existing BI solutions.

In the kNow—Operational BI

Data integration latency can vary based on the nature of business needs. For traditional BI reporting and analysis based on historical data, latencies of days or even weeks are common. For operational reporting and analytic applications that require near real-time data, latencies of hours, minutes, or even seconds, may be necessary. For instance, a forecasting application that predicts the re-order of merchandise based on sales and demand will require sales data that is at least hours old. A sudden increase in the sale of specific merchandise, due to a marketing initiative to offer discounts, can trigger either an automatic re-order action in the purchase order system, or send an alert to the department responsible for re-ordering. Historical information is used to predict demand patterns; however, operational data is required to detect any anomalous activities in real (or near real) time so that low availability can be addressed immediately. Operational BI is also relevant in live reporting, where data needs to be offloaded from the operational system to avoid placing query burdens on application systems.

The need to tie operational activities to BI content is becoming more important. It is essential, however, to keep in mind that not all data in a data warehouse needs to be current; a combination of real-time and analytical data integration is what best serves an organization's needs. Data cleansing has to be minimal (or nonexistent) with real-time data integration; as a result, data quality must be ensured at the point of its entry into the application systems.

IBM Cognos Now! is a product that includes a configured server with all the necessary components for operational BI. It is also offered as a hosted service through SaaS. A streaming server provides continuous data integration of transactional information with historical data. A business rules execution engine makes it possible to set up alerts based on operational activities. An analytic server includes engines for querying and analysis; aggregate data is stored in the server, eliminating the need for the data warehouse to be kept up-to-date.