TARGIT BI Product Certified

Recently, I met over the Web with TARGIT’s Ruben Knudsen and Ulrik Pedersen, along with some TEC cohorts to verify TARGIT’S BI product. TARGIT had completed a TEC-designed RFI containing a list of BI capabilities that every BI vendor could support “out of the box.” The RFI is a common list of BI capabilities that we send to all BI vendors, and from the long list of TARGIT responses, we chose 172 entries for them to demonstrate. Without missing a beat, TARGIT demonstrated all the 172 selected entries from a total of 1900 criteria we chose using a “live meeting” and telephone sessions. TARGIT passed with 100 percent verification – no omissions.
TARGIT is a Danish company. Specializing in business intelligence, TARGIT works through a world-wide distribution channel that includes distributors (VARs), OEM partner relationships, and direct sales to the customer. Their product has both a real-time interface and a batch system interface. TARGIT standard data marts and OLAP facilities allow for drill downs to detailed information, desktop and Web reporting, as well as drill through analysis via SQL functions. TARGIT indicated that the majority of their implementations are done via resellers.

I asked Ruben and Ulrik about TARGIT as a company and I liked what I heard. Many of their 75 employees and 80+ distributors have been with the company since it was founded, 22 years ago. Major clients include municipalities. They do most of their sales via distributors such as Fujitsu, and retailers. Their product is very robust, efficiently coded, and geared to the tier-2 and tier-3 companies (from 50 employees to 500, and companies with $500 million in earnings or below).

From a technical perspective, there are several BI business areas for which they provide out-of-the-box analytical solutions that interface to several different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems: Microsoft Dynamics AX, NAV, GP, Oracle, SAP. The business areas covered include supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), finance, sales, and projects.

TARGIT is strong in the area of activity-based costing analytics. From the user interface, TARGIT provides scorecards, bubble charts, dashboards, hierarchical org charts (not the chart itself though) and alerts. If the client wants to, he can build reports using the usual statistical distributions and the associated functions for regression and correlation analysis, calculations of the mean, variance, standard deviation, and other statistical measures.

The Whitelisting of America: Security for IT

Once upon a time around 1995, the well-known American agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), decided that there was no computer operating system that was adequately secure for their needs. In analyzing the risks, they found that while UNIX was the most secure, they needed additional protection. They looked at the industry of anti-virus protection, at problems with Trojan software, at the problem of keeping up with virus authors, and at the requirement for government level security to prevent a corrupted module from secretly penetrating their operating or business system environment. Their conclusion was that “anti-virus blacklisting” is ineffective and isn’t worth a pinch of dung.

Eight years ago, in 2000, the NSA produced a kernel extension called Selinux for UNIX and also for Linux. What this extension did was to manage a catalog of permissions for files and processes. The way it generally works is as follows:

An operating system-owned rule database consisting of a set of permissions (i.e., a “whitelist”) is generated, and every executable (be it operating system or user program) is assigned permissions according to its functionality. A module not in the permissions database is not allowed to execute. Modules with matching rules in the database are limited to permissions determined by the rules. The restrictions may include other then execution privileges such as not being allowed to do things that the module was not designed to do. For example, a video driver is not allowed to write to a file. A second example is that of a “user program” rule which allows the module to write to a subset of of all public data directories. Digital signatures are used to certify each module and to ensure that a replacement module is blocked from execution until a new certification rules/signature for it is registered.

Selinux has been a great success, and as a result, it is used in many Unix versions and in Red Hat Linux since 2000 and in SUSE Linux since 2005. Whitelisting is proven.

More recently (2008), this capability is still not present in Microsoft operating systems. As a result, third-party vendors are looking at the Linux successes and asking “Why not?” Several competing vendors have recognized that if Linux systems can do it, then so can they do it for the Microsoft platforms. Several companies have brought their whitelist product to market. Each has developed its own whitelisting facility, sold to compliment the traditional anti-virus software for Microsoft platforms. Whitelisting for other platforms works in a similar manner to Selinux. Rather then block bad applications that it recognizes by signature, it allows execution of those applications and processes that match the security rules and internal certificates. Again, for example, a video driver is only allowed to be a video driver, and nothing else. In the same vein, a program may be allowed to write to a file, but not to use video, or be allowed to trap keystrokes. In effect, like Selinux, whitelisting builds good fences around all modules, and makes for a very secure system.

Where whitelisting comes into play big time is in the protection of database systems. All database systems are in need of protection from module replacement or from modules that misbehave. Whitelisting builds and manages the permission “fences.”

A reasonably good article about whitelisting, for Microsoft Platforms, written by Jason Brooks “Toward A More Idiotproof Internet”, was published in eWeek on October 1st, 2008. Selinux information is available from the National Security Agency (NSA).

Job Scheduling Maze in Distributed IT Landscapes

We certainly learn new things every day, and sometimes out of pure serendipity. Namely, when I was recently asked by one of my industry contacts (working for a PR agency) whether I would like to have a briefing with and about his client, whose name included the word “batch” as a part, I agreed, thinking it was a process enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor or maybe a manufacturing execution system (MES) vendor.

To my chagrin, as soon as the Web conference meeting and demo started, I realized that I was in the quite unfamiliar territory of enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, especially when it comes to highly diverse and distributed information technology (IT) environments. Many of these jobs are still run in a batch mode without human interaction and intervention (at least preferably).

Some batch job examples would be: database/data warehouse updates, payroll runs, file copying and archiving, systems rebooting, disks de-fragmenting, reports printing, processing insurance claims, billing statements, and/or enrollments, file transfer protocols (FTP), and so on. Thus came the ActiveBatch product name, I guess.

For someone who is not that technically proficient, the knee-jerk reaction was to say: “Sorry, this was a misunderstanding”, but I was drawn in by a good discussion and the product’s apparent usefulness. In fact, the briefing made me think about how often we take things for granted, and how unaware we are of the legwork that IT staff, especially within large corporations, is conducting behind the scenes. We are usually aware of the IT folks only when our PC is not working or the email server is down, and when we “need help now!”

The conversation made me realize that this vendor truly understands mission-critical business that requires high-performance systems. ActiveBatch originators know what it means to meet both deadlines and service level response times. Conversely, while the commonly used enterprise applications, databases, platforms (e.g., Microsoft Windows with Task Scheduler or UNIX with Cron) contain limited scheduling functions, these address only basic requirements within the confines of the individual system.

In fact, from my erstwhile experiences as a Baan (now Infor ERP LN) and SAP R/3 functional consultant, I vaguely recall some task scheduling functions (e.g., setting overnight or weekend material requirements planning [MRP] runs, or performing a trial balance and general ledger [G/L] updates at a certain time). The technical consultants would set up these batch jobs within the Baan Tools or SAP Basis administrative capabilities.

Overcoming Individual Systems’ “Autism”

However, the problem is that as the number of systems, applications, databases, and whatnot platforms increases, the IT business community requires automation among and across these various systems in an end-to-end manner to provide a single point of workload automation. In addition to the ability to integrate all the pieces of a heterogeneous environment, such a system should be able to schedule jobs based on events and associated built-in business logic, as opposed to merely on a set date/time, and in a single-path manner within a silo (as is the case with inwardly-oriented “autistic” enterprise systems).

To that end, ActiveBatch provides a central point of scheduling that allows each of these disparate systems to be automated and integrated into coherent workflows. The essence of ActiveBatch, Intelligent Automation, is to provide the level of integration for applications, platforms, databases, and specific functions without the need for costly and tedious code scripting (and reliance on programmers).

What prospective customers look to ActiveBatch to accomplish is the following:

* Improve IT service levels;
* Integrate workflows and business processes between diverse applications and platforms;
* Reduce the number of manual errors (which otherwise come with the territory of relying on humans);
* Implement a centralized view of jobs that span across the vast platforms’ landscape; and
* Eliminate an “artificial” wait or idle time that has to be built into existing workflows (to accommodate all imperfections).

In a nutshell, this is about ultimately reducing the cost of IT operations. Some customers cite the fact that often in the past the original enterprise job scheduler (typically made in-house in a heavily customized manner) would allow some jobs to fail without notifying anyone, and the company wouldn’t know anything about it until someone belatedly complained about not getting the output of the job (e.g., a report). Tracing and fixing these instances would often take more time and resources than the job scheduler was supposed to save in the first place.

ActiveBatch and Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI)

But let me backtrack and talk about the ActiveBatch’s genesis. The company that owns ActiveBatch is privately held Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI), with headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey (NJ), United States (US). It was founded in 1981 as a system software engineering and consulting company focused on the development of products for former Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) OpenVMS operating system (OS) product (meanwhile of course, DEC was acquired by COMPAQ, and now both are part of Hewlett-Packard [HP]).

ASCI’s first product, INTACT, was a transaction processing system for OpenVMS to allow customers to use OpenVMS systems in commercial applications. INTACT was licensed to major financial organizations around the world. In late 1986/early 1987, DEC exclusively licensed INTACT from ASCI, and renamed it DECIntact, as a solution incorporated as part of its erstwhile Enterprise Application Strategy. DEC’s decision at the time was based on the need to compete with IBM and its transaction processing system, Complex Instruction Computer Set (CICS), with a counterpart competitive solution. INTACT and DECIntact are both still in use in many organizations around the world.

ASCI has also developed other layered product solutions for the OpenVMS market including:

* SHADOW – the first shadowing/data replication system for OpenVMS;
* WATCH – for help desk and other similar functions that allow one user to watch other terminal sessions;
* Performance Simulation System (PSS) – the automated regression and application testing system for the OpenVMS applications; and
* VIRTUOSO – a virtual container technology that enables the development of virtual disks to be used as random access memory (RAM) and cached disks for performance improvements, encrypted disks for security, and more.

In 1991, ASCI enhanced SHADOW with a new family of products including FileSHADOW and RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS. RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS has since been installed in over 1,000 customer environments to reduce the time of data recovery in the event of a system or site loss. For instance, in 2001, during the dreadful 9/11 attacks, RemoteSHADOW for OpenVMS was used by many financial organizations, including Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DSW) Bank, to recover their data and get their business functioning again within hours at an alternate site.

In 1996, ASCI broadened its OS focus from exclusively OpenVMS to include UNIX and Microsoft Windows. One of the UNIX-based products that is still in use is DeviceShare. For its part, XLNT (Extended Language for NT), a command and scripting language for Windows (not only Windows NT, as the name would imply), was introduced to offer system administrators a scripting alternative to managing systems and developing workflow scripts. Over 100,000 XLNT licenses are currently in use around the world.

Enter ActiveBatch

In 1998, XLNT users needed a batch system to automate and run their XLNT scripts on a schedule. ASCI thus introduced Batch Queue Management System (BQMS) to assist XLNT users to automate their scripts on and across Windows servers. In 2000, BQMS was renamed and re-introduced as ActiveBatch V3, a heterogeneous job scheduling solution for Windows, UNIX , Linux, and OpenVMS systems.

ASCI proudly claims to be self-funded, and that its development, quality assurance (QA), and support teams are its own (and not outsourced or off-shored). The company has licensed ActiveBatch to over 1,400 customers in 34 countries around the world.

With its Intelligent Automation capabilities and performance, and having been tested across 2,000 servers, performing over 1,3 million jobs per day, ActiveBatch is fast becoming the Workload Automation and Enterprise Job Scheduling solution of choice. Additionally, ASCI has licensed nearly 4,000 clients in 34 countries around the globe for the full range of its products. Its clients include many of the Fortune 1000 companies with a mix of medium to large enterprises.

ASCI competes with several powerful and renowned application providers in the Workload Automation and Job Scheduling market including Computer Associates (CA) Unicenter AutoSys, BMC CONTROL-M, and IBM Tivoli. Many of these vendors’ products were originally developed for the mainframe, not necessarily for today’s heterogeneous, horizontal server environments. As a result, they have customarily been adapted (retrofitted) to today’s distributed server environments.

More modern job scheduling vendors’ products like Tidal Software, UC4, Redwood Software (especially in SAP environments), Quartz (open source), and of course ActiveBatch, understand the distributed server environments, and have targeted their solutions to address this requirement. Part 2 of this blog series will analyze the ActiveBatch architecture and evolution in terms of functional and technical capabilities.

Job Scheduling Maze in Distributed IT Landscapes

ActiveBatch Architecture

The ActiveBatch architecture has always been a multi-tier approach (enabling centralized job scheduling with distributed job execution) consisting of the following elements:

* ActiveBatch Job Scheduler — This Microsoft Windows-based layer consists of the ActiveBatch automation intelligence and logic to understand the requirements presented in operating a real-time, event-driven system;
* ActiveBatch Backend – This database tier is where the “job” definitions and templates are maintained along with how the “jobs” are to be triggered (i.e., date/time-based, event-based, data-based, or on-demand). This layer also determines which resources are required (e.g., servers) to run the defined jobs, and what to do upon a job’s success or failure, or based on other information. This layer uses either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database;
* ActiveBatch Client – This client layer is the interface in which the user, developer, or operator interacts with the ActiveBatch system. Workflow design, programmatic connections, or simply review of jobs’ status (success or failure) can be monitored or reviewed. There is a raft of possible client-side technologies, such as Microsoft Common Object Model (COM), Web Services/Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for cross-platform environments, Windows-based applications, Command Line Interface (CLI), Web Server interfaces, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) gadgets, SmartPhone devices, and wireless BlackBerry handheld devices; and
* ActiveBatch Execution Agents – This tier represents the physical or virtual hardware and software systems, which execute the “jobs,” applications, processes, etc., as directed by the abovementioned ActiveBatch Job Scheduler. Execution agents can run on a number of operating system (OS) platforms like Microsoft Windows (including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000), UNIX, Linux, OpenVMS (including the Alpha and Itanium brands), and IBM z/OS (for the ActiveBatch Job Library feature that will be explored later on).

A fully operational ActiveBatch instance requires each of the basic architecture layers, i.e., Job Scheduler, Database, Client/User Interface (UI), and a minimum of one ActiveBatch Execution Agent. Most ActiveBatch shops have Windows systems. But even some like, for example, LiveWire Mobile that have over 90 Linux servers and only a few Windows systems, still strongly support ActiveBatch as a key approach to integrating applications, databases, and platforms into coherent workflows.

Panoply of Job Types and User Views

As mentioned in Part 1, ActiveBatch attempts to provide “Intelligent Automation” for its users with an approach that can minimize or eliminate scripting. Up through Release 6, the product has offered the following five types of jobs (by comparison, most of other counterpart job scheduling products only support one or two job types):

1. Process Job — lets users run user-written scripts and/or executable program files. For example, I could un the Windows Internet Explorer executable (IEXPLORE.exe) and pass TEC’s Uniform Resource Locator (URL) as a parameter to open the TEC’s home page. Worth noting here is the “Copy Script to execution machine” option for running scripts as a process, as well as the ability to allow pre- and post-job steps;
2. File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Job — can initiate a series of FTP and/or Secure FTP commands in a heterogeneous fashion, using the following secure protocols: Secure Socket Layer (SSL) v3 and v2, Private Communications Technology (PCT), Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Shell (SSH), or without embedded security;
3. File System Job — lets users perform operations such as Copy, Delete, Rename or Move Files, or Create New or Delete a Directory, without regard to the specific platform they are on, and what Command shell they might need to use.
4. Email Job – lets users compose e-mails, whereby email servers and/or clients that leverage Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) can be utilized (not necessarily only Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange Server). A notable capability is the use of variables to create alerts/triggers (e.g., when a certain stock symbol reaches certain value); and
5. Script Job — where the script (rather than an executable file, e.g., a Visual Basic Script [VBS] piece of code) is placed into an ActiveBatch job so that it can be executed on any system rather than being limited to the system where the file resides. Scripts using virtually any script language can be used, and if ActiveBatch does not provide an extension the designer can simply add it to the list. However, the server running the script must be able to associate with the relevant file extension.

Various Views to Monitor Jobs

Furthermore, ActiveBatch comes with a number of different ways of viewing and monitoring ongoing enterprise jobs. To that end, the Run Book view shows operators’ job schedules in a calendar view (à la Microsoft Outlook), whereas the Daily View shows daily job executions in a detailed list. Both views can be used by operators to monitor the status of jobs that have been run, are still running, or are scheduled to run (past, present, and future). Jobs can be filtered by days or execution status (i.e., “Show me only jobs that have failed, aborted, not run, or are still executing!”).

The Gantt View can be used by job designers as well as administrators and operations staff to identify load levels (to balance loads) or quiet periods for system’s planned maintenance, etc. Finally, the Administrators View helps administrators with setting policies, defaults, etc. Part 3 will unveil the latest enhancements and options offered within Release 7.

ActiveBatch Evolution

ASCI continues with ActiveBatch’s ongoing development with a cycle of 18 months between versions. This allows the vendor to offer existing and new customers the ability to take advantage of new features and approaches in technology by applying them for improved performance and usability.

In the ActiveBatch V4 product release, the ActiveBatch Backend layer was changed from a proprietary database to the much more standard Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. This has enabled the vendor to take advantage of the database programming power that the “stored procedure” capabilities could deliver. Also, these two database systems were the primary databases used by the ASCI’s target marketplace as part of their IT infrastructure, thereby reducing the learning and training costs for users.

Moreover, ActiveBatch V4 added support for additional OS platforms such as IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Linux to the previously supported Windows, Sun Solaris, HP Tru64 UNIX, and OpenVMS environments. The client interface was updated with a new graphical user interface (GUI) for drag-and-drop operations to simplify the design of workflows. Finally, the High Availability capability was added, remote management access was provided for Internet access, and remote management was made possible using BlackBerry devices.

In the ActiveBatch V5 release, performance became paramount as ASCI took advantage of the power of the supported databases. The vendor was able to test actual performance of up to 2,000 disparate server connections (i.e., execution agents), and over 1,300,000 jobs triggered in a 24 hour period. Moreover, ASCI says that there are no architectural limits in this regard.

As for managing workflows and all ActiveBatch objects such as Jobs, Schedules, Calendars, Users, Servers, Alerts, and more, the product was now able to put these objects into a one container called a Job Plan. Finally, while ActiveBatch had always fully exposed its Microsoft COM interface for programmatic access to its objects, methods, and properties, this release added a Web Services programmatic access for users who were not Windows-based, for true cross-platform capabilities.

ActiveBatch V6 – The Game-changing Begins?

The ActiveBatch V6 release had many major enhancements. For one, it introduced the framework for the abovementioned Job Library, containing templates to applications and key functions used by IT departments in support of the customer’s business. The goal was to reduce code scripting, so that users could simply add key information (e.g., select options in a wizard-like style), and ActiveBatch would be able to run jobs behind the scenes.

These templates include a variety of jobs, such as follows: Structural Query language (SQL) routines, Data Transformation Service (DTS) packages, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Crystal Reports creation, etc. The library also caters to functions like Secure FTP, file archiving, ZIP file operations (compressions), email jobs, etc. The use of ready-made job libraries within ActiveBatch eliminates both errors through reusability and the hassles of creating scripts. In layman terms, complex workflows can be composed by selecting options from a library of routines rather than via pesky coding of scripts.

The V6 release also featured a much improved audit system for compliance and control with both internal policies as well as governmental regulations. In addition, there is the capability for dynamic policy auditing using the Audit Variable feature. Also, policies can be mandatory or optional, and users can also conduct policy version comparisons.

The release offered HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM, formerly Microsoft Operations Manager [MOM]) to fully manage and monitor objects in the ActiveBatch system around the clock. V6 also introduced the ActiveBatch Mobile capability for Smartphones and PDA’s (beyond BlackBerry devices).

Furthermore, ActiveBatch Windows execution agents now fully support 64-bit systems as well as 32-bit ones as appropriate. Other general changes for improved IT service levels entailed the following:

* setting expected start times for event-based jobs;
* alerting for delayed and late running jobs;
* Windows PowerShell; and
* setting the maximum dispatch time.

As another major enhancement, ActiveBatch 6 introduced the concept of Virtual Root to allow for its job scheduler to be made available as a multi-tenant utility within or outside of the enterprise. Each organization’s unit will see its “Job Plans” populated with its ActiveBatch objects, but, if so required, will not be able to see or access other users’ plans and objects. In other words, each user/tenant is isolated, secured, and “blind” or transparent to the other. Each unit’s plans are published as directory references for secure access.

Last but not least, event management capabilities were enhanced for non-Windows-based systems. The options range from file triggers, centralized logging (log files can be made directly to the UI/client regardless of platform type), and silent (push) installations. The system also features integration of jobs to be executed on a mainframe system, or for a mainframe job to trigger other workflows on Windows, Linux, UNIX or OpenVMS systems.

Excellent Value in the ETO Landscape: How Global Shop Solutions Excels for ETO Industry Challenges

The needs of the changing business, economic, and technology landscapes have given organizations that manufacture precision and complex products an added incentive to see how they can manage to contain rising costs, and stay competitive against global competition and market volatility. The findings were quite unlike those experienced by tradiditional discrete manufacturers, since discrete manufacturers do not deal with the same intricacies of mass customization as ETO manufacturers. It was with this as a backdrop that I and fellow TEC analyst Leslie Satenstein engaged in conversation with Global Shop Solutions ERP engineer Marc Atnipp in order to review their product One-System as part of a recent TEC Certification exercise.

A Word About the Vendor

Over three decades ago, from deep in the heart of Texas, Global Shop Solutions founder Dick Alexander was a proponent of such core manufacturing principles as continuous improvement and just-in-time manufacturing. In these approaches the goal is always to reduce and eliminate non-value-added activities which contribute to delays in production and ultimately drive costs upwards through excessive machine set-up costs and improperly managed inventory among other things. Through the core principles which underlay the development of this software, the product struck an eager and responsive chord among its initial customers in the small to medium sized manufacturing space within the “custom job-shop” and engineer-to-order segments of the market. The initial market acceptance of these principles and a vendor that could deliver on the promise propelled the organization though its growth and development. Now, three decades later, Global Shop Solutions is truly a global enterprise solution, with customers not only in the US and Canada but also in South America and down-under in Australia.

What We Liked About the Software

Global Shop Solutions has developed a fully integrated manufacturing and accounting ERP package for custom ETO shops spanning a range of industries, including aerospace and electronic and precision machine and fastener manufacturing. Among the neat features was the GUI icon display menu configuration, the product’s embedded BI application to capture KPI scorecard information at a glance. It also had a rich and comprehensive tool featuring web-enabled scheduling and graphic scheduling tools which can at a glance look at current capacity or constraints across the shop floor, or drill down to specific work center or machinery. The ETO offering supports a “Product Configurator” tool which is mission-critical for any company whose business model is dependent upon the ability to integrate design and engineering changes, estimates, and quotes in short order on a daily basis. The ETO ERP application offers standard CRM functionality, which means it can be a one-stop single solution for those firms looking for a value proposition between functionality, budget, and feature. The system had its own built-in report generator, permitting the user to easily create reports on the fly. This can be useful for organizations that have inventory at multiple locations and need to either reconcile physical inventory counts or transfer semi-finished materials between plants and company warehouse locations.

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.