ERP Special technology report
observes that compliance has become an
increasing burden in many businesses; both from a legislative,
Kevin Bull, product manager
environmental and quality management perspective. “ERP systems need to include tools that allow business
process documentation to be generated and held in a central resource and linked to system processes,” said Bull.
Richard Turner, ERP solutions director at CSC, considers that one of the recent key talking points has been Oracle’s move to the new R12 E-Business Suite. “This has been due to the announcement that from November 2011 there will be an increase of 20 per cent in support costs for prior releases, and final legislative patches will be released March 2013,” explained Turner. He added that the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Release 12 is a major new addition to the market, with significant changes in data model and
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functionality, especially in the Financials product area. “It introduces centralised functionality to handle accounting, taxation, access to data across organisations and offers more flexible implementation options than were available in Release 11i,” he said, pointing out that this is in order to meet today’s wider variety of business needs.
‘Green’ incentives According to James Norwood, senior vice president of product marketing at Epicor, one key area is carbon accounting. “The
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ERP systems need to include tools that allow business process documentation to be generated and held in a central resource and linked to system processes.” – Kevin Bull, product manager, Columbus IT.
environment and reduction of carbon consumption has been talked about for generations,” he said, “but in the last ten years huge strides have been made by governments in the way they legislate on this area, and provide incentives for businesses to
demonstrate their own reductions.” In the UK, Norwood points to programmes such as the CRC Energy
Efficiency Scheme, which have accelerated the need for organisations to report accurately on their use of carbon throughout the business. “This is extremely complicated to do,” said Norwood, “but making it an integral part of enterprise-wide systems, such as Epicor, can remove a lot of the headache, improving governance and reducing risk.” Jonathan Orme, sales operations manager at Exel Computer Systems, observes that more and more companies now demand browser- based ERP solutions from their system providers. “These businesses,” he said, “are looking to continually increase productivity by
… in truth, full-blown ERP SaaS offerings are only just reaching a point where customers are prepared to entrust their businesses to them.” – James Norwood, Epicor.
www.logisticsit.com
allowing users remote connectivity to their operations, and this requires data to be available at all times to all users, anywhere.” Orme added that the ability to access business systems worldwide, without the need to load client software, is now a necessity for any business.
According to Phil Burgess, RVP, base ERP sales at Infor, Mobility is a key area of development. “People expect this capability these days due our familiarity with a range of mobile devices and the ubiquity of wi-fi and broadband,” he said. “Simply put, the expectation is that it should be as easy to access any enterprise app as easily as anything at home, on the move.” Another development, says Burgess, is to be found in the area of reporting – KPIs, balanced scorecard, BI etc. “Reporting still rules a lot of reasoning,” he remarked. “You must be able to make informed decisions based on the intelligence in the business. This is now ‘uber-critical’ as every decision (especially in the current finance climate) must be
December 2011
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
James Norwood, senior vice president of product marketing
IT 11
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