Best Practices for Selecting ERP Software

Learn 6 best practices from Focus Experts for selecting the right Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for your business. ERP solutions are, by nature, large and complex. How do you select the solution best-suited to your firm? In this guide, Focus Experts share their top 6 best practices for selecting ERP software.
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Essential Features of Manufacturing ERP Software

This brief will help you understand how the functions link together, help reduce the overwhelm and highlight where you can realize the most value. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can seem like giant beasts when you realize how integrated they can be with nearly every function in your business. From the Sales and Quoting process through Material Planning, Procurement, Scheduling, Shop Floor Control, Quality Management, Outside Services, Shipping & Logistics, Customer Service, Finance and Human Resource Management, an integrated system can be tied into nearly every function. This brief will help you understand how the functions link together, help reduce the overwhelm and highlight where you can realize the most value.
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The 2011 Focus Experts Guide to Enterprise Resource Planning

In this Guide, you will find a wealth of insight, analysis and information intended to help you understand and select an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. In this Guide, you will find a wealth of insight, analysis and information intended to help you understand and select an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Despite being a backbone enterprise application, ERP is often misunderstood. This Guide demystifies ERP so you can make an informed buying decision. The contributors to this Guide are all top experts, so you can have confidence in their suggestions and recommendations. The audience for this Guide consists primarily of small and midsize enterprises. While core ERP principles hold true regardless of company size, large organizations and government agencies have distinct needs from those of smaller companies. When evaluating ERP, small to midsize organizations should look for ease of use and simplicity of implementation. Check Vendor Considerations on page 18 as a starting point in your search. Even though small companies may have complex requirements, often there is insufficient budget or human resources available to devote the required effort to maintaining IT infrastructure. Therefore, Web-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) products are worth serious consideration.
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2011 Trends Report: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

In this guide, Focus Experts Steve Christensen, Dana Craig, Tim Hourigan, Robert Israch and Michael Krigsman share eight of their 2011 predictions for ERP, so you can plan around changing tides and trends. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) automates many aspects of an organization’s operations, cascading across traditional boundaries of operations, finance, manufacturing and more. As such, changes in the ERP market can cause a ripple effect in your business. In this guide, Focus Experts Steve Christensen, Dana Craig, Tim Hourigan, Robert Israch and Michael Krigsman share eight of their 2011 predictions for ERP, so you can plan around changing tides and trends.
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SOA Best Practices & Design Patterns: Key to Successful Service Oriented Architecture Implementa

White paper exploring best practices for SOA. There is no question that the successful implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) relies on a careful and holistic approach to business planning. One of the most important tools in the evaluation, purchase, and ongoing use of SOA is the body of best practices that vendors, consultants, and customers have compiled. The promise of business agility, improved customer service, and competitive advantage with SOA is real. What varies most is the time, cost, and ease of SOA implementation. By learning from the experiences of those organizations that have been through the process and looking at the standard best practices of large-scale technology implementations, success can come earlier and more dramatically.
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Right from the Start: SOA Lifestyle Governance

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) promise unlimited agility and organizational flexibility. However, achieving these benefits is entirely contingent upon the ability to effectively manage the SOA environment across the enterprise. This paper presents an overview of strategies and practices for governing the transformation to, and the evolution of, SOA.
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Achieving Business Agility with Application Grid

Companies are learning how to run their data centers more efficiently using less hardware, less software and less IT resources. These companies are turning to a new concept called application grid, an infrastructure layer beneath the application layer that pools and dynamically provisions the resources on which those applications run. Application grid brings the same type of efficiency, scalability, and quality of service to the application layer that database clusters brings to the database layer. With an application grid you get greater efficiency, exceptional agility, and superior quality of service. Download this free white paper now.
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Tech Talk: Delight Business Users with Integrated Query and Analysis

IBM Cognos Business Insight changes information delivery for all business users. Watch this recorded event which originally aired on February 15, 2011 to see how this unlimited BI workspace enables business users to create, personalize and interact with all of their information assets. Through demos and discussion, you'll learn how this revolutionary interface lets users: . Satisfy all their information needs in a single, highly intuitive workspace . Blur the lines between business authoring and analysis . Easily create net-new analysis . Enhance existing reports with information from a personal data source Discover how IBM Cognos Business Insight enables self-service BI for business users, while giving IT complete confidence that data will remain secure.
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