PepsiCo Inc. has selected SAP's full mySAP Business Suite to streamline its distribution and delivery processes, improve planning and forecasting, and give better visibility to its global supply chain. 

PepsiCo, which manufactures, distributes and markets Frito-Lay snacks, Pepsi-Cola beverages, Gatorade sports drinks, Tropicana juices and Quaker foods, is aiming to better link its supply chain and inventory data with its customer data.    

SAP and Oracle have been in intense competition for customers in recent years. Welch Foods Inc. picked Oracle to be its global ERP provider in an agreement announced late last year. Now SAP has stolen some Oracle busines from beverage giant PepsiCo, which had been one of Oracle's premier customers since 1997. 

Pepsi North America, one of PepsiCo's divisions, will drop Oracle, adding SAP's entire business suite, including its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ SAPlanning by Exception
Source: Supply & Demand Chain Executive

Demand planners at glove manufacturer Wells Lamont have put their finger on a way to bring new value to the company by leveraging technology that allows them to plan by exception.

Once a company has a uniform forecasting process in place, how does it take its demand planning to the next level of efficiency and effectiveness? That was the challenge facing Wells Lamont Corp. in 2003 when the Chicago-based glove manufacturer began looking for a tool that could move its planners out of the data gathering business and into a more strategic role at the company.

Founded in 1907, Wells Lamont today is the world's largest glovemaker. Its retail division's product can be found at home improvement centers, supermarkets, discount stores and hardware chains, as well as specialty retailers such as outdoor outfitter and sporting goods stores, while the industrial division sells its gloves through safety distributors into the industrial marketplace.

Aside from forecasting on the order of 5,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs) between the two divisions, Wells Lamont faces planning challenges typical of the two sectors in which it operates. On the retail side, the company offers products with high seasonality, while demand for its industrial gloves runs in up-and-down cycles that reflect trends for the various product lines on this side of the business. As a result, the company's planners cannot take a “cookie-cutter” approach to how they look at demand, performance and forecast adjustments for Wells Lamont's different product lines. (Read more...) 0105
_________________________________

▼ Open source on offense in ERP and business applications market 
By Jay Lyman
Source: NewsForge

Flexibility, cost savings, and efficiency have been driving enterprise users away from proprietary technology to Linux and open source. Now a recent IDC study shows that one of the last holdouts, the big-vendor-dominated market of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, is also poised to start taking off for non-proprietary technology.  

The top ERP vendors -- SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Microsoft, and Sage -- are likely to hold onto their 46 percent of the anticipated $26.7 billion ERP applications market, but the desire to avoid vendor lock-in, more support for Linux as an underlying platform, and ability to gain cost savings are all coalescing to boost open source in this market, estimated to hit $36 billion by 2008, according to IDC research director Albert Pang. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Rebound seen for resource management software  
By Dawn Kawamoto
Source: CNET News.com

Sales of applications for managing enterprise resources are expected to grow 7 percent this year to $26.7 billion, with the top vendors taking a larger share, according to a report released Monday by IDC.

Midsize customers, government agencies and industries such as health care are helping to drive the rebound in enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software, which IDC attributed to an increase in spending on information technology and a pent-up demand for new applications to increase productivity. The market is expected to grow to about $37 billion by 2008.  

"It's become more apparent in the past six to nine months we're ready for a rebound," said Albert Pang, enterprise applications research director at IDC. "Last year, it was a getting-ready year for some of these ERP users. And in 2004, it's the contract signing and implementation years for them."  (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Getting IT Spending Right This Time
Source: Forbes.com 

Who can blame executives if half a decade of overspending on information technology now makes them obsessed with costs? Companies in much of the world are capping their IT expenditures. Some even peg the performance bonuses of chief information officers to how much money they cut from technology budgets.  

Yet companies underinvest in technology at their peril--even in lean times. New technology, deployed intelligently, can help organizations make dramatic leaps in productivity and redefine competition within whole sectors, as Wal-Mart and Dell Computer, among others, have shown. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Finding The Right Fit
By Doug Bartholomew
Source: Industry Week

Software responds to different industries, sizes of manufacturers.  

When 3M went looking for a software package to help standardize and automate its far-flung and disparate methods of barcoding and packaging products, it found there was nothing on the market that fit the bill.   

Faced with that problem, many manufacturers, assuming they have the information systems expertise, will create their own application. And that's exactly what 3M did. The only difference is, the new software worked so well, the company decided to offer it to other manufacturers of industrial products that had similar packaging needs. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Supply Chain management for really smart people
By Robert Westervelt
Source: SearchSAP.com 

When Malvern, Pa.-based MG Industries tried to forecast its demand schedule several years ago, the company could look barely five days ahead.

Using dated delivery schedules, scribbled on notebook paper and attached to clip boards, managers were having a difficult time calculating demand and often wrote insufficient reports, said Matt Brown, vice president of supply chain management at MG Industries. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Security in an ERP World
By Mark Van Holsbeck and Jeffrey Z. Johnson
Source: Help Net Security

Every good hacker story ends with the line: "and then he's got root access to your network and can do whatever he wants." But the story really doesn't end there. This is just the beginning of the real damage that the hacker can inflict. 

While most information security initiatives focus on perimeter security to keep outsiders from gaining access to the internal network, the potential for real financial loss comes from the risk of outsiders acting as authorized users to generate damaging transactions within business systems. 

The continued integration of enterprise resource planning software only increases the risk of both hackers who break through perimeter security and insiders who abuse system privileges to misappropriate assets — namely cash — through acts of fraud. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Business Process Modeling: A Model Student
By Debra D'Agostino
Source: CIO Insight

The goal is to get all the benefits from automation—improved efficiency, reduced costs, greater speed — without becoming inflexible. But how? For some, business process modeling does the trick.   

Automating business processes is essential to keeping a competitive edge, but can make your company inflexible.

In his 2001 book, Jack: Straight from the Gut, former General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch wrote, "The most valuable opportunities for establishing competitive differentiation are in how a product or service is created, sold, delivered and supported." Few would disagree. Every effective business has processes that monitor the "how" of creating and getting products and services to market, and the efficiency of those processes can mean success or failure. 

The need to manage business processes has been around ever since people began trading bushels of maize for buffalo hides. But it wasn't until the rise of information technologies, and especially enterprise-wide systems such as ERP, CRM and supply-chain management, that the effort to automate these processes began in earnest. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Wal-Mart tests RFID in Texas stores
Source: ComputerWeekly.com

Retailer Wal-Mart has begun testing the use of RFID (radio frequency identification) tagging at seven US stores and a regional distribution centre in Texas, in anticipation of a wider rollout of the technology which the company hoped will eventually replace bar codes. 

The trial includes participation from eight manufacturers, which have agreed to implement case and pallet-level tagging on a total of 21 products. 

The much-anticipated test comes after Wal-Mart threw down the gauntlet to its top 100 suppliers last year, setting a January 2005 deadline for them to place RFID tags on all cases and pallets destined for its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in the Dallas and Fort Worth area. 

The trial is intended to start the RFID tag migration in anticipation of the January deadline, said Simon Langford, manager of RFID strategy at Wal-Mart. According to Langford, all of its top 100 suppliers except two are on track to meet the deadline, with many planning to join the trial earlier. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Send Jobs to India? Some Find It's Not Always Best
By Eduardo Porter
Source: The New York Times

Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised. 

"For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far," said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. The "depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough" among Indian programmers, the executive said. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Majority of IT and Business Plans Still Not Linked
By Allen Bernard
Source: InternetNews

Businesses that align information technology (IT) strategies with business strategies are significantly more likely to achieve a high return on IT investment, according to a survey of senior financial officers conducted by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and Financial Executives International (FEI).

"Only by linking IT and business strategy can companies really assess the ultimate ROI of information technology investments," said Rebecca Segal, vice president, Worldwide Services and Solutions Integration Strategies Research. "This survey is a wake-up call for financial executives to take action given the potential benefits to be gained."

The sixth annual Technology Issues for Financial Executives survey that looked at the IT trends most critical for chief financial officers (CFOs) and other senior finance executives also found that only 10 percent of companies achieve a high rate of return on investment for IT projects. Among those companies with a business-aligned IT plan, however, that percentage more than doubles to 24 percent. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Going the cross ERP way
By Ashish Gupta
Source: Express Computer

Over the next three to four years we will see cross ERP products as customers demand more from enterprise applications.

All businesses are wired and most software companies accept that their products must talk to each other. The Net is both omnipresent and a still highly attractive environment for applying technology to business processes and problems. Finally, even the most hardened competitors in the software world now accept that it is in their self interest to share previously secret application programming interfaces (APIs) to ensure different companies products work easily and effectively.

Easy sharing of data and applications will happen, but the business world, already questioning the ROI of previous technology investments, will not do business with technology companies that make unrealistic claims and then fail to deliver. Finally, software companies with mature management and a realistic understanding of their market can and will prosper — neither Rome nor the Taj Mahal were built in one day, but built they were. (Read more...)
_________________________________

▼ Secret CIO: Another Outsourcing Done Him Wrong Song
By Herbert W. Lovelace
Source: InformationWeek

Over the years, I've found there's real value in talking to other CIOs about their problems and tribulations. It isn't just the pleasure of commiserating about the unfair burdens heaped upon us. What makes these discussions essential is the ability to learn from their experiences. It's far better to have knowledge of where a specific technology or vendor is weak than it is to go blindly into what can be a career-threatening decision (aren't they all today?). So it was with anticipation that I met my friend Glenn after work.

Glenn is one of the more innovative CIOs in our city. He was the first among us to try voice over IP and to provide executive education in IT when the rest of us were complaining that our business leaders didn't have a clue as to what we did for a living. Recently, he decided to outsource his global help desk for internal users and business customers. Since his company depends heavily on Web-enabled transactions, this step wasn't a trivial one. Glenn had told us that although other industries were using outsourced customer support with mixed results, he felt that he could make it a success, even though his business requires some specialized knowledge of regulated products.

When I got to the hotel bar, Glenn was ensconced at a corner table with a drink in front of him. This behavior was unusual for him. The man limits himself to one adult beverage and never orders before I arrive. I figured that I already had some insight into how his great leap forward was progressing. (Read more...)