Enterprise Apps Today interviewed IT experts to determine what’s going on with Enterprise Resource planning (ERP), where it’s all heading and what companies should be doing about it.

• ERP’s Cloudy Future – Migrating to the cloud enables companies of all sizes to evolve their IT infrastructure.
• Hybrid Cloud – Have the best of both worlds with on-premise applications AND cloud appications integrated to your system.
• Better ERP Reporting – Improved reporting, facilitated by analytics and tighter integration is a current trend in ERP.
• Fighting ERP Tradition – Companies hesitant of change want something that can help them solve their problems with simple solutions.
• SMB ERP Adoption – The move to the cloud has led to greater SMB adoption of ERP.
• ERP Platform Approach – There is a move toward businesses making a strategic platform choice first, and then working with individual departments to choose applications that fit the overall platform strategy.
• ERP Vendor Consolidation – There will most likely be more mergers in the near future.

We are likely to see a growing cloud ERP presence, heavier SMB buy-in, more analytics and a smaller group of ERP vendors to choose from as the field continues to thin down due to mergers.

 

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Earlier this month, Infor acquired supply chain management cloud software GT Nexus for $675 million, a move to broaden the capabilities of its Enterprise Resource planning (ERP) software. With customers including the likes of Adidas Group, Caterpillar, Columbia Sportswear, Levi Strauss & Co., Maersk, Pfizer, and UPS. Infor’s aims to strengthen its portfolio as the retail industry continues to shift towards contract-based manufacturing. Charles Phillips, chief executive of Infor, states “Together, Infor and GT Nexus will provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their supply chains to manage production and monitor goods in transit and at rest.”

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An academic medical center in New Hampshire is working to revolutionize healthcare with predictive analytics, wearable devices and the cloud. “It’s important to think about healthcare being on the precipice of what I think of as an industrial revolution,” says Dr. Jim Weinstein, president and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System. Weinstein’s goal is to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs and deliver more personalized care. To get there, healthcare providers must implement technology in a more automated, systematic way.

Connected devices such as blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeter devices and activity tracker would collect data to be transmitted to the Azure Cloud via smartphone, where it’s pulled into a Cortana Analytics Suite dashboard at a contact center, helping to prevent people from getting sick in the first place by providing physicians with actionable data that can help them provide personal, optimal care.

 

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Implementing Lawson Security is a relatively simple and straightforward procedure. If you are planning on taking on this challenge in-house we encourage you to follow the following steps:

1. Spend time on gathering your requirements. This is by far the most important step of the process and you should have a good working document to begin with. If you need templates to start with, feel free to use our templates.
2. Come up with a really great naming convention up front. This will save you all kinds of headaches in the long run. I like to add the word “Role” to all my roles, and “CLS” to all my classes, because later it makes them easier to read and understand as I’m trying to debug. You can come up with your own ideas but keep them consistent.
3. Make sure you have a good backup process for your LDAP data and you have tested it. There is nothing worse than losing your entire implementation because of corrupt LDAP instances. It happens more than you know.
4. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t try to implement all the wishlist of every department in the first phase. Give them the necessities. After they have tested and accepted them, then move on to the fancier stuff.
5. Ask us for a 30-day trial of LSF_IQ when you’re ready to implement because I can assure you that it will save you hundreds of hours of work.
6. Clear all your cache when testing. I’m talking all your cache including:
   1. IOSCacheRefresh
   2. Browser Cache
   3. Security Cache
7. Have a small group of testers. This will ensure that testing is completed in a reasonable time. Otherwise you will be chasing after users for their issues.
8. Create a Google Spreadsheet for issue tracking unless you have a better tool.
9. Roll out to one small group of users at a time. Remember, until check_ls is set to YES, users can still use LAUA

Last but not least, go to the education page on this site and look for webinars related to Lawson Security. There are several there that go over concepts.

If you’re trying to find a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to use for  your business, consider the following when choosing the system for you:

1. Simplify your business processes first – you should always look to simplify your business processes before implementing ERP software.
2. Know what you need – Have a check list of needs, that way choosing the right ERP system will be easy.
3. Get your whole team involved – Your company is as strong as your weakest link, so make sure you get input from every person in every department any needs they would have that an ERP system can solve.
4. Train staff to understand your business processes – If your staff understands the way your business works and the processes which underpin it, they will have a good grounding in the logic which works behind the scenes of an ERP software solution.
5. Enable the use of multiple applications – choose a system that is available on your mobile phone/tablet, too so you can access the data you need wherever and whenever.

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