Can 'Intuitive' And 'ERP' Words Be Associated?

Seemingly unfazed by (although certainly aware of) tough economic environment, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com ), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, continues to pragmatically expand its operations worldwide and to unveil significant enhancements to its latest product release.

Most recently, it released Intuitive SPC, an optional statistical process control (SPC) software module for Intuitive ERP (formerly MRP9000), Intuitive's flagship ERP system. Intuitive SPC is a real-time module that combines data collection, charting, monitoring, analysis, communication and reporting � all functions accessible from a single screen. At a glance, any authorized user can then check on the exact status of any process at any workstation, department, or plant locally or around the globe.

Intuitive SPC reportedly allows the user to activate program functions with one mouse click, choose from one of five ways to input data, and close the loop with an �out-of-control' warning for corrective action before operators can proceed. The module also allows the user to cut and paste graphic and table data into virtually any other Windows application. Further, sophisticated analytical capabilities of Intuitive SPC allow users to display up to three sets of control limits on charts, choose estimated or calculated sigma for control limits and process capability calculations, and generate charts from highly refined data queries.

Earlier, towards the end of 2001, Intuitive also announced the release of another optional module, a web-based Advanced Configurator aimed at streamlining the quotation and ordering of configure-to-order (CTO) products to deliver, on-the-fly, accurate pricing, product configuration and specifications, as well as bill-of-material (BOM) and process routings. The Advanced Configurator is reportedly a true "bottom-up," rules-based configurator, providing point-and-click product definition under a rule and constraint-based guidance engine. It can be executed from any Web browser and allows the user to execute product configuration concurrently or independently in either client/server or "thin web client" environments � all utilizing one universal set of product configuration rules and objects. The Advanced Configurator is fully integrated with the sales, inventory, costing and quoting modules of the Intuitive ERP system.

Previously in 2001, Intuitive announced the release of iTrack, a new e-commerce enhancement aimed at increasing customer satisfaction while decreasing sales administrative costs for its customers. iTrack extends the previously available WebRemote functionality by allowing customers to log into Intuitive ERP via the Internet and track the status of their shipments and orders, view a current accounts receivable aging, and make other valuable inquiries specific to their organization.

iTrack was a part of the of the Intuitive ERP Release 5.2, released mid 2001. Version 5.2 added functionality to many areas of the product, including: e-commerce, key process indicator (KPI) tracking and reporting, international improvements, major enhancements to the planning functionality, as well as enhancements throughout the order processing and accounting areas. Other noteworthy enhancements to the product included:

* The Decision Management Tool, which tracks and analyzes KPI from throughout Intuitive ERP to generate 28 different decision points that provide such information as the net sales to inventory ratio, return on net worth, current and quick ratios, margins, and inventory turnover. It also allows the user to generate trend analysis by year, quarter, or individual fiscal period, enabling management to make better, more informed and timelier decisions.

* The Visual Order Pegging module, which utilizes the recently released Dynamic MRP module, a completely memory-resident MRP planning system which drops MRP runs from hours to seconds. The Visual Order Pegging module allows the user to trace up or down the production hierarchy (multi-level) to track the source/use relationships. It then provides the most comprehensive and user-friendly tool on the market to visualize those relationships, graphically display problems areas in the schedule, and highlight the effects of things like new orders or a late-arriving material
Also in 2001, to bolster its basic front-office and sales management offering, Intuitive announced its partnership with Interact Commerce Corporation, makers of SalesLogix, the leader in mid-market and small business customer relationship management (CRM). Intuitive has entered into both Business Partner and Technology Partner agreements with Interact, and will be integrating the SalesLogix package with the Intuitive ERP product. The SalesLogix suite of products includes complete management of the sales cycle, marketing campaign management, customer support management, and eCommerce, all available anytime, anywhere, using essentially any device.

At about the same time, the company announced the expansion of its global partner channel with the signing of 12 international partners throughout 2001. International partners have been signed in the following locations: Turkey, Quebec, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Spain, Czech Republic, Poland, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia, Tijuana, and the Mexican states of Nuevo Leon and Cohuila.

The signings strengthen the existing Intuitive channel to 21 partners outside of North America. Historically, the Intuitive international channel has represented just over 20% of sales revenue, which should likely increase in the future. These new partners join an existing international channel, which includes representatives in Mexico, Brazil, Norway, France, Australia, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Vietnam.

Concurrently with all the above initiatives, Intuitive has pursued its Microsoft .NET initiative launch. As a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET beta program, the company had been designing and testing its future Microsoft .NET architecture for more than a year. Mid 2001, it announced the completion of the prototype of Intuitive's Microsoft .NET architectural framework and its plan to convert Intuitive ERP to the .NET Framework.

The Microsoft .NET initiative represents a shift that should transform how software applications are built and deployed. Leveraging Microsoft .NET technology should make Intuitive ERP much easier to deploy and maintain, faster to enhance and will allow it to leverage the Internet in through XML Web services. Software written using the .NET Framework is inherently more robust, faster, and easier to administer. For instance, software installation should be accomplished by simply copying files. Intuitive is glad to be saying goodbye to the old problems of Component Object Model (COM)-based software that the development world has often referred to as 'Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Hell' in the past.

A Definition of Data Warehousing

The data warehousing market consists of tools, technologies, and methodologies that allow for the construction, usage, management, and maintenance of the hardware and software used for a data warehouse, as well as the actual data itself. Surveys indicate Data Warehousing will be the single largest IT initiative after completion of Y2K efforts. Data warehousing is currently a $28 Billion market (Source: Data Warehousing Institute) and we estimate 20% growth per annum through at least 2002.

Two of the pioneers in the field were Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmon. Biographies of these two individuals have been provided, since many of the terms discussed in this paper were coined and concepts defined by them.
Biographical Information

Bill Inmon
Bill Inmon is universally recognized as the "father of the data warehouse." He has over 26 years of database technology management experience and data warehouse design expertise, and has published 36 books and more than 350 articles in major computer journals. His books have been translated into nine languages. He is known globally for his seminars on developing data warehouses and has been a keynote speaker for every major computing association. Before founding Pine Cone Systems, Bill was a co-founder of Prism Solutions, Inc.

Ralph Kimball
Ralph Kimball was co-inventor of the Xerox Star workstation, the first commercial product to use mice, icons, and windows. He was vice president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, and founder and CEO of Red Brick Systems. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford in electrical engineering, specializing in man-machine systems. Ralph is a leading proponent of the dimensional approach to designing large data warehouses. He currently teaches data warehousing design skills to IT groups, and helps selected clients with specific data warehouse designs. Ralph is a columnist for Intelligent Enterprise magazine and has a relationship with Sagent Technology, Inc., a data warehouse tool vendor. His book "The Data Warehouse Toolkit" is widely recognized as the seminal work on the subject.
Data Warehouse:

The term Data Warehouse was coined by Bill Inmon in 1990, which he defined in the following way: "A warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and non-volatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process".

He defined the terms in the sentence as follows:

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Subject Oriented: Data that gives information about a particular subject instead of about a company's ongoing operations.
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Integrated: Data that is gathered into the data warehouse from a variety of sources and merged into a coherent whole.
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Time-variant: All data in the data warehouse is identified with a particular time period.
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Non-volatile: Data is stable in a data warehouse. More data is added but data is never removed. This enables management to gain a consistent picture of the business.

(Source: "What is a Data Warehouse?" W.H. Inmon, Prism, Volume 1, Number 1, 1995). This definition remains reasonably accurate almost ten years later. However, a single-subject data warehouse is typically referred to as a data mart, while data warehouses are generally enterprise in scope. Also, data warehouses can be volatile. Due to the large amount of storage required for a data warehouse, (multi-terabyte data warehouses are not uncommon), only a certain number of periods of history are kept in the warehouse. For instance, if three years of data are decided on and loaded into the warehouse, every month the oldest month will be "rolled off" the database, and the newest month added.

Ralph Kimball provided a much simpler definition of a data warehouse. As stated in his book, "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", on page 310, a data warehouse is "a copy of transaction data specifically structured for query and analysis". This definition provides less insight and depth than Mr. Inmon's, but is no less accurate.

BI Market Consolidation Compared to ERP Market Consolidation

The frantic first week of June that marked an outright internecine war in the ERP space, seems to have been somewhat repeated in the second half of July, but this time in the business intelligence (BI) market. While one could find some elements of similarity (e.g., market share bolstering and cross-selling opportunities) with the ongoing raging consolidation in the overall enterprise applications market (particularly in the mature ERP segment), the onset of consolidations in the BI market still has much more to it than meets the eye.

One group of reasons would lie in different current evolutionary states between ERP and BI markets (i.e., the mature and highly penetrated first vs. the still fragmented and far from being saturated latter), while the others would come from peculiar factors, such as Microsoft's intended foray into the reporting sector of the broader BI market with its recent unveiling of SQL Server Reporting Services, slated for a foreseeable future and forcing those directly affected (particularly its still quite involved partner Crystal Decisions) to make defensive moves. Hence, Crystal, with already interesting genesis (see Seagate Software 'Crystallizes' Its New Name: Crystal Decisions) and particularly successful recent past, had recently announced its IPO intentions for ~$172 million, and it was also logical to expect acquisition suitors to start knocking on the door.

In any case, while ERP and analytics have been inseparable ever since the idea of business automation via the IT a way back in the 1960s, they have had different user experiences, evolutionary paths, and so on. Namely, although ERP systems have positively transformed many enterprises' business processes, many users have still been left feeling as oversold to, due to the overwhelming notion that these systems inhibit access to the vital information �jailed' in them. Often indeed, in most traditional ERP systems a number of financial activities are grouped together to form artificially created processes, which bear not much resemblance to the actual business activities, i.e., ERP systems' focus had often appeared to only be getting the correct figures into the general ledger and create a transactional glut.

Contrary to it, the BI applications have not experienced the "boom-and-bust" cycle of the adjacent application areas, and their need has been neither over- nor under-hyped. Business intelligence provides an environment in which business users receive information that is reliable, consistent, understandable and easily manipulated (i.e., flexible). Therefore, C-level executives and middle management have always had a need to understand their business' performance regardless of good or bad economic times � while the output from BI might change, the need is always there. Particularly the recent massive demise of dot-com's, the depressed economic times, and the stringent Sarbanes-Oxley reporting regulatory requirements following up the high-profile corporate fraud scandals (e.g., Enron and WorldCom) have additionally increased executives' focus on understanding and managing corporate performance. Given that the BI tools have neither been terribly complex nor expensive to deploy, but have still been helpful in facilitating decision-making process, they have lately become considered necessary rather than only a luxury. Also, decisions are nowadays increasingly made at ever lower levels in organizations.
To that end, various enterprise business intelligence (BI) solutions enable organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance, and they leverage the information that is stored in an array of corporate databases/data-warehouses, legacy systems, ERP, supply chain management (SCM) or customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Hence, given the market segment's still rosy outlook and many incumbent BI vendors' bullish recent performance, the consolidation just for the sake of market share would not be the main reason for mergers. A more compelling reason would be the fragmented and evolutionary nature of the BI market.

Namely, the market has gone through a number of evolutionary steps on a journey that began with the pesky "green bar" reports printed off from mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s, which were infamously poor at pinpointing critical information, and because they often arrived on managers' desks a week or so after month-end, they were already a cry far after the fact. Driven by technological progress in the decades since, the evolution has embraced everything from queries & reports, Executive Information Systems (EIS), on-line analytical processing (OLAP) technology, data mining, digital cockpits to portals, all with a common aim � to provide more timely information, filtered for importance and in a context that supports better decision-making.

Nowadays, popular uses of BI include management dashboards and scorecards, collaborative applications, workflow, analytics, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and both customer and partner extranets, to name some. These solutions enable companies to, e.g., gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, reduce costs, detect patterns, optimize the supply chain, analyze project/product portfolio, increase productivity and improve financial performance. For more information on these tools' use in the marketing automation segment of CRM, albeit with a possible universal applicability in many other enterprise application areas, see Analyze This).

Geac Gets Its Commonsense Share Of Consolidation, With Revolving Door CEOs No Less Part Three: Challenges

Beyond the Market Impact of the events covered in Parts One and Two of this note, Geac Computer Corporation Limited (TSX: GAC) faces serious challenges.

Although it is functionally strong, Geac System21 has until recently lacked some of the technology and buzzword �must haves' such as a web-based, server-centric architecture, XML-based integration and sales force automation (SFA) that have been natively provided by many of its rivals such as SAP, Intentia, IFS and J.D. Edwards. In contrast, Geac products have mostly "talked" to the outside modern collaborative world through a plethora of open APIs (application programming interfaces) and the company has remained content (or forced) to settle for �best-of-breed' connectivity. Additional functional suites like CRM, advanced web-based product configuration management, business intelligence (BI) and so on have been provided largely through partner alliances such as with Cognos, Information Builders, and Business Objects for business intelligence (BI), Applix for its iCRM and interactive planning solution, and with former Frontstep for its SyteLine APS and SyteCenter solutions.

By delivering the above-mentioned native enhancements within System21 Aurora, Geac might partially allay some customers' fears that System 21 functionality will increasingly lag that of its major competitors. Still, the tacit stance Geac has assumed while developing the Aurora enhancements over the last few years has come with a cost of lost mind share and a consequent challenge of putting the product back on prospects' radar screens. In fact, Aurora is a 2nd or 3rd-generation of web-enablement, given the web-based supplier- and customer-facing applications have been available in earlier System21 versions since the late 1990's. This lost mindshare will make selling the product to new customers quite difficult, especially considering a tough selling climate.

Further, Geac will have to also embrace and promote a rock solid strategy for integrating its product suite with multiple partners. The company may benefit from following J.D. Edwards' example and closely partnering with a major enterprise applications integration (EAI) vendor in order to ease integration with its partners. In line with this thinking, Geac already has strong technology partnerships with IBM and Jacada (for hardware and middleware). The Aurora product uses the latest IBM technology, and the dependence on IBM has largely helped Geac curb its development costs while delivering a number of additional modules running on a unified platform.

Still, the process of harmonizing the installed user base across a controllable number of active software versions remains a major challenge. If history helps us predict the future, most contemporary vendors will not be able to pull off a smooth evolution from their current architecture to the next-generation. The problem largely involves the issue of being limited by the past, making it more difficult to truly transition to a new architecture (for more information, see What's Wrong with Application Software? It's the Economics).

It is needless to say that the still varied product portfolio under the Geac banner will inevitably take more pondering and soul-searching and may likely act as a distraction from the primary products' strategy. Geac has already begun to address this matter by divesting a number of less-profitable and non-viable products (see Geac Decomposes To Survive), but it still has a few products running on disparate platforms, from mainframes to web-based architectures.

Having an unfocused, multi-product and multi-technology strategy in markets with diverse dynamics typically multiplies and overstretches sales, R&D, and service & support resources, jeopardizing the products' possible long-term success in their respective niches. This market perception and sentiment is not to be neglected, as some customers feel that Geac essentially treats some venerable products like the M-Series (a.k.a., Millennium, acquired from former McCormack & Dodge) as a cash cow and has long not reinvested significantly in the product's enhancements. At the same time, the support fee is perceived as costly, while the Millennium architecture is unique enough that it is difficult to find resources to support the application independently. Time alone will tell whether the Extensity and Comshare acquisitions and IBM technology overlay will add some major new value atop these applications. At least, the opportunity seems to be there.

Geac Gets Its Commonsense Share Of Consolidation, With Revolving Door CEOs No Less Part Two: Market Impact

With continued stable financial performance, Geac Computer Corporation Limited (TSX: GAC) has certainly moved far beyond its 2001 crossroads, although with an inevitable dose of lingering market skepticism. Back from the edge and on a comeback trail under energized management, and with a pruned but also more viable product set, Geac has joined the ranks of the once high-flying and almost deceased mid-market ERP vendors which are again poised for a more promising albeit subdued future compared to the halcyon 1990s (see Resurrection, Vitality And Perseverance Of Former ERP 'Goners').

In Geac's particular case, it appears the company has at least learned some hard lessons so it will not fall again as it did through its former unfocused, rampant acquisition strategy and in the face of the overall weakness of the ERP market during 1999/2000, which subsequently resulted in sharp revenue decline, product development strategy limbo, a disconcerted user base, and disastrous financial results (see Figure 2). Geac's former frugal strategy � focused on acquiring, relentlessly cutting administrative expenses and generating service revenue, instead of taking decisive action to breathe fresh air into its arsenal of vantage products � also backfired on the company and relegated it as an "also-ran" in the enterprise applications market.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Still, Geac's strengths today remain its geographical spread, restored financial health, manageable level of product diversity, and keen understanding of industry business processes in selected vertical sectors. The company seems to have meanwhile become well attuned to the needs of its mid-market install base, with many loyal long-term customers currently enjoying considerable service & support attention. To give the devil its due, Geac has managed, even during its most desperate times, not to painfully tighten the screws on its customers by blatantly increasing licensing, support & maintenance charges. In case of the System 21 Aurora enhancements, which have been a result of many current customers' requirements, one should note that most of the new functionality has been offered to these customers in return for slightly increased maintenance payments, but not for an additional license cost.

Moreover, Geac still ranks among the Top 10 global enterprise applications vendors based solely on revenues and customer base, since its estimated revenues and install base including Comshare would soon be close to US $600 million and more than 6,000 customers, respectively. Prior to the acquisition, the company had more than 5,800 customers in 55 countries, approximately 3,700 staff globally, and R&D expenditure in fiscal 2002 and 2003 totaling more than C$90 and C$70 million, respectively.

Therefore, Geac's ability to shore up the business and return to profitability and positive cash flow, which was achieved back in fiscal 2002 (see Figure 1), should be praiseworthy. With a healthy balance sheet, no debt, and substantial and increasing cash reserves, Geac should be able to face the testing future. Its intent to expand industry expertise and to build, prudently acquire, or license a number of selected products to belatedly extend product functionality and increase revenue opportunities from new and existing customers will prove much more difficult. One should, however, praise Geac's recent appetite for smaller and innovative software companies as acquisition targets (rather than erstwhile antiquated software companies at bargain prices in order to capitalize on their maintenance customer bases), with complementary products that can be sold into its Geac Enterprise Systems (GES) division.
The few recent acquisitions seem to validate the notion of Geac reinventing itself by offering more digestible point solutions that address specific business problems and thereby augment existing ERP or legacy system investment. Extensity, which was acquired last year and which added travel and expense (T&E) management, time and attendance, and basic procurement applications to Geac's offering, has already been paying off; the Extensity acquisition complements Geac's vision to add new functionality around the ERP fringes and to address issues of importance to CFOs and financial controllers.

Comshare also seems to be a good fit for Geac because the companies both target midsize enterprises in similar sectors, such as financial services, public sector and insurance, and in similar geographies like the US and the UK. Comshare's existing product portfolio of financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation software should allow Geac to cross-sell this broad range of BPM products to its existing customers, and to bolster its System21, SmartStream, and possibly even mainframe-based E-Series and M-Series product lines. The fact that both companies have experienced strategic and financial quandaries in recent years, and that they have largely weathered the storm, would be another interesting coincidence.

More on a down note, however, Geac still remains strongly service driven with less than 12% of its revenues coming from license revenues (compared to the 33% industry benchmark, estimated by TEC); close to 80% of Geac's revenue comes from professional services and 10% from maintenance revenue, which the above acquisitions will not remedy any time soon. Still, it is now a financially conservative, stable but acquisitive organization that has remained profitable despite the general IT industry downturn. Geac's future focus on delivering new functionality to its heartland of existing customers and industry verticals, while building out its technology to make its existing products more future-proof, seems prudent. Geac is also targeting new customers through Extensity, Comshare and other front-end applications.

While Geac's past difficulties surely originate in the post Y2K-based slump of the ERP market in 1999/2000 and the current protracted economic slowdown, the primary catalyst was a poorly executed acquisition of once prominent UK-based ERP vendor JBA International in 1999. This acquisition has unfortunately stopped short of producing the great synergy it seemed to have offered initially (see Geac and JBA Join Forces to Form New ERP Giant).

Geac System21 is a suite of integrated backbone systems for middle-market companies operating on the IBM iSeries platform. Since its launch in 1994, it has been used by 1,600 customers worldwide, with 650 in the UK (out of 900 in Europe), 350 in Americas and 250 in Asia-Pacific � many in the apparel and footwear, food and beverage and automotive supply markets. As for product scope, System21 covers all the bases of manufacturing, customer service, logistics, financial and service management operations, with several versions geared to specific vertical markets. This product suite offers indisputably deep functionality and advanced business process mapping development, configuration and automation technology in the form of its @ctive business modeling suite, which was an innovative technology that possibly preceded its time a few years ago.

Geac Gets Its Commonsense Share Of Consolidation, With Revolving Door CEOs No Less

During the last few years, Geac Computer Corporation Limited (TSX: GAC), a large Canadian supplier of enterprise management software has had a roller coaster ride. It started with a rampant acquisition stint during the 1990s (see Geac Computer Corporation: Mastering Growth by Acquisitions), followed by a subsequent near-death experience and causal resorting to lifesaving divestitures in 2001 (see Geac Decomposes To Survive), only to see the company come back around, achieve stable financial performance, and articulate a clear strategy to move away from its all-but-failed business model of selling maintenance and services for outdated applications. The result is a number of recent new contract wins, rejuvenated product launches and a return to the acquisition trail amid the ongoing consolidation slugfest, but this time in a seemingly more thought-out and digestible manner.

To that end, Geac announced that on July 15, 2003 the Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of the waiting period required by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 with respect to Geac's proposed acquisition of Comshare Inc. (NASDAQ: CSRE), a provider of corporate performance management (CPM) software. On July 1, Geac announced that it has commenced, through its indirect, wholly owned subsidiary Conductor Acquisition Corp., a cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Comshare. The tender offer was made pursuant to the previously announced definitive merger agreement between Geac and Comshare for US $52 million in cash, dated June 22. Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Comshare shareholders will receive US $4.60 in cash for each share of Comshare common stock held, representing a 31% premium to Comshare's trailing 20-day average share price at the time. The Board of Directors of Geac has received a favorable independent fairness opinion respecting the financial terms of the Comshare merger from Yorkton Securities Inc.

Geac believes this latest acquisition should broaden its business performance management (BPM) offering with the addition of the Comshare MPC ("Management, Planning & Control") suite of planning, budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, and management reporting and analysis solutions. The Comshare acquisition follows the successful purchase of travel and expense management software provider Extensity on March 6, 2003. Geac plans for the tender offer to close by August 2003 and expects the transaction to be accretive to earnings 90 days following completion of the merger as the business is integrated into existing Geac operations.

With its 500 customers and 300 employees, Comshare is expected to add roughly 12% to Geac's annualized revenue, based on the last twelve months of reported revenue from each company, and Geac aspires to participate in a new US $1 billion market that is growing more than 10% per year based on some analysts' predictions. Following the close of the transaction, Geac plans to "eat its own dog food", i.e. to standardize on Comshare MPC for internal use by its divisions worldwide and begin to implement the suite, replacing Geac's current budgeting and consolidation applications. Comshare products will be integrated into Geac's existing application offerings through the use of Geac's application integration framework, which is designed to facilitate integration and interoperability between disparate applications.

The rationale for the acquisition was based on a global assessment of Geac customers' IT requirements, in which approximately 33% of the company's ERP customers surveyed said that they were interested in acquiring improved business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools, such as budgeting, planning and forecasting. These organizations are looking for products that enable them to extract more value from their investment in various Geac's ERP products to monitor and manage overall performance more effectively. Additionally, enterprises face the increasing need for integration, analytics and real-time data access to comply with stricter public disclosure mandates of late.
In addition to pursuing strategic acquisitions, Geac has demonstrated a reliance on internal development as well. In April 2003, the UK division of Geac launched Geac System21 Aurora, a culmination of the most significant investment in the System21 product in recent years (see Geac Hopes To See System21 Shine Again Like 'Aurora'). Combining solid ERP functionality with real-time process management capabilities, System21 Aurora is designed to improve enterprise performance at many levels including operational, process and corporate. It also offers a collaborative supply chain management (SCM) solution that will supposedly leverage the newest technologies and provide users with access to all their business applications through a single web-based user interface (UI).

System21 Aurora is scaled for mid-sized enterprise needs, particularly in the food & beverage, apparel & textiles, fast moving consumer packaged goods (CPG), wholesale distribution and manufacturing sectors, where Geac already has a strong market presence, with a global customer base of approximately 1,600 companies. The product is the culmination of extensive product development, with a strong focus on customer requested enhancements. It provides a process-modeling engine that should enable organizations to map out key operational processes, streamline them, and then activate them to become live business flows of activities and data, with the software automatically generating alerts for manual intervention when required.

Competitive Challenges for Vanguard

Mid 2004, Vanguard introduced Direct Access, the technological enterprise information integration (EII)-like foundation of its Graphical Performance Series (GPS) solution, which delivers integrated enterprise information directly to business decision makers without relying on a data warehouse (DW), thereby potentially saving time, increasing business agility, and reducing costs. The Vanguard GPS solution has since been able to directly access the information stored in enterprise systems, without requiring businesses to move or stage data, or invest in complex and unwieldy data warehousing technology. For a more detailed analysis on this subject, refer to the article, BI Report Status Quo.

The Real-Time Data Integration Server (RDIS), is an integrated server-based middleware application developed by Vanguard that works with the Unified Information Model (UIM) to virtualize multiple data sources. To do so, RDIS receives and interprets information requests, determines which data sources to query to satisfy the request, and subsequently launches the appropriate queries to each source. Once the results arrive back from the data sources, RDIS compresses them to increase efficiency and streams them back to the user. To control the query workload, it manages a pool of connections to each data source and uses user-defined parameters.

RDIS also optimizes the use of available wide area network (WAN) bandwidth to enable efficient near real-time data integration from distributed data sources. There are multiple RDIS instances in the distributed scenario, and each one has high-bandwidth connections to its local data sources. Whenever one of them has no high-speed connection to the required data source, it will try to find the proper one among the other RDIS locations on the network, allowing the RDIS with the high-speed connection to the data source to process the request and use the first RDIS to stream the request back to the business user.

Vanguard's customers are primarily mid-sized manufacturers, many of whom have felt that data warehousing was overly complex, expensive, and inflexible for their business needs. Consequently, Vanguard has recognized the drawbacks and practical limitations of the DW model, and determined that technology had improved to the point where a completely new approach could be developed. The Direct Access solution was thus introduced to meet the real-world needs of these customers, and it has since been successfully implemented by many (one third or so of current) customers ranging from small manufacturers to multi-billion dollar global corporations.

Additionally, many Vanguard customers with DWs in place are reportedly currently phasing them out in favor of the Direct Access solution, which provides all the benefits of a DW—a single version of the truth, integrated enterprise information, high-performance reporting and analytics—but is less expensive and complex. To accomplish this, the vendor uses the RIDS innovative solution along with Vanguard's own patent-pending middleware technology.
Vanguard cites that business executives using its Direct Access solution should see the following major business benefits:

* With close to real-time information pulled directly from the source systems, they should improve business agility, make better decisions and improve the time-to-value of their data.

* They should eliminate the need to invest in a DW, centralized data mart, ETL software, or data storage hardware.

* They should improve the return on investment (ROI) of their ERP and other enterprise systems investments by leveraging the information generated by these systems to improve business performance.

However, Direct Access (or the enterprise information integration [EII] technology in a wider context) cannot always be an alternative to a DW, given these data integration solutions augment historical time-series BI reporting with fresher operational detail, rather than conduct deep, complex analytic processing, such as multi-terabyte queries, which are still needed for many businesses. Using only EII for BI could make it difficult to deal with business change or analyze historical trends, while the prospects might still be concerned about safeguards for data quality in data-diverse environments and the impact of EII on transactional systems.

Hence, the technology is nowadays still far from mainstream adoption. In the meantime, the virtual data unification/EII preaching vendors must strive to educate the market and gain a critical mass of customers for the approach. The successful ones might, for the time being, be those that position their tools to complement, rather than replace, conventional data warehousing. Some recent surveys do cite a notable percentage of users mentioning the lack of centralized DWs as a key reason for postponed adoption of analytic tools like dashboards within their companies.

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age Part Four: Challenges and User Recommendations

On April 1, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary.In 1994, the founders of another ERP vendor, PRO:MAN, sold all interest in the company and started a new one: Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology, with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; however, the company is still founded on the solid foundation of many of its staff's thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems. This article continues a discussion of the market impact.

While the initiatives covered in detail earlier on will, in our mind, help Intuitive create increased demand and acceptance of its offering in the target market, Intuitive will, nevertheless have to address many challenges in order to continue to thrive in this cutthroat competitive environment.

First one is the mere fact that the vendor is halfway within its product rewrite feat, which somewhat impedes the vendor's .NET awareness campaign to the prospective and current users' community. Namely, at this stage, the vendor can mainly target the IT managers by professing the many tangible benefits of .NET, such as ".NET-based systems will be easier to install and administer, and therefore cheaper to own over the long haul"; ."NET-based systems will be easier to secure against hackers, and will be less buggy and better behaved (e.g., without "Blue screen" mystery crashes)"; and "owners of .NET based systems will find it easier to connect their .NET systems to their trading partners' systems, wireless devices, such as, .NET makes it easier to conduct e-commerce, and to leverage information available on the Internet".

Nevertheless, as long as the "old" software is meeting business needs, new technology is not the change driver, which makes building replacement products on a new framework a higher risk strategy. Product functionality still quite matters and, while it is important for enterprise applications providers to implement the latest computer science "quantum leap", there is no guaranteed correlation between first-to-market and the ultimate success in the market. In fact, based on many experiences, one could even argue that the correlation might be inverse.

Still, while the evolution strategy might be safer in the short run for both the customers and the vendor, minimizing both investment and disruption, the evolutionary strategy has limits in how much can be accomplished. The existing product becomes a limit on the amount of innovation that proves practical. There are no definitely right and wrong answers at this stage, and every vendor has to conduct its own soul-searching and justification exercise for the direction it chooses. In the Intuitive's case, had it stayed within its legacy technology and just worked on functionally improving the product, it will have likely not have been able to release as much new functionality as it has in the 7.0 product release. That might become even clearer over the next twelve months or so as the vendor has been very carefully redesigning each section of the product as it moves to .NET, and the new planning, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) portions of the product are notably more functional than they have been before. The vendor claims to be selling and winning lately mainly based on functionality, and not necessarily on technology. Perhaps ironically, that functionality would likely not have been there if the vendor had not moved to the.NET Framework.

There is always the aspect of the future of enterprise applications, where Intuitive ERP and peer products are going to have to interact with people and, more importantly, with other enterprise software much better than anyone ever considered possible just a few years ago. Users will eventually need to be able to run their applications on devices like a smart phone, or to be able to process transactions automatically with their trading partners. Setup and infrastructure-heavy electronic data interchange (EDI) is eventually going to be replaced by secure transactions between systems that no longer need that "money drain" in the middle. As we move closer to these realities, technology architectures are going to make a huge difference in whether one iis able to provide these new capabilities or not, and how quickly, easily, and therefore inexpensively one can do so.
Still, Intuitive will have to carefully introduce the remaining pure .NET software components into Intuitive ERP through the normal sequence of upgrade releases, whereby the current customer base would gradually migrate to .NET as the Intuitive ERP product will gradually be transformed to pure .NET. The transformation, which entails converting or rewriting every single line of software code and modifying the Intuitive ERP architectural design to leverage the many touted benefits of the .NET platform will not likely be painless for the install base, but they do not necessarily have to be quite painful either.

Upgrade challenges generally consist of two major things: database changes and modifications that the customer has meanwhile made that need to be upgraded to the new release level. Had Intuitive made significant enhancements to the sales modules in the older release on a legacy architecture, for example, , it would have had the same upgrade issues as with the 7.0 release anyway. However, since the vendor was able to do so much more with the new architecture, it will have eliminated the need for modifications in a lot of areas that its customers had modified in the past. And for those who still need to modify something, the new environment is quite faster (and therefore likely cheaper) to code, which should mitigate the upgrade. Additionally, the vendor has always, and continues to provide its customers with basically all of the source code. For those who want to, they have the tools available to them (and Intuitive will gladly train them) to control and perform any modifications on their own, without necessarily relying on the vendor if they do not want to be dependent.

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age Part Three: Market Impact Continued

On April 1, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary. Namely, in 1994, the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in the company and started a new one, forming Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology and with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; however, the company is founded on a solid foundation of many of its staff's thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems. This continues a discussion of the market impact.

Further, the return material authorization (RMA) module applies the same level of quality management to returned items as is applied to production inventory, since inspection is required for all returned materials. The process allows users to dispose of the returned materials as scrap if they cannot be used, return them to inventory if they are still good, or open a rework order if they can be reworked. There is also the tracking functionality within the module, from assigning an RMA number for the customer, disposing with the samples (optional), receiving the returned materials, and disposing with all returns, while credit memos and replacement orders can be automatically generated if desired.

Delivering finished goods, packing slips, internal bills of lading (BOL), pro-forma and commercial invoices, and serial number tracking (among other features) are included as part of the shipping process. Tools to cancel, add, or reverse shipping transactions give users even more control over their shipping processes, which generate finished goods pick-lists based on user-supplied selection criteria. This operation can also automatically check the customer's credit status and the item availability before generating shipping pick lists. Logically, a report is generated that lists the inventory items that need to be pulled from stores, while shipments against sales order deliveries, inventory levels, and costing information are updated in real time.

As gleaned from its depiction so far, the Intuitive ERP system is aimed at the smaller discrete make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO)/assemble-to-order (ATO), and mixed-mode manufacturers with deal sizes averaging thirty users but moving toward the forty- to fifty-seat range lately. This brings us to the product's customer resource management (CRM) capabilities, which have been natively strong in terms of service and repair and of sales configuration. The capabilities for relationship management and opportunity management have traditionally been provided by original equipment manufactured (OEM) Best Software's SalesLogix suite, but the current .NET rewrite has also been leveraged towards writing these native CRM capabilities. Intuitive has consequently been selling its own CRM modules for about eighteen months now, and the 7.0 release includes a completely re-written CRM in a .NET managed code.

Introduced at the end of 2001 as an optional module, a web-based Advanced Configurator is aimed at streamlining the quotation and ordering of configure-to-order (CTO) products to deliver, on-the-fly, accurate pricing, product configuration and specifications, as well as BOM and process routings. It is a "bottom-up," rules-based configurator, providing point-and-click product definition under a rule and constraint-based guidance engine. It can be executed from any Web browser and allows the user to execute product configuration concurrently or independently in either client/server or "thin web client" environments—all utilizing one universal set of product configuration rules and objects.

The Advanced Configurator is fully integrated with the sales, inventory, costing and quoting modules of the Intuitive ERP system, thereby enabling both the user's sales force and customers to configure customized products, view design and pricing changes automatically as configuration modifications are made, thereby simplifying the collection and management of critical product data for sales and order entry functions.

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age Part Two: Market Impact

On April 1, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary. It was created in 1994, when the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in their company and started a new one: Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology and with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; however, the company is founded on a solid foundation of many of its staff members' thirty-years-or-so of experience in manufacturing systems.

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems can be a crown example of a small vendor with brave and fresh ideas, which are by no means the prerogative of the biggest and the richest. Thus, Intuitive belongs to a group of a handful of vendors, which have chosen to rewrite their applications on a new, possibly future-proof, application framework. The intent of these visionary vendors was to address the ever increasing market awareness of the following facts:

1) that almost every business changes, and that software must change with the business;

2) even small businesses are really unique—one size can never fit all;

3) the high cost of development, support, and enhancements in term of money, time, and quality limit the ability of installed legacy software to meet many demands of business; and

4) that custom software is a requirement for many enterprises, even for the smaller ones. At the same time, these vendors have been maintaining or improving their functionality, although some observers may contend that their "bold" moves have been virtue made out of necessity.

The persevering tough economic climate may still mean opportunity for the nimblest companies. It appears that a large number of manufacturing enterprises within the lower-end of the market have yet to deploy an enterprise package, particularly in emerging markets. Some of them have cited the complexity of ERP and associated enterprise applications as intimidating and a deterrence to implementation. Still, like their bigger counterparts, smaller enterprises also have to efficiently run and expand their operations while maintaining strict control over costs and expenses; cash flow; and inventory turns and levels.

To that end, Intuitive is one of the vendors that has long attempted to mitigate the actual and perceived barriers to ERP acceptance by smaller enterprises. However, in a time in which many peer vendors had to backpedal product development and expansion because of market conditions (such as the post Y2K slump combined with the ongoing recession), Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its product depth and breadth and geographic coverage, and renders itself as a more apparent ERP solution for the small and mid-sized discrete manufacturers.
Still being an ERP adolescent (given that there are many competitors that are a few decades' old) has been both the company's curse and blessing. The curse is that remaining a little, obscure, relatively unknown vendor (with an estimated less than $15 million [USD] in revenues) means still developing a client base and the global presence. On the other hand, coming later to the market has given the company the chance to make better choices and avoid the proverbial traps of many of its peers. Namely, the rapid pace of global business nowadays places a unique set of challenges on all enterprises looking to improve and automate their operations, and at the same time, remain poised to adapt quickly to change. With increased competition, globalization, and mergers and acquisition activity, enterprise software buyers increasingly realize that product architecture plays a key role in how quickly vendors can implement; maintain; expand or customize; and integrate their products. The product architecture is going to do much more than simply provide technical functionality, user interface (UI) or presentation, and platform support. It is going to determine whether a product is going to endure, whether it can be scaled to a large number of users, and whether it will be able to incorporate emerging technologies, all in order to accommodate increasingly evolving user requirements.

However, it takes excruciating efforts, industry domain knowledge, and resources (often estimated in hundreds of "man-years") to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch. Therefore, when that compelling new technology does appear, it is quite common in the industry for an enterprise application provider to surround its old ERP and accounting core software in a "wrapper" of newer technology, whose goal is to effectively obfuscate the old technology, giving it the latest graphical "look," or providing an easier means to access the core business logic and data from other, more-modern systems, devices, or from the Internet.

For a comprehensive discussion of the effort it takes to devise and build an enterprise system from scratch see Rewrite Or Wrap-Around Old Software?).

The precursor of Intuitive's ability to rewrite its applications into .NET was its choice a decade ago to use only contemporary Microsoft technologies and platforms. Written in Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), straight Microsoft Visual Basic, and Microsoft Transact SQL (T-SQL) languages, using Microsoft Access as the UI for forms and reports, and exclusively Microsoft SQL Server as the database, Intuitive ERP has never been "corrupted" by other, now detractive legacy technologies (such as, Microsoft DOS or some proprietary database like FoxPro, Pervasive, or Progress). Once other proprietary technologies are introduced into the research and development (R&D) equation, any vendor has to deal with translation, interface, and performance issues, not to mention the pain of migrating existing customers or maintaining multiple product versions. On the other hand, using technologies that are intrinsically compatible should result in faster and less costly development. As a result, Intuitive ERP does not have to contend with technology conflicts, trade-offs, or inefficiencies resulting from mixing or wrapping technologies.

The company's strategic relationship with Microsoft has consequently proven to be of a great importance given its market segment's infatuation with the technology, whose performance, reliability, and scalability has long been improving as well. By leveraging the capabilities of the Microsoft platform only, Intuitive now seems to also be in a better position to be responsive by delivering new functional features that its customers may demand. In contrast, a smaller vendor that covers multiple platforms often spends more than a half of its R&D budget on porting issues; thus making a cross-platform solution remains largely the prerogative (and a consequent burden) of only bigger vendors.

Furthermore, the early adoption of the .NET platform should help Intuitive transition from a traditional two-tier client/server architecture (where the entire business logic resides at the client front end) to the one where the business logic resides in a set of business logic components that can be used by the rich UI, alternate UIs, or it can be integrated with other systems through Microsoft BizTalk, which bolsters the systems interconnectivity and flexibility. The framework should also provide a "hands and administrator free" deployment model allowing the application to be distributed from a single web site, while product updates, enhancements, and new releases should, in future, be automatically deployed to the client, which should allow businesses to cut down on expensive client/server administrative time.

A Demand-driven Approach to BI

Vanguard Solutions Group, Inc. (www.vanguardsolutions.com), is a Chicago, IL-based, business intelligence (BI) provider that reportedly achieved major successes in 2004. The core concept behind their solution is that BI must be demand-driven, which means that the business needs of the user dictate the technical solution, not the other way around. In other words, it should let the business users drive the process, and remove the problems of content relevance and software complexity. Namely, although IT-driven BI projects frequently do not deliver what the business users need, Vanguard has come to an understanding that the BI development cycle is inherently iterative and open-ended and that therefore the business decision maker needs to "own" the process. Thus, the vendor's solution addresses the problem of content relevance by making the underlying data architecture transparent to the users, who have access to information from multiple systems, platforms, or locations, and view it in a functional user interface.

To that end, Vanguard's Unified Information Model (UIM) ensures that the appropriate business rules are applied and the information appears in a consistent, integrated context (whereby the user environment allows business users to identify and retrieve exactly the information they need), and provides easy-to-use tools for analysis. The value of information increases dramatically when business decision makers drive the process, by having precise control of the reporting and analysis process. In the context of real-world customer deployments, Vanguard's approach emphasizes a clear separation of responsibilities. That is to say, business people, from front-line tactical decision makers to strategic senior executives, are the key users of the solution, and they are responsible for creating and using the information, reports, and analytics that Vanguard provides. The key leaders of a typical Vanguard implementation are therefore often VPs of sales, finance, operations, purchasing, or other core business functions.
Another core concept of the Vanguard solution is the automated publication and delivery of analytic content to end users, as the eDeployment module automatically generates and "pushes" customized, updated Information Views to business users. These Information Views are user-defined, personalized data sets, in the form of a client-side on-line analytic processing (OLAP) interface, with intuitive data analysis, report writing, and graphing capabilities built in. Further, with user-defined Information Views, which combine data from single or multiple data sources, users view this information in close to real-time without necessarily relying on a data warehouse (DW) or repository, which will be detailed later on. Business users receive Information Views on a predefined schedule via e-mail, or over a network, or by accessing a Web page. For example, one Vanguard customer uses eDeployment to deliver updated Information Views via e-mail to several hundred sales executives across the US every Monday morning. The sales executives are then able to take the information with them on their laptops in a disconnected and mobile fashion, and use it to stay on top of ever-changing sales trends, product promotions, and customer activities.

This model ensures that the majority of the analytical processing of content occurs "off-line" on the user's PC, rather than over a network connection. Vanguard's user environments enable business people to filter, drill-down, modify, and preview the customized Information Views, whereby the level of customization and end-user control is such that the user very rarely needs to generate "live" queries against the relational databases. This also significantly increases the scalability of the solution by delivering compressed data sets during off-peak hours. Through experience, Vanguard has been able to identify the three main types of live user queries (in relation to the above-depicted user groups), and wisely design the solution to support them with a high level of performance. The three most common types of direct queries are

1. Content building, when power users are creating new Information Views for analysis or distribution to other users.

2. "Drill-backs", when business users, who receive a summary Information View, analyze the data off-line, then drill back into the relational database for more information to support further analysis. Drill-backs are typically targeted, exception-based result sets that are small and can be processed efficiently.

Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age Part One: Company Overview

Quite opposite from playing an April Fool's trick, on April 1, Intuitive Manufacturing Systems (www.intuitivemfg.com), a privately held company offering enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-size manufacturers, announced its ten-year anniversary. Namely, in 1994, the founders of the other ERP vendor PRO:MAN sold all interest in the company and started a new one: Intuitive. Since then, Intuitive has been offering enterprise software for small and midsize discrete manufacturers around the world with the flagship product, Intuitive ERP, which was designed from the ground up with 100 percent pure Microsoft technology and with well-established manufacturing practices in mind. The relative young age of the company has provided an organization and a development environment free from the burdens of supporting unwieldy sets of legacy systems and technologies; nonetheless, the company is founded on a solid foundation with many of its staff having thirty years or so of experience in manufacturing systems.

Intuitive's first product, MRP9000 (renamed into Intuitive ERP in June 2000), was built around the concept that the software should support standard business practices and that the underlying technology should be flexible and affordable. Hence, standard manufacturing and accounting practices such as those prescribed by American Production & Inventory Control Society (APICS) and Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP) were the building blocks of the product. The product has since matured into a broad ERP software system designed to manage most aspects of a small and mid-size manufacturing organization. Today, Intuitive has over 900 customers worldwide, in industries ranging from aerospace to bicycle parts, from circuit boards to boat docks. The Intuitive ERP product is also installed in over twenty countries, is available in sixteen languages, is fully multicurrency-enabled, and is supported by a network of direct offices and business partners worldwide.

Yet, Intuitive continues to pragmatically expand its operations and to unveil significant enhancements to its latest product release. Intutive's founder and co-chairman, J. Patrick Carey, had worked in the industry in various sales, service and consulting capacities for over fifteen years before he founded PRO:MAN in 1981, which was a provider of a PICK/UNIX-based manufacturing software system for small and mid-sized manufacturers. In 1994, Carey sold off his interest in the company, but, with his retained knowledge of manufacturing, he established Intuitive Manufacturing Systems.

According to the vendor's CEO Sara Gillam, back in 1994 the management had to decide between the status quo of a maturing UNIX system and putting a Microsoft Windows wrapper/fa�ade around that aging technology, or making the bold step of completely reengineering the product in the Windows environment. The apparent choice was aimed at being on the leading edge of technology in 1994, but also now, ten years later, Intuitive is continuing this vision by deploying the new generation of software technology—Microsoft .NET. The vendor was indeed a member of the official Microsoft .NET Early Adopter Program which began stealthily in the early 2000s. While lately, many competitors are claiming to use so-called "fast start" programs to aid in leveraging .NET technology, Intuitive claims to have been there at the very beginning, at which time it did not see any of these ".NET evangelists" that are present nowadays.
With headquarters in Kirkland, Washington (US), Intuitive is located only a ten minute drive from Microsoft's main campus, and it continues to enjoy a close relationship that has allowed it to not only discern Microsoft's future moves, but to gain invaluable aid from Microsoft in leveraging its latest technology. For that reason, Intuitive feels very confident that it will be significantly ahead of any other ERP vendor in releasing a pure .NET-based solution.

To that end, after eighteen months of research and development, mid-2001 Intuitive completed a prototype of its Microsoft .NET architectural framework that takes full advantage of .NET, extensible markup language (XML), and the new features of Microsoft SQL Server, and released a plan to convert the entire Intuitive ERP product—meaning every business logic feature, every line of code—to pure .NET technology. With the release of Intuitive ERP 6.0 in December 2002, the second phase of this plan was complete, as it was likely the first ERP product to release several areas of functionality built on a 100 percent Microsoft .NET managed code architecture. Then, in early 2004, Intuitive announced the beta release of Intuitive ERP 7.0, the only enterprise software solution with a pure Microsoft .NET "managed code" (i.e., a new type of software that leverages a new .NET set of tools and prefabricated components) framework and over 50 percent of standard product functionality released in .NET, which has been generally available since March 2004.

This substantial product redesign should allow Intuitive ERP to take advantage of the many new features of the .NET platform, satisfy the industry's e-business requirements, and better position the product to adapt to even more advanced technology in the future. Intuitive is glad to be saying goodbye to the old problems of Component Object Model-based (COM) software that the development world has often referred to as "Dynamic Link Library (DLL) Hell" in the past, owing to objects' sharing, and unfortunate consequent inexplicable conflicts amongst these objects.

Conversely, IT departments will be able to appreciate .NET software by the .NET feature known as "side-by-side", which allows multiple versions of the same application to reside and run on the same computer at the same time. Namely, with .NET, one does not have to uninstall or upgrade an old version of a software product, since the new version can be installed right beside the old one, and the user can run them both until she or he decides to remove the old version. Also, much .NET software can be installed simply by copying files to hard drives, while .NET avoids the Windows Registry and its many inherent problems.

Has the Mid-market Found Vanguard BI Solutions?

Vanguard Solutions Group, Inc. (www.vanguardsolutions.com) might confirm that the business intelligence (BI) market, and associated corporate performance management (CPM)/enterprise performance management (EPM) and analytics markets, have been having good times lately (in spite of the abundance of providers). Vanguard is a Chicago, IL-based, privately held BI provider that focuses on small and medium manufacturers and distributors, and on divisions of large organizations, all within certain vertical industries (e.g., chemicals, industrial manufacturing, food & beverage, life sciences/pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods), where it has a deep domain expertise. Namely, the company has recently reported that it had achieved major successes in 2004, securing new strategic partnerships, developing innovative technology solutions, and delivering measurable business value to customers.

These achievements have reportedly enabled Vanguard to increase the size of its installed customer base by more than 100 percent over the course of the year. The company's customers range from small, $25 million to multi-billion dollar companies, including Bayer AG, Intertape Polymer Group, Noveon, Parker Hannifin, Wyandot Snacks, and General Dynamics C4 Systems, who all leverage the vendor's performance management solutions that help them intelligently interpret and analyze business information.

The ability to deliver the value of practical technology to mid-market customers has been central to Vanguard's success in forging strategic partnerships with several leading enterprise software firms. To that end, during 2004, Vanguard signed original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partnerships with Exact Software, Lilly Software Associates (now part of Infor Global Solutions), and AssetPoint, which will be delved deeper into shortly. The vendor believes these agreements demonstrate the power of its solution, as well as the price and packaging flexibility of its partnering approach. The idea is to provide a sensible and cost-effective solution that would unlock value for business while providing a way to leverage and integrate existing enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) systems. Vanguard's opportunity is to continue to expand on the proven OEM strategy and effectively market to mid-market manufacturers within selected industries.

In mid-February, Vanguard announced a strategic partnership with AssetPoint, a provider of integrated enterprise asset management (EAM) software and services. The partnership will allow AssetPoint to license, install, and support Vanguard's Graphical Performance Series (GPS) solution for its customers as part of its TabWare suite. The new application, called TabWare Analytics, should enable clients in the manufacturing, facilities management, and services industries to immediately access detailed information about valuable business assets. The potential results for AssetPoint's clients should thereby be better, more informed decisions leading to reduced downtime and maintenance expenses, lower spare parts inventories and costs, improved purchasing efficiency, and more effectively deployed assets.

This proves that Vanguard continues to expand its network of strategic partnerships with renowned mid-market enterprise applications vendors, in its ongoing quest to seek out partners that can deliver domain expertise and outstanding customer relationships. In return, Vanguard offers partners a potent BI and analytics solution, with a great degree of flexibility. In this case, AssetPoint should now be able to offer a fully integrated, higher-value application tailored to the specific business needs of its customers. Vanguard touts to offer a partnering approach that features flexibility in pricing and packaging, along with the development of comprehensive integration to its partners' solutions. In other words, it allows its partners to bring Vanguard solutions to market as if they had developed them in-house. Vanguard offers a range of partnership opportunities, including referral programs, services partnerships, alliance partnerships, distributor partnerships, and OEM partnerships.

The above partnership is also the first to bring Vanguard's technology to the EAM market, whereas the vendor has naturally been the most entrenched in the manufacturing ERP market. Vanguard has or has had valued partnerships with renowned technology firms including former PeopleSoft/J.D. Edwards (now part of Oracle), MAPICS (now part of Infor Global Solutions), Infor Process Division (former Agilisys Process), former Marcam Solutions (now part of SSA Global), CIBER Enterprise Solutions, IBM, and Microsoft. With most traditional ERP products, translating the data stored within the transactional ERP database into information used to make prudent enterprise decisions has proven to be difficult.

Vanguard's GPS BI solution's availability and its deep understanding of operational systems within its industries of focus to build its own data and information integration capabilities that can quickly assemble data into predefined data models, has reportedly enabled the above mid-market ERP vendors to provide their customers with a valuable tool for harvesting the business value out of their database.

The Impact of Demand-Driven Technology in the SCM Market: IBS

The Sweden-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) provider International Business Systems (IBS) (XSSE IBS B), while currently not a uniformly well-known mid-market global vendor, seems to be poised to change that situation. As the ERP and SCM markets suffered throughout the dismal last several years, IBS also felt a pinch of flat revenues at nearly $350 million (USD), but remained mostly profitable. This was a notable feat, especially with its ambitious product development effort is combined with the difficult competitive sales situation. (See Part One)

Part Three of the IBS � Slow but Steady (and Demand-Driven) May Win the SCM Race series.

After "biting the bullet" a few years ago and committing a substantial investment in basically rewriting its flagship ASW ERP/SCM offering to make it both Web native and a web services amenable solution (XML and Java compliant), and to develop new Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based products like IBS Virtual Enterprise and IBS Integrator, IBS seems to be weathering the ongoing down economy quite well. IBS Virtual Enterprise, which integrates and coordinates different business systems in the supply chain, has been positively received by the market, and a number of projects have been conducted on behalf of large customers.

The market for integration solutions is likely to be an interesting growth area over the next few years, and IBS has an attractive offer for those companies with a complex and expensive business software at the group and headquarters level, wanting to lower their costs and speed up implementation in their operative subsidiaries by using IBS' business software for these companies.

Despite its resemblance in size, geographic coverage, and modesty, when compared to the flamboyancy of its North American peers to its Swedish peers IFS and Intentia (see IFS Continues Its Reinvention Through Pruning and Intentia's Movex for Food and Beverage: Gaining a Foothold in North America ), IBS has always paid close attention to its fiscal health. Accordingly, its balance sheet is relatively clean and strong, and the management team has largely been in place since the company's inception.
The vendor has a history that is characterized by growth and stable finances, and it has made a profit in a total of twenty-five of the twenty-seven years it has been on the market. Even in 2003, despite a continued weak IT market, IBS succeeded in meeting its established objective of making a profit after financial items. This was possible due to heavy cuts in operating costs accompanied competitive solutions and services. Combined these prevented revenue from decreasing by more than five percent, which is considerably lower than for many of its competitors.

An improvement in market potential and an increase in profit (after financial items) was seen in 2004. This was attributable to increased software licences by about six percent, higher billing per consultant which has lead to an improved professional fee margin growing from 20 percent to 22 percent, and to larger portion of self-developed products, which has increased the software licence margin from 90 percent to 92 percent. Also, the vendor has improved profits in the crucial Swedish operations.

During 2004, IBS also strengthened its position within a number of sectors, including the distribution of pharmaceuticals, electronics, industrial supplies, machinery and equipment, automotive aftermarket, property management, paper and packaging, and foodstuffs. Here, a number of new international customer agreements have been entered into within these sectors. The efficiency of IBS software development will continue to improve in other ways, through increased outsourcing to low-cost countries. IBS currently has some of its development in low-cost countries such as Portugal, Poland and India. China will also be considered since IBS has decided to increase its presence in this expansive region.

To the credit of IBS, the vendor has long been targeting its sales and development efforts at the medium and large enterprises seeking proven, low-risk technologies that have a low total cost of ownership (TCO), and are relatively easy to operate at low cost and risk. These technology- and cost-sensitive companies have till recently been overlooked by many enterprise vendors. After several years of declining investments in IT, there has again been a pent-up need among many companies and organizations to increase profitability and competitiveness with the aid of new or improved business software. Priority is, above all, being given to investments that can generate measurable improvements and rapid payback through lower costs, increased customer service, integrated supply chains, improved financial control and information to corporate management. Another of the more important changes in the IT market is the respective management of IBS' companies, which are considerably more involved in decisions concerning business systems and IT investments. This has led to a change in focus from often more technical evaluations to more financially- and business-oriented assessments, which requires both specialized business software, as well as skilled consultants for its implementation.

A growing number of companies, and in particular companies with operations in several countries, have discovered that it is not only business software functionality that is of decisive importance in guaranteeing profitable IT projects (see Easy ERP: A Challenge to Conventional Thinking). Of equal importance is the actual installation project, in combination with ongoing support and further development. To that end, IBS has for many years focused its attention on providing implementation support for its customers through a combination of business consultants (with experience from specific industrial sectors) and technical consultants. It is this combination of knowledge about customer business processes, technical competence and a highly developed project management system that is the key to the successful installatiion of business software.

Supply Chain Operations Reference and Other Features in ASW

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The flagship software suite of Sweden-based International Business Systems (IBS) (XSSE IBS B), called Application Software or ASW, espouses supply chain management (SCM), customer service, demand-driven manufacturing, financial control and business intelligence (BI) functionality. This global provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) solutions also offers IBS Virtual Enterprise software, a collaborative commerce solution with the additional abilities of enterprise application integration (EAI) software, which is further enhanced through its utilization of business logic for coordinating cross-application business models. Cramo, Europe's third largest equipment rental company, reportedly selected IBS Virtual Enterprise to minimize total procurement costs, optimize logistics, simplify routines, improve functional efficiency, and build long-term supplier relationships. Investing in a collaborative procurement solution with EAI capabilities and equipped with business logic was reportedly vital to remain competitive.

Part Two of the IBS � Slow but Steady (and Demand-Driven) May Win the SCM Race series.

From a functionality point of view, ASW covers a broad range of functionality, but its functionality is not evenly deep across the entire extended-ERP scope. Historically, the professional services orientation of IBS has tended to favor much more in terms of modifications and customizations for each customer rather than providing deep, off-the-shelf product functionality development for the entire application suite. Rather, specific functional extensions, enhancements, and partnerships tended to be done on a one-off basis that would infrequently be applied to the entire product in different parts of the world.

This custom development for each customer approach of the past is drastically changing as IBS works to move away from the modifications business and towards a software development model. As a result, new customers using ASW in midsize sales order handling operations are increasingly finding that the functionality of ASW is ample and does not require heavy modifications as it did in the past.

Much of the issue of functional fit has also been reflected with more discipline in the sales process of IBS. I In the past the vendor was not as strict in its sales lead qualifications and marketing focus; however, now, the new approach being adopted by the organization should help to reduce the number of situations where customers will find themselves doing one-off development to the product. Accordingly, more notable additions in functionality in the late 1990s included support for telesales (which is one of the distinguishing functional areas of the product relative to its competition), enhanced executive information systems (EIS), and on-line analytical processing tools, and integration with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino.

IBS�Slow but Steady (and Demand-Driven) May Win the SCM Race

International Business Systems (IBS) (XSSE IBS B) is a Sweden-based global provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) industry-specific software solutions and other accompanying services for companies embracing IBM-based technologies. Since the early 1990s, IBS has achieved some success in transitioning from mainly being a Scandinavia-based solutions provider to a player in the broader European, Asia-Pacific, and North American markets. It now has an international network in over twenty countries.

IBS remains primarily a services company driven by the sales of its expanding enterprise software application portfolio. IBS has long focused on selling strong wholesale distribution functionality supplemented by financials and manufacturing functionality, including focus on logistics, sales order processing (SOP) and warehousing. It also provides general financial management, accounting, and some light manufacturing functionality. Its market is comprised of technologically conservative, mid-size companies that are looking for turnkey "one-stop-shop" solutions from a single supplier. This market segment is currently without an apparent leader, and one of the reasons only a few vendors have chosen to address this lower-end of the distribution market is likely because it has proven to be a less profitable (less margin-friendly) market segment.

Nowadays, IBS provides three main types of services: software, professional services, and hardware. The company's software products cover the fields of collaborative sales and procurement, customer service, order management, demand-driven manufacturing, inventory management, business performance measurement (BOM), and financial control. It has also provided software solutions for specific distribution-intensive markets, including the automotive and motor vehicle parts distributors, consumer durables, electrical products, electronic components, food, industrial supplies, industrial machinery and equipment, medical equipment and supplies, paper and packaging material, pharmaceutical and healthcare products, independent wholesalers, and business-to-business (B2B) distributors. This vertical strategy has been sales- and marketing-related, and has manifested itself in IBS' product development agenda.

IBS' professional services consist of analyses of business processes and improvement potential, customer support, development of complementary tailor-made systems, follow-ups of projects and results achieved, implementation, information technology (IT) strategy and system design, modification and development, operation and maintenance, project management, and training. Its hardware products are based on the IBM iSeries (formerly AS/400) hardware and include computers and network equipment that contribute towards SCM solutions such as the IBS Pharma Adaptive Supply Chain solution for pharmaceutical distribution.

Recently, IBS has refined its overall strategic direction which long focused business operations on medium and large companies, and the subsidiaries of major groups. The strategy is based on the following cornerstones:

* A focus on key market areas in which IBS can maintain a leading position, provide customers with high value, and in this way achieve a sound level of profitability;

* an emphasis on sector industry solutions that include pharmaceutical distribution, electronic components, industrial supplies, food, publishing and consumer durables;

* a stronger market position through acquisition of companies with complementary customer bases and competence;

* a global market presence in order to be able to serve international groups, such as the 2004 decision to open offices in Tokyo and Shanghai;

* offering comprehensive solutions based on professional services (with experienced consultants with knowledge of pertinent industries), servers and network solutions as well as financing, all to vouch for long-term relationships with customers (of at least ten years); and

* cost effectiveness in product development, marketing and sales, implementation and support, to offer integrated solutions at a competitive price.

IBS believes the value for its customers should come from its ability to

* provide vertical solutions and multi-level processes for collaborative organisations;

* implement customer projects with mainly own resources;

* work primarily with its own software, in combination with some customised software solutions;

* espouse specific focus on distribution, manufacturing, and service companies; and

* achieve a market-leading position by focusing its efforts, passion and expertise on the aforementioned companies and industries.

Contemporary Business Intelligence and Its Main Components

Economic and regulatory pressures, along with the need to stay competitive in the marketplace, have made business intelligence (BI) more important than ever for enterprise application users. BI gives users the ability to extract, consolidate, change, and analyze data in ways that are not possible in other approaches to enterprise applications. BI also allows users to exploit subsets of data within disparate organizational systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, and human resources (HR), to combine various dimensions of organizational data in order to create a single view.

For example, manufacturing and distribution enterprises of all sizes would benefit from leveraging software that not only senses the daily pulse of the operations, but that also spots incongruities, analyzes the performances of multiple areas, and initiates corrective adjustments. BI tools help employees harness data which might be too complicated for manual manipulation. For instance, in departments such as purchasing and sourcing, there are constant and rapid increases in materials costs, deviations in lead times, and growth and instability in the supplier base—all of which require ever increasing buyer dexterity. BI gives organizations the ability to manage these issues proactively.

To build BI solutions within an organization, data warehousing, data integration, analytics, scorecards, and dashboards must also be considered. Each organization has its own use for some (or all) of these tools, depending on how it chooses to use the available tools. We'll look at the main BI components, and at the way BI tools can be applied within an organization.

Contemporary BI Solutions

Contemporary BI solutions enable business users to author, publish, and distribute enterprise reports via a fully integrated report writer, with an easy-to-use report creation wizard. Users can also customize and tailor reports to specific information needs. Report writing and graphing capabilities should enable even nontechnical users to create and share clear representations of complex business conditions. In addition to being easy to use, report writers must also incorporate advanced features like exception filtering and highlighting, calculations with sub-queries, rankings, drill-throughs, and so on.

Nowadays, BI tools generally provide graphical analysis of business information in multidimensional views. Most companies collect a large amount of data from their business operations; to keep track of this information, users require a wide range of software programs, along with more sophisticated database applications for departments throughout their organization. However, using multiple software programs makes it difficult to retrieve information in a timely manner and to perform analysis of the data.

BI represents all the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process by allowing a company to gather, store, access, and analyze corporate data for decision-making. Generally, these systems assist organizations in customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis, to name only a few.
Data warehousing is a collection of data designed to support management decision-making. A data warehouse (DW) contains a wide variety of data that presents a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time. Its purpose is to create a database infrastructure that is always online, that contains all the information from the online transaction processing (OLTP) systems (including historical data), but that is structured in such a way that it is fast and efficient for querying and analysis (as opposed to a database for processing transactions).

Separating these two functions may improve flexibility and performance. The development of a DW includes the development of systems to extract data from underlying transactional operating systems. The DW also installs a warehouse database system that provides managers flexible access to the data. The term data warehousing typically refers to the combination of many different databases across an entire enterprise. This is in contrast to a data mart, which is a database (or collection of databases) designed to help managers make strategic decisions about their business. While a DW combines databases across an entire enterprise, data marts are usually smaller and focus on a particular subject or department, although some data marts, called dependent data marts, can be subsets of larger DWs.

Dimensions of Data Integration

With the advent of data warehousing came the creation of extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, which use metadata to transfer information from the source systems into the DW. The three functions of ETL combine to pull data out of one database and place it into another:

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Extract—the process of reading data from a database.
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Transform—the process of converting extracted data from its previous form into a form that can be placed into another database. Transformation relies on rules or lookup tables, or on the combination of data with other data. This allows disparate data sources to be merged, which creates a centralized view of organizational data.
*

Load—the process of writing the data into the target database or DW.

Again, ETL tools are typically used to migrate data from one database to another, to form data marts and DWs, or to convert databases from one format or type to another. Additional tools, which also make use of structured query language (SQL), have also been developed to give users direct access to the data in the DW. With time, these query tools have become more user-friendly, and many such tools now have a parser (a program that dissects source code so that it can be translated into object code) which can turn natural language questions into valid SQL commands.

Enterprise information integration (EII) is a category of software that confronts the longstanding challenge of enterprise data integration over diverse data sources in scattered enterprise systems. Companies that have overcome the problem of scaling and managing data are now pondering how to unify their data sources and leverage them to solve near real-time business problems. To that end, EII aims to provide unified views of multiple, heterogeneous data through a distributed (“federated”) query. One way to think of EII is as a virtual database layer that allows user applications to access and query data as if it resided in a single database. In other words, the concept takes the existing database capability to merge a query across different tables, but on a virtual basis, shielding users from the underlying complexities of locating, querying, and joining data from varied data source systems.

EII is a fundamentally different approach to such data integration technologies as enterprise application integration (EAI), which provides data or process-level integration, or enterprise portals, which merely integrate data at the presentation level. EAI can be defined as the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes throughout networked applications or data sources.

EII is also different from conventional ETL tools for data warehousing because it neither moves data nor creates new data stores of integrated data. Rather, it leaves data where it is, leveraging metadata repositories across multiple foundation enterprise systems, and visibly pulls information into new applications. As a result, customers may be content to trade in expensive DWs for a data extraction and presentation layer that sits on top of existing transactional systems—but only on the condition that they receive unimpaired performance.