Enterprise planning white papers

This Excel4apps White Paper provides guidance to Oracle ERP users on the impact on General Ledger reporting when their existing application is upgraded to Release 12, as well as solutions available to address the gaps in meeting user requirements in the new environment.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has become a key tool for managers as they struggle to deal with increasing complexity and change. While 'resource planning' is certainly part of the capability most ERP suites offer, it is no longer the most important part.

Many organizations are becoming increasingly global. To support these efforts, they have established multiple sites or locations —manufacturing plants, branch and regional sales offices, distribution warehouses and national, regional, and even global headquarters—that may be distributed within a country, a region, or around the world.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) provides the necessary infrastructure that forms the operational and transactional system of record for manufacturers of all types and sizes. With a history that spans almost three decades, ERP has truly become a mature business application. Aberdeen's theme this year in benchmarking ERP in manufacturing is measuring business benefit and time to value.

Today's enterprise network provides more than simply a technology infrastructure. It's an enabler for the enterprise, supporting mission-critical applications, creating operational efficiencies, and increasing productivity. While the infrastructure provides a foundation for the organization and its initiatives, the business strategy must drive the development of the enterprise network, ensuring it supports today's requirements while evolving to meet tomorrow's demands.

On the international scene of business, companies are realizing a growing need for an intelligent and individual method of communicating business documents with customers, partners and suppliers. The format and distribution method of business documents often vary from one customer to another, depending on specific country, industry or legislative standards.

Organizations go to great lengths to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and for very good reasons. ERP systems support data centralization and eliminate islands of information caused by software applications that do not communicate. Despite these compelling reasons and the overall benefits of ERP systems in general, many users find them rigid and difficult to adapt to certain workflows and business processes, in particular those processes related to the definition, execution, analysis and distribution of financial reports.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is more than a necessary infrastructure that forms the transactional system of record upon which a business is based. ERP is the potential source of cost savings and operational improvements. It is also a serious undertaking. This Epicor white paper, written by the Aberdeen Group, serves as a roadmap to small to midsize businesses (SMBs) for realising the maximum return on investment (ROI) from ERP implementations.

Parsons Brinckerhoff, one of the world's largest planning, engineering, and program and construction management organisations, relies on Oracle Applications to help run its business effectively. And as an engineering business, it relies heavily on Oracle Projects. A business challenge with its projects was monitoring and managing costs, setting budgets and looking after billing, especially with the large, complex and ever-changing breakdown structures.

No two businesses are exactly alike and therefore business software must be able to adapt to distinctive processes and polices. Quite often, the technology that helped automate an enterprise in the past is the same technology that keeps it trapped today - unable to adjust to changing business needs or the ebb and flow of the global economy. The business technologies of tomorrow need to be agile, intuitive, compliant and manageable, and the time to chart this course is now.

As organisations expand into new territories, they face a number of operational challenges. They need to adapt to the business rules of foreign countries, including government regulations, reporting requirements and variations in tax and labor laws. They must accommodate multiple languages, multiple currencies and varying local best practices. And because companies operating in multiple countries are required by law to create separate legal entities, inventory transactions become more complex with intercompany movements being treated as purchases and sales between legal entities.

An ERP system is your information backbone and reaches into all areas of your business and value chain. Replacing it can open unlimited business opportunities. The cornerstone of this effort is finding the right partner and specialist. Your long-term business strategy will form the basis of the criteria for your selection of an ERP system replacement. Your ERP provider must be part of your vision. It is the duty of your software provider to do their part to make sure your next system will be your last ERP system replacement.

Test process assessment can achieve various strategic and tactical objectives of an IT organisation. Assessments provide a methodical way of gathering the pain areas of a QA organisation, and developing a practical road map to address these areas. An assessment model provides the framework against which the maturity or the level of capability of an organisation or an entity can be measured.

Are enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems really ever in need of a change? That question plagues most CEOs, CIOs and CFOs as their legacy ERP system continue to chug along. It's no light matter to replace your ERP system: by definition, the ERP system is your financial and operational backbone and reaches into all areas of your business and value-chain. Replacing it would appear to be a difficult and intensive process, but done right, it can open unlimited business opportunities.

Although a challenging economy has caused many organizations to reduce overall IT spending, several continue to invest in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Such systems enable organisations to reduce costs, improve customer response time, become easier for customers to do business with and manage growth expectations. Additionally, in an era of increasing globalisation, organisations are challenged with streamlining their supply chains, becoming more demand driven, bringing new products to market faster, and complying with greater regulation.