ERP's Utility for SCM: How Good is Good Enough?, prepared by Peter Krensky, senior research associate in Aberdeen's Business Analytics practice, states that nobody in the business world ever gets excited about "good enough." Business leaders want "exceptional, groundbreaking, flat-out awesome." But these lofty adjectives often require unfeasible, impractical, or ill-advised resource expenditure.
So, sometimes, "good enough" might be just right, particularly when using supply chain management functionality within an enterprise resource planning system. Although there are SCM solutions worthy of the aforementioned superlatives, that does not necessarily make them the best option for an organization's particular needs. As generalizations are dangerous, this Analyst Insight will only examine specific areas and cases where ERP is being used in an SCM capacity to either support, or substitute for, an independent SCM system, highlighting the capabilities, modules, and extensions that some organizations are utilizing to make ERP a worthy understudy to a full-fledged SCM solution.
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Operational Intelligence: Grease the Gears of Daily Decisions, also written by Krensky, states that without oversight and management operations can become a tangled mess of broken processes and unidentified inefficiencies. New procedures are layered upon old procedures, and people entrusted with executing them change until a once humming machine is slowed to a frustrating crawl. Decision makers need tools to navigate the processes and procedures that must mesh smoothly within a complex organization. Operational intelligence (OI) shines a light on the structures and processes that keep an organization running. This form of business intelligence (BI) fosters the visibility and analysis needed to connect operational metrics measured every day to corporate strategy and overall performance.
With OI, decision makers can glean actionable insight from the crush of data produced by the daily activities in their respective departments and apply that insight to make tough calls. This Analyst Insight will highlight the performance of top-performing organizations with OI and explore the benefits of real-time data feeds and analysis of customer-facing operations. Click here to obtain a complimentary copy of this report.
More Data, More Channels, Fewer Problems: Using PIM to Drive Business Performance, prepared by Nathaniel Rowe, research analyst in Aberdeen's Business Intelligence and IT Infrastructure practices, reveals that inside and outside the corporate firewall, there has never before been a greater demand for product data. Customers are clamoring for more channels to access and digest information through, employees need to share data across departments, and software applications must connect to data sources internally, in the cloud, and from business partners. Aberdeen's study on master data management revealed that organizations that invested in a centralized system of high-quality product data could present a clear, consistent message across all these channels. Seventy-two organizations with heavy product-data dependencies were analyzed, comparing 42 companies with product information management (PIM) systems to the 30 without. The organizations with PIM systems reported company-wide benefits including fewer product recalls, more perfect shipments, higher levels of customer satisfaction, and greater revenue growth.
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Talent Acquisition 2013: Adapt Your Strategy or Fail, written by Madeline Laurano, Research Director for the Aberdeen Human Capital Management research practice, finds organizations are still struggling to identify and attract talent. Today's workforce has changed dramatically and if talent acquisition does not keep pace, organizations will lose qualified candidates and jeopardize organizational growth and performance. To gain competitive advantage, organizations must consider adopting a new approach that, beyond "filling positions" quickly, focuses more on aligning with the business.
This report highlights how leading organizations achieve this goal by rethinking their strategies and technology options, challenging the traditional role of the recruiter, and focusing on how talent acquisition efforts can directly impact organizational outcomes.
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