National Grid & SAP $1 Billion Upgrade Cost
Coupa and NetSuite team up to transform procurement process
On a related topic to Heather, Coupa has recently partnered up with NetSuite to drive customer savings with the procurement process and expense management. NetSuite is an industry leading provider for cloud based financials and ERP software. This process will help businesses improve their financial processes, purchasing decisions and help highlight savings opportunities. These savings can be trickled down to the customers.
- What are the major advantages to this new partnership between Coupa and NetSuite?
- With all the positive reasons that are given to why a business would want to use SuiteApp, what might be some reasons that businesses would not want to use Coupa and Net Suites’s app?
- Once a business adopts the SuiteApp, what could be some challenges they would face?
Coupa vs. SAP
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/03/20/coupa-raises-40m-for-cloud-procurement-software-takes-on-sap/
I had never actually heard of Coupa before I found this article from March of this year. Reading this, it seems like, if Coupa really is as all-encompassing as it sounds, there’s a great, untapped market just made for them. There are tons of companies that want total integration – or as close as they can get – but can’t afford the prices SAP wants to charge. Up to now, their only choice has been to cobble a bunch of different applications together to get functionality without inegration. Coupa provides an alternative to both SAP and “Frankenstein’s monster” as it says in the article.
Questions:
1) What are the advantages/disadvantages of choosing Coupa over SAP?
2) Does the newness of Coupa as an ERP make the option more or less attractive to prospective customers?
3) Does Coupa pose a serious threat to SAP’s market-share in your opinion?
ERP Comes to the Cloud and (Finally) Smaller Businesses
I wanted to try and find an article that discussed ERP as a service or “cloud” application that is also an affordable solution for small businesses. Whenever I think about ERP I think of larger companies, global corporations that have six, seven or even eight figure budgets. It seems that only recently it makes sense for a small or even medium size business to pursue an ERP solution.
Questions.
1.) At what point does it NOT make sense to implement an ERP solution?
2.) What are some of the advantages/disadvantages of a cloud ERP solution?
3.) How can a ERP solution provider make their cloud ERP solutions better for small business?
“Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges”
link: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2496725/enterprise-resource-planning/oracle-lands–100m-erp-project-covering-34-colleges.html
Hi class, I selected the article “Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges” because I wanted to apply ERPs to an institution that we are all familiar with since we are all students at Temple. Many universities suffer from the “silo approach” where information and communication in an organization isn’t fluid amongst different departments. This article highlights 34 Washington schools striving to break down these silos and ultimately increase efficiency at their university through implementation of Oracle’s next generation Fusion Application. Though this project’s implementation could result in great benefit for these universities; the article discusses numerous discrepancies that could make this project a poor investment as well. Oracle’s contract totaled 100 million dollars, however with a project so large; predictive analytics, budgeting, and establishing a legitimate time line for completion are all difficult to predict accurately. This investment could be successful as long as the universities’ needs are addressed by the system appropriately, and the risk associated with the project has been accounted for and mitigated as much as possible. Each of the proposed questions below applies to the article and is discussed in this week’s textbook chapter.
Questions:
1. From the college’s view, what is the risk associated with allocating immense financial resources and 5 years for this ERP system’s implementation?
2. Are these colleges more likely to adopt a “processes as a whole” type ERP system or a “single process” type ERP system? Why may this be the case?
3. Which business functions (supply chain management, human resources, customer relationship management.. ect.) will Oracle and these colleges hinge their ERP system on and why?
What to ask when implementing an ERP system at your company?
Implementing an ERP system at your company is a huge investment that requires an extensive amount of planning, strategy and work. These systems have the potential to save a company millions in tangible costs and huge amounts in intangible costs as well. But just as there is a huge amount of upside in adopting an ERP system, poor planning and implementation can lead to inefficiencies, unanticipated costs, and thousands of man hours wasted. This article outlines a few major categories and corresponding questions related to ERP that should be asked of every provider to ensure a successful ERP experience. The major categories include: Business Opportunity, Security & Risk, Reference and Vendor Quality, Implementation, Training and Documentation, Ongoing Support, Scalability and Future Proofing, and Results Measuring. Addressing questions in each of these categories can help minimize the cost implementing an ERP system and help management have a keener understanding of when these processes will start reducing costs and generating profit.
1) What category in the article do you think is the most important for business leaders to discuss with their ERP provider? What specific question?
2) Are there any questions listed in the article that surprised you? Which questions do you think most often get overlooked by companies when implementing and ERP system.
3) What do you think are the biggest challenges companies face when adopting an ERP system?
http://erpcloudnews.com/2013/10/40-powerful-questions-to-ask-erp-providers/
Huntsville, Alabama, Chooses Tyler Technologies’ ERP Solution to Streamline Financial Operations, Enhance Services
Article: Huntsville, Alabama, Chooses Tyler Technologies’ ERP Solution to Streamline Financial Operations, Enhance Services
The city of Huntsville Alabama has used the ERP system Munis to integrate its business activities across its departments and key resource functions in finance, budget and human resources to become more efficient. This is allowing the city to move away from paper and manual process to electronic systems to save time and money. It has also allowed the city to improve its business process and flow and to perform a better job.
Questions:
- What is the city of Huntsville’s plan for redundancy since all the work flow indicated in the article depends on this ERP system?
- How efficient is the Munis ERP system in the city’s business flow?
- What are some of the advantages of the city’s implantation of this ERP system?
- What are some of the disadvantages of this Munis ERP system?
SAP’s Enterprise System Cloud Transformation
Article: SAP Cloud Sales Should Benefit From Growing SaaS ERP And SCM Offerings
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/09/18/sap-cloud-sales-should-benefit-from-growing-saas-erp-and-scm-offerings/
SAP, an already established corporation in the Enterprise system market, recently began offering its system as an on-demand System as a Service (SaaS) on its own cloud-based platform.
This article specifically analyzes the company’s Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software market trend as a result of the transformation.
Questions:
1. Do you think this business transformation was a worthwhile risk for a company that was already an enterprise system market leader?
2. What do you think are some disadvantages to having an enterprise system on a cloud-based platform?
3. What do you think are some advantages to having an enterprise system on a cloud-based platform?
4. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages in your opinion?
Class of 2014: Top-Paid Business Majors
The most recent survey of starting salaries for college majors shows that MIS is the top-paid business major in comparison with all other business majors. See http://www.naceweb.org/s05282014/top-paid-business-majors.aspx
Data Centers in Rural Washington Gobble Power
This article covers the events that occurred in a rural area when Microsoft decided to open up large data centers in the region. These data centers, which in the articles are described as the physically entity of “the cloud” began consuming very large amounts of electricity and causing pollution to the nearby area. Microsoft often put up quite a fit when it came to paying fines related to different electric and environmental issues.
The internet, especially the cloud, is not something we generally associate with pollution. Tech companies, as stated in the article, have given us the impression that they are more “sleek” and “clean” than traditional, older companies. We rarely consider the insanely large amounts of power needed to fuel the massive data network we live in today.
1) Have you associated new data like “the cloud” with old fashion pollution? Or, as stated in the article, did the new tech companies appear to give off a cleaner, sleeker image?
2) Is this an issue to be worried about? Technology and the demand for data is growing at an exponential rate – we constantly need more and more space for data. Do you think that the demand for data centers like the ones in this article could get so high that the pollution produced could become as bad as something like oil?
3) Do you think it is right for companies like Microsoft to go into small rural towns and put such a giant demand on the resources (ex. electricity) of the town?