Send us Fan Mail Generating demand for new products is super challenging. But the challenges would be at a different level if you had to generate the demand for product categories that didn't exist and if you had to go through procurement. Luckily, today's technologies allow you to target specific roles in a given account, so they can relate with your logo and brand before you visit them. The manufacturers who would have wasted millions of dollars in the generic marketing strategies such as trad...
Nov 15, 2021•46 min•Ep. 198
Send us Fan Mail Open-source is not a term you will hear when it comes to ERP systems. But there are a few open source ERP systems such as Odoo. While their claim of being open-source made them super popular in the development community, are they truly open-source? Well, if you look under the hood, the open-source pitch is really to grab developers' attention as the core component of ERP, such as the accounting module, is not really open source. But developers still love it. That's probably the ...
Nov 13, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 197
Send us Fan Mail When you start your business, you will do whatever you can in your power to survive. You might sign up any customers that might have any amount of money in their pockets. You might sell an offering that you might not have on your menu. Again, we as entrepreneurs have figured out how to survive. But the same entrepreneurial spirit fires back when you are trying to scale your business. Once you reach an inflection point, you will likely have the most complex product mix, manufactu...
Nov 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 196
Send us Fan Mail While you may get tons of traffic for your e-commerce website, if your users don't find your content interesting, they might not stay on it for very long. And this is where the KPIs around sessions are critical. It will help you understand what's happening after the users land on your pages. It will also help you understand how long they stay on each page and how many pages they visit per session. The session KPIs are helpful when you might have a lot of traffic but not as many ...
Nov 11, 2021•55 min•Ep. 195
Send us Fan Mail Transportation management has multiple facets, and it could mean different things to different companies. But the real value of a TMS system will be when multimode legs are involved in shipping goods. And that's why the transportation and 3PL companies have greater needs for a TMS system than manufacturing and distribution companies. But if the manufacturing company manages its own fleet and requires visibility into multi-mode tracking, it might also need a sophisticated TMS sys...
Nov 10, 2021•36 min•Ep. 194
Send us Fan Mail Logistics planning is hard, and it gets harder as the number of incoming and outgoing truckloads grows for a warehouse or manufacturing facility. While yard management is typically an afterthought as its implications may not impact the core operational and financial transactions, you can't ignore it due to the financial hits caused by unused trailer capacity, detention, and demurrage fee. Unless you have enough data at your fingertips and automated management of your gate etc., ...
Nov 09, 2021•46 min•Ep. 193
Send us Fan Mail The journey of e-commerce could be frightening. In fact, it's kind of confusing because of the blurring line between B2B and B2C. The approach that worked for B2C may not be most appropriate for B2B. There is also a blurring line between whether you want to consider the content-first approach or cart-first. Whatever you consider, you will have significant implications on your business model, and you want to make sure that it's the right fit for your business. If your business is...
Nov 08, 2021•43 min•Ep. 192
Send us Fan Mail Most people might recognize Microsoft for Windows or Office applications. They might also recognize them for their database and Azure. But did you know that Microsoft always had a significant market share in the ERP space? While Microsoft's go-to-market strategy has been very different from other ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP, they have always had a lead in the market with their products such as GP, SL, NAV, and AX. In the world of the Cloud, Microsoft may even be ahead of ...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 191
Send us Fan Mail Garbage in garbage out is perhaps the most overused phrase of all during the ERP conversations. Everyone uses it, but very few understand the consequences and implications of this phrase. Also, your data, whether structured poorly or diligently, forms the foundation of your business model. But why? Because many data sets are relevant in the ERP conversations, such as master, configuration, transactional, and historical, they each have their implications on the selection and impl...
Nov 05, 2021•58 min•Ep. 190
Send us Fan Mail Pricing and discounting are two strategies to incentivize buyers to make a purchase decision. But there is always confusion where each would be appropriate. Also, pricing is often a sensitive area where most companies would rather undercharge in fear of losing market share or customers. Companies could use pricing strategies such as cost-plus, competition-based, value-based, price skimming, loss-leader, penetration, dynamic, bundle, premium, and anchor. But they rarely understan...
Nov 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 189
Send us Fan Mail The divide between IT and OT has always been challenging for business executives. But this divide has always existed and still exists among other groups too. For example, sales and marketing teams don't like to deal with IT as they are perceived to slow down things. The supply chain doesn't like them either as they would rather manage their systems independently than dealing with IT. While other groups have realized the importance of IT and created true partnerships, OT teams ha...
Nov 03, 2021•41 min•Ep. 188
Send us Fan Mail Due to the proliferation of IoT devices in manufacturing environments, the number of access points prone to attack has increased significantly. And while the OT environments don't have as thicker the code base as the IT environment, OT environments are less secure than IT. The lack of education in how to write production-ready software and a greater push for efficiency have been the reasons why OT devices are more prone to attack with higher safety consequences. In today's episo...
Nov 02, 2021•48 min•Ep. 187
Send us Fan Mail Scheduling has always been challenging for manufacturing industries, especially for industries such as Automotive, where stopping the assembly line even for a couple of hours could mean the loss of millions of dollars for a company. Some industries also have challenges where the skill matrix could play a huge role in your scheduling as the skills may not be transferrable. If you don't have a sense of how many associates from each skill would show up on the shop floor and if ther...
Nov 01, 2021•39 min•Ep. 186
Send us Fan Mail Epicor is the household name for mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies. Just like Infor, it offers last-mile functionality for manufacturing and distribution companies that may not be available through other enterprise players such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. While Epicor may not be as global a solution as some of their larger competitors, they offer more value to the SMB manufacturers and distributors. Epicor also has a similar strategy as Infor and Aptean to f...
Oct 30, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 185
Send us Fan Mail The supply chain structure defined in the ERP software must mirror the actual supply chain. But it very rarely does. This issue is even more critical when the organizations may have multiple sites to distribute or manufacture goods. The supply chain professionals often need to plan on spreadsheets to make up for the underlying problems in the ERP configurations and data. While there are many definitions of a multi-site implementation, the sites in most implementations maintain t...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 184
Send us Fan Mail Planning for sales in the traditional world was easy. If you had a retail location, you would plan the right location, inventory, study the neighborhood, and provide the customer service and pricing aligned with the neighborhood's needs. If you were selling through big-box retailers or distributors, you had to hire salespeople qualified to sell to distributors, design their territories, and perhaps send them to golf courses. In the world of e-commerce, planning for sales require...
Oct 28, 2021•58 min•Ep. 183
Send us Fan Mail Identifying the appropriate production method requires you to have a deep understanding of your finished products and raw materials consumed. An incorrect production method and its KPIs may have implications on the production capacity. Also, if there is a mismatch in your demand and supply, you might need to understand if there might be a way to increase the capacity. If you are lucky, you might be able to duplicate the existing line and increase it. But if you have to install a...
Oct 27, 2021•40 min•Ep. 182
Send us Fan Mail Traditionally most systems used on the shop floor were disconnected. Even if you had multiple systems such as ERP and MES, they didn't have real-time connectivity with the machines. And to get data from these systems, manufacturers created data lakes and powered dashboards using the insights gathered from these lakes. While these dashboards provide visibility into operations to some degree, they were deficient in providing the controls that connected systems would offer. With th...
Oct 26, 2021•35 min•Ep. 181
Send us Fan Mail Edge computing is powerful. It can help companies monitor and maintain distributed assets that would otherwise require significant capital and manpower to manage. In addition, these technologies allow your technicians to control those devices remotely without having to travel. You can also gather tons of insights that can improve the operational performance of these devices and help them recover for common error conditions. However, due to the Cyber Security issues and data cent...
Oct 25, 2021•39 min•Ep. 180
Send us Fan Mail Oracle and SAP are the only two names you will hear in the enterprise accounts while everyone else is trying to claim the third spot, including Microsoft, Infor, and Sage. In fact, you might hear that you are either an SAP shop or an oracle shop in the enterprise community. Oracle also largely dominates the database market, which could be why IT typically champions Oracle applications inside enterprise accounts. But in the cloud market, that's no longer true as now Oracle has tw...
Oct 23, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 179
Send us Fan Mail Utilizing software in a siloed department is super easy. But as your enterprise grows, you will require cross-functional collaboration across departments. You will have systems that share common data, such as inventory or parts, customers, and vendors. Your architecture may contain ERP, E-commerce, WMS, MES, and P2P systems. Each of them is equally important, which may be dictated by the needs of each department. If you don't have a clearly defined source of authority for each m...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 178
Send us Fan Mail Traditionally, there were a limited number of channels that a company had to manage. But as the lines keep blurring in the business models, businesses will need to manage more channels. The marketplaces and their ever-evolving business model will fuel the growth of channels even further. These marketplaces also pose some of the newer challenges that didn't exist in the traditional channels, such as the dynamic changes in pricing based on market conditions and consumer behaviors....
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 177
Send us Fan Mail The needs of the production floor have always been the most critical for Manufacturing, with scheduling being the most challenging function. The finite scheduling method has been the most accurate and most commonly used so far. It claimed to improve the on-time delivery by scheduling based on the due date and only working on jobs when they were due. But finite scheduling never worked as it didn't accommodate real-life scenarios such as machines going down or some resources not r...
Oct 20, 2021•43 min•Ep. 176
Send us Fan Mail People often talk about the importance of diversification, especially for cash-intensive businesses such as manufacturing. But what exactly is diversification, and how to plan for it? Is it about having the right balance of customers? Is it about rejecting opportunities even if you might have millions of dollars knocking on your doors? Well, diversification requires the complete change of thinking and redesign of your business model. To be completely diversified, you can't just ...
Oct 19, 2021•40 min•Ep. 175
Send us Fan Mail Every company manages thousands of contracts. These contracts could belong to procurement, sales, or HR. But in most cases, the contracts management function is part of the procurement team because of the sheer volume of contracts issued and negotiated. If you don't want to spend millions of dollars in back and forth negotiating with lawyers, then you would need a contract playbook that can help define the boilerplate for your contract, along with a system to track contract expi...
Oct 18, 2021•41 min•Ep. 174
Send us Fan Mail ERP conversations can't finish without the mention of Sage. Like SAP, Sage has always been strong in the European market as it's a European company. They have also been very well penetrated in the accounting and CPA community due to their distribution and business model. Sage has many different products in its portfolio, with construction and process manufacturing industries being its strength. While there have been many debates about the 3rd spot in the ERP market among Microso...
Oct 16, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 173
Send us Fan Mail The main challenge with ERP is that it cannot address 100% of your organization's needs, no matter how good it is. There will always be company-specific needs such as reporting or KPIs. There are also likely to be several integrations that you might require, such as integrating your inventory forecasting, demand planning system, or e-commerce. These integrations and reporting requirements will drive changes to your core ERP functionality, such as exposing additional data fields ...
Oct 15, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 172
Send us Fan Mail Most e-commerce companies remain busy chasing new customers and visitors to the site. And they ignore the average order value, also known as deal size in the traditional world. There are several ways to increase your average order value, such as trying different pricing experiments, bundling, up-sell, and cross-sell. But you would not know what's going to work unless you design suitable experiments and measure them accurately. In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-func...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 171
Send us Fan Mail It's tough to keep up with the trends and technologies in the e-commerce ecosystem. Social media marketing and channels have grown significantly, especially due to COVID. As a result, it's becoming harder and harder to manage the marketing budget and explore the right channels for your market segment and business model. Managing relationships and promoting your offerings through nano influencers is one such trend that's been rising in popularity lately. But it almost seems like ...
Oct 13, 2021•49 min•Ep. 170
Send us Fan Mail The journey of serving the DoD market could feel frightening. While it might provide stability to your fluctuating revenue cycles, it also comes with a significant overhead with the process upkeep. But as part of DoD compliance, you get several benefits, such as protecting your IP as DoD is trying to protect your proprietary methods or patents. With these controls in place, professional investors will see your business as more sustainable if you decide to sell it. Finally, you c...
Oct 12, 2021•50 min•Ep. 169
