Send us Fan Mail The oil and gas industry is unique with its process complexity and its ad-hoc nature. Also, it's even harder for global companies when you might need to comply with global regulations in each country. If you were to implement an ERP for a large, global oil and gas company, you not only have to figure out which countries would be the right candidate to avoid implementation failures as well as cost overruns, but you also need to figure out how to standardize ever-changing processe...
Feb 23, 2022•43 min•Ep. 258
Send us Fan Mail While most businesses think that a website is important for their businesses, they very rarely understand the user experience issues that can affect the conversion rate. The issues run way deeper than we realize. And these issues might be as insignificant as color or messaging that can have a huge impact on consumer psychology. Unless you have a deep understanding of these issues and the toolset to provide you with the data that you need to discover these issues, you might not k...
Feb 21, 2022•45 min•Ep. 257
Send us Fan Mail There are two ways to grow an ERP company. Either you build the product from scratch or acquire several products to gain market share and then figure out your product strategy. Both approaches have pros and cons and implications for customers. But there comes the point in the company's lifecycle when you need to consolidate your product portfolio. Or you can't sustain it. Also, no one commercializes the idea of micro-verticals as much as Infor. But are they really deep in these ...
Feb 19, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 256
Send us Fan Mail Marketing teams typically drive the overall market penetration strategies. They could also drive your strategic priorities in key market segments and transform the customer experience. Also, while they use a lot of tools and technologies to be efficient with their day jobs, they very rarely are part of the operational core. So what are the systems that marketers need in their roles? And do they need to interface with the enterprise systems such as ERP? How do you accommodate the...
Feb 18, 2022•58 min•Ep. 255
Send us Fan Mail Traditional media has been a master of offering relevant content based on users' locations. And while digital media has far more traceability, brands typically struggle to deliver location-based content to their visitors. Then you have location-centric businesses that only target specific neighborhoods and cities. You might have products relevant to the specific locations as other locations might not care for that. Location-based marketing requires a comprehensive review of your...
Feb 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 254
Send us Fan Mail If you are a seasonal CPG business, you may have grown due to word of mouth to this point in growth, primarily through B2C channels. While B2C has its nuances for planning and procurement due to the unpredictable consumer demand, the drivers and consequences are not as severe as B2B once you have landed a few large enterprise customers. Also, if you want to have fast growth, you will need to sell through marketplaces and large retailers. While onboarding them could provide susta...
Feb 15, 2022•51 min•Ep. 253
Send us Fan Mail Traditionally manufacturers didn't have to worry about software development or release processes as the only software they utilized for their business processes was packaged software. But with Industry 4.0, manufacturers are utilizing more and more software in their OT environment. This requires their software lifecycle to be controlled. And it needs to be compliant with any changes in the hardware. But how? Well, that's where DevOps can help. Utilizing DevOps practices can redu...
Feb 14, 2022•43 min•Ep. 252
Send us Fan Mail Most people think of ERP as a manufacturing or distribution solution. And if you are not a manufacturing company, they feel that ERP systems add very little value to operations and become limited to just finance. While that might be true for some companies such as professional services firms or marketing agencies, companies that are very heavy in assets and field service such as MRO, telecom equipment operators, utilities, and energy companies have different needs. These needs r...
Feb 12, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 251
Send us Fan Mail Sales teams are typically known to be completely disconnected from the organization. But if you have a smart sales team, they understand the importance of technology and what it can do to the sales process. The sales technologies have also come a long way. There are so many tools out there that can help with each step of the process. But what are the systems that need to be part of the enterprise architecture to help with each sales role inside the organization? In today's episo...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 250
Send us Fan Mail For every one second it takes for your website to load, your conversion rate goes down by 10%. But how true is that? Well, speed is a huge factor in ranking on Google. In fact, even if you have mastered the Desktop speed, you might still not rank well if your mobile speed might not be as good. But what are the issues that cause a site to load slower? Are these issues related to hosting provider, site design, # and size of the imagery, or bloated themes? What do you need to do to...
Feb 10, 2022•59 min•Ep. 249
Send us Fan Mail Time series data is all about continuous monitoring of your machines to detect trends with your batches. If you don't collect and analyze the data, you might feel that you don't have capacity to meet customer demand and might be forced to acquire additional capacity or facility if you don't miss the opportunities. But the additional capacity might be right there within your facility and existing machines. Just because you may not have enough data points to draw conclusions from,...
Feb 09, 2022•57 min•Ep. 248
Send us Fan Mail If you are in the custom machinery business or building a custom machine using control systems from scratch, you have several challenges. While you might have previous experiences in building similar machines, each job is unique. The materials and the process may vary. The tooling required may be completely different. And then, you need to keep calibrating the interaction of materials, tooling, and variables using data gathered through your control systems until you get the desi...
Feb 08, 2022•52 min•Ep. 247
Send us Fan Mail Most manufacturers relate eCommerce as the B2C experience and swiping the credit card for pre-paid customers. But digital commerce is more than that, especially in the B2B setting. Also, in most cases, most people relate eCommerce as the engine for generating revenue through net-new customers. And they miss the point that digital commerce is about enabling and tailoring the experience for each persona to create the sticky effect that can create a much superior competitive advant...
Feb 07, 2022•44 min•Ep. 246
Send us Fan Mail If you are a small custom manufacturing shop switching off from spreadsheets or QuickBooks, you will likely come across GeniusERP. It is probably the only small ERP that can work with complex assemblies and BOMs in the small ERP category. In the small ERP segment, most ERP systems don't support hybrid manufacturing. And in most cases, they will be able to support a couple of manufacturing processes. In the case of GeniusERP, they target custom manufacturers geared toward ETO pro...
Feb 05, 2022•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 245
Send us Fan Mail If you are responsible for managing operations for your organization, you will find yourself caught in the middle. On one side, you have a sales team that may not commit to driving predictable sales, but they will not allow you to miss even one delivery, even if it may be out of your control. Then on the other side, you have unpredictable factors such as workers not showing up on time or truck drivers not meeting their commitments. Finally, you need to make sure you can plan fac...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 244
Send us Fan Mail How many shoppers do you know will buy the first time they visit a store Very few, right? It takes some time before we can trust a brand. The same goes for e-commerce. The percentage may be even higher for e-commerce due to low barriers to exit from a site and go to the next one. In fact, more than 95% of the people that visit a website for the first time are not ready to buy. They need more than one interaction before they can make their mind. That’s where retargeting comes in....
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 243
Send us Fan Mail Sales and operations planning is a dark art, and most organizations typically have a very ad-hoc process of forecasting due to its nature. But it's critical to be directionally correct with your plan. Or you might end up missing opportunities or losing customers. Also, planning is more than just creating a model on a spreadsheet. It requires you to come up with estimates and iterate until every external or internal stakeholder agrees with the plan. In today's episode, our guest,...
Feb 02, 2022•52 min•Ep. 242
Send us Fan Mail Launching a business model could provide a revenue engine and competitive advantage that will be unmatched. But launching a marketplace is not easy. In fact, it's a chicken and egg problem. Your suppliers will ask you to get the customers first. And your customers will need a decent product and vendor mix before they can choose your site over other stronger brands such as Amazon. Also, the technology investments required to launch a marketplace are substantial. But at least now,...
Feb 01, 2022•51 min•Ep. 241
Send us Fan Mail If you have been thinking about incorporating robotic processes or industry 4.0 controls into your facility, you will have a choice whether you would like to buy the control systems directly from the vendors or program the robotic arms and control systems until you get the desired results from the manufacturing processes. Therefore, irrespective of whether you are a system integrator or the end consumer of the robotic process, you need to make a key decision whether you want to ...
Jan 31, 2022•47 min•Ep. 240
Send us Fan Mail There are two ways to grow an ERP company. Either you build products from scratch like SAP, Acumatica, SYSPRO, and NetSuite, etc. Or you acquire several products until you have a solid market share to create a product strategy like Infor, Epicor Software, Sage, and Appian Corporation. While Infor and Epicor were very aggressive with their acquisition strategy in their early days, they have realized how bad having too many product bases could fire back. One of the challenges that...
Jan 29, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 239
Send us Fan Mail If you ask any manufacturer, they will tell you that the Shop floor is where you make money. You need to make sure you have the right material and the right operator at the right machine. Wasting machine or machinist time is equally expensive. But then your margins may be tight, and you need to make sure you are profitably able to produce the job by optimizing the cycle time. You also need to make sure that you service your equipment at the right time, or you have the risk of di...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 238
Send us Fan Mail Getting a visitor to your site is not easy. Once you get visitors, keeping them engaged on the site is not easy either. But what is worse is if they end up dropping out without buying. Dropouts could happen because of a lot of reasons. It could be the higher price or shipping options. It could also be the checkout experience if the process may take a longer time than expected. So how do you control visitors from dropping out? What are the best practices for reducing the dropout?...
Jan 27, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 237
Send us Fan Mail Demand and inventory planning is a dark art that even trained S&OP practitioners struggle to understand. Each company goes through a maturity curve as they scale their operations. They will start with a spreadsheet or a combination of a spreadsheet and an ERP system. They might also do a lot of planning inside the ERP, but the development of those reports could be costly, and your planners may still not like to use it due to the rigidity of the ERP systems. As they grow, the...
Jan 26, 2022•40 min•Ep. 236
Send us Fan Mail Did you know that plastic could be more sustainable than paper? Wait, what? Well, to understand sustainability, you need to analyze the complete product lifecycle, identify your KPIs for the critical material waste, and find out how much total waste you have in the entire product life cycle. If you did this, you might learn that paper usage resulted in wasting some other key resources as the product moved through the supply chain. This is why sustainability is more challenging t...
Jan 25, 2022•49 min•Ep. 235
Send us Fan Mail Prototyping business is unique since each order is different. Most people would not be able to imagine standardization for this business. You may be building parts of different materials, shapes, and sizes and may require different machines and tooling to process the parts. You may also struggle with material storage requirements and might produce several WIP items as it might be cheaper than ordering each individual part. Given such constraints, how many people would think of i...
Jan 24, 2022•44 min•Ep. 234
Send us Fan Mail While most ERP systems might feel as if they overlap entirely, there is a clear distinction between desktop apps, single-tenant, multi-tenant, and enterprise solutions. You might also need to pay attention to how many levels of BOMs are supported in the solution to ensure that you find an appropriate solution for your company. For example, most solutions that support industries such as food and beverage and automotive parts may not be suitable for complex manufacturing such as E...
Jan 22, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 233
Send us Fan Mail While the 3PL and companies involved with freight movement may have much stronger needs for logistics and transportation processes, manufacturers and distributors can't be efficient if they treat logistics as their stepchild. In fact, more and more companies are managing their in-house fleets to meet the consumer expectations of faster delivery and issues such as driver shortages. The inhouse fleets are also required if you have regulated business or special requirements to ship...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 232
Send us Fan Mail Retaining customers is 10x easier than acquiring them. But you will not be able to create the sticky effect with your customers unless you have a solid strategy behind it. Retention requires a loyalty model that makes your customers feel that they are getting preferential treatment for their loyalty. It also requires you to communicate the value of preferential treatment. Unless you communicate, how would they know that you are doing something for them? Without communication, yo...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 231
Send us Fan Mail Getting in front of more customers is typically the response of most manufacturers that might have sales performance issues or ambition to grow their sales. But you need a formalized sales process and a deep understanding of why you might be losing your current deals or how to find the next cohort of customers that might be similar to the ones you currently might have to be successful. Also, unless you have a well-adopted CRM for your sales team, it's hard to formalize the sales...
Jan 19, 2022•46 min•Ep. 230
Send us Fan Mail The more regulated a business, the harder the requirements for regulatory compliance. Pharma distribution might feel like a straightforward business, but it has several requirements related to lot and serial number tracking that only exist in this industry. They also have unique channels and how their sales and purchase orders need to be processed in order to be compliant with the regulatory bodies. Utilizing a vanilla ERP for a pharma business may be a harder lift due to the un...
Jan 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 229
