Vita Sanguis Supple Vinculum - Labor Management
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Infosys’ blog on industry solutions, trends, business process transformation and global implementation in Oracle.
February 5, 2012
November 19, 2011
Achieving Higher Levels Each Time - Servicing Contracts
Continue reading " Achieving Higher Levels Each Time - Servicing Contracts " »
November 14, 2011
Integrating social media with ERP applications
Guest post by
Amit Kumar Dey, Senior Consultant, Infosys
The importance of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube no longer need any emphasis. Perhaps the power of these tools were not known even to the perpetrators of the great Middle East revolutions until they were able to garner support of millions and mobilize the masses which resulted in the end of decades of despotic rule. Social media which acted as the stimuli and later as a catalyst for the movement was very effectively used by the revolutionaries to unify and spread their message between themselves and also to animate support from the international community.
Continue reading " Integrating social media with ERP applications " »
October 3, 2011
Day 1 at OOW 2011 : The 'Green' and the 'Machines'
Guest post by
Abhishek Sabharwal, Head- Infosys Oracle Innovation Center
Finally, we are here again on the helm of one of the biggest IT events of our times, Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) 2011. As the feeling of nostalgia triggers in with everyone beating each other about the number of years they had been participating in the OOW, the registration lines grew bigger and bigger. The weather, the excitement, iphone tunes and bustling traffic remained the same at SFO but the event seems to gets bigger and better, with representations from 120 countries and close to 45000 registrants. OOW started on a Green note of using minimum paper throughout the event, so no more bulky schedule. All replaced by mobile phone apps, and real time online updates...welcome Social Media and Mobility to the OOW...
Continue reading " Day 1 at OOW 2011 : The 'Green' and the 'Machines' " »
September 30, 2011
Video: Mobile CRM - Delivering the Next Generation Customer Experience
Guest post by
Puneet Gupta, AVP and Head - Infosys Mobile Platforms, Infosys
Continue reading " Video: Mobile CRM - Delivering the Next Generation Customer Experience " »
September 29, 2011
Mobile CRM is not a choice, but a necessity for Enterprises
Guest post by
Shanmugam Gnanasambandam, Principal Consultant, Infosys
Today, enterprises have CRM systems/applications implemented to support their Marketing, Sales and Service functions, which have matured, over the last two decades as an On-Premise Application and also being offered now as an On Demand Application, for access through Desktops/Laptops.
The significant progress of mobile internet, which includes availability of a wide range of affordable smart phones/tablets, high speed internet connectivity on mobile devices and users becoming more and more tech savvy, has created a keen interest in the Mobile CRM space.
Continue reading " Mobile CRM is not a choice, but a necessity for Enterprises " »
September 20, 2011
Why Oracle ORPOS, ATG, and Siebel Need to Merge?
Granted, it is a provocative headline and I could already visualize question marks being raised on the headline itself of this blog. However, it is time we take a fresh look at good old point of sale (POS) application that has perhaps had its golden run for over 20+ years in its various incarnations by multitude of app developers.
Continue reading " Why Oracle ORPOS, ATG, and Siebel Need to Merge? " »
August 12, 2011
JD Edwards (ERP) User Adoption made easy with Oracle User Productivity Kit
What is perhaps the number one complaint about introduction of JD Edwards ERP or a new functionality in JD Edwards, in an Enterprise?
No one knows how to use it!!
According to one study, effective User Adoption seems to be the absolute best predictor of enterprise software success. More often than not, Enterprises have a lack of focus on faster User Adoption that helps to sustain Oracle -JD Edwards implementations and upgrades throughout its life-cycle. Let's talk about ways of achieving a faster user adoption based upon efficient usage of Oracle's User Productivity Kit (UPK) in an Enterprise.
Continue reading " JD Edwards (ERP) User Adoption made easy with Oracle User Productivity Kit " »
November 29, 2010
How 'closed' is closed-loop-marketing?
Guest post by
Nitin Lehri, Lead Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
So many times we casually make use of the term "Closed-loop-Marketing" without fully realizing its actual meaning. Most of us may have not, but I am sure people who are associated with Marketing related services, would have used this jargon. Several clients limit themselves to the response which they receive against the myriad offers they roll out to customers. Further they content themselves with response rate figures derived as part of post roll-out reviews of campaigns. Clients, banking on IT applications, will actually realize the benefits of closed-loop only when they can see the conversions coming in.
Continue reading " How 'closed' is closed-loop-marketing? " »
November 22, 2010
Am I on the right path for my Social Media Strategy?
Guest post by
Aniruddha Suresh Parwekar, Principal Consultant- Business Intelligence, Oracle practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Most people make haste in getting on to "Social Media" bandwagon. They want to ensure that their organization has presence on all the key social networking portals and also put in a sincere attempt to lead a discussion or two before the initiative gets fizzled out. Why does this happen? If I am a business executive, I would invest only in that activity where I get the biggest or at least some bang for my buck. And I would question, with participation in the social media, am I generating additional sales? Am I able to provide better service to my customers and prospects? Is my company image getting better? Am I generating more Word-of-mouth? Am I engaging prospects and customers on a new idea or co-creation? This is very similar to what many organizations did in late nineties when "e-commerce" was the buzzword and every company thought, mere presence on the net would boost their sales. What went wrong? STRATEGY!!!
Continue reading " Am I on the right path for my Social Media Strategy? " »
October 14, 2010
Is there an 'enterprise' email id for your contacts?
Continue reading " Is there an 'enterprise' email id for your contacts? " »
October 7, 2010
Emerging Disconnects in the Traditional Sales Pipeline
Continue reading " Emerging Disconnects in the Traditional Sales Pipeline " »
September 6, 2010
Strategy, Social media, CRM and me!
September 1, 2010
Scope of Social CRM - Demystified Part-2
As promised, I have come back with the second and final part of the scope of Social CRM series. In case, you have missed out on the earlier part, it can be accessed here.
As I said in the first part, the parameters provided were only a subset on which an organization could go for an assessment exercise. But the actual test for any organization is how to go about once the analysis is out. For this, I will put forward different scenarios assuming that only these are the set of parameters, thus strategy could focus on the following options based on the how did they fare on the various parameters.
Continue reading " Scope of Social CRM - Demystified Part-2 " »
August 30, 2010
Scope of Social CRM - Demystified Part-I
Continue reading " Scope of Social CRM - Demystified Part-I " »
August 26, 2010
Social CRM : Prospects and Pitfalls
Apart from forecasting a tremendous growth of Social Media for Business and customer facing communities, Gartner's CRM predictions for 2010 have some key points to note
June 4, 2010
CRM-Changing Rep's Mindset: Looking Inwards!
Why would a sales rep embrace CRM Application? To answer that, let's wear a Salesrep's hat for a moment and see why he would not embrace it!
Continue reading " CRM-Changing Rep's Mindset: Looking Inwards! " »
June 2, 2010
Order Management for Legal Online Publishing
During a process improvement discussion on 'Voice of Customer' meet, one of the sales managers said, "Order processing in systems is the biggest bottleneck in our sales cycle. Further you simplify, more you will get it". The meet was part of large scale transformation endeavor, instigated with a new product launch for a legal media publishing company.
How true it is for a sale representative! Continuously bombarded with new products, company's acquisitions resulting in desperate order entry applications and compensation linked with products cross sell. Why only for sales? Even for call center reps doing order entry while on call, and for consumers doing order entry through self service channels.
Let us take a quick look at online products; typically online products are sold as part of Menus. For legal publishing, these Menus consist of information published from content sources. The content provider publishes varied information like Cases, News, Public Records, and Court Filings etc.
Now let us look at some facts which make these offerings complex;
• Within last 10 years, number of menus has increased to 1400 %**
• Individual source can appear in any number of Menus
• Each Menu has a different price point
(**Data - leading legal solution provider in US)
Typical characteristics of legal publishing enforce designers to think laterally for this industry where business models are getting transformed from "Service Providers" to "Solution Providers".
While it is true that legal industry dynamics and product structure contributes to Order entry complexities. But majority of complications are also due to 'People's involvement & training', 'Holistic Process definition' and 'Right use of technology & tools'. While there are enormous discussion opportunities on these subjects, I would limit the scope by illustrating on order processes.
In legal publishing, the order function revolves around following high level processes;
• Proposal & Contract: Proposing different offers and finalizing on one, subsequently formulating a contract with approvals, legal terms editions etc.• Order Capture & Validations: Entering the order details and subscribers data along with system checks on data validations like emails, subscription period etc.
• Security & Verification: Validation of subscribers, company and contact information for background check and future communications.
• Billing Provisioning: Sending order information to billing application and setting up the billing cycles, account and subscription information.
• Order Fulfillment & On-boarding: Running the subscriber information against authentication, generating and sending the user id password information.
• Subscription Management: Different operations on a subscription e.g. extend, inactivate, reactivate, terminate, interrupt, resume etc. with different level of validations and authorization.
The problem statement becomes more complicated while leveraging the alignment of "Order-to-Cash" with "Campaign-to-Order", "Cash-to-Care", "Billing & Invoicing" & "Royalty" processes. What make it worst is the inconsistencies in order processing rules across different segments like Small Law Firms, Mid-Size & Large Law Firms, Law Schools, Law Students, Corporate & Non-Profit Firms and Government clients.
Different leading software vendors have been collaborating with publishing leaders to enrich their application platform. Infosys team has been working with a US client to create a seamless solution on Oracle platform. We successfully completed the first milestone where the Order Management functions are configured on Siebel platform with an end-to-end integration with Billing (BRM), Finance (PeopleSoft), Fulfillment (WAM) and other back office applications.
I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences and opinions for handling complex order management function on typical enterprise software packages. Also if you are facing similar challenges, I will be very happy to share more details. Please feel free to write back.
May 22, 2010
Go Lean: Minimize customizations and reduce overall TCO in Oracle ERP implementation (Part 3)
There are many ways to achieve Leaner ERP implementation, and I have discussed some of the strategic levers for it in my previous blogs Go Lean (Part 2) and Go Lean (Part 1) like senior management and executive sponsorship, robust decision making framework, effective change management approach, upfront planning for middleware and reporting platforms, solution design workshops, selection of appropriate edge products and leveraging localizations. However, there are many tactical and operational levers also available for enterprises to adopt, which are primarily part of implementation execution cycle. I am discussing here some of these levers and best practices to minimize customizations:
- Boot Camp Trainings - Before initiating the solution design phase, organizations must seriously consider to conduct the boot camp trainings on chosen ERP to their key super users, business analysts and implementation core team, facilitated by System Integrator (SI). The intent for boot camps must be training to the team for vanilla features and functionalities of ERP relevant to their industry processes. This will enable them to bridge many gaps and requirements through seeded ERP functionality, and increase the overall fitment of the package application, leading towards reduced customizations.
May 4, 2010
When is the right time to conduct End User Training in Oracle implementation?
One question that continues to baffle the program management community around Training delivery in large ERP implementation programs is when to deliver end user Training? The answer is probably not as straight as you may expect. Let's first discuss the constraints around this decision:
- Go Live Date: If there is a huge gap between Go Live Date and User Training, the user tends to forget what they learnt as during this period they have to continue using the legacy system and will not be able to unlearn some of the old practices and habits post go-live. On the other hand, if the training continues till the last date, you will not be able to make an apt decision towards user readiness and its implications on implementation Go No Go Decision.
Continue reading " When is the right time to conduct End User Training in Oracle implementation? " »
May 3, 2010
Training Need Analysis, the first steps towards a successful End User Training for large implementation programs
Typical implementations would tread the wrong path by training their end users on all the modules/ functionalities being implemented using the traditional system based classroom session training approach, assuming that this will make them ready for the implementation. Some of these organizations, who are more mature, may leverage similar approach, however by grouping their user community by departments and having some amount of hands on training. But the fact is, the both ways lack the vision and approach towards a successful Training Program. Even before any training activity is initiated, it's important to understand the target end user population, their current skill sets, the impact of the system changes on their day to day tasks and job responsibilities, and then only a strategy must be developed around Training.
Road towards Package Adoption and Learning - Comprehensive Training Strategy is your Precursor to implementation success
In my last blog Still waters run deep - Poor User Adoption may cost you your ERP Implementation.. I discussed at length about the importance of ERP training and the need for organizations to focus more on user adoption. As ERP Implementations mature and grow, the focus on user training also intensifies. While many organizations have started realizing the benefits of user adoption, they often struggle to determine the right budget and the right approach to achieve it.
April 30, 2010
Still waters run deep - Poor User Adoption may cost you your ERP Implementation..
June 29, 2009
Consolidate, Cleanse, Complete Customer Data -Four steps away!
Today enterprises have IT systems performing varied business functions like Finance, Sales,R&D etc. and they are spread across geographies. All these different IT systems need to share the relevant and critical key data - products, customers, suppliers.
Customer Data Integration (CDI) integrates the customer data across multiple channels, multiple lines of business where there are potential multiple sources of customer data residing in multiple applications.
Customer Data Integration (CDI) integrates the customer data across multiple channels, multiple lines of business where there are potential multiple sources of customer data residing in multiple applications.
Continue reading " Consolidate, Cleanse, Complete Customer Data -Four steps away! " »
June 23, 2009
MDM Best Practices – The first steps
Further to my earlier post on managing expectation from MDM implementation – we will discuss on some of the best practices for Master Data Management (MDM).
A company decide on going for a MDM program - what are the first steps to be taken to ensure a successful implementation of the program.
June 3, 2009
MDM Implementation – Managing Expectations!
Managing customer expectations – this is a big topic. We restrict ourselves to discussing a couple of expectations from customers when they plan to implement an MDM solution. MDM is a growing field – people have limited knowledge and there is no clear leader in MDM product offering. So obviously customers will have certain expectations and inhibitions about the MDM implementation.
Continue reading " MDM Implementation – Managing Expectations! " »
April 28, 2009
Product Data Integration Challenge: Structured Vs Unstructured Data
The two key components of Master Data Management (MDM) are Product Data Management and Customer Data Management. The customer data consists of mostly structured data like Name, Address etc., whereas product data is highly unstructured. Product Data will have unstructured data like CAD Drawings, Specification Sheets, Images etc. While creating a product master data in a MDM system – you need to migrate product information from multiple disparate systems into your MDM system. Integration of unstructured product data during migration throws lot of challenges.
Continue reading " Product Data Integration Challenge: Structured Vs Unstructured Data " »
March 27, 2009
Master Data Management – A Lifelong Journey!
Master Data Management (MDM) helps in managing your product or customer master more effectively and efficiently. MDM ensures data consistency across various disparate systems used in any enterprise. This is not a one-time process but a continuous journey. MDM acts as hub of your product or customer master and all other front-end applications subscribe to this hub. This hub acts as a middleware application for all front- end applications.
Let us start our journey of implementing Master Data Management:
Continue reading " Master Data Management – A Lifelong Journey! " »
March 18, 2009
CDH/UCM -Competitors, Yet same Vendor!!!
The market leader in database strongly focuses on Customer Data Hubs. Why? Oracle is going to use Customer Data hubs to increase its sales of Oracle CRM and ERP in SMB sectors. Read the blog to know more on the competitors in Customer Data Hubs in the market.
Today, enterprises need a single system of reference to consolidate the duplicate records lying in disparate systems to provide a global view of customer data. To facilitate this, Oracle provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate with E-Business suite of Applications through its homegrown product - Oracle Customer Data Hub.
Continue reading " CDH/UCM -Competitors, Yet same Vendor!!! " »
March 4, 2009
Master Data Management - An Imperative!
Continue reading " Master Data Management - An Imperative! " »
February 23, 2009
Customers – Lifeblood of an Enterprise!
All of us are customers in one way or the other in our everyday life. How satisfied are we with the service, products that are sold to us? Do we even know how vital are we to an enterprise for their business growth, sales, profits etc.? How do the enterprises look at the customer data when it comes to business? Do they have enough information about all of their customers? Read through the blog to know more about how the Customer data is maintained in a central Hub.
Continue reading " Customers – Lifeblood of an Enterprise! " »
September 16, 2008
How to Improve Visibility into Customer Demand
Forecasting has been rated as one of the top supply chain issues in the globalized world. Organizations are striving to predict customer demand as accurately as possible. Accurate forecasting kick-starts demand and supply chain planning. A large number of products-geography-customer combinations require system enabled forecasting capabilities. A holistic forecasting system brings in Statistical Rigour and Modeling, Dashboards and Simulation capabilities and automatically tunes its models to suit changing business requirements. Sharing here excerpts from one of our working paper – the criteria in choosing the holistic forecasting system.
1. Ability to Model Demand:
Ability of a forecasting system to generate forecast at the most granular level across Time, Geography, Product and Customer dimensions, with the highest accuracy. This will also decide how effectively the system has been able to model the business requirements.
2. Statistical Rigour:
Forecasting systems need to have exhaustive library of statistical models - starting from simplest to most complex. This can help in choosing the best forecasting model which truly represents demand, yet manages model complexity. For example, there are cases where a simple “Moving Average" model may be adequate, whereas there might be cases that demand more sophisticated models (such as “ARIMA"). Moreover, there might be occasions where a combined model is chosen with a weighted average of different models. As a result, the system should not only provide the means through which different models may be easily applied but also facilitate the collaboration between these models for a true representation of demand.
3. Accuracy and Forecast Generation Time:
The preliminary requirement of any forecasting system to generate accurate forecast may not be enough. For example, an organization requiring daily forecasts for the planning purpose may not be able to use the forecasting system if it takes 10 hours to generate forecasts, regardless of its accuracy. Timely availability of forecast is as important as the accuracy it provides.
4. Interpretability:
Statistical error measures (e.g. MAPE, MSE) are popular yet widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. Quite often, end-users are not equipped to interpret the forecasting accuracy through such error measures. Forecasting system should enable business users with dashboard capabilities that communicate such measures in visually interpretable mediums.
5. Accommodate external issues:
Selecting the best forecasting model may not be enough. In majority of the cases, accuracy could benefit from the consideration of external components. These components could entail information such as the dates of forthcoming national holidays and the occurrence of exceptional events such as marketing campaigns. Hence an automated system should be able to understand such components and should be able to seamlessly combine them with basic forecasting techniques.
6. Automatic self-tuning:
An automated collaboration of the various components generates an additional consideration. When various models are combined, collaborative operation and self tuning becomes a major issue. The challenge arises from the relationships among the models. Although manual operation is a solution, it is associated with two major problems. Firstly, efficiency is reduced due to the required time and secondly, selection of models may be compromised in order to choose simpler alternatives. Hence an automated process for self-tuning would increase the flexibility and efficiency of the system.
Different applications will be associated with different forecasting parameters. Typical examples of such parameters include geographical areas, types of product and priority levels of service. This list could be enriched as diverse application scenarios might be considered. As a result, the design of a generic and fully automated forecasting framework requires the definition of a generic data representation. This data type will hide the low level details and present an abstract view on which the generic forecasting framework may operate on.
Excerpt from the working paper – Shah M., Owusu G., Shoban B., Balkundi N., “Improving Forecasting Accuracy of Traditional Demand Planning System” (2008)
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