Twitter Spreads the Buzz as SAP's John Wookey departs

I’ve been watching the buzz that followed the announcement of John Wookey’s departure from SAP. Others have come and gone with hardly a mention but this departure is getting a bit more attention. Quite frankly I think it has more to do with Twitter than it does with SAP or John Wookey himself. That’s how I first learned of his resignation and I would guess most industry observers learned about it the same way. The immediacy of social media, Twitter especially, seems to spur everyone to either weigh in on the matter, or at least pass along the news. I was no exception, even though I am hardly as prolific in tweeting as many of my industry counterparts.

Ordinarily I don’t write much about organizational changes unless I believe they are somehow game changing. In fact I haven’t written a real analysis of a departure since Shai Agassi’s departure in March 2007. I did post a brief entry to my Aberdeen blog when Leo Apotheker left, but even that did not have the potential impact that Shai’s departure had. And John Wookey’s doesn’t even come close. But that is actually to John’s and SAP’s credit.

Yes John Wookey was a voice of the on-demand strategy at SAP, but let’s not forget that initially the “line of business” (which was really the large enterprise) on-demand strategy, which John was in charge of, had nothing to do with the current strategy which uses the Business ByDesign architecture as the overall on-demand platform. But today the revamped on-demand  strategy is firmly enough in place and execution has begun in earnest. I don’t believe John Wookey’s departure (or that of any SAP exec) has the potential of derailing the wheels that have been set in motion to carry through on that strategy.

Shai’s departure was much different. First of all, Shai had a far more influential position than John. Prior to his departure he oversaw the development of the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP xApps packaged composite applications, mySAP SRM, SAP Business One, and the project that ultimately produced Business ByDesign (called the A1S mid-market initiative back then). And there was a massive reorganization when he left. I never really decided for sure whether his departure triggered the reorg or if the reorg triggered his departure.  In the end, it didn’t matter all that much.

At the time, as an Aberdeen analyst I wrote, “SAP appears to be far enough down the path of its enterprise SOA strategy to not be derailed by the departure of a single executive, even one as charismatic as Shai. The migration to its new platform and mySAP ERP [which became the basis for the Business Suite] has begun although SAP still has a long way to go to meet the publicly stated goal of 100,000 customers by 2010 [the Business Objects acquisition gave that initiative a big shot in the arm]. And SAP is in the early stages of delivering against the newly announced A1S mid-market strategy [which was made available on a limited basis as Business ByDesign in September of that year].”

Since Shai’s departure there have been a lot of ups and downs, as well as sideways motion on all these initiatives. But all of these goals have since been achieved, in one way or another. At this point I would just wish John well and will keep an eye out for where he lands. I am sure someone I follow on Twitter will tell me as soon as they know.

SAP Business One customer U-CLOCK makes practical use of mobile technology

I was talking to an SAP Business One customer today and came across an interesting use of mobile technology to help manage a workforce deployed to a remote site – think of a construction site perhaps or physical therapists that regularly go to a nursing home or assisted living facility, contract security, temporary locations. This is not a product the Business One customer uses in their own implementation, but rather a product they build and sell.

The name of the company is Advanced Ventilation in the UK and the product I’m talking about is made and sold by a spin-off called U-CLOCK which operates as a separate company. U-CLOCK makes use of mobile phones to manage time and attendance as well as project updates (including material requests), report health and safety issues and accidents and provide an audit trail of all of the above.

Here’s how it works: The U-CLOCK customer purchases a small device that it locates at the remote site. When the employee arrives, he or she enters the 8 digit number that is shown on the device. A free text message is then sent from the mobile phone (employees can use their own personal phones) to a secure online account to register the location and arrival time. The number changes every 30 seconds, so the time entered is precise within a 30 second window. Managers track this on a computer logged into the company’s U-CLOCK account, but aren’t tied to the console. Email notifications can also be sent to the managers’ mobile phones. If an employee doesn’t arrive as expected at the site, the manager knows immediately. They can also report health and safety incidents and requisition materials.

All this information can be exported to a .csv or .pdf file or can be integrated into back office systems for billing and reporting.

In addition- and this is the part I like best -  the U-Locate feature is designed for the lone worker. U-Locate is designed to address the needs of people who can potentially find themselves in an "at risk" situation such as, accidents, physical or verbal abuse at work, or dangerous roles with a real and present risk of physical danger. The main issues for employers is to know (with accuracy) where the lone worker is at any time via the worker’s mobile phone. The U-Locate Software, also accessible through the U-Clock secure console, gives the employer complete insight into the current location and past whereabouts of lone workers.

 But more importantly it helps the lone workers in reacting to a dangerous situation or an unexpected event and gives them peace of mind knowing they will be missed if they don’t show up where they are expected and in knowing there will be someone at the end of the line who will know what to do. The worker can activate an alert which will be received by a dedicated emergency response center that has the ability to listen in to events as they happen and contact the relevant emergency services to ensure the quickest response possible.

I guess I show my age when I shake my head over kids constantly texting – and some of my colleagues on Twitter and other social media sites aren’t much different from those kids. Not that I am surprised… many of them are half my age. But I honestly don’t care what my business colleagues had for lunch, when they go to bed or what the view is from their hotel room. This seems a much more pragmatic use of mobile technology.

Lawson Mashup Designer – Getting M3 Customers Excited

What got customers excited earlier this week at CUE 2011 (Lawson’s annual Customer User Event)? The announcement that seemed to cause the biggest stir amongst the M3 customers was Lawson Mashup Designer. It is a new tool that helps Lawson customers build their own composite applications from multiple data sources, on-screen views and business intelligence reports – all without having to write software code. Only having one (quite full and busy) day at CUE this year, I didn’t have a chance to see all I wanted to see. So for now this will be some initial observations, with more to follow.

Lawson Mashup Designer is based on Lawson Smart Office (LSO), which was released back in March 2008. The original goal of LSO was along the same lines of thought as Mashup Designer is today. It was meant to be an intuitive, personalized user interface that allows users to directly access Lawson and Microsoft applications and update data pervasively and instantly across the applications. But while the emphasis of LSO initially was on those Microsoft productivity tools such as Microsoft Excel, Outlook, Word and PowerPoint, Mashup Designer builds upon LSO and extends beyond the realm of Microsoft and has customers fired up about the possibilities. In fact in talking with the COO and CFO of JR Watkins, a Lawson M3 customer, the pair commented that Mashups were “what lit our fire. We can definitely visualize how they could be used in our environment.”

Matthew Allbee, product management director for Lawson describes Lawson Mashup Designer as, “a new way for our customers to build better applications that they can use every day. By combining forms, process flows, data views, reports and business intelligence content into a single user-created application, we're now offering a new level of user customization. But most important, this does not require advanced programming skills. Instead, people who use Lawson every day can quickly start to create their own task- or process-specific applications."

But the keyword here might be “advanced” programming skills. While the intent is to be a tool for line of business versus IT, it is primarily for Lawson power users, system administrators and programmers, not your casual user or users that spend their entire time performing one specific function using M3.

LSO, being the foundation for Mashup Designer, is a prerequisite. Although the Mashup Designer is only available with M3, Lawson also plans to make it available for S3. In the meantime, for a limited time (until the end of August) LSO is available at no charge to any S3 customer with Lawson System Foundation (LSF). Those that take the deal do have to pay maintenance on LSO. For those S3 customers that have already purchased LSO – contact your customer service rep. Sounds like you could get some added incentives.

Details aside, what struck me first and foremost about Lawson Mashup Designer was the similarity in concept to Infor’s recently announced Infor Workspace. This is particularly relevant if in fact the proposed acquisition of Lawson by Infor goes through. You’ve got two companies thinking very much along the same lines in terms of a role based user experience that blurs the boundaries between disparate enterprise applications and web-based tools and applications. It would be great to see this kind of synergy accelerate the feature/function and technology innovation that the combined company could deliver to its customers.

My initial take on Epicor, Activant and Apax Partners

Yesterday Epicor announced it had agreed to be acquired by Apax Partners. While I am not personally familiar with Apax, its website tells me it is an independent global private equity advisory firm and holding company for the worldwide Apax partnership which is the lead investment adviser to the most recent Apax Funds. Apax Funds buy both majority and minority stakes in large companies that have strong, established market positions and the potential to expand. It has a strong heritage of technology investment.

At the same time, it was announced that Apax would also acquire Activant Solutions and merge the two companies. The combined entity will operate under the name of Epicor Software Corporation and become a privately held company. Of course it is too early to tell exactly how the merger will be executed, but Epicor itself has a history of acquisition and is the only ERP company that has grown through acquisition and successfully executed a product convergence/consolidation strategy. Epicor 9, released in December 2009, is built on Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE) 2.0, a second-generation Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technologies and is generally recognized for its visionary architecture. But just as importantly, Epicor 9 merges capabilities of nine different products (hence the “9” in the name).  If Epicor remains true to past strategies, I would expect it to treat the Activant products similarly.

But then again….maybe not. Activant serves some very specific vertical industries including:

·         automotive aftermarket

·         farm-home

·         hardware and home centers

·         heavy duty truck and trailer

·         lawn, garden and nursery

·         lumber and building materials

·         painting and decorating

·         pharmacy retail

·         specialty retail

·         wholesale/distribution

While Epicor also serves retail and distribution sectors, Epicor also has products which complement ERP in support of a retail environment, and has never been that “niche” oriented.  It remains to be seen whether these industries are best served by separate product lines or whether Epicor will decide to continue the convergence and turn Epicor 9 into Epicor 10, or maybe even Epicor 11 or 12.

For now it is safe to assume the transaction will be good for Epicor and allow it to fuel more aggressive growth in the market. As for Activant, customers should take comfort in knowing that Epicor’s strategy has been very customer-centric with a motto of “Protect, Extend and Converge.” Whether convergence is in the future or not, I have a lot of confidence in the resultant management team preserving the part about protect and extend.

Infor Workspace: Work Without Leaving the Comfort of “Home”

On March 31, 2011 Infor announced Infor Workspace, calling it a new “consumer grade user interface designed to revolutionize the experience of doing business using enterprise applications.” Built on Microsoft SharePoint with significant investment, Infor Workspace delivers the next generation user experience by blending a common user interface across a mix of enterprise applications, web services  and business intelligence.  The role-based user experience is akin to setting up a home base of operations from which a business user can comfortably operate all day long, without ever leaving “home.” More than a portal, and more than just a common look and feel for Infor’s products, its power lies in further blurring the boundaries of applications and carrying context between applications of all types.

Boundaries are blurring

For the past several years the lines have been blurring between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other enterprise applications to the extent that it has become very difficult to determine where ERP ends and these other applications begin. This is particularly significant in any discussion of Infor, due to the company’s voracious appetite for acquisition. Over the years Infor has collected quite a variety of ERP solutions as well as complementary products that expand its footprint beyond the usual confines of traditional ERP. These acquisitions have put applications such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and others into the Infor portfolio.

While this provided Infor with a more complete solution along with up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, there is never a silver bullet that turns different applications into a single cohesive solution that allows data and processes to flow smoothly between applications. That takes time and effort.  

Now these boundaries are blurring even further. Think about it. As a business professional you spend time in enterprise applications that run and support your business; you spend time using desktop tools, time on your own Intranet and you spend time out on the Internet. Lines between your business and personal life are also beginning to blur as the data and applications you use as a consumer also start to permeate your consciousness and re-set expectations, particularly those of younger folks fresh from college or business school.

More than a beauty contest

While Infor Workspace gives a common look and feel and a single sign on to potentially a vast array of disparate applications, it is more than just a portal. While how an application looks and feels is more important than ever, the real value of tools such as Infor Workspace are in providing visibility and ease of use and in fueling productivity. While top of the list of goals for ERP (and many other enterprise applications) is providing added visibility to the business, most companies today still lack a clear line of sight from quote to cash, and many individuals in those companies waste precious time searching for data on a regular basis. In this quest for information and knowledge, it is less important to know exactly where the information is coming from and more important to be able to easily carry information from one of these applications to another. This is what is meant by “context.”

Let’s take one example. One of your sales representatives might be using sales force automation tools available from your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. This is where he has all his contacts, including an address. Now he is preparing to visit the prospect or customer and needs to plan his day around this visit, so he needs to know how long it will take to get there; he needs directions and he might also want to determine if he might be able to combine this call with a visit to another prospect or customer. No problem, he just opens a browser where he probably has Yahoo!Maps or Mapquest or Google Maps bookmarked. Then he grabs the address from CRM and copies and pastes it into the navigational application to get driving directions. This probably takes two or three steps because the address is contained in several different fields in the application that must all be strung together in the navigation application. And he better not forget to put that appointment in his calendar.

Fast forward now to Infor Workspace. Instead of multiple copy and paste steps, right from the customer record, he can click on a button to open up Google Maps and the destination location is automatically filled in from the CRM application.

In this case the sales rep doesn’t know or care if his directions are coming from an internal business application or an application he is accessing via the Internet. What’s important is that the customer and address was carried over automatically without having to find, copy and paste.

Or what about when that prospect is not within driving distance? He will need to determine the closest airport, then visit the company’s approved travel site and then search for other prospects and customers in close range. And he also needs to get approval (online?) from his manager for his travel.

It’s about context

This may seem like a trivial example to those who operate on the bleeding edge of technology, but there are plenty of business professionals out there, including some Infor customers, who have yet to apply these efficiency and productivity steps to their everyday work experience. If one individual can save a few key strokes every day, how much time and effort can a sales force of 100 individuals, or 1000, save in a day, a month or a year? Then think of other ways to save time and key strokes. What about currency or time zone conversion? How many other small tasks are you doing every day that quickly and quietly suck up minutes that, when added together, turn into hours. How many different applications do you typically have open at any one time of the day?

Exception management

In addition to the mapping, currency and time conversion tools that are available, Infor Workspace also provides automatic alert management tools that monitor the status of tasks in relation to promised completion or established service level agreements and alert users to exceptions. Event management tools that alert decision makers when conditions or activities occur or fail to occur have been around for more than a decade. Yet adoption rates and implementation of these types of tools are still very low. Building these tools into the application is certainly one way of encouraging more exception management.

But the real value of alerts is dependent on the level of intelligence available in the data. Infor has added certain charts and alerts as standard fare, but if the customer wants to build their own Business Intelligence they do need to buy those tools from Infor.

Another factor that impacts adoption of alerts and event management is the question of where and how these alerts are delivered. As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile, just delivering these on your standard desktop or laptop is not sufficient. An application running in a standard browser, which is a prerequisite for Infor Workspace, generally allows it to also run on an iPad. Today Infor Workspace is available on an iPad, but Infor admits it still needs to do some work on the touch and feel aspect of the interaction since some of the standard icons are quite small.

Underlying architecture

Infor has made use of its ION integration technology as well as Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Reporting Services. As noted above, applications will have to be browser-enabled in order to take advantage of Infor Workspace.

While most of Infor’s key go-forward products are browser-enabled, this will leave some of the legacy applications out of the picture. That is not necessarily a bad thing. While giving customers choice is good, encouraging them to stay on old, outdated technology is empowering them to remain underserved by technology and innovation. One of Infor’s goals is to get customers on the latest and greatest versions of their applications without having the customer incur a huge cost. For existing Infor customers Workspace is available through their annual maintenance agreement and Infor has tried to minimize the cost and impact of upgrading through means such as pre-built migration kits.

Recommendations and Key Takeaways

Infor Workspace provides a new paradigm and a new experience for Infor customers. It is more than a portal, it is a work space (hence the name), customizable by role and by individual, bringing together the power of internal and web-based applications. Existing Infor customers should explore the possibilities that unfold in implementing Infor Workspace along with applications they already own.

What about expanding beyond current products implemented? Because many of the solutions besides ERP have been acquired by Infor , current customers may not have perceived significant value in purchasing those complementary solutions from Infor. Now with a consistent look and feel, the benefits of a single sign on and “in context” business intelligence, they may want to think again.

For prospects of Infor currently considering a purchase, fully explore the application under consideration but also look carefully at how Infor Workspace can continue to expand the scope of the implementation, without adding extra cost.

NetSuite has arrived on the scene of ERP in Manufacturing

When I first “met” NetSuite about 5 years ago I have to admit I didn’t really consider it an ERP vendor. Of course that was back when I had a more narrow view of ERP and thought that if a vendor didn’t have MRP then it didn’t have ERP. I’ve since gotten over that and for several years now I have defined ERP as an integrated suite of modules that provide the transactional system of record for a business. Not every type of business needs MRP to form that basis. Of course most ERP solutions offer much more than that, so this is really my base line definition.

Back in 2006 I viewed CRM and eCommerce as NetSuite’s strengths even though it did provide a suite that extended beyond these modules.  But since then it has officially entered the realm of ERP in my book. Its Home page on its website (www.netsuite.com) labels it as “The #1 Cloud ERP / Financials Software Suite” and further describes its solution as “full-featured financials / accounting, CRM, inventory, and ecommerce software—all in a single system.” So in a way, it is still down-playing the ERP moniker in favour of “suite” and its historically strong suit: CRM and eCommerce, packaged with financials.

Also back in 2006, NetSuite did not target manufacturers. Without a true Bill of Material and MRP all it could address was some level of assembly or very light manufacturing. That has now changed, although not all as a result of organic development. Some of the manufacturing functionality NetSuite offers now comes from a partner, Rootstock. Rootstock Software is a certified NetSuite Solution Provider specializing in the manufacturing industry with heavy focus on the NetSuite Manufacturing Edition solution. While its website claims, “NetSuite Manufacturing Edition is the only cloud-based integrated business suite for manufacturing”, I think they are missing a few other players, with Plex Systems being at the top of that list. Plex has been offering a complete SaaS ERP solution for manufacturing for more than 10 years. Other more traditional ERP players (Epicor, Infor, QAD, SAP) also have cloud based offerings for manufacturers and even more have arrived on the scene with hosted cloud models.

But what I find very interesting is that some of NetSuite’s key customer successes were achieved without the use of Rootstock functionality.  I just listened in to a webcast sponsored by NetSuite and featuring 2 manufacturers using NetSuite and both purchases pre-date the partnership with Rootstock.

Schaeffer Oil prides itself on being “the oldest oil company you never heard of.” With 30,000 customers, it processes 90,000 orders a year using NetSuite and has achieved the following results:

·         Reduced its IT spend by $100,000 in the first 6 months

·         Reduced cycle time of order processing from 3 days to 1.5

·         Reduced backorders by 25%

·         Processed 25% more orders with 15% less staff

·         Improved communication and visibility

GLI Pool Products is a manufacturer and distributor of custom and specialty products for the swimming pool industry. It was founded in 2006 with the purchase of assets from a much larger Canadian company and in doing so inherited an ERP solution, but none of the influence over its continued development.  Ultimately they replaced that inherited solution with NetSuite. GLI has bucked the downward trend in construction related businesses and attribute much of their success to the use of NetSuite. They achieved lower material and operational costs while improving flexibility – a key consideration as they no longer wanted to live in “used-ta-land.” They could no longer be productive and profitable doing things the way they used to do things.

So while the addition of Rootstock functionality really just took effect in mid-2010, NetSuite has been quietly amassing quite a collection of manufacturers in its installed base for quite some time. This is particularly notable since NetSuite is not known for its “quiet” marketing tactics. With the addition of a couple of relatively new names to the NetSuite roster (Roman Bukary and Ranga Bodla) charged with promoting NetSuite in Manufacturing and Distribution, perhaps this will change.

Epicor University: Do we really need education and training?

Last week (March 15, 2011) Epicor announced the launch of a new university for its customers, partners and employees. Epicor University was created to address the challenge of delivering consistent high-quality training worldwide, and to expand the range of Epicor’s education deliverables. It also offers certification programs for Epicor’s partner channel. With the introduction of the university concept, all content, materials, and training is developed by a dedicated centralized team.

The primary objective is to provide customers with resources and tools to help them realize the greatest benefit from their enterprise software investment while allowing individuals to learn in the way they learn best. Epicor already offers a lot of resources, from embedded courses within their ERP system, to user guides, classroom courses and certifications, to an online help system that gets down to individual fields help and technical reference guides. According to Epicor, there are more than one hundred embedded courses associated with Epicor 9 and over 100 virtual or classroom courses available, 2,500 pages of content and graphics in Epicor technical guides, and 74,000 fields defined in Epicor 9 Field Help.

So why is a University needed? After all, user interfaces have become so much more intuitive and software has become easier to use. Navigation through an enterprise application is no longer cumbersome and confusing. And when was the last time you read the instructions for any kind of software anyway? If you can’t figure it out easily it just doesn’t get used.  

Exactly! That’s one of the reasons that education and training often gets ignored. Sure the user interface is intuitive. Sure it is easy to navigate through the various functions. But these are potentially complex business processes that are being modeled through an ERP. Are those business processes efficient? Are they standardized and repeatable? Do they produce a clean audit trail? Can they be easily audited? Do they put you in a position of competitive strength or hold you back from realizing your full potential? Most importantly, are you getting the most value out of your investment? Why do you think one company fails miserably while another succeeds beyond all expectations while they both use the same software?

Most every software company on the planet is working to enable self-service training and support. That makes sense. Like any other type of company today, most are attempting to grow while also reducing or constraining costs. The software business itself is very scalable. Create one piece of software and sell it dozens or hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of times. But services don’t necessarily scale as easily. Sure, you can make it more scalable by creating user guides and online on demand training courses. But there is a certain element of education and consulting that happens one person, one hour or day at a time. And even the very best software can be underutilized, used incorrectly or used to model inefficient and incomplete processes.

So kudos to Epicor for bringing education and training back into the spotlight. Are you getting the maximum value possible from your ERP?

Infor announces hiring plans along with Q3 software license growth of 17%

This morning  Infor announced it will expand its engineering organization by hiring approximately 400 additional software developers and plans to add significantly more new features and releases this year than ever before.  Reinforcing, the strategy shift away from building middleware, all these new hires will be focused on building business applications.

This signals an increase in investment in product development under the leadership of the new management team put in place by Charles Phillips who took over as CEO, bumping Jim Schaper to chairman of the board.  Infor also announced license growth of 17% and increased cash operating margins of 24% (which includes Infor and Softbrands Q3FY11 results over Q3 of Fiscal Year 2010). Infor added 400 net new customers last quarter. This is an important statistic since we have witnessed slowed growth of ERP solution providers, coupled with the downturn in the economy over the last two plus years. Indeed, Infor’s customer count has hovered around 70,000 for the past five years, ever since the acquisition of SSA Global, Systems Union and Extensity in August 2006. Since then, new customer growth has compensated for attrition, but has not moved the needle significantly.

New releases, standards based integration through Infor’s new ION platform, and planned changes to a new and universal user interface are all necessary components in order for Infor to break out this year and grow that number, especially if it wants to grow organically, as well as through acquisition. This announcement comes just days after the new of the proposed bid to acquire Lawson by Infor and its major investor Golden Gate Capital. Clearly Infor management wants to send the message that while acquisitions are likely in the near future, organic growth is also important.  

Activant announces new Business Rules Engine

Last Thursday I questioned whether IT spoke the language of business. In that short commentary, I used a couple of examples. One of them was “abstraction.” I mentioned that, “if you tell a business person you can set up rules that will govern processes once, and those rules will be enforced by all your business systems, then you have introduced the concept of abstraction without having ever said the word.”

Today I read that Activant has introduced a Business Rule Engine for Distributors.  This is exactly the type of feature I was talking about – one that takes the solution beyond the traditional transaction and reporting ERP of old. The Business Rule Engine provides Prophet 21 users with the ability to insert their own business logic into the Prophet 21 code base without altering the application code itself.

Some examples provided by Kevin Roach, executive vice president and general manager of Activant's Wholesale Distribution Division included:

·         Conversion rules that auto-populate some fields based on others -  like the town or city and state based on zip code? These are the types of “smart” features we have become accustomed to through our own personal online shopping experiences. Heck, I was a catalogue shopper long before the Internet and even back in those days I had customer service reps automatically filling in my town and state based on my zip code. But I didn’t see the same intelligence in business applications. This is a very simple example, but there are scores of ways to use this kind of functionality.   Like certain compliance requirements based on type of product.  Activant suggests an item entered with a product group of Pharmaceuticals could automatically set the Pedigree Tracking Checkbox to be checked. Or food and beverage for nutritional labeling, etc.  As new requirements are added, new rules reflect the changes with far less disruption than mucking around in code.

·         Validation Rules:  Another Activant example, Customer A can only buy items with Item Class 1 set to "No Restrictions." The system will provide an error message if an item without that Item Class is entered on an order for Customer A. These validations basically allow for the creation of warnings and error messages based on rules being met or not met.

·         Asynchronous Workflows. A third Activant example… a distributor could set up a workflow so that a purchase order placed in the amount of $5,000-$10,000 triggers an alert to an authorizing manager for signoff, while an order over $10,000 triggers an alert for the CFO's signoff. When the inserted trigger is activated in the Prophet 21 software, the rules included in that workflow will be executed in the sequence indicated.  Those are the rules today, but perhaps during a downturn in business, you need to (temporarily?) reduce those authorization levels or require the CFO to additionally review all purchases. Perhaps the rules tomorrow will add the type of purchase. Maybe a requisition generated for direct materials will be handled differently than indirect materials.

Why are these features and these examples (which appear to be so simple) so important? Because these business rules are subject to change. And if they are embedded within the logic of the application then changes to your business either require changes to your application (think source code and programming) or prevent your business from adapting.

If you are using older, outdated technology, and looking to upgrade or replace…perhaps this type of requirement is not top of mind. But all ERP users should be clamoring for this type of logic to be extracted (or abstracted) from the underlying code so that it puts the power of change in the hands of the business user.