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Incredibly informative article on the history of ERP and an anlysis of the future; includes a glossary

Editor's Note: requires a (free) account to view

Are customers willing to put all their eggs in an ASP's basket? Maybe, but it's going to be one egg at a time.

ERP applications are designed to optimize an organization's underlying business processes - primarily accounting/financial, manufacturing, distribution, and human resources/payroll. This note identifies 3 current trends in the ERP market: ERP Functional Scope Expansion; Sharper Vertical Focus; and Flexibility Enabled by Adaptable Architecture. These trends are the direct consequence of vendors' attempts to resolve current ERP functional and/or technological deficiencies, and/or expand software sales both within their existing and potential customer bases.

Part 2 of 2-part note. This part identifies 3 more current trends in the ERP market: Web- and E-commerce Enablement of ERP Systems; Intensified Market Merger & Acquisition Activity; and Advent of Application Hosting Services.

The era of making things yourself is over. The web is going to create dramatic new efficiencies for manufacturers and their supply chain partners.

Distribution chains are becoming obsolete, replaced by distribution communities that collectively create value for the customer

These days, it seems that both traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers and online "e-tailers" are drowning in a sea of customer information, including data from online transactions, point-of-service scanners, membership programs and even sensor chips on shopping carts. The question is, with all this sophisticated technology on hand, why have department store markdowns over the last 20 years grown from 8% to 33% of sales? And why are customers still going away dissatisfied because what they want isn't in stock? In an article entitled "Rocket Science Retailing Is Almost Here - Are You Ready?" in the July-August 2000 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Wharton operations professor Marshall Fisher and two co-authors take a hard look at why many retailers are "awash in data but starved for information."

Those of us who have been thwarted in our efforts to find a copy of a just-released video at our local video store will be interested in research conducted by Wharton professor Gerard Cachon and Martin A. Lariviere from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Their studies suggest that using a revenue-sharing model can be a smarter way to do business - and provide enough copies of new releases to meet demand - and relying on the traditional wholesale price-only contracts. While Cachon and Lariviere use the video cassette rental industry to make their case, their research shows that the performance of any supply chain can improve under this type of contract.

For more than two decades, Morris Cohen, a Wharton professor of operations and information management, has studied how companies use supply chains to support their after-sales service operations. This research has had an impact on companies in industries ranging from computers to automobiles. Now, according Morris and his colleagues, the arrival of the Internet is revolutionizing supply chain management in ways that can dramatically lower costs and improve customer service.

Similar to their gravitational counterparts, supply chain management implementations can grow to vast, unanticipated proportions, enveloping unbudgeted amounts of time, resources, and money. A crucial difference between the two is that supply chain projects can be kept to a manageable size by making careful preparations and setting realistic expectations at the outset. The following real-life examples offer insights that may help prevent your supply chain project from collapsing into oblivion, taking your enterprise with it.

Article discusses the potential resurgence of Six Sigma and its implications for the New Economy.

A look at the concept of activity-based costing, or ABC and its growing popularity in the manufacturing world.

This is the second part of a two-part series on supply chain customer loyalty. Interesting issues addressed include the difference between satisfaction and loyalty and the correlation between employee loyalty and customer loyalty.

Can hundreds of research teams working together rewrite the way we manufacture? [A look at the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) - program]

Procter & Gamble is wiring its products to track when items leave the shelves. It's part of the battle to cut inventory costs and revive earnings.

Article also provides some insight into P&G's operations and the importance of the supply chain in the consumer products industry. Also discusses collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment, or CPFR

"Despite big spending on information systems, many organizations are finding there's still a shortage of truly useful information, due to the fragmentation of data. How can organizations resolve this 'Information Paradox'?

Business intelligence (BI) solutions can put the information pieces back together to provide businesses with a more meaningful, complete picture. In this article, I'll describe the conceptual architecture commonly used for BI."

Companies find the applications limited, integration troublesome, and managing catalogs difficult. Is it worth it?

Because of its ability to link people around the world, the Internet is causing a global logistics transformation. Moving goods and dealing with customs and tariffs is still hard, but software automation and supply-chain suites are starting to help the process.

Few business areas need to be measured more extensively, more frequently, and more effectively than logistics. When evaluating criteria for individual metrics, consider this checklist.
1. The validity/reliability of the measure
2. The robustness of the measure
3. The usefulness of the measure
4. The completeness of the measure
5. Cost-effectiveness
6. Compatibility
7. The level of detail
8. Behavioral soundness
9. Administration problems

Instead of drifting into decline and irrelevance, producers of goods have a chance to seize the future.

Shigeo Shingo is credited with creating the concept of zero defects and the techniques of poka-yoke (Japanese for mistake-proofing). The approach seeks to remove the causes of defects, or, where this is impossible, to inspect each item simply and inexpensively to determine that it passes the quality threshold - with no defects.

Short article centers on a traditional 2x2 consulting matrix for purchasing, with the price as the x-axis and cooperation as the y-axis. This high-level analysis is interesting in that it was published in early 1996 before the huge SCM craze.

Editor's Note: This is part 1 of a 3-part series.
Part 2: "Systems, Modules or Components? New Light on Purchasing"
Part 3, "Setting Supplier Cost Targets: Getting Beyond the Basics"

The proper care and feeding of customers is a hot topic these days. Whether the discussion goes under the name customer satisfaction, zero defections, loyalty or intimacy, the customer issue has pushed its way to the top of the agenda for a growing number of C.E.O.'s.Yet despite all that attention, surprisingly little is said about a core problem many a chief executive faces: how do I insure that my end customers receive the right service at the right price? Indeed, although at least half of all goods and a significant portion of services flow through distribution channels, most of the extensive body of writing about customer care either addresses services provided directly to customers -- by airlines, banks, hotels -- or simply skirts the complication of dealing through intermediaries. This article addresses head-on the unique challenges faced by suppliers of goods and services that flow through distribution channels.

Capturing the full potential from suppliers has always been a challenge. To pull it off, successful companies have devised ways to effectively integrate the right suppliers into their business processes. In so doing, they have created powerful supplier relationships that simultaneously encourage cooperation and competition. The results of these best-practice relationships are demonstrable. But how are such relationships achieved? This article, a follow-up to 'Balanced Purchasing', describes the ability to define clearly what the authors term a supplier's "scope boundaries."

Editor's Note: Part 2 of series
Part 1: "Balanced Purchasing"
Part 3: "Setting Supplier Cost Targets: Getting Beyond the Basics"

Many purchasing organizations are being challenged to increase the level of "global sourcing" to tap into promising opportunities and to fend off competition. Unfortunately, many companies are ill equipped for the challenge: though global sourcing employs the same set of activities as domestic sourcing, there is also greater complexity. Based on our experience, most companies need to enhance the skills of their purchasing organizations to pursue global sourcing effectively. Although our research in this area is still under way, this article explores some issues in global sourcing encountered by our clients. The article is part of a series in Strategy & Business expounding upon the skills required in the business model that Booz-Allen describes as "balanced purchasing."

Consultant R. Michael Donovan writes that manufacturers need to become more nimble and much faster in their order-to-delivery process. Mike discusses the implications of push vs. pull, IT tools as enablers and potential benefits from Demand-based Flow Manufacturing.

For a searchable repository of business cases check out our Case Study Center

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The poster company for the new economy not only failed to anticipate the economic downturn, its much-heralded forecasting software and outsourcing infrastructure may have even made things worse.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Until it attains godlike profitability, reduces costs to zero, and hears the pathetic mewling of its last, defeated competitor, Dell Computer won't stop remaking its business. Its three-part strategy for ultimate victory? Web, Web, and Web.

Collaboration among manufacturers, suppliers and customers is helping companies drive excess costs out of the supply chain. Mutual trust and accurate cost accounting are the critical links.

The cost of goods and materials is usually the largest component of a company's cost structure. Why, then, isn't every financial manager examining the supply chain? Here are the keys that you can use to open the door to improvement — and play a pivotal role — in the supply chain management process.