SAP Implementations - DO's and DON'Ts

Small and Medium Sized Businesses (SMB) and organizations that have outgrown their home-grown ERP's and spreadsheets should undertake the ERP journey sooner than later for various reasons such as process optimization, scaling their business processes, etc... The imperative for maintaining a lean IT team, competing IT projects and other factors require an organizations to engage with an implementation partner that can stay with them through the ERP leap. In this article, I am going to address a few Do's and Dont's when engaging with implementation partners (most of these suggestions stay valid even if the implementation is done with internal/contract staff).

Change Management for ERP Culture

Introduction
Change is tough! Period. The number of partial or complete ERP implementation failures caused by a lack of proper strategy for change management is amazing. When organizations implement an ERP system, there is invariably resistance from almost every level in the organization. There could be a variety of reasons for this resistance including employee job security, the fear of the unknown, a general aversion to change, a lack of dynamism in the organization’s culture (the organization has never re-engineered its business processes), a lack of skills to learn new systems or ways of doing things, a lack of appreciation of the gains, personalities

Project Based Manufacturing: Make-to-Order

Introduction
As opposed to make-to-stock production, which is geared towards stocking finished products to meet a forecasted demand by customers, make-to-order production is driven by the receipt of a specific sales order from the customer. In make-to-order production, customized finish products are assembled using more or less predefined production processing. Make-to-order business processes cover the middle ground between the two extreme cases of production - make-to-stock and engineer-to-order.

SAP for Small and Midsize Companies

Introduction
Invariably, businesses growing from boutique firms to sizeable businesses always struggle with their teams becoming more and more disconnected from an overall business process flow point of view. It's very easy for companies to fall into this trap in the middle of aggressive growth and consequent demands on delivering to customers - before the management realizes, is is very likely that the company has developed information silos and disconnected departments, resulting in organizational inefficiencies hindering further growth and a reliable profitability analysis. This is where business management software solutions come into the picture to rescue. There are a wide variety of sotware vendors providing business software solutions, but

SAP CATS for Contractor Labor Payments

Payment of contract labor services is often a cumbersome process in many organizations. The reason being, there are various stakeholders involved such as the managers / supervisors that need to approve timesheets, the purchasing department that needs to manage the PO's, AP paying the vendors, the vendors submitting the invoice and the contractors themselves, that need to keep one or more versions of their timesheets, depending on the client and vendor requirements. It is very common for companies to spend significant dollars to set up something like a vendor portal or time entry portal for contractors to achieve even a semi-automated system. More often than not, even a minor hiccup in the whole process,