Easy Deployment in the Cloud: What About Users and Applications?

Businesses are migrating their systems to the cloud, it’s true. Organizations of every size and type are taking advantage of the cost savings and flexibility introduced with cloud deployments and hosting services. Rather than focusing efforts on procuring, installing and maintaining servers and applications in-house, IT departments are moving workloads offsite to cloud providers and hosted platforms. The tools are readily available to help these IT workers configure and light up VMs in hosted infrastructure, and certain platform licenses and other elements are made accessible to customers. But there’s something missing in the toolsets provided by platform hosting companies – a certain something that ultimately determines how useful (or not) the hosting platform service is when IT is ready to deploy users and applications in the environment.

Leave a commentCloud Computing

Turning a Product or Service into a Solution: the Value Add of a Reseller

There is quite a bit of chatter on the web and among IT resellers about how opportunities to serve business customers are diminishing, yet business adoption of cloud computing, managed services, and mobile technologies is growing tremendously. It seems that use of technology is increasing, but the opportunity for “traditional” IT resellers and channel partners to make money by selling IT-related products and services is diminishing. This is not new, and is simply a finer form of the problem that has been revealing itself for years. In order to provide value, suppliers must provide businesses with solutions to business problems rather than just trying to sell them products and services with a hefty profit margin.

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How Can Advanced Financial Management Systems Make You A More Strategic CFO

For decades, financial managers have pieced together and manipulated spreadsheets in order to report on past data and maintain the financial integrity of their businesses. Sure, if they had time, they could use these primitive tools to attempt to identify trends and offer insights. But this effort was ridden with information silos, dirty data and outdated numbers.

Fortunately, times are changing.

Leave a commentaccounting, CapEx, Finance, FP&A, Risk Management

Is Poor Quality the Anti-Hero of Data?

As a kid, I enjoyed reading comic books and watching animated television series about superheroes. Among my favorites were Spider-Man, Batman, Thor, Iron Man, and the X-Men. Which is why, as a adult, I enjoy the super advancements in cinematic technology that not only powers (mostly) live-action superhero movies, but has also propelled them into mainstream culture.

Leave a commentBiz Intelligence

ERP Implementation Success Factors – Takeaways from Clash of the Titans

How long should ERP implementations take? How much do they cost? How long does it take to recoup these costs? How long does it take to realize the benefits of the new system? These are the magic questions asked by thousands of companies around the globe.

With so much money at stake — after all, some ERP implementations can cost millions of dollars — the timing of such a technology project is critical.

The answer, as you might expect, is that it depends on many different factors.

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Tales of an ERP Implementation

Jelly beans are tricky business.

They look simple enough — little pills of confectionary goodness, a handful of colors, a handful of flavors, consumable by the handful. Nothing could be easier.

But at Jelly Belly — the gourmet jelly bean pioneer from Fairfield, Calif. — these tiny treats represent one of the most complicated global process manufacturing feats in the industry.

“Making jelly beans is an extremely, extremely complicated manufacturing process,” explains Dan Rosman, vice president of IT at Jelly Belly.

There are, he says, 50 official flavors of Jelly Belly jelly beans, with another 130 unofficial flavors in the mix. Each of those 180 flavors, from “buttered popcorn” to “stinky socks,” require seven to 14 days of cooking, cooling, molding, drying and shell-building to complete — a process it has taken the company 144 years to perfect.

And that’s just the beginning.

Leave a commentManagement

Should CFOs Oversee Big Data And Accounting Analytics?

Corporate leaders are beginning to face the facts: The key to marketing and innovation is successfully harnessing the power of digital information.

Over the last few years, harnessing the power of information has presented itself as Big Data and accounting analytics. Big Data describes data sets that are so large and complex that traditional data management systems have difficulty processing them.

But one question remains…

Leave a commentFinance

4 Reasons Users Might Hate Your New ERP (and What to Do About It)

For executives, project managers, and IT decision makers, going live with a new ERP is an exciting time. After all the planning and preparation, there’s often a great deal of optimism about the improvements a new ERP system has to offer. And, rightfully so. A well-deployed ERP system can help ease interdepartmental communication, improve efficiencies, turn data into actionable business intelligence, and enable a wide variety of other business benefits.

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The Secret Life of Garbage

I was recently sent a fantastic infographic called “The Secret Life of Garbage” which explains what happens in the end to end process of garbage collection, recycling and disposal. I’ve embedded the infographic below.

Co-incidentally I’ve just finished an assignment with a waste management client so I thought I’d share a few insights into the process.

Leave a commentFYI