Monthly Archives: April 2014

How BizSlate is Bringing Sexy Back to ERP! Part I

As per our last few posts, ERP used to be sexy, but hasn’t been that way in a while. That needs to change, because ERP should be sexy. Fortunately for us, BizSlate has decided to do something about it. They agree that ERP should be appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué and are doing something about it.

Appealing

Built from the ground up to be 100% web-based SaaS, and taking lessons from best-of-breed SaaS e-Supply Management solutions, which themselves took lessons from best-of-breed B2C consumer e-Commerce solutions, the system is friendly, streamlined, easy on the eyes, and useable. Realizing that success stems from use and use stems from desire to use and desire to use stems from knowing it’s easier, and more satisfying, to use the system than to bypass it (which is a common problem among all types of systems in a modern organization), BizSlate put a lot of effort into designing a system that
was not only easy to use, but that a person who needs an ERP would want to use.

Exciting

New catalog season used to mean new headache from hell. As per our recent post on how It’s Time to Bring Sexy Back to ERP!, if your new product line contained 20 pairs of footwear in 7 different sizes and a minimum of 2 colours each, and each needed its own SKU, that was at least 280 products you needed to create one at a time! With all of the coding and cross-coding required, it was probably 15 minutes a product, or 30 products a day, or two weeks of data entry for some poor intern just to create a starting product catalog! But not with BizSlate. With its batch create capability, you define a template, define the characteristics that define the variations, define the different instantiations of those characteristics (e.g. size, 6-13, and colour, black and brown), define the starting SKU, define the ending SKU pattern, and press a button and — BAM! — it generates all 280 draft product entries. If you’re happy, press another button, and — BAM! — 280 products created and added to your ERP. If not, go back, alter the template, characteristics, and variation rules and go again. If there are custom values that need to be defined, you can populate just those fields in a spreadsheet view during the validation step. Retail and distributor customers that used to spend weeks and weeks creating new product entries for new product lines now spend a few days and generate hundreds of entries in just a few hours. It’s an exciting development in ERP usability.

Glamorous

As per our last post, traditional ERP is unsophisticated. This means a number of things. First, as per our last post, if you wanted to define multiple, sophisticated, commission plans for internal and third party sales people based on category, product, volume, and stock-type, you had to buy an ERP from Imaginationland, because that was the only place an ERP exists where such a task is possible. But not with BizSlate — they’ve thought through this need and built a commission definition and management system to support even the most demanding client. But this isn’t the only feature that makes this modern take on an ERP glamorous compared to the dinosaurs it is competing against.

Traditional ERP is quite dumb. Typically it’s not even as smart as the relational database it is built on. For example, let’s say the value list for shoe sizes is the same as the value list for sneaker sizes, think you can abstract that list and re-use it? Not a chance — create it every time you need it, buddy. Building a goods receipt and the value is already in the purchase order and want to re-use it? Copy and paste.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Want to re-use similar types of reporting structures or entry forms, because you use the same data in inventory management, order management, invoice management, etc. and don’t want to re-invent the wheel? Fat chance! Rebuild for the use-case and repopulate as above.

But not with BizSlate, who have built their streamlined ERP around repetitive mechanisms. Value lists, forms, and report components are all implemented as reusable components that can be reused wherever they are needed. Need that size list across your clothing line? No problem. Need that discount percentage by spend across your electronics category? No problem. Want to re-use the same entry form template for entering order details for your suppliers and invoice details for your customers? No problem. Repetitive Mechanisms take the repetition out of your job and allow you to focus on the job and not the data. That makes ERP glamorous.

BizSlate: They’re Bringing Sexy Back … to ERP!

BizSlate, first introduced to you on SI back in September, 2012 in our post about an ERP for the Small to Mid-Size Distributor, and covered again last February when BizSlate Released its ERP for Mid-Sized Distributors and Retailers to the Masses, has decided that it’s time to bring sexy back to ERP.

BizSlate, who, like the doctor, noticed a void in useable and affordable modern ERP solutions for the mid-sized distributor, retailer, and manufacturer, decided that they needed to do something about it and built a new ERP from the ground-up, that is custom-designed to meet the need of the mid-market distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that are under-served, and released it last year. But working closely with their initial customer base, they noticed a few things that typical ERP and implementation providers overlook. Among other things, they noticed that:

  1. Traditional ERP is Ugly
    Black and Green screens are functional, but belong in the server room. There’s no reason that ERP can’t be functional and appealing.
  2. Traditional ERP is Cumbersome and Boring
    Does your new product line contain 20 pairs of footwear in 7 different sizes and a minimum of 2 colours each? And does each need its own SKU? Guess what, that’s at least 280 products you need to create one at a time! With all of the coding and cross-coding required, it’s probably 15 minutes a product, or 30 products a day, or two weeks of data entry for some poor intern just to create a starting product catalog! Talk about cumbersome and boring. High-tech is supposed to relieve your burden and excite you!
  3. Traditional ERP is Unsophisticated and Unglamorous
    Do you use third party agencies to sell your stuff? If you’re a mid-sized distributor or manufacturer or even a mid-sized retailer who focusses on the core business of distribution, production, or store-front retailing, you probably do (since sales, distribution management, and e-Commerce aren’t your forte). And you probably (want to) pay based on commission. But if you’re using an old fashioned ERP, you’re probably stuck with one simple commission plan, or, if you’re really lucky, one per third party agency. What if you need multi-tier? Or different rates based on category or component (since you want to push new product lines but don’t want to pay a lot for end-of-life products where inventory is being sold off at reduced rates)? Better luck next time. But what if you could manage commission plan by agency, by product line, and even by salesperson? And what if it was easy? That’s a level of sophistication that would make your life, and the life of Accounts Payable, easy! An ERP that solved this obvious need would be glamorous.
  4. Traditional ERP Works Off the Nineties Model of a Back Office System.
    The nineties were two decades ago. Traditional ERP hasn’t kept up with the trends and can’t support the modern sourcing, procurement, distribution, inventory, and order management needs of a modern organization that has to respond to customer inquiries and adapt to customer needs on the fly — not on a weekly reporting schedule. Given the critical nature of an ERP solution, it has to keep up with e-Business trends.
  5. Traditional ERP is Non-Disruptive
    The core functionality and process flow of ERP hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years. This is a problem because true innovation that brings true leaps in productivity and generated value comes from technology that is willing to take a risk and disrupt the status quo.

In other words, BizSlate realized that ERP was ugly, boring, unsophisticated, out-dated, and non-disruptive and that it shouldn’t be this way. So they’ve spent the last year streamlining and improving the core of the new ERP that they’ve built to make it appealing, exciting, glamorous, trendy, and just a little risqué. Because that’s what ERP should be. As per our last post, we have to remember:

ERP used to be sexy. It’s time to make it sexy again!

It’s Time to Bring Sexy Back to ERP!

ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning, used to be sexy. Designed as an extension of MRP (initially Material Requirements Planning but later Manufacturing Resource Planning), it was designed to automate the back-office functions that did not directly affect customers and the general public and also include product planning, manufacturing control, and distribution in addition to the basic inventory control and production planning capability that was found in the precursor MRP technology.

But that was in the early days back in the nineties when design, manufacturing planning, and distribution planning was still largely paper-based. Then came the noughts with e-business, e-commerce, CRM, SRM, and e-Sourcing. Then ERP became boring old back office software that no one wanted to talk about. If you could afford the new fangled front-end systems, you were a Fortune 500 / Global 3000, you already had ERP, and there wasn’t much to talk about.

But now things have changed. The prices for e-business, e-commerce, CRM, SRM, and e-Sourcing have come down, the mid-market is starting to become saturated with basic “e-” functionality, and the new mid-market manufacturers and distributors need an ERP to take those orders, send those invoices, and manage the inventory they need to produce to meet your JIT inventory requirements. But, until now, they’ve had two choices — either fork out high six-plus figures for a stripped down version of Oracle or SAP (and the expertise to get it installed and integrated) which likely won’t meet all of their needs, or a custom implementation of an open source package such as Compiere, which probably won’t meet all of their needs either (but at least won’t cost them the virtual arm and leg). And neither solution is sexy.

As per SI’s recent post on how Mid-Market Manufacturers and Distributors Need an ERP That Works!, the solution needs to support the needs of the mid-market manufacturer, distributor, and even retailer. These needs include the need to deal with electronic purchase orders from customers, real-time demand planning and order management when customers inquire about availability and ship dates, inventory management, electronic purchase orders to your suppliers, automated invoices from your suppliers, and automated invoices to your customers. Without an ERP that gives them these capabilities, mid-market manufactures and distributors are left in the dark ages.

But if an ERP is to truly be effective, it not only has to provide you with these capabilities, but it has to be easy to use, which would make it appealing, and eliminate a lot of the manual data processing and tactical processes that organizations with traditional ERP systems tend to drown in, which would make it exciting. And if you want to get the new ERP system widely adopted, it should be glamorous, trendy, and even a little bit risqué. And that is the very definition of sexy.

Will ERP be sexy again? Stay Tuned!

Price Fixing is on the Rise. Only the US Can Stop It!

But will it?

As per these recent articles in the Economist on Cartels: Just One More Fix and Boring Can Still be Bad, competition authorities have uncovered several whopping conspiracies in recent years, including one in which more than 20 airlines worldwide had fixed prices on approximately $20 Billion of freight shipments. (In 2010, the European Commission fined 11 Air Cargo Airlines €800 Million for operating a worldwide cartel which affected cargo services within the European Economic area – namely Air Canada, Air France-KLM, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Cargolux, Japan Airlines, LAN Chile, Martinair, SAS, Singapore Airlines and Qantas.)

In addition, investigators are still unravelling a huge network of cartels among suppliers of a wide range of car parts, including seat belts, radiators, and foam seat-stuffing. And the European Commission recently fined five marks of automative bearings $1.32 Billion and raided a number of manufacturers of car exhaust systems. On the other side of the Atlantic, Brazilian prosecutors have charged executives from a dozen foreign train-makers accused of rigging bids for rail and subway contracts in the country’s main cities.

This is despite the fact that enforcement has gotten tougher, smarter, and more coordinated, the fact that firms can expect staggering fines, and bosses can go to jail … unless they are in the United States. As the latter article states American courts, only too ready to lock up other types of miscreants for a long time, have rarely jailed egregious price-fixers for anything like the maximum of ten years that the law allows. But what do you expect from a country that won’t even jail executives who got caught knowingly laundering Billions for Mexican Narco-Terror Cartels? As per this recent article on BoingBoing, on HSBC Settlement Approved, there were no criminal charges, only 5 weeks’ profit in fines, and deferred bonuses for laundering Billions for Narco-Terrorists. That’s right, they still got their bonuses! (But whatever you do, don’t feed the birds, since you go to jail for feeding birds.)

Until significant mandatory jail sentences are enforced for all executives involved in price-fixing, given the still-low risk of detection, collusion pays. After all, best case is you succeed undetected and make a few Billion. Worst case is you get caught, pay some of your ill-gotten gains in fines, and go back to business.

And stiffer fines aren’t the answer — if fines inflict so much damage on guilty companies, they will undermine competition as new entrants will be afraid to enter the market in fear that their efforts to keep costs in line with the competition will be seen as price fixing that could net them fines that would put them in bankruptcy.

The only answer is stiff prison sentences against executives, and the only major country that is unwilling to pursue them is the country that controls 25% of the global GDP – the US. So while you can do a lot to detect price-fixing and, if possible, avoid it by way of big data, statistical tests, market research, and collaboration with authorities – until the US DoJ and Courts step up and do the right thing, price fixing will likely remain a major problem.