enterprise application

First Look – Activant DynaChange rules

April 13, 2011

I saw an interesting press announcement the other day about Activant’s new business rules functionality. Activant (who recently agreed to be acquired and merged with Epicor) is an ERP provider focused on distribution and retail – 60% of revenues come from retail and 40% from distribution. Activant as a whole has 15,000 customers concentrated in [...]

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Decision Management: Orchestrating Consistent Enterprise-Wide Decisions

April 11, 2011

As companies move to this more changeable, uncertain world that requires a coordinate extended enterprise, it is essential to manage decisions as well as processes – not by using process management to manage decisions but by managing decisions alongside processes. These operational decisions – micro decisions – are the front line in driving business agility [...]

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Standard processes, custom decisions

March 9, 2011

I gave a webinar on Smarter ERP with Decision Management and one of the tweets during the presentation – “Standard processes, custom decisions” prompted a few requests for more details. So, here goes.
When I talk to companies about their ERP implementations we often end up discussing the balance between standardization/globalization and flexibility/localization. These companies invested [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – multi-channel distribution and customer communication

February 22, 2011

Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]

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Webinar: Smarter ERP with Decision Management

February 2, 2011

Large companies rely on their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other enterprise applications to manufacture, distribute and manage the products their customers need. The behavior of these operational systems is critical to how a company treats, and is perceived by, its customers, its partners and its suppliers. Yet these systems [...]

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Business rules, accelerating change and Decision Management

January 4, 2011

Randy Heffner had a post late last year that I just got to – Business 2011 Gets Faster; Business Rules And SOA Policy Get More Important. Randy makes the key point that while the pace of change means you cannot afford to lock up your business logic in traditional code, you also can’t just let [...]

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Some thoughts on legacy modernization with business rules

November 18, 2010

I saw this white paper by IBM on Legacy Modernization with business rules and thought I should quickly re-summarize my point of view on this and link to my various posts on the topic. The white paper does a nice, if IBM-centric, job of outlining the key issues:

You don’t need to modernize the whole application
Decision [...]

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Taking advantage of mobile devices with decision management

May 14, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Lots of articles talk about the need to provide BI and analysis on mobile devices. And lots of enterprise applications want to “mobilize” themselves. But I don’t see it. I don’t think employees want to do BI on a smartphone or even data mining on an iPad. Nor do they [...]

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IBM Advanced Case Management

April 15, 2010

At the IBM Advanced Case Management event in San Francisco today. Mike Rhodin, SVP of the newly formed Solutions Group within IBM Software, introduced the role of Advanced Case Management in Smarter Planet.
Smarter Planet is IBM’s umbrella concept for building systems to add intelligence to an increasingly instrumented and interconnected world. The changing kinds of [...]

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Update from SAP Co-CEOs

March 15, 2010

Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running the [...]

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BRFplus – rules and ABAP #sapteched09

October 14, 2009

Carsten Ziegler started off re-iterating the same benefits of business rules that came up when the BPM team discussed rules. He used an insurance policy application and pricing scenario as an illustration. The rules for this scenario are organized into a catalog that contains various rulesets, either if..then rules or a decision table, just like [...]

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Getting to Enterprise Application 2.0

August 26, 2009

On Monday I posted about Enterprise Application 2.0 and promised to return with some thoughts on how to get from Enterprise Application 1.0 to Enterprise Application 2.0. Let’s see:

Expose core elements as services
Identify and manage processes – hook up legacy and new services into new, more effective workflows
Find and automate decisions using business rules
Manage simple [...]

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Enterprise Application 2.0

August 24, 2009

As organizations try to achieve agility, productivity and efficiency they often look to new technologies, new approaches to change the status quo. But when it comes to information systems, most large enterprises have an electronic backbone of legacy enterprise applications. Whether packaged or custom developed, these are “1.0″ enterprise applications. Or, more bluntly, dumb applications. [...]

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How can decision management help with customer engagement?

July 30, 2009

Shantanu Narayen of Adobe recently said “Engagement is the new business mandate” and when Denise Shiffman (author of The Age of Engage) spoke at a recent CMO summit she added:
As I talk to customers, partners, and employees, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the health of a company relies on the extent to which [...]

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First Look – ServiceBench

June 29, 2009

I saw ServiceBench when I presented at the Warranty Chain Management Conference and got a chance to get a more detailed presentation just recently. ServiceBench is aimed at the Service Supply Chain and is now part of NEW (who also presented at the conference). The service supply chain is often very complex because of the [...]

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Intalio Cloud – BPM, CRM and appliances

May 19, 2009

Intalio hosted a launch today to position themselves as The Enterprise Cloud Company. Intalio turns 10 years old this year. They remain a privately held company with 500 paying customers and have passed 50,000 deployed sites in 52 countries. 35 employees and 20 contractors across 14 offices worldwide. Customers cover all industries and business is [...]

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First Look – WorkXpress 2

April 2, 2009

I got a chance to see a pre-release demonstration of WorkXpress 2.0, announced today, some weeks back. WorkXpress are focused on customized business application software for large and small businesses. About 7 years ago they started building out what we would now call a Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS offering and have had customers for about 5 [...]

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Salesforce is getting smarter

March 19, 2009

Decision Management Solutions attended the Santa Clara Cloudforce 2009 event yesterday and heard CEO Marc Benioff present “Welcome to the Real-time Cloud” in which he introduced some great features in their spring 2009 release and demonstrated, once again, that salesforce.com is paying attention. Salesforce.com has clearly realized that the next step for enterprise [...]

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Driving harmonization for competitive advantage

March 12, 2009

Kevin Hogan of Accenture talked about how implementing a warranty system can drive harmonization and competitive advantage.  His focus was on a recent case where they helped a company implement an SAP-based Warranty solution. The case is a global heavy equipment manufacturer with about a focus on Europe and North America. They were running 4 [...]

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Warranty Management – New rules to apply

March 11, 2009

Rob Pritchard of Infosys presented on the power of business rules in warranty. His focus is on agility – most warranty systems are inflexible and hard to change. Organizations cannot make changes to warranty policy to respond to competitors, can’t create what-if scenarios, can’t tighten claims control or pre-valid claims or repairs. These problems come [...]

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