ERP and Everything In Between: The Software Essentials

The Official Guide to Enterprise Software Selection

Chapter 1

INSIGHT

By Josh Greenbaum

ERP and Everything In Between: The Software Essentials

TechMATCH Pro INSIGHT | The Official Guide to Enterprise Software Selection

This whitepaper series has been prepared to enlighten and assist in software selection and is brought to you by TechMATCH Pro, the unique SaaS-based collaborative software selection platform. Each chapter has been authored by an expert in enterprise applications and offers up important insight and guidance in the software selection process.

The Official Guide to Enterprise Software Selection

Chapter 1: ERP and Everything In Between: The Software Essentials

Chapter 2: Planning and Budgeting

Chapter 3: Software Requirements

Chapter 4: Product Research

Chapter 5: Five Software Requirements

Chapter 6: Six Product Research

Chapter 7: Seven Software Requirements


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While concepts such as manufacturing resource planning (MRP) entered the business world in the 1960s, modern enterprise software—embodied in MRP

and its successor, enterprise resource planning (ERP)—actually date to the early 1980s with the advent of two important phenomena: the rise of the relational database and the adoption of the manufacturing and inventory management practices based on Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System.

The relational database—pioneered by two IBM research scientists, Ted Codd and Chris Date—was quickly incorpo-rated into the entrepreneurial efforts of companies like Oracle, Informix, Ingres, Sybase, IBM, Digital Equipment Corp., and Microsoft. This new database technol-ogy became an evolutionary crucible that in turn created the client/server market and the accompanying application de-velopment tools market. With a grow-ing palette of development options, the relational database, when combined with emerging trends in distributed computing and lower-cost open systems like Unix, started a relatively quick march up the value chain from early custom applica-tions development efforts to higher-value, easier-to-implement, and, for vendors, highly profitable packaged software.

From this concept of packaged software, based on a distributed client/server model and utilizing relational database technolo-gy, the modern enterprise software market emerged.

While there were many ways in which these new technology tools were ap-plied to business problems, the concepts of MRP and Lean manufacturing lent themselves particularly well to this new technology paradigm. Planning, schedul-ing, purchasing, and fulfillment were all ready-made for the transactional function-ality inherent in the relational database. Although the mass adoption of what is

now called Lean manufacturing was still to come, people began to understand how quality processes embodied in enterprise software could change business outcomes.

One more crucial point of origin for the enterprise software market can be found in the late 1980s/early 1990s phenom-enon known as business process reengi-neering. While much of this trend initially emerged as a means to drive high-powered consulting revenue into the coffers of large consultancies and systems integrators, it quickly became obvious that packaged enterprise software—with its standardized processes and pre-integrated functional-ity—could be an essential part of the pal-ette of services offered by consulting and integration firms focusing on the lucrative BPR market.

While packaged software had existed prior to the emergence of these phenomena,the early products were ill-suited to capital-ize on these new opportunities. Most of the packaged enterprise software products that were on the market in the early 1980s were mainframe-based and, by definition, expensive, inflexible, and dependent on older server technology that was non-relational and non-client-based. While these products—Cullinet and Dun & Bradstreet being the two best–known ven-dors—were highly functional, they were unable to serve the business and technol-ogy needs of a changing market and were quickly rendered obsolete.

Although the mass adop-tion of what is now called Lean manufacturing was

still to come, people began to understand how qual-ity processes embodied in enterprise software could

change business outcomes.


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What did emerge was a crop of software vendors able to capitalize on the prom-ises of efficiency and productivity based on the new business and technology trends. While many of these companies would eventually focus on MRP and manufacturing-centric ERP software, many had their initial success in providing packaged software for internal financial management—Oracle Financials being one of the very first products in the new large-scale, packaged, client/server market. Even when SAP’s R/3 was introduced in 1991—one of the first packaged software products targeted at the MRP and ERP opportunity—SAP’s initial success was achieved by selling to financial manage-ment, not to the manufacturing side of the business.

Nonetheless, even with financials lead-ing the way in many large accounts, by the late 1980s the concepts of MRP were being embodied in an increasing num-ber of products from a growing alphabet soup of vendor companies—ASK, Baan, DataWorks, Oracle, QAD, SAP, and SSA, to name a few. Others, like Platinum and Great Plains, would soon shift from their focus on financials to a more manufactur-ing-centric ERP product mix.

The MES Market Emerges

While the organizing and integrat-ing aspects of the relational database and client/server tools were transform-ing the back office and the executive suite, a separate revolution—separate in terms of technology, purpose, and user base—was emerging on the factory floor. These systems, known as manufacturing execution systems (MES), started life as

a means to collect and utilize data from a wide variety of shop-floor devices used in manufacturing, logistics, service, and quality management. They evolved to be an essential component in the manage-ment of manufacturing resources and the efficient production, distribution, and quality control of manufactured goods and their underlying processes.

Without the central organizing effect that the relational database had on the enterprise software market, MES systems evolved around a broad number of de facto and de jure standards. While in many cases these standards have been moved from de facto to de jure status, there remains an enormous gap between MES data and functionality on the shop floor and the enterprise software systems running the back office. This functional gap remains a major challenge for enter-prises and software vendors today.

ERP and Enterprise Software Today

The state of the ERP market today is vastly more complex than the term “ERP” would imply. In addition to core manu-facturing and financials, ERP suites typi-cally include human resources manage-ment, customer relationship management, supply chain management, asset manage-ment, supplier relationship management, business intelligence,and a host of other functionality.

The expansion of the concepts of ERP to include an alphabet soup of acronyms and business buzzwords came from a recogni-tion that the organizing concepts found in MRP and ERP software could have a wider and more comprehensive applicabil-


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ity to the enterprise. One of the essential organizing concepts of enterprise software is the automation of the business pro-cesses that center on a central data model. In MRP, this data model is the bill of materials (BOM), and most of the func-tionality in MRP is related to managing the processes that derive from this BOM. Similarly, financial software has as its organizing data model the general ledger; the various processes of managing finan-cial systems are built around the creation and management of this digital ledger.

The experience of using essential data ob-jects as the organizing principle for MRP and ERP software led to the realization that a host of similar data objects exist-ing across the enterprise could be used in a similar way to automate processes and drive efficiency. Thus, the customer object became the point of origin for customer relationship management (CRM) pioneers like Siebel, while the employee record was used by PeopleSoft to create the human resources management system (HRMS) market. The product master engendered the product lifecycle management (PLM) market, the supplier master and the con-tract were the organizing concepts around the supplier relationship management (SRM) market, and the product plan be-came the point of origin for supply chain management (SCM).

As the market’s understanding of enter-prise software and automated business processes became more mature, it was obvious that merely executing transac-tions—buy, sell, build, deliver, etc.—was insufficient. Businesses needed to be able to analyze the past and plan for the future, track their performance and the per-formance of their partners and custom-ers, and otherwise apply the emerging

concepts of business intelligence to their newly automated enterprise software systems.

This led to the growth of business intel-ligence tools—and, much later, packaged analytical applications—that were capable of extracting transactional data from the underlying database and performing com-plex reporting and analysis on that data. This market, which encompassed business intelligence as well as predictive analytics, performance management, complex event processing, and, with the emergence of the Web, click-stream analysis, continues to evolve and mature at a much more rapid rate than the rest of the enterprise software market.

The most recent evolutionary factor to influence enterprise software has come from the requirement to greatly expand the footprint of the software inside and outside the enterprise. This has seen an increasing focus on vertical and geog-raphy-specific functionality, as well as a recognition that the enterprise needs to greatly expand its relationship and interac-tions with its own customer base, and it needs enterprise software to do that. This has brought an overlap of consumer and enterprise software, best epitomized by the use of the iPad in the enterprise, that is rapidly changing how software is designed and delivered, particularly with the consumer or consumer-like function-ality in mind.

Interestingly, the most-noted development in enterprise software in recent days hasn’t involved functionality, but rather method of delivery. The now-popular software-as–a-service (SaaS) phenomenon has at its roots the application service provider (ASP) and hosted software models of

The most recent evolutionary factor to

influence enterprise soft-ware has come from the

requirement to greatly expand the footprint of the software inside and outside the enterprise.


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decades past. ERP and other software buyers can now “rent” their software by tapping into Web-based applications that do not require them to purchase and run supporting hardware in their own data centers. The SaaS trend has filtered into almost all enterprise software, providing software buyers with new options for investing in what had heretofore been strictly a capital expense.

Enterprise Software by Category

Against this backdrop of evolution and change, the enterprise software market has been divided and sub-divided into a seem-ingly endless list of categories, reflecting more the products that vendors are able to develop and take to market than the functionality that enterprises are seeking to acquire. This is particularly evident in the major categories that have emerged from the super-category of ERP: CRM, HRMS, and SCM. As both markets and buyers have matured, these sub-categories have continued to split up into finer-grain categories that are more reflective of the functionality required by customers.

TechMATCH Pro, an authority on enter-prise software, lists 14 distinct categories of enterprise software. Below is a brief discussion of each.

Business Intelligence Business intelligence (BI) is a super-cat-egory that encompasses a broad range of infrastructure technology, tools, and pack-aged solutions. Most BI offerings include technologies that extract, transform, and load data for analysis, as well as the data warehouses and related technologies that are the engines used to generate analysis,

and reporting tools that help business users visualize the analysis. A host of pack-aged solutions provide analytics that are targeted at specific functional, vertical-industry, geographic, or other business-specific requirements. BI is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the enterprise software industry, and as the challenge of “big data” grows, the need for BI products that can analyze both the well-known structured data inside the enterprise as well as the vast quantity of unstructured data outside the enterprise increases exponentially. Many BI software vendors are now embracing in-memory technol-ogy, which takes advantage of advances in computing power and architecture to de-liver faster business insight and put more power in the hands of business end-users.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) This is another super-category that has expanded from its origins in sales-force automation to encompass all aspects of the customer/enterprise relationship, from identifying a prospective customer through the process of selling, delivering, billing, and servicing. CRM’s role in the enterprise software stack has evolved as well, from a standalone function inside the sales organization to an essential component in the customer-facing side of the business as well as the accounting, fulfillment, and operations back-office. As such, CRM software is increasingly integrated with the rest of the enterprise software stack, in particular finance and the supply chain. CRM is also one of the more dynamic market sectors, in part because of its increasing scope and value and in part because it was the first major enterprise software category to benefit from the advent of on-demand/software-as-a-service technology. It has also given


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birth to social CRM, a category of tools that help companies find and service cus-tomers in the world of social media and social networking, whether that involves Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or other sites.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) The success of ERP software at running the back office and managing manufactur-ing resources helped spawn an enterprise software category specific to managing the internal assets of the enterprise. These assets span the gamut from individual pieces of equipment to entire plants, as well as mobile assets such as rail cars, ship-ping containers, and aircraft. EAM allows companies to rationalize their lifecycle in-vestments in strategic assets by managing their acquisition, maintenance, and end-of-life as well as other key factors such as financial status, availability, and location. This rationalization allows enterprises to more fully use their assets while improv-ing how assets are maintained, accounted for, and eventually replaced or retired.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) ERP is the successor to MRP, which was the originating software category for today’s modern enterprise software market. ERP has grown well beyond its MRP roots to serve as a super-category for a wide range of enterprise functionality, including financial management, human resources management, and supply chain manage-ment. ERP’s super-category status has led many vendors in recent years to eschew the use of the ERP moniker in favor of a more fine-grained product definition that avoids comparisons with either old-line ERP/MRP software or the large-scale software suites (such as Oracle’s E-Business Suite and SAP’s Business Suite) that are often—somewhat erroneously—called ERP suites.

Financials Financial management software is a cornerstone of the enterprise software market, and one of the essential functions of early ERP products and their succes-sors. Financial management software has traditionally been focused on fulfilling accounting and other legal and regula-tory requirements, with core functions that include accounts receivable, accounts payable, and general ledger. The sector has since evolved to include significant fi-nancial planning and forecasting capabili-ties. This evolution has placed a growing amount of new functionality into the hands of the office of the CFO, and has greatly expanded the enterprise’s ability to leverage the historical and real-time data in the company to better manage risk and plan for the future. As such, financial management software is one of the areas that have benefited the most from the recent boom in business intelligence tools and applications.

Human Resources Human resources management is another category that helped pioneer the en-terprise software market and is today benefiting from an increase in the depth and breadth of the offerings. While HRMS software traditionally was focused on managing tasks such as employee on-boarding, payroll, and benefits, HRMS vendors have moved into providing a more comprehensive set of functions to support the full lifecycle of the employee as an individual as well as the overall employee base of the enterprise. This has meant the addition of recruitment, talent management, succession planning, human resources allocation, and other functions to the original HRMS palette. As with CRM, this has led to deeper requirements for integration with other back-office


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capabilities, including financial and CRM software. HRMS has recently been the beneficiary of a number of new product and service offerings from the on-de-mand/SaaS market.

Manufacturing The support of manufacturing comes at two basic levels in the enterprise software market: the back-office ERP functions that manage orders, supplies, finances, service, and support, among others, and the shop-floor manufacturing functions that are the purview of the MES market. Manufacturing has two fundamental sub-categories, discrete and process, that reflect the nature of the products being produced. Discrete manufacturing is dis-tinguished by the production of individ-ual items based on a BOM, while process manufacturing is distinguished by the production of batches of product based on a recipe. These distinctions are often blurred in a single company or even plant: A company that makes dairy products us-ing process manufacturing techniques still needs to package and distribute discrete products—bottle of milk, packages of cheese—that require discrete manufactur-ing software. Software makers have sought to deliver combined functionality to suit these hybrid manufacturers.

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) The manufacturing shop floor’s automa-tion has been one of the great revolutions in modern manufacturing, and the addi-tion of intelligent machines that can be remotely managed has added enormous efficiency as well as complexity to the manufacturing plant. This complexity is abetted by the vast differences in shop-floor equipment and the lack of standards across much of the supporting systems.

Nonetheless, advances in areas such as sensor and wireless technology have led to considerable innovation in MES, and the resulting quantities of data now originat-ing on the shop floor have led to an ana-lytics boom similar to that found in the enterprise business intelligence market.

Manufacturing Intelligence (MI) The concept of business intelligence has a plant-floor corollary: manufacturing intelligence. This discipline uses data col-lection tools and analytics technology to identify opportunities for improvement in manufacturing production. Manufactur-ing intelligence is closely tied to MES, SCADA, sensors, and automation control systems, all with the goal of reducing production bottlenecks and increasing efficiency within operations. MI users say they are better able to perform technology transfer and can scale to production speed faster to get new products on the mar-ket. Reduced process variability achieved through MI software also facilitates lower inventory and drives down associated costs.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Product lifecycle management is a category that focuses on managing the process of delivering a new product from initial design through end–of-life. This means that PLM software helps manage not just the initial design of a product—with particular emphasis on producing a comprehensive BOM that can then be used by MRP and ERP software—but also assist with managing any changes in design or the BOM, whether they are due to engineering changes, changes in the cost and availability of supply, or compli-ance with regulatory requirements, among other factors. Thus, while the use of PLM

MI users say they are better able to perform

technology transfer and can scale to production speed faster to get new

products on the market.


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software generally starts on the engineer-ing side of the enterprise, enterprise PLM has significant points of interaction with other systems, including finance and supply chain management, in addition to MRP and ERP. The digital factory concept, also known as digital manufac-turing, ties product design to shop-floor automation, creating a closed-loop system of production and quality management.

Quality Management Companies across all industries must con-trol and track the quality of their products while observing the specific requirements demanded by their industries and the markets in which they sell their goods. Quality management software gives a manufacturer track-and-trace capabilities and helps facilitate quality-focused initia-tives such as Six Sigma, while conducting root cause analysis and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). An effective quality management system can increase worker productivity, reduce waste in the manufacturing process, and bolster customer trust and retention by reducing defects in the field.

Supplier Relationship Management Supplier relationship management soft-ware seeks to help optimize the value of suppliers to the enterprise by providing a unified view of the supplier relationship that can be used to correlate supplier per-formance with service-level agreements, industry best practices, and regulatory compliance. SRM software may also include strategic sourcing software, and there is generally an important overlap between SRM and supply chain manage-ment software (see below). In general, SRM software is tied to the terms and conditions in the supplier contracts, and

the analysis and reporting of supplier performance against those terms and con-ditions is a key function of this software category.

Supply Chain Execution Supply chain execution software is a cat-egory that often has a significant overlap with supply chain management, and in many cases the two are indistinguishable from one another. The primary difference is that supply chain execution deals with the actual functional operations of the supply chain, including logistics, order and warehouse management, and inven-tory management, while supply chain management includes a significant plan-ning component in its functionality.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) Supply chain planning is the main core function of SCM software, and the ability to test and analyze the impact of varia-tions in the supply chain is an important benefit that SCM provides. In addition to advanced planning for new product intro-ductions, SCM software is used to man-age the impact of supply chain disruptions due to changes in demand, parts avail-ability, supplier fulfillment issues, pricing changes, and a host of other important variables in the supply chain. As such, SCM can be an extremely computation-ally intense function, and more and more vendors are focusing on complex supply chain modeling as a core function in their SCM products.


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Business Pain Points and the Acquisition of Enterprise Software

The rationales behind enterprise software acquisition, like the software itself, have evolved over time as both the technology and business uses of enterprise software have changed. With that evolution has come an important shift: The traditional buyers and individuals who influence buying decisions in the enterprise have changed. Whereas buying enterprise software was once the exclusive purview of the IT department, it now falls on the line-of-business managers to both directly buy enterprise software as well as influence the IT department’s buying decisions.

This evolution toward the line of business has led to a significant shift in how enterprise software is developed, sold, marketed, and implemented. In particular, the influence of the line-of-business buyer has meant that enterprise software is now being developed in smaller, more consumable applications that promise a rapid ROI and do not require a massive, multi-year project by the IT department. The growth of SaaS and on-demand options has helped fuel this shift by providing the line of business with a means to con-sume enterprise software with little or no intervention from IT.

One final shift in the acquisition of enterprise software is the growth in the use of enterprise software to more closely align the enterprise with its customers. This shift is expressed not only in the advent of modern CRM products, but in the growth of social and Web 2.0 products and technologies that provide the ability to link the end-customer directly to the enterprise value chain. Enterprise software that helps connect the software customer to its own customers is now a priority as vendors build their products.

In the aggregate, there are 10 overarching reasons why companies buy enterprise soft-ware. In many cases, the buying rationale stems from a combination of these reasons, and that combination produces a complex buying process that may at times seem to be less than rational. Balancing the different buying rationales and the many stakehold-ers makes for a complex process that is often politically charged and frequently yields less than optimal results. An emerging crop of SaaS tools has brought new rigor to this process, with collaborative workspaces that help the software buying team make better, more efficient decisions.

The growth of SaaS and on-demand options has helped fuel this shift by

providing the line of busi-ness with a means to con-sume enterprise software

with little or no intervention from IT.

1 Refresh the Technology Infrastructure

One of the more common, and more expensive, rationales for buying new enterprise software centers on the need to upgrade or refresh a company’s underlying technology infrastructure. This require-ment can stem from the need to replace an aged or inadequate infrastructure or the need to be able to make use of new

technologies not supported by the older infrastructure—or a combination of both. In either case, there are significant dependencies that must be taken into account when refreshing the technology infrastructure, as older applications may not work correctly or effectively once the new infrastructure is in place.


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2 Refresh Business Processes

The requirement for upgrading or improv-ing business processes has been the main source of the growing influence of the line of business in the buying decision. As the first generation of modern ERP software has become established, the degree of automation afforded by the new software brought into stark relief the remaining

components of key business processes that were not well-automated. This exposure of an enormous quantity of unautomated or poorly automated “white space” in the en-terprise is increasingly driving a similarly enormous demand for more automation of core business processes.

3 Prepare for New Business Opportunities

The highly dynamic nature of the global economy is placing a high value on busi-ness innovation, and that in turn is driv-ing a growing requirement for innovative software that can support innovative business practices. This is in particular the purview of the line of business, which is charged with driving business change and is therefore active in acquiring the enterprise software tools to support that

change. But the IT department is also more and more directly involved in sup-porting new business opportunities, and many technology-infrastructure refreshes that address issues like service-oriented architectures and mobility are set in mo-tion by the need to provide the neces-sary platform to support new business opportunities.

4 Lower Costs, Improve ROI

The requirements for business and technology innovation are also driving software and hardware acquisitions that are intended to lower overall costs and improve the return on investment of existing and new technologies. This buy-ing process is predicated on the realiza-tion that upward of 85% of current IT budget is spent on maintaining existing software and hardware systems. With a

relatively paltry 15%left over for innova-tion, enterprises are looking for ways in which monies spent on maintenance can be shifted to funding innovation. These cost-cutting moves,spurred by the ongo-ing weakness in the global economy, have resulted in a requirement for software that can more directly contribute to bottom- and top-line growth while being cheaper to implement and maintain.


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5 Accommodate Mergers, Acquisition, Divestitures

The unending appetite for mergers and acquisitions across most sectors of the economy is also fueling a significant quan-tity of enterprise software buying. Mergers typically bring together entities that do not share a common technology base, and in many cases one of the newly merging entities must jettison its older system in favor of adopting the same enterprise software platform and applications that are being used by the acquiring company.

Similarly, divestitures frequently require a downsizing and software refresh as the newly divested entity must often shift from being part of a larger organization to standing on its own, and therefore needs a separate and better-sized IT environ-ment than it had as part of the larger entity. Either way, these business events can engender significant technology and applications purchases by the merged company and/or its acquirer.

6 Respond to Competitive Pressure

Being able to achieve parity with indus-try best practices—and then striving to surpass them—is a time-honored ratio-nale for acquiring enterprise software. At times, this process looks more like brinkmanship than a careful, rationally though-out software acquisition process.

But as enterprise software has moved from a more horizontal focus to one that is deeply vertical and geographically focused, the baseline requirement of being up to date with industry best practices has fueled a considerable quantity of new software purchases.

7 Expand the Customer Base & Customer Satisfaction

For many companies with a significant number of retail customers, expanding their connectivity and service levels to those customers provides an important impetus to acquire new enterprise soft-ware. These consumer-facing companies are seeing an increasing requirement to use social media, customer relationship management techniques, and online shopping to engage directly with their

customers. And they are also realizing that existing business processes—invoicing, for example—can be rendered more personal and engaging to customers, which in turn can improve customer pull-through and lower new customer acquisition costs. These improvements also promise to have a direct impact on customer satisfaction, a leading metric for success that by itself is driving significant software sales.


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8 Expand the User Base

Expanding the reach of high-value business processes to a broader percentage of the en-terprise workforce is another key rationale for new software acquisition. Key business processes like supply chain management, for example, once the unique purview of operations research Ph.D.s, are now being expanded to include other business users, such as call-center operators, who are using information from the SCM system to man-

age customer service calls and locate lost or delayed items. Similar trends are happen-ing across the enterprise as companies seek to maximize the value of their enterprise software systems by expanding the scope of the underlying business processes to a larger set of stakeholders. Simultaneously, as noted above, the expansion of enterprise software innovation has also engendered a significant expansion of the user base.

9 Deal with Forced Upgrades

Despite an industry trend toward provid-ing varying degrees of lifetime support for packaged software, companies are often forced to upgrade their enterprise software due to the vendors’ insistence that a par-ticular piece of technology be upgraded or sunsetted, or else face limited support from the vendor. These enforced upgrades can be extremely complex and costly, in part because many legacy systems have a

considerable quantity of customization that is difficult or impossible to migrate forward into the new system. (Indeed, the problem of migrating customizations is the main reason why customers don’t upgrade until they absolutely must.) As with all upgrades and migrations, the complexity of dealing with the upgraded system’s dependencies on other systems can engender additional software buying.

10 Implement a Greenfield

Last but hardly least, new companies of all sizes require enterprise software to com-pete in the modern economy, and though relatively rare, greenfield opportunities generally have an exceptionally broad buying requirement, though one that often starts with a limited user base. But despite the relatively small starting point for many greenfield implementations, the

prospects for high-speed business ramp-up frequently result in an initial buy-ing decision that takes into account the requirements of a much larger business. This makes the scoping of a greenfield op-portunity more extensive than it might be for a more straightforward technology or business process upgrade.


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The Road Ahead

In subsequent chapters of The Official Guide to Enterprise Software Selection, we will outline the steps a company should take to ensure that its investment in enterprise software pays dividends. From Planning and Budgeting, to Requirements Gathering, to Implementation and Integration, the guide will deliver actionable advice for meeting business needs and achieving measurable payback from enterprise software.

About the Author

Joshua Greenbaum is a highly regarded expert on enterprise applications, with over 30 years of experience in the industry as a computer programmer, systems analyst, author, consultant, and industry analyst. Having helped pioneer coverage of the enterprise software market in the late 1980s, Greenbaum moved to Europe in 1991 and worked as an industry analyst and correspondent for industry publications. During this time he wrote the first technical analysis of SAP’s R/3 enterprise software suite, a move that helped establish him as a leading expert in the market. Greenbaum founded Enterprise Applications Consulting in 1998 and has been a pioneering independent analyst and consultant ever since.

About TechMATCH ProTechMATCH Pro is Manufacturing Enterprise Communications’ proprietary enterprise software matching service, con-necting technology buyers and vendors with accuracy, efficiency, and confidential-ity. The collaborative platform is based on a database housing more than 800 prod-ucts across 14 categories, which include mission-critical applications such as BI, CRM, ERP, PLM, and MES. The Tech-MATCH Pro database has recently evolved into a software-as-a-service on-demand offering, in which subscribers are provided with a sophisticated system for gathering requirements, tracking project process, requesting product demonstrations, and developing RFPs, as well as gaining access to a network of software experts.

Manufacturing Enterprise Communi-cations, a unit of Thomas Publishing Company, LLC, provides a complete set of decision-support informational tools for executives and technology decision-makers at manufacturing companies. Thomas Publishing Company is recognized for its experience connecting industrial buyers and suppliers worldwide. TechMATCH Pro’s cloud-based collaborative platform is the latest example of the cutting-edge technology, information, and expertise on which Thomas Publishing Company has built its reputation for more than a century.

A New Way To View Software Selection

TechMATCH Pro is part of Manufacturing Enterprise Communications, a division of Thomas Publishing, LLCFor information visit www.techmatchpro.com or contact Chris Chiappinelli, [email protected]

Tel. 212 629-1512 or 800 638-2286

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ERP and Everything In Between: The Software Essentials

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