Last week, I ordered a birthday present online for a dear friend from my favorite chocolate store. The shop’s unique and quality products have quickly made them my go-to-store for gifts over the past few years. However, over the past six months or so, they’ve become quite popular and I’ve found that the once easy ordering process I used to experience with them has now disappeared.
Year: 2014
Simplify or die
Are you paying too much, relative to what you are getting? Are you paying for things you did not order because the account is too complex to understand?
The cost of complexity is not only to the account of the consumer; producers and sellers suffer too.
If we look back fifty years and make a comparison to current times, our access to technology and knowledge is a hundred fold more, yet our lives have never been more complicated. In business, there are few parts where complexity exerts a more painful grip than in the IT arena. The more pervasive and fundamental the IT system, the higher the system complexity, and the more money required to feed the beast. One must ask why we have accepted this state of affairs? Why have we not rebelled? The most obvious answer is that we are overwhelmed by the complexity.
The easy way out
Human beings are strange creatures in many ways. One of the habits we all have is a tendency to avoid doing a difficult job today in favor of a quicker workaround, despite the fact we know in the long run we would be better off implementing the proper solution at the start. It frustrates me that even though I am hyper aware of this tendency, I still fall victim to it.
When to put your ERP system in the cloud
The other week I was at a friend’s house having a barbeque when his granddaughter ran out of the house clutching my friend’s iPad asking (in a way that only 4 year old girls can) to watch Peppa Pig. My friend’s reaction was to tell her to put the TV on but the demand came back “NO! On my pad, on my pad”.
Impatience is a virtue
Unless you’ve been living on a desert island for the past 5 years, you shouldn’t have failed to notice that when Apple released the first generation iPad back in 2010 it sparked off a revolution in personal computing terms when it brought to the consumer device market an intuitive, simplistic and easy to use personal computing device.
The Future of Manufacturing Technology
It used to be that manufacturing was only considered important in emerging economies. Recently, however, analysts groups and influential business publications have started discussing the significance of a new wave of manufacturing that will pervade all economies.
The Pros and Cons of ERP Certification
Just last week, my Dad and I were discussing and debating the value of certifications in the real world – a contentious topic that is widely debated across different professions. Being a civil engineer, my Dad shudders at the idea of hiring a newbie engineer who has achieved a professional qualification without any exposure to applying this knowledge practically. In his industry, practical experience is a requirement.
Measuring the ROI of your ERP
We are regularly asked to provide a tool to demonstrate ROI (Return on Investment) on the purchase and implementation of an ERP system. Personally I don’t believe in today’s uncertain, unpredictable, fast moving world there is value in such a tool.
35 ERP years young
As SYSPRO celebrates 35 years of being in business today I have been reflecting on what this means on a number of levels.
