The recent Amazon’s US$13.7bn acquisition of the premium organic grocery chain Whole Foods Market (Whole Foods) has already generated a lot of media buzz. While this deal will, without doubt, reshape the retail industry for years to come, there is another ongoing story worth mentioning: how Whole Foods has been completely transforming its IT systems.

Koch Industries, the U.S. second largest private company, is moving its core financials and HR processes to the cloud with Infor CloudSuite, the company announced on July 11. This huge implementation, which will be rolled out to more than 120,000 users globally, is yet another critical step to strengthen the partnership between Koch and Infor.

According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report for Second Half 2013, email was the fourth most commonly used transmission vector by malicious infection attempts on Microsoft computers during that period. This includes malware-infected emails and phishing emails.

It seems increasingly clear that cloud computing is the future of ERP. For businesses, the transition to the cloud is as much about financial benefits as it is about new technologies. This is especially true for small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). 

Spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel has long been indispensable to organisations thanks to its ubiquity, versatility, and ease of use. Such attributes, however, also make spreadsheets particularly susceptible to human errors, as demonstrated by the following cases.  

In the previous blog, we discussed the fundamentals of cloud ERP. We now talk about benefits and drawbacks of adopting a cloud-based ERP system, and which types of organisations should do that.

For a hotel chain, which may own, operate or manage thousands of properties around the world, revenue management truly is a daunting challenge. In recent years, many hotel chains have heavily invested in Business Intelligence (BI) to drive their revenue management. The massively powerful data analytics capabilities provided by Business Intelligence solutions have created giant leaps in revenue optimisation of hotel chains.

In the last blog post, we examined how APS (advanced planning and scheduling) benefits modern manufacturers. In this post, we will talk about CPQ (configure price quote), another key integration for advanced ERP software.

Cloud-based solutions are one of the most prominent trends in ERP, and there is plenty of hype around this trend. Most major ERP vendors have offered cloud-based versions of their products and are encouraging their customers to upgrade from legacy systems to cloud offerings. A few vendors offer exclusively cloud systems. And while moving to the cloud has constantly been praised as the right direction, it must not be seen as the only option for companies looking for ERP.

If Tesla Motors is to achieve the aggressive goal of making 1 million cars by 2020 set out by its CEO Elon Musk, it will partly be because of application of data analytics in its manufacturing operations.