We are living in the internet boom, where information is transferred without borders anytime, anywhere. ‘Cloud computing’ has recently become the most talked about among IT pros and businesses regardless of sizes. Though surrounded by scepticism and concerns, cloud computing still prospers without any sign of it ending.

ERP has been the backbone of manufacturing software for more than 25 years since it evolved from the predecessor - MRP (manufacturing resource planning). Such long history also means there is a certain resistance among manufacturers against dramatic changes in ERP technologies and deployment models. Still, many have come to realise that legacy ERP systems simply cannot keep pace with today’s competitiveness and customer demands.

Companies today are deploying an increasing amount of systems to support various business functions – accounting software, CRM, asset management system, etc. The downside though is that those systems are not always capable of “talking” to each other, especially if they are from different vendors.

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.