Everybody seems to talk about blockchain these days. But what exactly is blockchain? There is no shortage of definitions on the internet, but many are too technical for a typical C-level executive to understand.

Depressed demand and increased supply have caused oil prices to fall from over US$100 per barrel in July 2014 to $30 in February 2016. Even though prices have increased somewhat since then, with Brent reaching a five-month high of US$55.99 per barrel on September 15, many experts remain sceptical about the outlook of oil’s US$50-plus status¹. Oil and gas companies, therefore, are bracing for an extended period of low oil prices.

Managing enterprise data may seem like a daunting task. It can easily get overwhelming and out of control if not managed well. In a survey conducted by Primary Data in 2016, the results showed that a common trait among many enterprise IT experts that they have to handle 10 to 20, sometimes more, data sources as the company grows. How can you simplify your data management? Check out this infographic for the answer.

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.

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 ERP solutions are one of the most prominent trends, 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.