Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Assembly Line
Nike overhauls ERP in bid for better supply chain speed, agility
Transit times remain at roughly two weeks longer than pre-pandemic levels and aren’t expected to improve significantly through the end of FY 2023, Friend said. As a result, the company is managing inventories to deal with the slower movement of goods, including adjusting product life cycles. “We’re taking some of our styles to seasonless that we can manage it on more of a rolling basis,” Friend said. “And we’ll continue to leverage the experience that we’ve had over the last 2 years, navigating through this environment from a supply chain complexity and congestion perspective.”
Arkestro brings AI to ERP
Arkestro is bringing a mixture of modern artificial intelligence algorithms to the world of ERP. It wants to use a combination of machine learning, game theory and behavioral science to make the supply chain more efficient and better able to withstand failures.
A large part of Arkestro’s solution focuses on allowing algorithms to help people with pricing and price discovery, a challenge that is also only growing more complex now that inflation is putting more pressure on the enterprise to charge the right amount. When prices are stable, suppliers can work together for years without renegotiating prices. But the specter of currency erosion makes it crucial for companies to find the appropriate price. Arkestro offers a predictive pricing model that tracks the relationship between both sides of the transaction while also folding in data from others in similar marketplaces. It also tracks anomalies and disruptions that can send pricing shocks.
Infor hits $1 billion in SaaS revenue - what’s next for the ERP vendor?
This new era for Infor will form a number of components. For instance, the company is continuing to double down on its industry focus, going deeper into verticals that it has expertise in, delivering relevant functionality, process knowledge and data. Equally, Infor itself has invested in ensuring its internal organization is restructured around these industries, so that it can ‘talk the talk’ with its customers, rather than adopting a horizontal approach to services, sales and support.
Samuelson was also keen to highlight that the ERP market is still undergoing fundamental changes, where he believes Infor is now in a good position to seek out buyers that are looking for long-term partners in the cloud.
Western Digital’s Journey To Build Business Resiliency Through Cloud And ERP Transformation
In 2019, Western Digital started the most crucial part of the transformation journey. This fourth and final phase would transform manufacturing, inventory operations, and intercompany finance for 10 manufacturing plants across five countries, contract manufacturers and end users in a future-ready platform. Infosys was engaged to bring in an outside-in industry view to challenge current business practices and identify opportunities to harmonize process across the sites and standardize by eliminating custom practices.
The program was divided in multiple sub-phases. First sub-phase involved transforming manufacturing operations and intercompany transfers between component factories alongside payroll consolidation, reporting consolidation in Oracle BI. Second sub-phase had as many as 12 parallel projects for bringing hard disk drive manufacturing operations to cloud and consolidating all shipping and revenue operations, making way to retire two out of three legacy ERPs.
How to calculate digital transformation ROI
To simplify and prioritize the digital vision, first consider how digital transformation for manufacturing integrates three key business components:
- Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), programmable logic controller (PLC) and control (machine automation)
- Manufacturing execution system (MES), which includes: (part traceability, machine monitoring and machine management, i.e., recipes and so on)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP), which includes: (AP/AR, raw materials, purchase orders, inventory, scheduling and tracking).
Achieving large profitability and competitive gains requires seamless integration of three business components. However, it is important to begin at the machine automation level, then incorporate the MES and finally the ERP. The reason for following this path is based on data requirements but also because it is the easiest path for development.