As the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market approaches the quarter-century mark, many manufacturers and asset-intensive industries are going through an upgrade or refresh cycle. With the growing importance of Cloud, mobility, Big Data analytics and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), these firms are frequently driven by competition, or senior management’s desire to change the company's competitive position, through Digital Transformation to become a Smart Manufacturing company. LNS has numerous end-user clients that see their business environment changing, and application decisions they made one or two decades ago now leave them with a technology portfolio that inhibits their ability to pursue Digital Transformation. Data from our IIoT survey shows that of the nearly 650 respondents, 62% list enterprise application spending as the number one investment area, over Big Data analytics and knowledge management. Unfortunately, many firms struggle with choosing their next generation ERP technology. What are the most common mistakes that make it so hard?

Last week, LNS attended the Schneider Electric Innovation Summit in Paris. It is one of the two flagship summits from 16 overall events Schneider Electric will hold this year to showcase their vision and technology. The event, first since Schneider Electric Software and AVEVA merger, was held in Paris from April 4-6 and had nearly 5000 attendees including customers, partners, prospects, employees, press, and analysts. The host city was painted green to match Schneider Electric brand color.

Just how critical are risk and quality to today’s supply chain? Recent LNS research reveals risk and quality improvements are among a supplier’s most important investments. For many, this will not be a surprise, because quality is often leveraged to determine preferred supplier status, and preferred supplier status impacts contract awards. Quality and risk are indeed strategic investments given that suppliers are even more focused on growing revenue than the rest of the market.

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Developing profitable, timely, high-quality products is more important today than ever before. Visibility to product performance has never been higher, while competition continues to squeeze margins and time to market. These market dynamics, among others, are increasing the pressure on product teams.

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The 14th annual SAP-Centric EAM (enterprise asset management) event was held in Austin, Texas the week of March 26. This is the second year SAP elected to roll its supply chain event into the event that’s produced by ASUG and Eventful Group, and supported by SAP. The combined EAM/supply chain event resulted in a much more diverse set of attendees, an expanded program that reflected the interests of a much broader portion of people from corporate functions in business, and attracted a larger set of SAP partners and third-party solution providers than past events. The Americas’ SAP Users Group (ASUG) drives the program content as well. The event has a very high percentage of SAP user-delivered content, blended with a mix of SAP strategic leadership vision delivery as well as product roadmap previews and technical user group lab environment workshops and roundtables. This event exposes SAP's greatest strengths and the significant challenges it faces going forward in the SAP user community.

The notion of a risk-based approach to manufacturing domains such as quality, asset performance, safety and environmental management is not new to life sciences manufacturers. What’s changed is the scope and nature of risk management processes, and how they relate to overall enterprise risk management, sustainable operations, and profitable growth. This trend is driven by the accelerating rate of change in global business networks and operations, creating a more dynamic risk environment and calling for better risk processes and outcomes.

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LNS Research has been tracking and influencing the market’s use of Industry 4.0 technologies to improve quality for several years. These technologies have proven to be transformative, and include advances in connectivity and sensors, data management, analytics, app development, and collaboration. LNS calls this Quality 4.0 and recommends all quality teams include Quality 4.0 in their strategies. To better understand it, read the blog post and eBook.

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Infor, an enterprise software company, brought together the analyst community at its New York headquarters for another Innovation Summit to share updates on progress and plans for its product set. The Infor senior leadership team, backed by several customers, walked analysts through the entire product portfolio. Often perceived as “the other ERP company,” in the shadow of SAP and Oracle, Infor deserves more credit for innovation and adoption of future trends and technology. Infor was the first of the major enterprise application players to embrace Cloud and user experience, and was a very early proponent of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the progress Infor made has been in industries outside of manufacturing like healthcare, transportation, retail, and in standard business functions such as human capital management (HCM). Manufacturing and asset-intensive industries should take note as they will benefit from the advances the software vendor is bringing to the market, in addition to all the Cloud capabilities directly associated with manufacturing in relevant CloudSuites. The Innovation Summit featured several end-users who made it clear they see Digital Transformation as their only option.

On Tuesday, March 20, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Industry Standards as Building Blocks to Quality Maturity and Operational Excellence.” The presentation examined how to use industry standards to capture the attention and cooperation of senior corporate executives, the capabilities required to achieve competitive advantage through quality, and the results companies should expect.

Earlier this month, I participated in the NAEM EHS and Sustainability Software conference in St. Petersburg, FL. I’ve come to rely on this annual event as the place with highest concentration of people, companies, and content focused on EHS information technology (IT). This year’s event did not disappoint.

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