Thursday, March 24, 2016

Did SAP Fiori capture the future of software development?

SAP Fiori is using modern design principles like role-based, responsive, simple and delightful to create the next generation of SAP software products. The user experience or UX is personalized that you can create an application by targeting a certain user or persona instead of the current designs where we all fit everything in one window to target multiple users. What happens, users tend to ignore fields that are not relevant to them and this equates to frustration or even inefficiencies. So the question then is, will the future design of applications target certain personas not roles to make business users feel that its personalize than targeting a role then use that as your template?

Here are some videos about SAP Fiori:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX5X8ewlD0I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-UMfarMOoo&list=PLeNDocm2iuMMT75fIkxK_OwF97nzk4p5o


Friday, February 12, 2016

In-Memory Appliance: SAP HANA vs Oracle Exalytics

I was trying to research Oracle Exalytics to learn more about the Oracle cloud offering and stumbled upon this interesting video comparing it with SAP HANA. Just interested as previously had implemented HANA with another client so knowing the basic difference might make a difference in the future I need to choose between the 2 giant vendors.

Here's the video, ignore the characters as they look like aliens without neck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ykQHmudoQ

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

EPM arena but where is Microsoft

Happy Monkey Year!!!

I haven't been as active as I've been learning and implementing different systems. If you check my previous posts, my last project was moving Dynamics to SAP suite and we finally wrapped that at end of 2014. One reason my client move out of Dynamics is lack of applications in planning and HR.

In 2015, I started another chapter and this time managing programs. One program was finance transformation where there were several tracks including SAP upgrade, Financial Planning, Tax Transformation and others. I'm also managing other parts of retail like OmniChannel, Retail Accounting, Visual Mechandising programs which was very interesting as you see other parts of a retail business.

The SAP landscape was moving to a new platform, can't really say it but it's in the retail space. 

Financial Planning was another exciting program where I'm moving an Infor system to Oracle Planning Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS). 

I want to call out Microsoft Dynamics as I moved to implementing Tier 1 applications,  I realized that Microsoft Dynamics is missing a lot of business applications. One application which organizations have now realized benefits is Enterprise or Corporate Performance Management (EPM/CPM). Leaders include SAP BPC, Oracle Hyperion/PBCS, IBM TM1 (Cognos). In my years attending Convergence and others, I never heard Microsoft going into this arena and you ask why. 

Every organization today do performance planning in one way or the other. Retail, CPG, Telecom, Healthcare, Prof Services and others need to do this to stay competitive and the functionality is already mature. I think to survive the next wave of ERP investments or Postmodern ERP, CIOs will look for vendors who can provide a consolidated package of solutions including the following - ERP, CPM, BI, CRM, HRIS and others.

If you look at the market today, you can count the vendors with one hand. Unfortunately, Microsoft Dynamics is not one of them as they missed investing in CPM and HRIS. SAP even have solutions for HRIS - SAP HR and SuccessFactor.

I hope this will open conversations inside Microsoft where the next investment should be. I'd be interested to be part of that conversation.




e-Commerce discount types

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