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Getting ERP best value
It’s not so much about looking under the covers: getting best value from ERP today is less about functionality and more about proper business analysis, good old-fashioned ITTs and due diligence, says Brian Tinham |
29/09/2007
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Are you tooled up?
Desktop management is getting tougher, with mixed environments, security and
compliance among the culprits. Brian Tinham examines some of the issues
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26/09/2007
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Free software?
Open source is gaining prominence – and not just in the developer community – but can it really slash your costs?
Brian Tinham finds out |
25/09/2007
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Digital voice
VoIP had bad press not so long ago, but now the bandwagon is gathering serious pace. Brian Tinham looks at what’s happening and what you need to know |
24/09/2007
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Network practice
There’s much more to securing and provisioning your business and plant networks than meets the eye – and, with the pressure on for better performance, getting this right is key. Antony Adshead reports on the latest solutions |
11/09/2007
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Wireless world
Going wireless isn’t just about business communications. Brian Tinham discovers a fast emerging world of mobile production possibilities |
11/07/2007
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SOA's apprentice
You probably think you’ve heard it all before, but Brian Tinham discovers that a services orientated architecture (SOA) is the start of something big, new and surprisingly powerful |
09/07/2007
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Less is more: aligning your IT
IT costs very, very big bucks, and manufacturing businesses depend on it now more than ever. Brian Tinham talks to CIOs about how to get more from less – and sustain it |
01/06/2007
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Hype versus reality
Advances in IT are now so fast and potentially so transformational that it’s getting difficult to differentiate between hype and reality. Brian Tinham seeks direction |
01/06/2007
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Mobile IT: for real
Formula One is set to deliver a new level of enabling IT, not just for the automotive sector but ultimately much of manufacturing industry, says Brian Tinham |
25/04/2007
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Always on?
Renishaw’s solution to getting high availability computing might save you quite a lot of money, effort and downtime. Brian Tinham reports |
25/04/2007
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Unlocking business with cyber security
IT security is a cost of doing business, right? Wrong: today’s smart money is on configuring protection to enable better busienss. Brian Tinham reports |
18/04/2007
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Netting material improvements
Converging your data and communications networks has been on the cost cutting business agenda for years – but some users are finding it’s capable of a lot more. Brian Tinham talks to Victrex about how it’s enabling better business support |
28/03/2007
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Future fantastic
We’ve all heard the fantasies, but the next three years of network development look set to change the way we work. Brian Tinham talks to BT futurologist Graham Whitehead |
22/03/2007
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Who grasps virtual space
Everybody who’s anybody is saying it: even in quite small organisations IT managers would be well advised to investigate the potential for savings and efficiencies through consolidation and virtualisation – of their servers, storage, operating systems and whole IT networks. Virtualisation meaning decoupling the physical infrastructure hardware from the software and data it runs by means of an abstraction layer that provides for policy-based management of shared resources. The business case involves everything from reduced server real estate and complexity to simplified admin, improved utilisation, possibly also resilience and certainly flexibility – including with archiving and back-up. It’s about making the infrastructure cheaper to buy, own, run and manage, as well as better able to respond to changing business requirements, even on the fly. |
26/01/2007
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IT keys to mouth watering benefits
If you’re after a vision of how an ERP system implementation can become both driver and foundation of a total business transformation, look no further than Yorkshire Water. This one is extreme, and although the ERP system happens to be SAP, it’s the business objectives and how they were met that matter most here. |
11/12/2006
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Horses for courses in today’s race for storage
While many things in IT seem constantly to shrink, others are ever increasing. One is the proportion of budget you need just to keep on top of data storage. A decade ago storage made up between 10% and 15% of IT budgets. Today that figure is nearer 40%. |
04/12/2006
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Data hub gets global bearings group rolling
When automotive bearings firms Glacier Industrial Bearings, Glacier Vandervell and Garlock Bearings came together as GGB, the group found itself with 13 sites around the world, some manufacturing, some distribution, some sales offices – but all with different ERP and legacy systems and incompatible business processes and parts data. It needed to consolidate its IT, but it also needed to cut costs, reduce inventories and improve customer service by getting slick and lean internally, inter-site and in its supply chains. |
04/12/2006
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Setting the IT agenda for your business in 2007
What’s hot? What’s not? Who cares? What matters to management teams running the various aspects of increasingly stretched and complex manufacturing companies today has nothing whatever to do with what analysts, journalists or anyone else see as ‘hot’, ‘in’ or ‘fashionable’. The primary concern is simply keeping the operation going, cutting costs and attempting to get production better and smarter – meaning faster, more efficient, more flexible and the rest of it. Brian Tinham talks to senior users in manufacturing for some serious clues |
28/11/2006
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Welcome to the secure connection
Success depends upon the speed and agility with which organisations and their partners can share information – but the barriers are numerous. Systems are typically designed for internal, confidential operation, yet, as Mark Wheeler, Adobe’s marketing director for Northern Europe, explains, there is huge business benefit in exposing some content to the supply chain. |
28/11/2006
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Avoiding the pitfalls of outsourcing IT
As a means of saving money and improving service, outsourcing IT has not got the best of track records. Earlier this year, for example, in what seems to be an annual pronouncement, analyst Gartner published research saying that 50% of all outsourcing contracts signed in the previous three years had failed to meet expectations. There is a clear disparity between expectation and outcome on many outsourcing projects. So, what are the latest trends and how can you ensure your project is not one of the staggering 50% that fail? |
14/11/2006
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Don't let your IT be a barrier to the business
Manufacturers are spot on the average for hardware flexibility across the business sectors at 47%, according to analyst Butler Group’s recent benchmarking survey. However, they are well below the average on the software side – 20% against the mean 29% value. Does that matter? Well ultimately, yes it could – for two reasons. First, globalisation, commoditisation and technology are lowering the barriers to new entrants, so competing today is increasingly about improving your customer experience and opportunity awareness as well as cutting costs and improving agility in design and production. But typically when managers start wanting to adjust business processes, they find those are ‘hard wired’ in their systems – so making changes is going to cost a lot of money and take 12 months, by which time it’s too late. |
14/11/2006
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Your business needs a brighter network
Was the time when manufacturers simply needed to be experts in the technicalities and marketing of their trades. But now, computing in some form or other – from the firmware in a machine tool right up to the business ERP software – is integral to their success. However, between the computing devices that increasingly drive manufacturing faster are networks that carry the data in whatever form – and advances here are also fast-moving. Moore’s law states that processor speeds double every 18 months. There is no such law for bandwidth but some have estimated carrying capacities grow by around 50% annually, while in a decade the cost of bandwidth has decreased by a factor of 10. |
07/11/2006
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Bombardier gets big time on the rails
Bombardier Transportation expects to make a 30% materials saving within three years on the back of a software tool that sees and standardises data across legacy systems. The firm has squared up to an extreme challenge: after years of acquiring and consolidating businesses it had more than 70 databases in eight legacy systems containing an apparent 2.8 million parts from some 200,000 suppliers. What’s more, those were distributed as more than 9 million records in five languages. |
04/10/2006
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Roaming access is right formula for mobile work
Polymer products and chemicals manufacturer Chemtura was highly commended for its noteworthy competitive advantage and productivity improvements achieved by providing its 300 mobile workers with context-sensitive access to real-time information and applications via Citrix systems. The company was already using centralised server-based computing on Citrix Presentation Server for Windows to deploy applications like SAP BW (business intelligence), but wanted to extend this to deliver role-based access to information and applications through a web browser. |
04/10/2006
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