Enterprise Software

As food production gets increasingly complicated, food manufacturers often struggle to track products from raw materials to packaged goods -- and, in the event of a recall, from packaged goods to raw materials. Even those with automated quality systems often find it hard to integrate supply chain data. That's why some food makers are turning to specialized ERP systems.

Microsoft has added features to Power BI for Office 365, a data analysis tool to complement Excel that the company hasn't yet released in final form.

Oracle has hyped its new 12c database as faster and more powerful than ones that have come before, and now it's highlighting the release's ability to easily serve up multiple databases of varying size and scope according to a particular user's needs.

Box, the Silicon Valley darling that has disrupted enterprise cloud storage and file sharing, will broaden its scope into the content-creation space with a new online note-taking application.

Swiftpage has launched a new version of the Act contact manager and CRM software it acquired this year from Sage, a move that could reassure the product's many small-business users that it is in good hands under the new ownership.

Workday is hoping to give rival Oracle and other ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors fits with an upcoming product aimed at institutions of higher education.

Implementing cloud-based ERP software wasn't exactly a nuts-and-bolts deployment for FMW Fasteners, as the software needed specific fastener manufacturing industry functionality. Experience rolling our cloud CRM helped, as did an experienced consultant. Now FMW's cloud ERP gains are boosting the firm's ecommerce prospects.

Researcher IDC today slightly lowered its tablet shipment forecast for 2013 and beyond, blaming competition from larger-sized smartphones and futuristic wearable computing devices.

For Carlos Cardoso, CEO of Kennametal, a wealth of data about customers' manufacturing plants allows his company to identify ways to boost efficiency

Salesforce.com's next CRM (customer relationship management) software release will contain a slew of new features, with many focused on the Chatter collaboration and messaging tool as well as customer service, according to a set of official release notes.

If it's true that the best CRM systems are built, not bought, then which features should you be building? And how should you build them? As with riding a bike, implementing a CRM system gets much harder once you take off the training wheels--or, in this case, the out-of-the-box features.