ERP

Microsoft's AX ERP (enterprise resource planning) application will be receiving a set of mobile applications that mix connectivity to back-end systems and processes with a social milieu.

California has terminated its contract with SAP in connection with a US$371 million software system that was supposed to overhaul the state's payroll system but instead ended up mired in major delays and cost overruns.

As 2012 comes to a close, the ERP software market's biggest players, Oracle and SAP, are seeing their long rivalry become a stalemate, while they face a common set of enemies in the form of upstart ERP vendors based in the cloud, such as NetSuite and Workday.

The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending $1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain.

ERP systems are used throughout most large enterprises, with SAP and Oracle accounting for 80% or more of the installed based in regulated sectors such as pharma and energy. But these same systems, with their million development budgets and long learning curves, have been singularly unsuccessful in smaller enterprises.

The economic whirlwind of the past few years has forced even the savviest of companies to rethink how and where their money is spent. Increasingly, the microscope is being placed on internal back-office processes, seen as prime candidates for strategic cost-cutting initiatives. Perhaps unsurprisingly to many who work within the department, accounts payable (AP) has emerged as an area ripe for improvement.

Two completed pilots of the more-than-US$5 billion project are being scrapped.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can be a headache for businesses. There is a high barrier for entry, both in terms of financial commitment and investing in IT experts to keep it running. Naturally, getting your ERP through a software-as-a-service model seems like the perfect way to mitigate that problem, but according to industry analysts, there are a lot of things to consider before taking that plunge.

Salesforce.com is strengthening its hand in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) market, announcing on Thursday two new partnerships with Infor and Workday that will result in an intermingling of the companies' applications and technologies.

If your enterprise has customized your mission-critical ERP systems over the years, your future upgrades will likely be more troublesome and terrifying because the changes can conflict with the patches. On the other hand, if you are running out-of-the-box ERP with little customization, maybe you're not getting all the important features your business needs.

Last fall, a Forrester Research study found that most had no interest in investing in ERP. New information, however, is showing a renewed enthusiasm for ERP.