Month: January 2020

The Strategizing Part for Manufacturing Sector – Tips for Futuristic and Sustainable Planning

Posted on by stridely

Technological trends have caused a seismic shift in the way organizations to work and plan for the future. Nearly every sector and every industry have parted ways with the traditional form of business, adopting digital methods.

One sector that seems to be moved drastically post the inception of digital ideologies is the manufacturing industry. What’s more important is the fact that a small change in the manufacturing industry would altercate the lives of everyone across the globe.

From business organizations to customers and employees, none can sway away from the effect of digital transformation.

Impact of digital transformation – Trends To Set In The Manufacturing Industry

Digital transformation is the new talk of the town. It is believed that the above would lay an impact on the lives of all. And if organizations want to make their business future-ready, it is important for them to integrate the ongoing trends.

  • Improved Efficiency

    The manufacturing industry is the one that is on the roll gave the impact of digitization and industrialization 4.0. There has been a wave of automation that has fostered the growth of the sector as basic tasks have been digitized and automated. When every task gets regulated by adding digital methods, it eliminates the possibility of error, triggering the productivity and efficiency of the organization.

  • Real-time Data Analysis

    Another aspect of digital transformation is the proliferation of data mechanism. Embedding tools and techniques that came gather huge amounts of data, access and analyze them to come up with significant insights help organizations make better and smarter decisions. Suppose, that a manufacturing unit produces 10 quintals of a product in a single stash. At times, the production amount surpasses the supply or vice-versa. To ensure that the adopted ecosystem has a balance between the production and supply, organizations put their data to use.

  • Sensors To Monitor Assets

    Manufacturing industries employ thousands of assets that carry out the process of developing products. Now, what happens here is that assets are vulnerable to break down. Imagine that you have a big unit and dismantling of one single unit might cause the entire system to fail. This might incur huge losses to the organization.

    That’s where we introduce the concept of sensors. To make sure that the embedded assets in your organization work effectively and are break-free, one can integrate sensors that monitor the functioning of the assets and notify the concerned person, in case there exists an error. Deploying such sensors lead to the efficient working of the assets as the downtime of the system is drastically reduced.

  • Bots For Work Safety

    There are certain units that employ a hazardous environment. Working under such conditions pose a threat to human life. With the adoption of computerized bots and robots, such tasks can be overtaken by them, and the processes can be performed effectively without impacting the lives of humans.

    Further automated units are so designed that it can detect vital signals that outline the possibility of injury or fatal outcomes. Once detected, concerns are raised and the operation managers can take effective steps to combat the effect of the mishap and prevent the occurrence of an accident.

    It seems that the digitally-driven manufacturing industry is not only future-ready but also capable of creating an infrastructure that is largely positive. From data-driven insights to digital innovation and automation, the manufacturing industry is on the cusp of change and this is definitely one that promotes sustainability.

Taking the Leap – A New Start

It is glaringly obvious that digital innovation would augment efficient processes across the manufacturing industry. However, it is seen that even today the manufacturing industries haven’t implemented the above.

No wonder why manufacturing industries lag behind the others in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. The present scenario incorporates an environment where organizations aren’t sure where to start. While the existing infrastructure is a bit siloed and lags in the majority of the aspects, the one that is sustainable and future-ready would have endless opportunities for growth and drive processes through digital evaluation.

Picking The Right Technology

We are well aware of the fact that digital transformation is all set to disrupt the manufacturing industry. However, just picking up technology and implementing it straight away would do no good. It is important to assess the different technologies, find the one that fits best the needs and then move ahead with the implementation process.

Imagine that you have a small scale business and now if you decide to move ahead with the adoption of artificial intelligence tools or bots for embedding automation, it might happen that you get bogged down by the cost incurred in incorporating the emerging technology.

Hence, you need to be mindful of the type of technology you are about to implement in your manufacturing units. Another important aspect that you need to take care of is the adoption of both people and processes and training them to map the technology set. It is seen that around 40% of the organization has purchased digital units yet failed to integrate them within their existing infrastructure.

Bringing everything on the same platform

The success behind the integration of technologies and tools is to tie everything together. What we mean to say is that simply investing would not help organizations to lead. Instead, if these units want to turn sustainable and ready for the future, they need to bridge the gap between the people, processes and innovative technologies.

For instance, when manufacturing industries decide to embed tools that help gather data and use it to make smarter decisions, it is needed that the people working on the data are trained to deal with the same and process that data to come up with intelligent insights.

Now, adding all of this seems to create a huge mess and untangling all of it is what the organization looks forward to in order to turn sustainable and ready for the future. So, what do you think? Are you or your organization industry-ready?

SAP Vs. Oracle – Which Solution is the Best for your Organisation?

Posted on by stridely

Many companies face a common challenge about operational stability and benefits realization. Even though ERP systems are in use, 60% of companies are not able to make use of it. Based on the custom software development services, you can find two best software solutions in the market.

Who needs an ERP (SAP or Oracle) system?

SAP itself says that systems, applications and products and organizations dealing with products and in need of customised options use SAP software. When it comes to data handling organizations prefer Oracle software. Both products have their pros and cons, and you need to choose the one for you.

A Quick Comparison – SAP Vs Oracle

When companies tend to stand out in the competitions, you need to grasp the best out of the best software. There are two apparent software products available in the market, as in SAP and Oracle. While incorporating ERP systems in the companies, you need to check with all the variables and tradeoffs:

  • Cost and Time

    Cost and time are the main primary factors when it comes to the implementation of ERP systems in organizations. Because there involve some operational disruptions like shipping and manufacturing products.

    Generally, implementing an ERP takes on around 2 months to 18 months, it depends on the requirements of the organization. Here, Oracle takes a maximum of 12 months to implement, whereas SAP takes a maximum of 14.7 months in implementation.

    As SAP targets global and complex companies, it takes a more extended period for implementation. SAP targets the Organisation, which has at least 1$ billion annual turns over, and Oracle targets $750 million annual turnover companies. It is natural to take up a bit longer time for implementing in multiple locations.

    When it comes to costing, SAP does costs much more than Oracle. Organizations spend 4% of their annual revenue on SAP, and the Oracle customers spend an average of 1.7% of annual revenue only.

  • Implementation risk

    Either of them involves their risks. Here, you need to check what are the methods and tools they are offering, which can suppress the risks to a more significant extent.

    Many SAP customers claimed implementation failures when comparative to the Oracle customers. Along with that they also faced some material operational disruption while going live. SAP has introduced the best practices and pre-configuration methods to reduce the maximum risk.

    Whereas with the Oracle, the third stage consulting group top list of 2019 ERP systems does not have a place for the Oracle Cloud ERP software. Every oracle customer is bound to a high degree of implementation risk. Oracle also has introduced similar practices to decrease the risk factor.

    Both the software products involve high risk in implementation, which may affect the whole organization. But they had fixed the issues and taken precautions by considering the feedbacks. Both have a productive user kit, which does complete testing, training, and makes the implementation process more effectively.

  • The Scalability

    Businesses always look at different ways to expand and grow while producing excellent results. It is the reason why choosing ERP systems is a primarily essential factor. It will be an operational background and help in the scalability of the organization.

    It is listed that 500+ companies are using either or both ERP systems for their industrial growth. Both are equally essential, but choosing any one of them depends on the organization’s requirements. Most of the companies are capable of increasing their scalability with either of the software.

    The primary difference is that SAP is offering a single consistent system and primarily consolidating its products into a unique system from the ground level. Here, Oracle has the best options with numerous solutions. Such as Fusion, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, Siebel, and Hyperion.

  • Functionality and Customisation

    An ERP system must have a set of functionality and should continuously work for improving business operations. There is no doubt that both SAP and Oracle can help in enhancing system functionality. But based on the reviews and feedbacks, it says that SAP customers can enjoy more benefits from the features than the oracle users.

    Ease of customization is another important feature in the ERP system. Surprisingly, both SAP and Oracle are offering customization to the customers in their way.

    SAP’s ERP systems are offering flexibility to integrate tools on to their software for enterprise customers. In contrast, Oracle is offering the best solutions for managers to integrate with the software according to their requirements.

  • Customer Relationship Management

    SAP has changed the traditional way of customer relationship management tool and integrated it throughout the ERP systems. It includes all the customer’s records, financial functions, and procurement.

    Its built-in sales features help the sales force to manage accounts, streamline procurement process, build invoices, and manage contracts and orders from the interface of ERP. All the fonts that involve the customers are covered.

    Organizations have a full customer experience suite, which can help with enhancing the lead generations more effectively. It also includes the entire marketing, finance, and sales teams, which speaks out the whole history of the customer and provides a perfect sales strategy.

    Oracle has offered sales enablement tools, which are customer experience, marketing, sales, social tools, and services. These can be integrated with the Oracle ERP cloud. But Oracle does not have any dedicated sales tool, and this is a minor disadvantage for the companies with sales as their target.

    However, it comes with a robust financial management tool, where you can find vital customer information. You can precisely filter the customer information such as orders, quote, and financial records.

    Even though Oracle’s customer account management is good enough, but SAP is the best in this expectation. Whereas Oracle has its strengths in the reporting and data.

    As said, both SAP and Oracle have their beneficial factors. Choosing one of them entirely depends on the organization’s targets and requirements. Both of them are offering a variety of functions, but they may or may not be suitable for your needs.

The Final Word

We can conclude that SAP is best for the companies who are looking for scalability from the consistency and standardization. And the Oracle works best with the organizations that have more flexibility and decentralized model.

 

 

Best Practices of Online Document Collaboration

Posted on by stridely

Working with teams that are distributed across different regions could uncoil a series of challenges. For one, collaborating at such a wider level is a problem difficult to solve and to top this, avoiding the possibilities of miscommunication is another crucial thing.

Where at one end, seamless interaction between teams can accelerate the productivity of teams, communication gaps and disparity in the documents shared, might account for poor organizational performance. Having said that, you would never want to dismantle the trust your customers have in you. Evidently, you undertake all possible measures to ensure that projects submitted are of top-notch quality and at large, error-free.

But to aid this, you would definitely need to have an ecosystem where everything is organized and synchronized. A single glitch between the workplace would disrupt the workflow, hampering the overall efficiency. Now, when we talk about the workflow within the organization, document collaboration happens to be the most important step.

Imagine you have a team comprising of 15 members. Each has access to the project documents and can edit or modify it as per their own convenience. A situation arises where member X edits the document, in the manner he/she finds best. Now, another member of the team says, Y isn’t aware of this change and goes on to edit the previously modified file. This leads to utter confusion where everyone edits the file, leaving it confounded.

The only solution to such a problem is the collaboration of online documents. It is important that every process is coordinated and synchronized, eliminating the possibility of error and that where we ideate the incorporation of certain steps to ensure optimal document collaboration.

This article is specifically designed to guide on the best practices and without wasting any time further, let’s move ahead to uncover them.

Steps You Should Take To Ensure Online Document Collaboration

  • Management OF Document Collaboration

    When there are multiple people working on the same project, it is important that at the very start, roles are identified and duties divided. In fact, if all of the members are at the same level, they can edit the document as and when they find it inevitable. But if the participating members have different roles, the ease to modify the document should be limited and would necessitate the need to take permission whenever a subordinate wishes to make changes.

    Such an infrastructure ensures that the concerned party is always notified about what needs to be done and only after the permission has been granted, can anyone apart from the authorized edit the document. Further, a time frame needs to be set for every edit and before publishing the final piece, a draft should be shared with the owner to avoid the emergence of any discrepancy. It is best to notify the admin or the owner, of every change and move ahead along with the team.

  • Seamless Communication

    One of the common reasons why organizations fail to deliver projects in time or pitch one with errors is the communication gap. When there is minimal or communication between the members of the team, the work is bound to suffer and get delayed. This creates a negative impression in the mind of the customers affecting the business on a whole

    To ensure that there persists an efficient document collaboration, it is important to use tools that promote instant messaging services. While working, team members might experience issues or doubts and the faster their queries get answered, the easier it becomes to continue with the process.

    One best practice while editing documents is to leave a comment or provide a short explanation of the need to edit a piece within the document. This notifies the other members so that they can have a look and decide whether the edits are required. Where the top tier members can leave a comment after they have modified the document, tagging the concerned members, the ones that aren’t authorized to make changes without the permission are expect to first leave a comment and if approved by the rest, go on with editing the document.

    Such a process ensures transparency across the members of the team where everything is done with total collaboration.

  • Consistency Across Documents

    Editing documents should not be such that the older versions are lost or cannot be tracked back. It’s best to create a version of the documents while one edits it. This makes it easier for the owner to keep track of the original document and outline the changes. Also, if documents are given numbers every time a modification is done, the owner can easily determine if there were any unauthorized access is made to the document.

    Further to adhere to the security norms, access granted to third party members should be revoked as soon as the job is complete. The owner can, under specific conditions, limit the copying and printing of the documents at external sites. This ensures that the document isn’t hacked or used for evil purposes. Collaborating in real-time might also require remote members to access the files. Based on the roles defined by the owner, the ease of saving and distributing the documents can be restricted.

Final Word

Without a doubt, document collaboration is important, irrespective of the type of business you are in. It is, in fact, one of the vital things within an organization and every team leader should deploy solutions to ensure optimal collaboration of documents.

There is an array of digital tools available across the industry that helps with the process of document collaboration. Adopting either one of them would make the task of document collaboration easier and faster. You might find creating and editing documents through email a better way, but when you have multiple members and a plethora of documents, automating the process through digital tools is the best resort. So, step ahead, take the leap, download a document collaboration tool and adopt the measures stated above to ensure seamless collaboration across your organizational teams.