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

In the world of retail today every retailer is trying to find ways and be creative to attract online customers. To attract your attention an...