BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO LEGACY SYSTEMS WITH RESPONSE MANAGEMENT

If you're like most OEMs or contract manufacturers, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is your biggest application investment year after year. This is understandable, because these transaction-oriented systems serve as the "execution backbone" of most organizations. But while ERP systems are designed to help your business run like clockwork, serious challenges arise when the business doesn't run like clockwork—which is increasingly the norm.

Randy Littleson serves as vice president at Kinaxis and has more than 17 years of management experience, having held executive-level positions at Interface Software, Spyglass, and Palindrome Corporation (a Seagate company). To discuss this topic further, join him online at blog.kinaxis.com.

In the days of Henry Ford, well-planned, long production runs determined manufacturing success. Today, success is increasingly defined by how quickly and effectively manufacturers can respond to volatile customer demands and worldwide supply conditions. Although companies need all the help they can get to meet the challenges of today's fiercely competitive global economy, the front lines of manufacturing operations remain one of the last frontiers for performance management solutions.

Meeting the intense deadline pressure in manufacturing operations requires teams of management and specialists across the department, the enterprise, and beyond to respond rapidly to changing real-world conditions. Traditional solutions fall short, because they don't support collaborative decision-making and typically rely on after-the-fact information that arrives too late to drive effective response. Instead, teams need a collaborative solution that lets them quickly create and evaluate multiple action alternatives in the context of continuously changing information, and then drive the actions best aligned to corporate objectives.

Response Management can help. Response Management solutions easily integrate with existing ERP systems to deliver a powerful user productivity tool that enables organizations to quickly and effectively deal with the challenges that arise when the business doesn't run like clockwork. Response Management supports and enhances current planning processes and dramatically boosts operating efficiency. And because they're ERP-agnostic, Response Management solutions can deliverable measurable improvements in customer service and operating margins across disparate systems or even during an ERP upgrade or migration.

A growing number of global business leaders are adopting Response Management to complement their SAP, Oracle, Baan, or other ERP systems. With low deployment and maintenance costs, Response Management solutions are helping these and other companies leverage the value of ERP data to immediately deliver measurable business benefits and gain competitive advantage.