Group items tagged

ERP vendor selection. As the following graph shows, the primary candidates for ERP software were SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Epicor, and Infor:

The cloud question. Despite the hype, only 14 percent of respondents are using ERP delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS). Although the best cloud vendors can deliver superior security and reliability than most internal IT departments, market momentum to ERP in the cloud is not there yet, as the following diagram illustrates:

Important lessons. Implementing an ERP system is always complex because the deployment drives changes to both data and processes that extend across departmental boundaries inside the organization.

Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.

Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”

1) Do bad customer experiences cause people to switch brands? In a 2011 research project conducted by CX application vendor RightNow, 89% of consumers said that yes, a bad experience has spurred them to switch brands. But in the brand-new study of business-executive perceptions that’s the subject of this column, only 49% of the surveyed executives said yes.  QUESTION: What steps do you need to take to close this dangerous perception gap? 2) While 97% of executives say CX is critical to the success of their company, and 91% say they’re committed to making their company a CX leader, only 20% would rate their own CX initiatives as “advanced,” with a dedicated CX leader in place, initial projects pushed to the optimization phase, and the overall project extended to new channels and groups . QUESTION: What are the obstacles preventing you from aligning your actions with your words? If you say it’s a “budget” issue, aren’t you really talking about strategic priorities rather than line items? 3) Most companies have a clear and direct understanding of the looming CX challenge and the powerful interaction of social media. The study found that the top two drivers for CX initiatives are (a) rising expectations from customers (59%),  and (b) the impact of social media on customers’ ability to broadcast good and bad experiences (37%). Now, even if you’re able to somehow rationalize those findings, here’s one that not even the most-accommodating executive can dismiss:

4) Being a CX laggard can cost those companies many tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue: executives estimated that the lack of positive, consistent, and brand-relevant customer experience can cause them to lose out on a staggering 20% in annual revenue.

Worse yet, all that money’s likely to wind up in the pockets of your competitors!

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office.

For example, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent.

important factor of production, alongside labor and capital.