WBSRocks: Scaling Growth with AI, Enterprise Software, and Digital Transformation

Send us Fan Mail Most companies would rather give a product for free than worry about reverse logistics. Especially when the cost of the supply chain may be higher than the product itself. By the way, reverse logistics is not as simple as printing a shipping label and sending it to your customer. It could include getting a product to your facility and then recycling it or sending it to the vendor...

Send us Fan Mail The debate about whether a platform should be more business vs. developer-friendly is classic. Even the platforms that might claim to be friendly for business users might struggle with aesthetically pleasing interfaces. But Episerver takes a very different approach with their rich CMS that is already integrated with several ERP platforms popular in the industrial space. The B2B sp...

Send us Fan Mail Most people might think of the distribution business as buy-and-sell. But distribution really gets really complex in the industrial space. You have challenges such as price and rebate management, buying groups, rush orders, and millions of SKUs. Unlike manufacturing, you might have very different planning for your warehouses, including push and pull-based replenishment. The bin st...

Send us Fan Mail Whether to go for iterative deployment or the big bang is always subject to debate. But one factor that is often missed is the number of issues you might get on the day of deployment. As well as, the number of resources that you may require to avoid and control the impact of business disruptions. Most consulting companies would often advise against massive rollouts. The smaller th...

Send us Fan Mail What comes to mind when you think of RMA? Well, for me, I always feel that I have a fundamental right to return any product as I so please. However, if you think about the people and businesses that have to enable processes such as store credit, refund, sending the shipping labels, and getting the merchandise repaired,  you might no longer feel like returning a product. Each of th...

Send us Fan Mail When people think of SAP Hybris, they are definitely not thinking of the modern stack such as React, headless, or PWA. But SAP Commerce has come a long way in its capabilities and stack. While it might not be as headless as some of the newer breeds of the tools, not many tools can match the enterprise-grade infrastructure capabilities of SAP Commerce Cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud has...

Send us Fan Mail Sage 300, also known as Accpac, is the household name for many companies when they think of an ERP system. It has always been a powerful accounting package, especially for SMBs. It has also been very strong with construction, real estate, and field service verticals. Especially very deep functionality for unions, cost codes, retainage, submittals, and commitments. While most peopl...

Send us Fan Mail It’s very hard to pinpoint the real cause of ERP implementation failures due to the number of moving pieces involved. Some people would always blame the software vendors while others would blame the system integrators. In reality, these factors might not contribute to the ERP implementation failure as you would think. But one factor that has a much higher chance of firing back is...

Send us Fan Mail Committed inventory and allocation are perhaps the most complex processes to master in the ERP world. But they are critical after a certain point in your growth. If you don't have committed inventory processes figured out, you might not be able to reserve for key customers. Every department may create ad-hoc arrangements to preserve its inventory. And that might result in inv...

Send us Fan Mail The whole idea of eCommerce and the web have always been making IT and programming easy for marketers. So easy that they don't need to learn coding to run eCommerce operations. But the world of headless seems to be taking the opposite approach. So is every vendor treating headless as the same? Not really. Also, should the headless experience always be based on React? Probably...

Send us Fan Mail Before Microsoft started migrating all of their customers to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and F&O, they had a similar strategy as Epicor or Infor, with several products in their portfolio targeted to specific industry verticals. In fact, they still sell products such as Microsoft SL. While they have announced the end of life for the SL product, some community members fe...

Send us Fan Mail Most people underestimate the differences in taxes and localization and their implications on the ERP processes. Some countries may have requirements such as reporting on pollution or privacy standards. But countries such as Mexico have completely transformed their taxation system to prevent corruption and bribery in the market. This transformation, however, creates unique challen...

Send us Fan Mail Shop floor scheduling is always the hottest debate in the ERP community. In fact, it is so complex that most SMB companies end up managing their scheduling on spreadsheets. Also, the problems are much worse when multiple systems might be involved in the architecture. They each might claim how inadequate the other system is. With no clear consensus on what works when it comes to sc...

Send us Fan Mail When it comes to enterprise platforms, it's hard to meet the expectations from all fronts: performance, customization, developer experience, and functionality. Most platforms can perhaps check a couple of these boxes. Salesforce Commerce Cloud might be able to check a lot of them. That's probably the reason it's the leading platform for enterprises. It has deep indu...

Send us Fan Mail Epicor Eclipse has a more loyal community than crypto and Metaverse. But why is that? Based on the amount of technological innovation happening, you would guess that any school grad might be able to write ERP software. Right? So then why do technologies such as Mainframe, AS400, and Epicor Eclipse still exist? Is it really because change is hard. But change is hard for whom? For c...

Send us Fan Mail Automating a process is easy. But understanding which process is the right candidate for automation is more difficult than most people think. Also, not every process is the right candidate to be hosted inside an ERP. By the same token, not every process can be as ad-hoc as RPA. There is one category that is in between the enterprise-wide cemented processes of ERP and ad-hoc proces...

Send us Fan Mail The bill of materials becomes complex when you might have multiple layers of costing and sub-assemblies. But you need to be at a different level when you might have co-products and by-products involved as part of your manufacturing process. The co-products can help you optimize your production process and allocate costs appropriately. The by-products can help you measure the yield...

Send us Fan Mail Most people might not even pay attention to the location in the digital world. We can hire workers from any country remotely. We can trade with most countries easily. But when it comes to eCommerce and ERP systems, location is still a huge factor. The solution from North America may not work well in Europe. The solution from Latin America might not work well in North America. Ther...

Send us Fan Mail Most businesses take a reactive approach to their banking needs. They are likely to default to the bank that has the lowest fee. Also, they might have several exposure points for attackers to get access to your accounts. But does the lowest fee always mean the best strategy for your business? What if someone gets unauthorized access to your account and drains all the funds? Well,...

Send us Fan Mail Just like ERP, the Bill of Materials is perhaps the overused and oversold term. A BOM could be the assembly of two materials like wrapping a gift for your birthday. Or it could be the manufacturing process of the whole spaceship. But what if the process of manufacturing a spaceship resulted in waste material that could turn into a nice lamp. Would this whole process be captured as...

Send us Fan Mail eCommerce is easy when you are managing a couple of stores and selling in 6-figures. But it becomes increasingly difficult when you have to manage millions and billions of transactions. While also managing the transactional depth of a complex business with thousands of channel partners. When you grow at that level, you will need different search engines for different areas of your...

Send us Fan Mail Infor M3 is a unique product that can meet specific requirements of certain industries. But do these specific requirements really matter? Can't you just customize a vanilla ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central or SAP S/4 HANA? Well, it gets really tricky for certain industries such as Fashion and Apparel, Food and Beverage, and equipment rental. It'...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies feel that the insurance companies would be able to cover most financial risks for them. But without understanding your risk profile, it’s hard to predict if they will be covered. Understanding and identification of risks require a thorough analysis of your processes and supply chain and evaluating them on an ongoing basis. You might also need to monitor macroeconomi...

Send us Fan Mail Consolidated invoicing and billing are typically the outliers and don't get as much attention until they become painful issues in the organization. So what are the different variables that drive the consolidated processes? How many different types of consolidated invoicing processes exist? Does it vary by industry? Does it vary by product type? Are consolidated invoicing rele...

Send us Fan Mail commercetools is the hottest darling of the eCommerce space. This is especially true for the people who are big on microservices architecture and are part of the MACH alliance. But headless architecture is a lot of work for brands and requires tons of capital. The only reason why companies such as Shopify and BigCommerce are so successful is that they made it turnkey for entrepren...