IQMS Blog for Manufacturing ERP Expertise

Problems are often masked with symptoms that lead us away from the root cause. I recently had an experience I would like to share with you that sheds some light on this concept and it involved one of our RealTime Production Monitoring devices and its connection to the Local Area Network (LAN).

Growing up can be very disillusioning. As a child, we can be sheltered from so many of life's challenges and issues. Life was one big adventure after another with amazing discoveries waiting around each corner and nothing more than a thought needed to make fiction a reality.

With all of the regulations put upon the different manufacturing industries, one important consideration when selecting manufacturing ERP software is user traceability. Regulators not only want to know that there is traceability on the manufacturing of the product, but they also are enforcing accountability. There are several requirements to keep in mind regarding your ERP system's user traceability functionality and here are just a few of them:

Cloud computing. The concept has been around for a long time. Part of the reason the Internet was created was to make resources in the scientific and academic community more accessible when not economically feasible to replicate. This sharing of computing horsepower many years ago is not much different from the concepts that are floating around now. We have huge data centers storing large amounts of data, centralized eCommerce sites designed to stamp out storefronts by the thousands for businesses of all sizes, and processing centers designed to offload application processing into machines designed to handle the workload. 

The Internet has become the major driving force behind all growing businesses in the world today. It is very obvious that the method of proliferating information used in the 1990s cannot compete on the same global level as effectively and efficiently as Internet based media does today. As such, corporations of all sizes increasingly rely on Internet based services to handle their day to day business needs. Some companies have become completely virtual storefronts, only existing on the Internet, and the manner in which data is collected, processed and stored becomes increasingly critical to business continuity and effectiveness of the global supply chain. We recently discussed the importance of having some form of disaster recovery plan in place in the event of a failure within critical data systems. That is only half of the equation. With the number of users on the Internet increasing by the minute, the number of threats to companies from outside sources likewise increases. How well is your company prepared for ... the Attack of the CyberVirusMutantTrojanBotWorm?

Lately, there has been a lot of hype regarding operating your business in the cloud. But is cloud computing the way of the future or simply a trend, like Beanie Babies or Air Jordans? Before hopping on the cloud bandwagon, there are two serious concerns to consider:

Man-made and natural disasters are constantly occurring around us. Some we can control quite easily while others literally shake the foundations of our earth. As economies around the world continually become more tightly knit together with supply chains being forged, these events challenge the stability of businesses and ultimately individual lives. Without a good disaster preparedness and recovery plan, critical businesses can become the weak link in the chain and have far reaching effects.

(Article submitted by guest author Jason Slater)

This question has come up more times than I can count in the past year and every time it does I cringe because I don’t like saying, “I don’t know”.  My response is usually followed by the question: Can’t you just measure the capacity of the network versus the number of users multiplied by the average requirement of the application?  The answer is no, because I don’t know what your users’ “average application usage” is.

ERP systems are the life blood of a company as they touch and affect the daily lives of so many of your employees and business processes. Why then do so many companies today make their ERP system software choice based on the type of database or the technology platform?  Putting this criteria before their business requirements is, to me, like the tail wagging the dog.