Welcome to ERP and More!

At one point or another, everyone wants to know how they compare to others in the Job Market. If you are working in the ERP industry, just how do you stack up against others in the ERP market? How does ERP stack up against other information technology jobs.

The key to remember with understanding salary comparisons is that the longer and more difficult it is to gain experience in a particular niche, the more likely the pay will be higher. For example, if you can take a few months and earn a networking certification you will make more than those without. But a job such as Enterprise Resource Planning take years of experience in all facets of a business environment to master will pay more. Similarly a person who hold technical skills will make one salary level, but the person in the same job with both the technical and the business skills combined have a higher earning potential.

There are several websites that deal with these concepts. We have listed a few here:

IT Salary Report: How Do You Stack Up?

The median expected salary for a typical erp project Manager in the United States

ERP Jobs, Average Salary for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Skills - United Kingdom

Local IT Job Market Reports - Dice.com

If you have other sources of information on this, please feel free to post them as a comment below.

AMR Research Bullish on ERP Software Market

Published: July 23, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Worldwide ERP software sales grew by 14 percent in 2006 to $28.8 billion, according to a recent report from IT analyst firm AMR Research. While 2006 was “spectacular,” according to AMR, the good times should continue to roll for the next five years, with an average annual growth rate of 11 percent, a percentage point more than the group predicted nine months ago.

At least once a year, and sometimes more, AMR publishes a report analyzing the past, the present, and the future of the market for ERP and related software, and ranking the top enterprise software vendors by revenues. Because ERP and related products are at the core of most organizations’ IT investments, the relative health of the ERP market can function as a barometer for the overall business IT market.

Read the entire Article Here…

ERP Manufacturing Software is a specific category of ERP Software and one that can be confusing. There a multitude of ERP Manufacturing Software vendors in the market, but which one is the best one for you? The simple answer is that there may be several. There are at least four key factors that need to be examined when selecting ERP manufacturing software.

The first is the industry you are working in. Are you a process manufacturer, such as paint or chemicals? Or, are you a discrete manufacturer making specific parts? More specifically, do you make repetitive parts, or are the parts make to order? Are you a job shop environment, estimating and making parts to order? Or are you a project based manufacturer, that similar to a job shop estimates and makes parts to order, but because of a complex process or a lengthy time for manufacturing makes parts as part of an overall project? There are specific software types for each of these manufacturing industries. The key to honing in on the specific manufacturing ERP solution is to know your industry type and then examine software that serves that industry.

Which leads us to the second point, the ERP manufacturing software’s legacy. Where did this software evolve from? What industry did it originally serve and what industries were added. A software that was built around a particular industry usually has that industries best practices built into the software functionality. When the software expands to other industries, it doesn’t always fit the best practices of that secondary industry as well. And many softwares become “jack of all trades, but master of none.” Look into where the ERP software evolved from.

Once you understand the legacy of the ERP manufacturing software, you need to look at its process functionality. This means that you should have some specific case examples of your process and have the vendor demonstrate that there ERP software can handle your process flow. You do not need to do some extensive flowcharting and spend months on the design. Simply understand the flow of orders in your plant and have the system replicate that flow for you, using your data. The vendor should be able to show you this in a “scripted demonstration”. Have them prove to you that it can handle the task at hand.

Lastly, make sure that your ERP manufacturing software vendor has a good fit to your requirements. There are a lot of requirements that a manufacturing software must address, but drill down on the specific requirements that make your organization unique. Is it the way that you account for your inventory? Is it the uniqueness of the bill-of-material structures? Is it a certain process that you employee to produce parts? Give the vendor a listing of your key requirements and using the process demonstration approach have them show you that they can handle these requirements.

There are a lot of factors that you need to consider when selecting an ERP Manufacturing software system. Keep in mind that every software is unique in its approach. They say that they conform to APICS standards, but exactly how they get there is often different. Ensure that you apply enough planning and due diligence to your selection process to extract the deep and sometimes difficult answers to your questions from the ERP vendors. Most of all, keep in mind that there is a lot of smoke and mirrors around the demonstration of ERP software and you need to watch the details for the truth.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is key to integrating all areas of a business. It controls the financials, the inventory, the purchasing and the ordering. There are a lot of ERP software vendors. The market though has consolidated in the past few years since the Y2K upgrade fever and the downturn of the software market.

Now ERP is undergoing a resurgence and many companies are looking to either purchase new systems to replace a collection of disintegrated systems or to upgrade an older ERP system that just doesn’t cut it anymore. With the market consolidation, there have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions of software companies. These acquisitions often result in the name of the company being revised and the software being renamed to something “more modern” or catchier to the ear.

One such software is Infor’s Syteline. At one point it was Symix Software’s Syteline. Then it became Frontstep. Then it was acquired by Mapics. Then Mapics was purchased by Infor. Thus Syteline the product has had a lot of masters. The core functionailty has remained relatively unchanged through the transitions. It has gone through some serious upgrades though along the path, including a switch to the .NET programming platform.

Baan is another software solution that has been through the wringers. But where Syteline continued to upgrade, Baan laid dormant for a couple of years. Baan had some financial difficulties and then it was purchased by a British company Invensys. Invensys held on to it for a while and then Baan the software was ultimately purchased by Infor. Under the hood, it is still relatively the same code base, although a lot of new functionality has been added.

On other fronts, older legacy software is becoming upgraded. Take JD Edwards World Software. It has a lot of clients who were running on the old green screen software for a long time with minimal upgrades. A few patches. Then in the past few months, Oracle, the new parent to JD Edwards finally released a comprehensive upgrade.

A key point to understand is that while many systems seem to be modern, you need to look at the history behind the software, especially if you are about to purchase a new ERP system. Key answers to find out are the history of the package, the customer base of the software, and the industries it typically serves. Often people will buy software and find out it was meant for a different market. Find out too if the software has remained on a consistent upgrade path. Some software systems have been completely rewritten in modern languages while other systems have had a window dressing interface applied, while the underlying engine is still antique code. Dig deep and hopefully you will be sure that you are not buying the proverbial pig with lipstick.

What On Earth Is ERP? - ERP Demystified
Sandra Stammberger

You might ask what is ERP? ERP is an industry term used by a variety of companies. It functions for a broad set of operations that supports multi use modules of application software.

This helps companies and manufacturers manage product parts for purchasing, maintaining inventories, customer service, tracking orders and interacting with suppliers.

ERP replaces standard computer systems with its simple categorized software program. The ERP software links together the business modules so that the finance department can look into the order forms of the warehouses software and determine or see where has the shipment been shipped too.

The ERP software is a very flexible component meaning you can make due with just installing a few modules for that day and do the rest another time.

So what exactly can ERP do you might ask?

� One of the advantages of ERP is the systems automating the different steps needed when taking a customers order.

� Another benefit of the ERP system is when a representative of the customer care service enters the customers order and can see all the necessary information to complete the order or to see if there are any problems with the order it self.

� The ERP system will show him or her, the customers order history, credit rating, inventory levels, and even the trucks docking information from the logistics module.

� The ERP can be applied to other business processes such as employee benefits and financial reports. It can also via route the order forms of any customers shipment to any department for updates.

� To track any shipment all you have to do is log in to the ERP system and it will give you a detailed description of where the shipment has been, what department and if any changes have been made.

With its vast descriptive database the ERP system can give customers their orders faster with fewer errors. ERP applications are used majority of the time by large management inventory companies who need ERP solutions for organization.

One of the great things about the ERP system is it was designed to manage all or majority of manufacturing and distribution enterprises. One of the reasons for ERP systems is that I can provide consistent user interface with other modules.

The ERP integrates all facets of business which leads to better results for companies who large quantities of shipments, buyers and customer care services. It is a system that goes beyond traditional application modes. It has advanced management methods and advanced information technology.

Even though there are departments who have their own systems with the help of ERP it can combine all software and programs creating a single integrated program that can run off one database and have various departments easily share and communicate more efficiently with each other

Sandra Stammberger owns and operates http://www.erpjob.net Erp Jobs