WBSRocks: Business Growth with Enterprise Software and Digital Transformation

Send us a textGarbage in garbage out is perhaps the most overused phrase of all during the ERP conversations. Everyone uses it, but very few understand the consequences and implications of this phrase. Also, your data, whether structured poorly or diligently, forms the foundation of your business model. But why? Because many data sets are relevant in the ERP conversations, such as master, configuration, transactional, and historical, they each have their implications on the selection and implementation of ERP. Suppose you implement or select an ERP without going through the phase of data cleansing or aligning your data with the future business model. In that case, you might end up choosing an incorrect ERP, as your poorly structured data may be influencing the decision for your ERP. The data cleansing could mean aligning your BOMs with your production process or your customer structure with how you transact with them. But how to follow the structured data cleaning approach to select the suitable ERP and avoid implementation disaster?In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss data cleansing prior to ERP implementation. We covered many grounds, including the difference between what garbage truly is during the implementation and why ERP historical data is hard to migrate compared to CRM. Finally, we discussed the business model implications of bad data and how the master data needs to be planned in different contexts in the multi-system scenario.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textPricing and discounting are two strategies to incentivize buyers to make a purchase decision. But there is always confusion where each would be appropriate. Also, pricing is often a sensitive area where most companies would rather undercharge in fear of losing market share or customers. Companies could use pricing strategies such as cost-plus, competition-based, value-based, price skimming, loss-leader, penetration, dynamic, bundle, premium, and anchor. But they rarely understand the true potential and their applications. There are a lot of factors to consider when developing an ecommerce pricing strategy. Competition, ever-changing customer expectations, material costs, and shipping all play a role in pricing your products. To stay relevant, brands need to continue to reevaluate their pricing strategy. But what are the best practices of pricing?In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss pricing strategies in the e-commerce world. We covered many grounds in this episode, including the difference between pricing and discounting strategies. Finally, we also discussed the nuances of various pricing types loss-leader, cost-plus, and competitor-based along with their pros and cons.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textThe divide between IT and OT has always been challenging for business executives. But this divide has always existed and still exists among other groups too. For example, sales and marketing teams don't like to deal with IT as they are perceived to slow down things. The supply chain doesn't like them either as they would rather manage their systems independently than dealing with IT. While other groups have realized the importance of IT and created true partnerships, OT teams have yet to figure out how to eat at the same dinner table with IT. In today's episode, our guests, Tom Harrop from Splunk, share his insights into the core reasons for the organizational divide between IT and OT. He also describes why OT cannot catch up with other departments such as sales, marketing, HR, and Supply Chain with IT and what companies can do to remove silos. Finally, he describes the ideal industry 4.0 architecture for companies to converge their IT and OT functions.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textDue to the proliferation of IoT devices in manufacturing environments, the number of access points prone to attack has increased significantly. And while the OT environments don't have as thicker the code base as the IT environment, OT environments are less secure than IT. The lack of education in how to write production-ready software and a greater push for efficiency have been the reasons why OT devices are more prone to attack with higher safety consequences. In today's episode, our guests, Corey White and David Cundiff from Cyvatar share their insights into how the tradeoffs for greater efficiencies and OEE may be driving cybersecurity issues in the OT environments. They also take a deep dive into a car manufacturer's story where they ended up losing millions of dollars due to a ransomware attack within 8 hrs of attack. Finally, they describe the mechanics of ransomware, how the codebase in OT and IT differ, and why OT devices are harder to secure and more prone to attacks than IT due to the lack of standardization and skillsets of OT operators.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textScheduling has always been challenging for manufacturing industries, especially for industries such as Automotive, where stopping the assembly line even for a couple of hours could mean the loss of millions of dollars for a company. Some industries also have challenges where the skill matrix could play a huge role in your scheduling as the skills may not be transferrable. If you don't have a sense of how many associates from each skill would show up on the shop floor and if there might be any hot order dropping on unexpectedly, there will always be disruptions on the shop floor. But what can companies do to manage these disruptions?In today's episode, our guest, Sneha Kumari, shares her insights into how SLAs and resource mix impact shop floor scheduling. She also shares concepts such as the importance of real-time data on the shop floor and how that can help improve the shop floor function. Finally, she discusses concepts such as the tradeoffs between pseudo resources and reduced admin efforts because of it and how change management could play a huge role in whether your team will adapt your initiatives or not.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textEpicor is the household name for mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies. Just like Infor, it offers last-mile functionality for manufacturing and distribution companies that may not be available through other enterprise players such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. While Epicor may not be as global a solution as some of their larger competitors, they offer more value to the SMB manufacturers and distributors. Epicor also has a similar strategy as Infor and Aptean to focus on specific industry verticals in the manufacturing and distribution space and have acquired many last-mile products in the last few years. Due to multiple products in its portfolio in the on-prem world, they have had similar challenges competing with other cloud-native vendors. While they have attempted to consolidate their portfolio and give their cloud strategy a new name Kinetic, just like Infor branding its products under CloudSuite, they are still actively selling and developing most of their legacy products.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry experts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to discuss major stories in the ERP and digital transformation space and an objective and independent review of Epicor's capabilities. We covered several grounds, including the overview of different product offerings from Epicor and their positioning in the market. Finally, we discussed their cloud-native strategy, their market share in each micro-verticals, and the migration path for their legacy customers.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textThe supply chain structure defined in the ERP software must mirror the actual supply chain. But it very rarely does. This issue is even more critical when the organizations may have multiple sites to distribute or manufacture goods. The supply chain professionals often need to plan on spreadsheets to make up for the underlying problems in the ERP configurations and data. While there are many definitions of a multi-site implementation, the sites in most implementations maintain their customer, vendor, and item master independently due to the lack of understanding and limitations of the underlying software. This limits organizations in capitalizing on the corporate discounts available globally, exploiting capacity optimization opportunities across the sites, and supply chain planning to minimize the number of hops. Multi-site planning requires you to analyze your item master, BOMs, customer, and vendor at a much deeper level to see how each site will interact with each other and who will be responsible for what.In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss data-sharing across multiple entities. We covered many grounds, including the difference between planning for multi-site vs. single-site. Finally, the issues around optimizing multi-site structures and the framework to implement the multi-entity architecture.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textPlanning for sales in the traditional world was easy. If you had a retail location, you would plan the right location, inventory, study the neighborhood, and provide the customer service and pricing aligned with the neighborhood's needs. If you were selling through big-box retailers or distributors, you had to hire salespeople qualified to sell to distributors, design their territories, and perhaps send them to golf courses. In the world of e-commerce, planning for sales requires much deeper planning. But what are the best practices for these strategies, and how to plan in a structured manner?In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss sales strategies in the e-commerce world. We covered many grounds in this episode, including the comparison between traditional and e-commerce sales organizations. Finally, we also discussed the framework for ensuring sales results and the strategic and tactical steps that a sales leader can take to ensure results.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textIdentifying the appropriate production method requires you to have a deep understanding of your finished products and raw materials consumed. An incorrect production method and its KPIs may have implications on the production capacity. Also, if there is a mismatch in your demand and supply, you might need to understand if there might be a way to increase the capacity. If you are lucky, you might be able to duplicate the existing line and increase it. But if you have to install a new line from scratch, there might be a lot more moving pieces and surprises than you would expect.In today's episode, our guest, Vlad Romanov, shares his insights into how the two schools of production, discrete and continuous, differ, including their KPIs. He also shares his insights into optimizing the production lines by analyzing the types of products produced and the types of raw materials consumed. Finally, he discusses how to increase capacity by analyzing the business case of installing a new production line vs. upgrading the existing one.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Send us a textTraditionally most systems used on the shop floor were disconnected. Even if you had multiple systems such as ERP and MES, they didn't have real-time connectivity with the machines. And to get data from these systems, manufacturers created data lakes and powered dashboards using the insights gathered from these lakes. While these dashboards provide visibility into operations to some degree, they were deficient in providing the controls that connected systems would offer. With the help of MQTT and a unified namespace, now you can connect all your disparate systems on the shop floor using a gateway or a broker.In today's episode, our guest, David Schultz, shares his insights into how manufacturers can increase the capacity from their existing investments by connecting them in real-time. He also discusses how traditional methods of creating data lakes fall short as they would not allow real-time decision-making and capacity optimization. Finally, he discusses several KPIs that operations managers need to know to optimize the capacity at the plant level.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.