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To Cathy Nelson, new technology provides a gift of time: an extra five hours each week, to be exact. That’s the time Nelson, director of customer service at Quaker Chemical, used to lose while handling a frustrating jumble of phone calls and e-mails when a customer wanted to return a
The two market leaders, Ariba and Commerce One, are bleeding tens of millions of dollars, yet vowing to be profitable sometime soon. But at least they’re alive, unlike several rivals from the heyday of Internet sourcing and procurement three years ago. Everyone from farmers to airplane makers to steel companies
Times are hard for Commerce One. The company has cut 65% of its staff since October. This month, its chief operating and financial officers both resigned. Commerce One still operates online marketplaces at commerceone.net. But it also has been working to sell its e-procurement software to large corporations to reduce
IBM has done SAP installations at 1,900 companies—more than 10% of SAP’s 17,000 customers. It has an unmatched 160-country reach. But here’s the thing: Choosing an integrator isn’t all logic. Gut feel, serendipity and inertia count, too. Alltrista Consumer Products, a $150 million maker of canning jars, didn’t even think
Making the trains run safely and on time is like mom and apple pie. What’s not to love, especially if you can demonstrate that a company will save money by doing so? The reality is that many benefits—like increased security, reduced risk of accidents and improved asset utilization—are often misunderstood,
Did You Know That: Picking the wrong parties to carry the new-process message leads to poor-quality implementation Brady spent much time reworking business processes with upper and middle management, but in some cases the wrong “subject-matter expert” was chosen to work it through on the front lines. Make sure the
For most people, labels are inconsequential. They merely lurk on furniture, cars or telephone cords. But for Brady Corp., they’re everything. They have qualities normal labels do not. To Brady, they are “high performance” products. Take Brady’s B-478-479 labels, one of the 50,000 items in its catalog. They include an
When Eclipse team members arrived at Brady Corp.’s Worldwide-Varitronics plant in Brooklyn Park, Minn., for the company’s first “go-live” in October, 2000, it was almost like putting an ‘interim government’ in place. The plant produces letter- and label-printing systems, laminating equipment and poster printers, employing about 250 workers. It closed
Katherine Hudson likes to have good, clean fun. But this was no situation comedy. After almost five years on the job, she knew Brady Corporation needed to focus on a complete overhaul of the way it made its “high performance” labels and signs. And she would need the best and
Brady may be basing the ambitious $30 million overhaul of its business processes on SAP software. But the label and sign maker declined to use SAP’s products in two key areas: product design and customer relationship management. The reasons are straightforward. Brady process engineers found the SAP platform lacking in