Social Networking has become the mainstay of the internet now.  Facebook, Twitter, and the like are all drawing people in and essentially training the next generation of computer users.  These social media sites are like magnets that people have to go to each and every day to keep up with their friends and share their updates.  People are accessing these media sources from all types of devices.  It is all absorbing.

One of the biggest problems in most business applications is user adoption.  Getting the users to use the system is a key challenge in many applications.  So how does the business applications market combine the social media attraction to a financial or manufacturing system?  Combining a social media approach to a business management system would seem to be a logical conclusion.  But there are obstacles.   You have two different elements playing here.  The cold hard facts of transactional data and the emotional connectedness of the social media.  How can these gel together?

Salesforce.com has begun a trend in combining social media with a business application through their Chatter application.  Essentially, Chatter is a Twitter for Salesforce.com.  It is an embedded part of Salesforce.com.  Users can post status updates and see all of the updates from their chosen connections (friends).  But the power of this application is that you can follow business objects within Salesforce.com such as Accounts, Opportunities, Contracts, etc.  So anytime an update occurs on these objects, you get a status update, not from a friend, but rather from an application.

So how would this likely work in an ERP solution?  First you could enhance any alerts to post to a status page.  Next you could potentially use it to notify you on any changes to any master record, such as customer, supplier, inventory, or BOMs.   The next thing you might consider is to have criteria based alerts be in the form of status updates.  Post an update when a customer exceeds their credit limit, or post an alert when a critical inventory part is below its optimal stocking level.

The next logical extension of this would be to extend the ERP to the social web.  Imagine getting private posts on Facebook when your major customer falls past due or when your shipment that absolutely must go out notifies you that it shipped on time.

The problem with this whole concept is the ability for traditional client server based ERP solutions to move in this direction.  Some of the new systems (or recently re-written) solutions may be able to implement this type of functionality quickly, but some of the older technology solutions may have difficulty bringing a social media function quickly to bear.

As this is a topic with no clear solution yet, what do you our readers think?  Where is this going?  When will we see it?  Please post your comments and thoughts.  Thank you.

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Social ERP? is a post from: ERP and More!

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Infor, one of the major players in ERP software, announced today that it has teamed with Micosoft to utilize their Azure platform for SAAS based computing and is offering several cloud based solutions on the Azure Platform.   This is a significant move on their part and shows how larger ERP Vendors are moving to cloud computing.

Leading their ERP charge is Syteline, a powerful ERP solution for manufacturers.  Taking this to a cloud solution will allow companies without the base infrastructure to utilize this software without the headaches of maintaining application and database servers.

Cloud based ERP should also shorten the implementation timelines of implementations. Using a cloud platform, you have taken the infrastructure questions out of the equation and are now strictly focused on processes and configuration.

You can read the press release here: Infor Launches Infor24 Cloud Initiative and Selects Microsoft Windows Azure as Preferred Cloud Platform.

What do you think of larger ERP solutions moving to the cloud?

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Infor Launches Infor24 Cloud Initiative and Selects Microsoft Windows Azure as Preferred Cloud Platform is a post from: ERP and More!

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It was announced today that Consona will be buying open source company Compiere. That is too bad as Compiere had one of the better open source offerings around ERP. The press release is here. It is...

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Watching a recent Salesforce.com partner presentation, we got to see firsthand where the technology world is going. The age of Cloud 2.0 is here. We are moving from fixed environments to web-based,...

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There is a new survey out that shows that IT Managers are not sold on the benefits of cloud computing. The primary reason is that these IT Managers view cloud computing as risky. The article portrays...

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I have a client who has about 60 employees, running two different business units. They are using Salesforce.com to manage their clients, partners, vendors, constituants, and others.

They are now looking at adding issue management through Salesforce.com’s Case functionality and using the force.com platform to develop a timesheet and expense tracking system.

All of this is done “in the cloud”. What is Cloud Computing? This video will help explain it.

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