News & views - Page 3 of 14

It’s 2018 so why isn’t my ERP vendor multi-tenant?

August 8, 2018 | 0 Comments | 180systems

August 7, 2018 from diginomica – “We may be at a point in the software space where application vendors that haven’t produced a multi-tenant suite may never do it. It matters and here’s why…” Click here to read the article. 180 View – Multi-tenant architecture allows one instance of a software system to serve multiple customers. The vendor is responsible for patching and updating the inevitable changes to a system. The article makes a persuasive case why multi-tenant matters but, in our opinion, it is just another criteria to make a decision. […]

National Forum On Technology Solutions

February 21, 2018 | 0 Comments | 180systems

180 Systems and CPA Canada developed a new conference that was targeted to senior leaders responsible for technology investment decisions. The conference focused on enterprise software (ERP, BI and CPM) and included customers speaking about their journey through selection and implementation by industry (manufacturing and distribution, not-for-profit and financial services). It also included solutions for today’s industry challenges and emerging technologies such as AI, Blockchain, and IOT. The conference took place on May 28-29, 2018 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and we will do it again next year. Click here for more information about this conference […]

Is Your Implementation On Track?

February 1, 2018 | 0 Comments | 180systems

February 2018 from CPA Magazine and written by Michael Burns – “Senior executives of any organization that is going through a major system implementation worry whether the implementation project will cause huge problems when it goes live or whether the costs and time estimates are accurate. The project manager might be telling them all is well but project managers have been wrong on occasion. How do you look under the covers of a project to see what is really happening?”… Read more […]

What come first – an ERP system (the chicken) or lean management (the egg)?

November 16, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

Lean management is all about eliminating any waste by identifying each step in a business process and then revising or cutting out non-value added steps. The question is whether this should be done prior to selecting an ERP system. Proponents of doing it first assume that the implementation of an ERP system would be merely improving the automation of the existing process and better to eliminate the waste first. However, this approach (sometimes called repaving the cow paths and extending the chicken and egg analogy) is not best practice. The implementation of an ERP system is the best opportunity to […]

2017 ERP Survey

September 28, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

September 2017 from CPA Magazine – “Welcome once again to our annual vendor survey on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Every year we have a different theme for the article that accompanies our ERP survey results. This year we decided to look at the fine print in ERP contracts and the good, the bad and the ugly about requests for proposals (RFP) used in software selection….” Read More […]

What’s happening at 180 Systems?

July 26, 2017 | 3 Comments | 180systems

Michael Burns was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment last year. The good news is that it all worked and Michael is healthy again, so much so that he recently rode a bicycle from Toronto to Niagara Falls in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Lawrence Young, B.Comp.Sc., C.Adm, CMC, I.S.P. joined 180 Systems last year. He brings over 15 years of ERP system selection experience to our team and is based in Montreal. Jeff Zygouras, MMPA, CPA, CA recently joined 180 Systems. Jeff was a TA (Teaching Assistance) at UofT for Michael Burns for many years for a graduate course […]

Are newsletters a waste of time?

July 26, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

Many of us get so much email that we don’t have time to read newsletters even from trusted sources. So why write a newsletter if it’s deleted by many if not most readers as soon as it is received? Over the past year, we have opted not to potentially waste our time. But we have now decided to resurrect our newsletter partly because we don’t want you to forget about us but also because it’s good for Search Engine Optimization. Another reason is that the primary writer of our newsletter is healthy again… […]

How Do You Compare A SaaS Annual Fee To A One-Time License Fee?-180Systems

March 29, 2017 | 2 Comments | 180systems

We have found that on average the one-time (on-premise) license fee is 3 times the annual fee based on our experience in evaluating RFP responses from vendors. One might think that the ratio between license and annual fee should be greater but that does not take into account the additional hosted services provided by the SaaS vendors including maintenance fees which are billed annually by on-premise vendors at approximately 20% of the license fee. It’s still early days for SaaS and as competition heats up the license ratio: annual fee will increase as SaaS fees are reduced. We recommend that […]

180 System ERP Customer Survey

January 11, 2017 | 0 Comments | 180systems

From CPA Magazine and written by Michael Burns – “We have all heard horror stories about failed ERP implementations but we rarely hear about the ones that went well. Does ERP deserve the bad rap it gets?…” Read More […]

Cloud security: fact or fiction?

June 8, 2016 | 0 Comments | 180systems

June 1, 2016 from CPA Magazine – “As our cloud survey article showed, data is moving to the clouds at high speeds across all kinds of organizations. But is the data safer than it was when these organizations kept it locked away on their own premises…” Read More […]