Enterprise
Resource
Planning
Solutions from IBM Global
Business Services
ERP
IBM Global Business Services
Do people across your organisation have easy access to the up-to-date information they need to address business priorities? Can you plan and forecast with accuracy to keep your costs under control? How well do you understand your customers’ requirements? Can you anticipate how their needs might be changing? And are you able to reach out beyond your own organisation to provide partners and customers with self-service access to appropriate information and systems?
Outstanding customer service, a productive workforce supported by efficient, cost-effective processes, and the ability to respond quickly and effectively to change are three of the fundamental building blocks for most successful organisations. While their importance is clear, achieving and maintaining all three in today’s volatile environments can be challenging.
All too often, companies find themselves hampered by existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that are focused on ‘one-size-fits-all’ applications. The business processes that come as standard are hard to adopt across the enterprise because they don’t allow people to work the way their jobs and customers require. As companies strive to keep ahead of the competition by developing new service, sales or distribution channels, many ERP solutions lack the capabilities and flexibility needed to establish the necessary connections.
Breaking through the bottlenecks
Collaboration and connection, throughout the extended enterprise and with customers, can give your people information and tools that help them improve communications, increase their personal impact and work more securely across organisational boundaries. Combined with broadly integrated analytics to deepen understanding and insight, collaboration and connection can result in enriched customer experience, more effectively managed costs and improved products and services.
Increasingly, information that was previously created
management platform, enabling your entire organisation to be connected – not just customers, suppliers and IT systems but also parts, products and other smart objects used to monitor events as they happen. Imagine how collaboration and connection on this scale would improve your efficiency, responsiveness and decision-making.
IBM offers ERP solutions that can help to promote growth and profitability through such a future-ready platform.
Appropriate tools, information and standardised business processes can be extended from the core of your business to help you reach out, not only to all parts of your own organisation but also, through the Web, to your partners and customers, delivering the services they require.
Through a long-term partnership with Microsoft®, IBM provides affordable, mid-market ERP solutions that deliver the flexibility plus the breadth and depth of functionality required to meet a wide range of specific needs across industry sectors. High levels of connectivity mean there is no need to replace all your systems and processes – capable of supporting the functions of an entire business, ERP solutions from Microsoft can also be used to replace specific parts of your business landscape, providing a scalable foundation ready for future expansion when the time is right.
Microsoft Dynamics® AX
IBM is committed to combining its experience with the very best business applications. There are hundreds of ERP applications on the market and IBM doesn’t offer them all – we evaluate the top products and ensure that we can deliver them to our clients efficiently and cost-effectively.
One of these products is Microsoft Dynamics AX. The emerging ERP product leader, this impressive application is easy to use, enabling both highly skilled and casual users to take full advantage of its powerful functionality, unlocking its potential to transform large and small companies.
IBM’s relationship with Microsoft and our deep understanding of the Microsoft Dynamics AX product represent a perfect blend of the experience and skills of the IBM Global Business Services team with the depth
and user-friendliness of the Microsoft Dynamics product.
• Production
• Distribution
• B2B channels
• B2C channels
• Mobile/Field sales solutions
• Supply Chain Management and efficiency solutions
• Service management
• Projects and project finance
• Financial management
• Customer Relationship Management
• Human Resource and Payroll management
• Expense management
• Compliance
• Business analysis
• Integrated workflow
• Enterprise portals
• Out of the box business intelligence
• Web services and .Net interoperability
• Business document exchange and integration framework.
Microsoft Dynamics AX supports your entire business:
Improving customer experience
In modern, volatile markets, customer-focused managers need to address increasing customer churn and lost sales opportunities. Without easy access to customer information and the tools to collaborate across teams, customer service representatives can struggle to deliver responsive, effective service. Furthermore, customers no longer expect service to be restricted to normal business hours; they want to browse catalogues, check progress, make and then track their orders online at a time that suits them best.
Microsoft Dynamics AX not only helps draw together information from across your organisation to deliver a single view of each of your customers, it also offers integrated, easy-to-use collaboration tools and, through the use of secure enterprise portals and Web services, provides customers with self-service access to product, sales and account information. By helping staff provide more responsive service, integrated solutions can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. They can also help reduce costs through more efficient scheduling and dispatching, improved contact centre productivity, reduced issue resolution time and service delivery through the Web and mobile services.
Customer experience highlights:
• Customer information, case management, service
history and support knowledge delivered to the
desktops of customer service staff
• Collaboration and realtime communication tools
• Secure, online self-service access to information
for customers.
Providing deeper market intelligence
For many sales executives, the top priorities are overcoming lost revenue and addressing the rising cost of sales. Too often a lack of timely sales and customer information clouds decisions about where to invest
resources. With inadequate access to customer information and a lack of tools to collaborate across distances, it is
An integrated, easy-to-use customer relationship management and collaboration solution can help sales staff improve their success rates and marketing teams drive new business opportunities. Marketing teams have a single system to simplify sales prospecting and cultivation, accelerate product launches and improve campaign execution. For sales staff, an integrated solution provides access to a greater number of qualified leads, helps track important associations across partners, customers and pending sales opportunities, enables distributed team selling, makes it easier to create high-impact sales proposals and frees up more time to focus on selling.
The resulting improved customer targeting, streamlined content development plus increased productivity and effectiveness can help to reduce marketing and sales costs.
And when sales people are away from the office, mobile access means they can use the same line-of-business applications they rely on back at their base location.
Market intelligence highlights:
• Single view of the customer
• Tools that streamline and automate everyday
sales processes
• Campaign management features
• Insightful marketing analytics
• Data cleansing and segmentation tools.
Making forecasting and planning more accurate It’s difficult to run a cost-effective, efficient business without accurate planning and forecasting, yet for many organisations poor access to information and analysis tools makes these activities time consuming and challenging. Often managers lack the insight they need to make the best decisions on resourcing or financing and companies are frequently forced to retain large safety stocks distributed across different sites to compensate for inadequate access to up-to-date information.
Forecast and planning highlights:
• Flexible forecast generation
• Three-dimensional, configurable data hierarchies
• Collaboration tools.
Driving productivity
A reliance on manual processes or a lack of integration between departments and job functions can seriously impact on a company’s productivity. When information doesn’t flow freely and quickly around the organisation how do you speed up your supply chain and monitor or respond to changes quickly and effectively?
The key to helping your business survive in a rapidly changing global economy is to empower your people to do the best possible job they can for you. IBM can support your entire business with an ERP solution containing built- in, best practice business processes. By automating and optimising your sales and purchasing processes, you can improve productivity and reduce costs while delivering strong, consistent customer service. When your staff or customers enter a sales order, related facts such as credit limits, customer account information and inventory levels can all be checked in realtime. You can print, fax, e-mail or publish order confirmations online. You can also offer customers flexible invoicing options, keep track of purchase orders and manage returned items. Information about open orders is clearly visible to your production and purchasing people, enabling reduced delivery times and effective stock management processes. By setting up automatic notifications of changes and events you can help people maintain control and manage exceptional situations, driving efficiency through your entire supply chain.
Productivity highlights:
• Best practice business process built-in
• Automate and optimise the entire supply chain
• Role-tailored user interfaces
• Configurable alert rules.
Managing change and growth
To keep pace with the competition, businesses face constant change. They need to extend into new territories, launch new products or services and increase their strengths through mergers and acquisitions. Business opportunity can involve serving a worldwide audience of customers through a network of cross-border partners. As an organisation changes and grows it needs to be able to scale its ERP solutions to support new users, new locations and new lines of business – as well as to improve the efficiency of its core business processes.
The flexible, scalable Microsoft ERP solutions offered by IBM help minimise the challenges of business growth, helping your company remain ready as the future
unfolds. Additional locations, merged and newly acquired companies can be integrated, providing consolidated financial, operational and customer information while preserving local data. Rapidly gained visibility helps deliver operational insight to build competitive advantage along with personalised customer, partner and supplier relationships. Support for centralised processes encourages unified standards and quality by enabling best practices to be shared and extending supply chain management across multiple sites and divisions. Global and local performance can be managed and monitored with sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, reporting and analysis tools. When expanding across international borders, Microsoft Dynamics AX offers country and region-specific functionality, including capability for dealing with multiple languages, currencies and local financial requirements in more than 36 countries and regions.
Change and growth highlights:
• Scalability and comprehensive functionality
• Support for local languages, tax systems
and regulations
• Ability to consolidate accounts across divisions
or companies
• Time and cost-efficient upgrade and modification
processes
• Customisation methodology that preserves the
upgrade path.
Work the way your people do
With a streamlined user interface, wizard-based tools and close integration with Microsoft Office system productivity applications, Microsoft Dynamics AX works the way your people work:
• A familiar Microsoft Office Outlook
®environment
supports fast user adoption and high utilisation
• Working with familiar products such as Microsoft
Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel
®, users are
empowered through wizard-based tools to create their
own dashboards and personal workflows without
outside support
• Role-tailored access to information both online
and offline gives people the information they need,
delivered in the way they want it.
Work the way your business does
Microsoft Dynamics AX provides choice and flexibility in how you implement and customise your ERP solution, enabling you to achieve the best fit for your business:
• Design and automate business processes to unify
line-of-business systems with flexible, easy-to-use
tools built on the Microsoft Windows
®Workflow
Foundation platform
• Compete globally with full support for different
languages and currencies across multiple time zones
while keeping costs under control
• Align IT and business goals using point-and-click
customisations, flexible data models and mapping
tools to help build a solution that matches your
business and your people.
Work the way technology should
Built on standard Microsoft technology, Microsoft Dynamics AX is an adaptable and affordable ERP system that can grow and change with your business:
• Connect to other technologies with built-in integration
between internal and external systems, helping to
reduce operational costs and providing fast access
to functionality.
IBM Global Business Services – leaders in ERP, leaders in Microsoft Dynamics
As one of the world’s largest business consulting services organisations, IBM has a proven track record in helping to deliver lasting change to thousands of customers, large and small around the globe. Our experience in business applications is second to none – and when you are planning something as significant as a businesswide ERP implementation, that’s important.
• Leaders in Microsoft Services (Custom applications,
Cross Platform Integration, Dynamics and
Infrastructure) – A Gold Certified Partner
• Over 2000 Certified Microsoft consultants making
IBM one of the largest Microsoft Partners
• More than 3000 Microsoft Technology professionals
globally
• Industry leaders in ERP and CRM implementations
• Deep and proven experience in finance, manufacturing,
supply chain and HR strategy, project management and
process analysis
• Low risk option with the benefit of thousands of ERP
implementations drawing on a global resource pool of
industry experts.
Maybe you think of us as just a technology company?
Our solution delivery experience is substantial:
• Proven world class delivery management at project
and programme level
• Business change management
• Process analysis and re-engineering
• Sales, marketing and service strategy
•
Powerful ERP solutions that…
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For more information, please contact:
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IBM Global Business Services Mid-Market Sector
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