I found the Aberdeen Research article on Travel and Entertainment (T&E) Expense Visibility very intriguing to say the least. On one hand, businesses today are searching for new frontiers where they can drive out costs in their operations. When the recession hit a few years ago, businesses immediately focused on driving efficiencies in their value chains which permeated its way into how they sold to their clients/customers, how they manufactured their products / offerings (with many outsourcing their manufacturing operations), and how they managed inventory to not tie up so much cash in inventory on-hand while also increasing fill rates.
 
As businesses now recover from the downturn, you are seeing them invest wisely (and cautiously) into areas that will create growth, but at the same time they have not lost that lust to manage costs. As a result they are looking into unchartered waters for cost containment and Travel and Entertainment Expenses are on the short list.
 
It makes complete sense that visibility would be one of the top challenges in the T&E domain. I would go a step further however and state that I think businesses really want to understand where their T&E dollars are going and more importantly, are they getting a real return in the dollars they spend. 

If I had a dollar for each time that I’ve heard the words, “paperless society”, I’d be drinking a Mai-Tai, watching the waves roll-in from my private Hawaiian beach-front property.  Well maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the reality is that after 40 years of talking about it, technology is now here to support the concept.
 
In March 2013, Aberdeen Group published a document titled, Mobility Making Waves in Manufacturing, I couldn’t agree more but would like to add two words and change the title to, SAP and Mobility Making Waves in Manufacturing, and these aren’t the Mai-Tai watching kind of waves.  In 2005 SAP purchased Lighthammer, in 2006 they acquired FactoryLogic, in 2008 Visiprise, in 2009 Business Objects and then in 2010 they added Sybase, today I understand the vision which drove these acquisitions.
 
Now when I meet with prospective and current customers and they say we want a paperless shop-floor with full security, we want our operators, from their mobile devises and without leaving their workstations, to have the ability to clock-in and out for the day and to log-in and out of an operation, and we want them to have the latest work instructions and 3-D documents and they should be alerted, also via mobile devise, when their equipment is starting to trend out of tolerance, I can look them in the eye and say no problem.
 
Just in time, a concept has become a reality.  I say just in time because, from what I’ve observed, the next-generation workforce is all about “swipe and tap”, a fact that none of us can deny.

I was just listening to an interview from last week’s SAP’s Sapphire user conference where SAP’s Co-CEO, Bill McDermott reported that SAP’s cloud business grew by 380% in Q1.  He didn’t break it down, but one can reasonably assume that the bulk of this growth occurred in business applications like core ERP, SCM, SFM, HCM solutions.  It got me thinking about where we are with Analytics in the cloud.  A report published last fall by noted BI analyst Howard Dresner tells how adoption of analytics in the cloud is still in the early innings.  This makes sense.  As business applications move to the cloud, more businesses get familiar and comfortable with this new computing model.  Perhaps more importantly, it puts business data—the lifeblood of analytics—out in the cloud making the move to cloud BI a natural next step. 

While reading a recent Aberdeen white paper, The Case for Cloud ERP in Manufacturing: Alleviating Outdated Concerns, I kept thinking to myself how well it fits with SAP’s OnDemand offerings, mainly SAP’s Business ByDesign ERP cloud solution. Although the article focuses on the “Cloud ERP in Manufacturing” aspect, the findings in the article can be applied to all types of Industries, not just manufacturing. As the cloud expands, I believe businesses that do not take advantage of the cloud will start losing any competitive-advantage they have over their competitors. How is this? Let’s look at the following five “Key Benefits of Cloud Solutions that a Manufacturer Must Consider” as outlined in the above-mentioned Aberdeen report and see how SAP’s OnDemand Cloud solutions are a perfect fit:

In Enterprise BI, adoption is everything. You can bring together the most relevant business data and deliver it within a beautiful BI application, but if your users don’t use it, it doesn’t matter.  One way to drive user adoption is to embed analytics directly into front line applications like SCM, CRM, or Customer Care systems. 

If I were a C-level at a company that is considering an investment in In-Memory technology, I would take heed of the key message in this insightful Aberdeen paper.  The author presents the results of a recent Data Management for BI survey that clearly shows In-Memory technology is being leveraged by Best-In-Class organizations to leap further ahead of their competitors who are slow to adopt.