Caterpillar Inc., a venerable 75-year-old maker of vehicles and equipment used in farming, construction and mining, is trying to reconstruct the way it does business, via a Web-based makeover of its supply-chain and manufacturing operations.
Just attaching a Web site to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and using the Internet to automate sales transactions isn't enough to really succeed at being an e-business.
Plans to use application service providers (ASP) to implement electronic-business applications are "virtually nonexistent" among Oracle's enterprise network users, according to a survey. The company claims, however, that its ASP initiatives have attracted the interest of thousands of users.
It was a big bang project - going live with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system throughout an entire organization at once. Employees even had to camp out at work in sleeping bags at certain crucial moments.
A new online exchange founded by aerospace industry powerhouses The Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and BAE Systems is due to go live this quarter, possibly as soon as month's end.
The Boeing Co. is moving closer to using an online business-to-business exchange that the aircraft manufacturer hopes will save millions of dollars in procurement costs and give it a competitive advantage in the market.
When Craig Conway took over as CEO at PeopleSoft Inc. last September, the business applications vendor was facing major challenges. Among them was a general softening of the demand for enterprise resource planning software made by PeopleSoft and bigger rivals such as SAP AG and Oracle Corp., which helped saddle the company with a $177.8 million loss for last year.