Supply chains are becoming more complex in order to support the increasingly diverse levels sizes and needs of new suppliers and customers. There are so many variables that can go into a single sale, like selling across multiple channels, delivering products directly versus delivering through drop shipments, and selling items with one-time charges as well as recurring fees. This transformation is having a tremendous impact on organizations of all shapes and sizes. As supply chain complexity builds, it's important that companies aren't spending more time entering and managing data rather than focusing on growing their business. They should have a well-integrated, audited and secure system that can be precisely reported on at every level.

Epicor Software Corp. has made generally available version 8.7.9 of Epicor Eclipse, its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for wholesale distribution.

Time to scrap your legacy I.T. systems. But how exactly should you go about it?

The idea of buying an enterprise application from a start-up company might sound like anathema to a CIO, but there are good reasons why one might want to do just that.

Infor, Epicor, Aptean, QAD, UNIT4, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and others all have the challenge of owning many solutions built over 20 years ago or more. In fact, many enterprises are still running twenty-year-old software. Still, many firms have yet to buy their first ERP, and they will certainly not purchase the old ERPs written in RPG, BASIC and ABAP or with Progress databases and so on.

There is no shortage of software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based manufacturing enterprise resource planning software offerings nowadays, for almost any vertical manufacturing market segment. But while cloud and hosted solutions are routine for many types of business software across various industries, manufacturing businesses still express a lot of skepticism, uncertainty and concern about the applicability of cloud software to their business.