Articles

Ever wondered which ERP vendor is best?

Panorama Consulting Solutions ranks ERP vendors for 2017 and comes up with a winner… That winner is Epicor – but at iStart, we have a nagging suspicion that the very notion of ‘the best ERP vendor’ is something of a ‘how long is a piece of string’

Salesforce hits billion dollar quarter: analysts look for profit

Tens of thousands of Salesforce faithful partied in San Francisco this week serenaded by GreenDay and seduced by Sean Penn – but investors weren’t buying… Since 2003 CRM software company Salesforce has gathered users and partners at its annual Dreamforce conference to educate, inform and entertain them

If most projects fail, why bother doing them at all?

There is still hope, explains international project management expert Gary Nelson… It is a tragic statistic – according to the most recent KPMG Project Management Survey (July 2013), only 33 percent of projects in New Zealand in 2012 were delivered on budget, 29 percent were delivered on

Billing best practice: Tips for a healthy debtors ledger

We feel like we are being held to ransom by our invoicing, but if we don’t get the dollars in the door more easily and effectively, our livelihoods will be on the line. David McNickel investigates the issues and offers the latest best practice advice on how to ensure

The Benefits of Case Management Software

Case management software comes with a plethora of benefits and can dramatically increase the efficiency of those working in the legal sector, whilst keeping them more organised and able to keep track of their workload. The software is used to record things such as legal expenses, lawyer-to-lawyer

Shadow IT seduces CFOs

The lure of cloud computing for CMOs is well understood and has seen more of the IT budget head to that department – now it’s the CFO’s turn… Delays and “chaos” in the planning cycle is driving chief financial officers to seek alternatives to the trusty spreadsheet,

Middleware – Bridging Disparate Systems

As businesses evolve, they tend to adopt more than one software system to manage their varied transaction flows and processes. The breadth of their requirements increases, resulting in disparate system usage across the board. Examples include: Financial Reporting Debtors and Creditors Inventory Manufacturing Systems Job Costing Time

Online or On Premise?

The interesting thing about online solutions is that, although the lingo changes, the concept is not new. For the last 10 years evangelists of the “hosted” solution have been banging down doors trying to get people to believe that you are better off as a business if

You’ve Chosen Business Software, Now What? The Importance of End User Training

So you’ve made the decision, selected your software, implementation is underway and you are shortly due to go live. So much to organise and yet often the crucial process of incorporating an end-user strategy is forgotten – arguably the most important. Unless your staff are trained on

Arm against IT project failure

Nearly half of all IT projects fail and the seeds of failure are often planted early in the process by failing to prepare properly and truly understand the return on investment that you can expect from an IT project. Research results published in the Harvard Business Review,