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ARE YOU ABOUT TO GET EATEN?
Successful business people often hate change. The mere thought of making one frightens them. It flat scares some silly. They know what they have, and are unwilling to take even modest risk for greater gain. Their fear is they'll lose some of...
How To Sustain With An Online Home Business!
Doing home business online is very popular. There are many, many homebusiness websites that compete for customers. Get quick rich schemes are praised and offered daily in the internet. The other side of the coin is: Many websites disappear as well...
Innovation Management – Some Idea Are Better Than Others
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.
There are distinct processes that enhance problem identification and idea...
Why Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses Should Monitor the Media
As the owner or an employee of a small- to medium-sized business, you might have never thought about media monitoring. Maybe you are not even sure what exactly is meant by this and have thus ignored it so far. But you should take some time to get...
Why Your Credit Score Matters
Among the many innovations that emerged after World War II, credit use has become a major factor in our entire economic profile. As a result, your credit rating is the most important factor in determining your credit APR when you apply for any type...
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Top Six Reasons to Buy Rather Than Build an Inventory Management Solution
Is building your own inventory management solution really your best bet?
The issues that companies face when they decide to build a solution in house are numerous: Scarce development resources, project cost overruns, delivery delays, unexpected technical issues, long-term maintenance issues. For these reasons, you should consider purchasing hosted, flexible, "out-of-the-box" vendor managed inventory (VMI) and web-based inventory solutions that can be running in five days, all at a fixed monthly price - with no delays, low risk and a lower total cost of ownership.
At Invendia we've often seen companies struggle with the decision to buy a technology or to build that solution in-house. The decision criteria typically are:
•Availability of qualified development resources
•Long-term maintenance staffing
•Implementation time and costs
•Project risk
•Process understanding
•3rd party objectivity
So, what are the top six reasons to buy rather than build an inventory management solution?
6. Availability of qualified development resources. If you have available resources that are experienced in developing web-based, distributed solutions then you should consider building your own solution in house. In addition, your staff should ideally be knowledgeable about leveraging development standards such as J2EE or .NET. If not, you should source an off-the-shelf solution that can readily integrate with your existing applications.
5. Long term maintenance staffing. Once you have a solution, how are you going to keep it current, from both a technology and from a process point-of-view? For example, in the last few years RFID, collaboration, wireless and countless other developments have forced companies to update their processes. With ever increasing innovations, you need to ensure that you are staffed to manage not only the system upgrades but any errors that you may discover. If you either don't have the staffing for this or don't want the headache, then you should consider a "bought and maintained" solution.
4. Implementation time and cost. How quickly do you need a solution? If you have ample time to scope your project, build a project plan, free-up resources, develop and test the application, then you should consider building the
solution.
Furthermore, do you have the budget to pull off an in-house project? What are the opportunity costs? What is your company's track record of getting IT projects completed on-time and on-budget?
3. Project risk. One major reason that organizations build in-house is that they want to build expertise in an emerging technology. Does this meet your organization's business goals? What if you find that the learning curve is long and steeper than you anticipated? Are you willing to take that risk? When you are scoping your project, have you considered all of the issues? Are you willing to stick to your original scope
when your users demand new features (scope creep)?
If you cannot mitigate these issues, then you should strongly consider a fixed price, packaged solution.
2. Process understanding. Collaborative inventory management(VMI) processes are
complex and varied as your trading partner needs. If you have many diverse trading partners (or may have in the future), building your own solution may not be a great idea (see "long term maintenance" above). Additionally, your trading partners may want to extend the use of the collaboration solution to their trading partners. Can they do this? Only if you are willing to get into the solution environment. This is especially important as your trading partners start to get more and more benefit from these solutions and may force you to switch to another solution.
1. Third-party objectivity. A critical concern for trading partners is that of data confidentiality and security. Most trading partners are leery of exchanging critical and confidential and feel more comfortable with a third party managing the data. Is this a critical issue for your organization?
Summary
In the nascent days of any technology, be it the car or software, many companies think that they can build the better mousetrap. However, as the technology evolves and becomes more complete, there are significant barriers to entry. As the collaborative inventory management field continues to evolve, there are enough reasons to give pause before deciding to build a solution in-house.
About the Author
Ken Town is VP of Research and Technology for Invendia, a leading provider of vendor managed inventory and web-based inventory solutions. He can be reached at kentown1@invendia.com or http://www.invendia.com.
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| DTI - Welcome to the DTI's Innovation Home Page |
| The DTI is working to stimulate a significant increase in innovation throughout ... It covers Living Innovation, web streaming of a series of high profile ... |
| www.dti.gov.uk |
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| Innovation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
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| en.wikipedia.org |
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| National Innovation Website |
| The Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources has developed this website to raise awareness of the importance and benefits of innovation and ... |
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| Innovation, creativity and brainstorming resources from ... |
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| Innovation Weblog - Trends, resources, viewpoints from Chuck Frey ... |
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| www.innovationtools.com |
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| CORDIS: Innovation Portal: Home |
| This Innovation Portal is supported by DG ENTR of the European Commission, ... European Commission adopts new Communication on Innovation: on 13 September ... |
| cordis.europa.eu |
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| CORDIS: Promotion of Innovation: Home |
| This programme stands at the cross-roads of the Community's policies on Research, Innovation and SMEs. |
| cordis.europa.eu |
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| Innovation Network... leveraging innovation, creativity and ... |
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| www.thinksmart.com |
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| Business Innovation : Car Reviews, Online Gaming, and Product Branding |
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| www.businessweek.com |
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| Innovation - Life, Inspired | PBS |
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| www.pbs.org |
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| Innovation.org - Welcome |
| Impact of Innovation Saving & Improving Lives Controlling Healthcare Costs Strengthening ... Future of Innovation New Medicines in Development Next Wave of ... |
| www.innovation.org |
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| Innovation: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
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| Innovation Relay Centres - The World Largest Network for ... |
| Innovation Relay Centres giving advice on Innovation, Technology Transfer and Exploitation. Major European source for innovative technologies or new ... |
| irc.cordis.lu |
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| The Tech Museum of Innovation | Welcome |
| The Tech Museum of Innovation - Welcome! The Tech Museum inspires and educates the innovators of the future. |
| www.thetech.org |
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| Pages tagged with "innovation" on del.icio.us |
| CoDev 2007 - Co-Development for Business Growth: Open Innovation and Alternatives ... PDMA & IIR's 5th Annual Front End of Innovation ... |
| del.icio.us |
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| innovation |
| Publication highlighting the research activities of NUS. The site provides snippets of selected articles online, and provides a subscription form online. |
| www.innovationmagazine.com |
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| Canadian Innovation Centre |
| Services includes invention evaluation, technology due diligence, market research, and education programs. |
| www.innovationcentre.ca |
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| London INNOVATION :: Home |
| Maximise your business potential through innovation. Learn the secrets of successful business innovation in London. |
| www.london-innovation.org.uk |
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| Eric Von Hippel's Homepage |
| Downloadable Books. Democratizing Innovation (2005) ... The Sources of Innovation (1988). Free download of the complete book. Permission granted by Oxford ... |
| web.mit.edu |
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| Intel Innovation in Education |
| www.intel.com/education/ - 3k - Cached - Similar pages |
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