Ramlee Ibrahim & Associates

Today’s business world is rapidly changing, bringing a combination of danger and opportunity for materials and operations professionals. Every company is looking at the Internet, some eagerly and some because they are frigthened about being left behind. There are success stories about companies changing how they deal with their customers and their suppliers and how they leverage Web technology to bring their employees together.

However, there are other stories in the press about companies putting in ERP systems that took years of effort and millions of dollars, which ended up failing miserably, or companies losing market share and sales because of computer sustem failures. These events have led to a question quietly being asked: Do we need ERP or is there another way? (more…)

Recently I was asked, "Why is implementing lean manufacturing such a big deal? The book I just read suggests I only need to worry about managing the value stream. Why is it so hard to do?"

While the effort required to be successful in an enterprise resources planning (ERP) system implementation is fairly well documented and understood, implementing lean and world-class manufacturing is far less clear. To help those who have a strong background using ERP systems, let's draw some analogies common to both types of implementations. (more…)

With the widespread emergence of standards-based integration technology such as Web services and extensible markup language, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become the key to interoperability among disparate processes and pieces of software. The current demand for for SOA is motivating forward-thinking solution providers to design applications specifically for reduced complexity, efficient data sharing, and collaboration throughout the supply chain. (more…)