Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

A new tool will help address the company's complex financial systems as well as its need to efficiently manage operations and customer service.

Soon after the company's formation,the Sun Products' IT team needed establish a new IT environment. This entailedreplacing every software system, including a combination of packaged andproprietary applications, in a five-month time frame.

Historically,Land O' Lakes ran as a holding company with many separate entities. Over time,this resulted in an overly complex IT environment. In 2005,a strategic decision was made to move toward an operating company mode. Here, two company VPs give an exclusive update on Project Catalyst'sprogress.

By enabling accelerated product innovation and time-to-market, 3M aims to realize its strategic business objectives, augment production capacity, enhance global capabilities and rationalize costs.

Mergers and acquisitions have caused Foster's to have a mix of enterprise resource planning systems and different methods for defining and processing key business data, such as information on customers and products.

The deal expands IBM's initiatives to help organizations gain customer insight and transform marketing through technology.

The largest producer and distributor of sweetener products in North America deploys Virtustream Inc.'s xStream Cloud platform to optimize its entire infrastructure, which includes a multi-thousand seat SAP enterprise application system.

As shared services units specialize in performing repetitive transaction based tasks, consumer companies can leverage the service model to perform tasks that require high-end business and consulting skill sets that may not be widely available in the organization.