deal architect

Two decades of HR Tech

Post updated with a change in source document

Stacey Harris sent me a preview copy of the Sierra-Cedar annual HR Systems survey. It is the 20th edition, and I particularly enjoyed the walk down memory lane when I was following HR applications at Gartner.

“20 years ago, David Link and Alexia (Lexy) Martin, the first authors of the HR Systems Survey, embarked on a journey to understand a new and emerging trend of self-service HR: the idea of giving candidates, employees, and managers access not only to data, but also to tools that they could use to help make decisions and improve their work environments. The Internet was in a state of infancy, and most organizations were still working through mainframe versus client-server application discussions. With Y2K just right around the corner, and all of the anxiety and optimism coming with the start of a new century, the industry was ripe for change. “

Get a copy of the report here for the nostalgia if you will. But especially do so for the chock full of data on the HCM market. There are 121 graphs – on average one a page. They cover wide ground from cloud adoption by HR application area, to HR analytics to mobile and social HR tools. Some of the data will surprise you – like how low cloud penetration is in many areas even though HCM has led other functional areas in cloud adoption.

After my last book, Silicon Collar about automation, I get the sense HR is in for a huge change over the next few years. Automation via AI, robotics, drones, wearables – is changing the nature of work in every profession. We will see new job titles emerge we did not anticipate just a few years ago. More of the workforce will be on platforms, in franchises and other “extended enterprise” formats. Workforce planning will increasingly factor in machines and related asset planning and maintenance. That will have a Big impact on recruiting, learning and every other aspect of HR.

I have a feeling the next few Sierra-Cedar surveys will increasingly reflect those changes. In the mean time, back to digesting all the data in the latest one. I look forward to more nostalgia as the survey reaches its 25th birthday.

Don’t write off SAP yet

It would be easy to be pessimistic about SAP when you read Dennis Howlett’s recent blog “It’s a hot mess and everyone, whether that is SAP, customers, partners or User Group people want it to go away. The issue comes in finding a solution.” The “mess” is what used to be irritation at individual SAP customers about Indirect Access audits. It is now a full blown crisis. Dennis writes “I was shocked. I have never heard customers so angry at a vendor as I did at this event”. I have heard the anger in my consulting for years now. Customers thought IA was very unfair, but some would grudgingly agree the greed was not confined to SAP. Other enterprise vendors had their own sneaky practices.  But to a person they would “punish” SAP by not inviting them to future business for a couple of years. I am convinced for every dollar SAP collected in IA, it was precluded from bidding for 5x in new business. But it was isolated to those customers who went through the ordeal.  Now, I hear it from every SAP customer and if all of them decide to punish SAP, it is like I said a crisis. 

It is one of several “unforced errors” I have seen SAP make as I continue my research for SAP Nation 3.0. CEO Bill McDermott acknowledged the problem in his keynote at SapphireNow in May. All of SAP should have rallied around his promise of a solution. 6 months later there has only been dribbles of information about it. SAP needs to treat it like a crisis.

The other unforced error SAP has been making is exaggerating S/4HANA success. It claims 6,500 customers but still cannot show detailed product road maps prospects can believe or show adequate reference early adopters.

Not sure why it feels the need to exaggerate progress on S/4. In SAP Nation 2.0 I profiled progress of several next-gen products and  I wrote “As we have seen earlier with Oracle, Microsoft and JD Edwards, a next-gen product takes years of development and maturation. Migrating a legacy customer base takes even longer. Those are just the laws of physics. SAP may be able to bend them slightly with S/4, but will likely not be able to break them.”

Worse, SAP partners are trying to get customers to repeat the sins of the last wave of R/3 and ECC implementations. They are telling customers to implement the (relatively more mature) financial modules of S/4. That is the mistake so many SAP customers made in the last go-around. They would start with financials, run out of funds and never get to the operational areas. And when they did they found the functionality much weaker than they had expected.

Between IA issues and S/4 claims, SAP has a credibility problem in the market. As an analyst told me “I wish Hasso Plattner was in every conversation with SAP. You would get a truthful answer pretty quickly”. That is a huge tribute to Hasso, but also an indicator of how little faith people have in what they hear from the rest of SAP.

But……don’t write off SAP just yet.

While I see just about every SAP customer adopting one of the “coping strategies” I had written about in SAP Nation – ring fencing with clouds, third party maintenance, two tier ERP with lighter alternatives etc, the core of SAP is still reasonably solid. They are still the book of record for utility billing, retail merchandising, oil and gas accounting and countless other vertical applications.

None of the competitors – Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, Infor, others – has made a major dent in the vertical areas. They could have gone for the kill but have been content to focus on horizontal areas like HCM and CRM.

And there with its cloud acquisitions especially hybris, SuccessFactors, Concur and Ariba, SAP has managed to stay competitive in many horizontal areas.

Another trend is also helping SAP. I see a number of customers keeping their legacy, on-premise applications in place and adopting a series of “intelligent apps” around them which leverage sensors, machine learning and other contemporary technology and data sources. SAP’s Leonardo toolkit is a gateway to that world.

So, I continue my research for SAP Nation 3.0 with that guarded optimism. I hope SAP gets the “spirit of Hasso” back into the field. It needs to become more of the product company it used to be, less the sales machine it has become.

Cognizant’s own Digital Transformation

You hear about digital projects at their clients, but you don’t hear much from outsourcers about their own transformations. Cloud competitors like Amazon, contract manufacturers like Foxconn and digital agencies have dramatically changed the landscape of services. So it was refreshing to spend some time recently with Raj Mehta, President of Cognizant, to discuss their internal realignment. He assumed that title in September of 2016 after a career in various field roles.

Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

“We were hearing from clients their needs were changing. They did not need large testing factories. They wanted to leverage automation trends. They did not need as big a BPO operation. They wanted more Cloud, Agile and Digital. And they would come to us and complain they had to go to individual practice areas to share their vision. Cognizant was not organized enough around the way clients were thinking.”

“We embarked on a 2020 vision project and realized we had not re-organized since 2009. The world has changed so much since (see graph above with 2015 figures from that strategy document).

“We have been executing against that 2020 vision and are now organized around three service lines aligned with our various digital opportunities (see graph below). They leverage our industry expertise in verticals which we have traditionally been strong, like financial services and healthcare, our consulting/strategy groups (which is now much tightly integrated with our vertical and horizontal units) and (our) much larger global footprint.  Our Accelerator has been making more venture investments, including one in a startup called Measure, which offers drones-as-a-service. The Global Technology Office (GTO), our R&D arm, is also more aligned with the Accelerator."

“It’s easy to say we’ve organized around these three service lines - Digital Business. Digital Operations and Digital Systems & Technology. To change a two hundred and sixty thousand person organization, it’s a big ship to change. We had to change the metrics on which our units are measured and how they are structured in terms of leadership.  So, in our traditional model you heard us talking about two in the box. We’ve made our client partners more consultative and complemented them with traditional engagement and delivery leadership. We are on a journey – I cannot say we are done, and it means always making sure we have the right people in the right roles.”

“We are delivering a variety of new digital services.  We’re heavily engaged now working with auto manufacturers not just looking at their supply chains. Helping them design their (vehicle) displays, designing new features, what are the types of – how do you display these units, right? So, more focused human interaction on the digital side. Or the drone investment – how can insurance, telecom companies leverage drones. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for a number of clients. So, you’re starting to see us in new areas than you would have in the past.”

“Look at the opportunity around digital healthcare. A large percentage of all Medicare/Medicaid claims go through our Trizetto platform. We have visibility through the whole supply chain from consumer to the providers, the pharma companies and the payers. Now overlay the wearables we are all adopting. I hope with all that data and where I’ve been traveling and which planes I’ve been on, the chances are pretty high we can tell I may get the flu bug in the next three days!”

“If you look at new business models, we are going to clients with outcome-based thinking. Take application management - it’s a totally different conversation than just the traditional on-site/offshore managed services. So, how can we bring down your cost over a period of time by retiring some of your applications, moving others to the cloud, and give you an application-based pricing model?”

“We have been telling clients for a while to Run Better, Run Different. Cognizant has the opportunity to do the same. How do we run our large HR operation more intelligently? How do we manage our attrition, how do we better manage (our) talent pools around the world, and how can we leverage automation to help us make those kinds of decisions?”

‘The timing has been fortuitous. We had an activist investor (Elliott Management) and we have agreed to improve our margins over the next couple of years. Our realignment, already underway, helps me – as you can imagine, by bringing a lot of these units together, it helps me free up a lot of dollars internally.”

It was a really interesting conversation and hope I can spend more time with him and write a case study about their digital transformation in an upcoming book.

Plex evolves the Analyst Summit

I get invited to a number of user conferences. I must admit I often feel I am intruding there on customer time with vendor executives. I much prefer smaller analyst summits and Plex has honed such summits to an art form. They always showcase something from their lab and they always take us to a live customer factory tour.

The summit this week was no different. The Edge corporation - their demo shop floor was supplemented this year with glimpses of early thinking around IoT on the shop floor (leveraging PTC's ThingWorx), natural user interface (showing off RealWear's HMT-1 Helmet which incorporate's Kopin noise cancelling technology ), and Augmented Reality on the shop floor (with Microsoft HoloLens)

The live factory visit was at the St. Clair Shores plant of Fisher Dynamics. Fisher is a seating-systems and mechanisms company which will make 50 million seating assemblies this year. It is a fourth generation family owned, global manufacturer. Besides the tour it was good to hear about how seats will evolve in a world of autonomous cars. To me it is always educational to see customers walk you through nuances of their implementation of a vendor's software.

But the biggest change this year was the summit was co-mingled with the periodic meeting of Plex's customer advisory board. At dinner and through most of the day we sat next to CEOs, CIOs and operational execs from 15 Plex customers with revenues ranging from $25 million to over $3 billion. With refreshing transparency we heard Plex's financial plans (Petri Oksanen from the lead investor, Francisco Partners led most of that discussion), product plans and customer feedback. In side conversations there was plenty of talk on likely changes to NAFTA, automation and jobs, lots of practical talk about what the Fourth Industrial Revolution means to the shop floor. The summit lived up to its billing as the Future of Manufacturing Roundtable. I hope the customer execs enjoyed it as much as the analysts did and hopefully we were not much of an intrusion.

On a personal note, I was invited to be part of the Plex all-company meeting which also coincided with the summit. It was exhilarating to be with over 300 excited, motivated Plex employees and tell them it is so nice to see an ERP vendor which actually focuses on gritty shop floors not just clean, white collar functions.

Plex keeps raising the bar for analyst summits. It is refreshing for industry analysts to be able to communicate directly with customers and investors. I reach out to them all the time for my books and blogs. But usually I do so on my own not proactively facilitated by a vendor. When a vendor facilitates that it is a sure sign of their confidence.

Salesforce’s “Open Tent”

Dreamforce always has a feel of a political convention. You almost expect to see signs directing crowds to the LGBT or Pacific Islander caucus room. This year, watching it streamed I have been navigating through sessions titled with words like “diversity”, “equality” and “authentic leadership”. In his opening keynote, CEO Marc Benioff welcomed thousands of nonprofits and NGOs and the Monastics who are doing a session on “mindfulness”.  Hollywood is always represented. This year Ashton Kutcher did a moving talk on child trafficking. So is Washington, DC. Bill Clinton and Colin Powell have presented in the past. This year Michele Obama and President Bush’s twin daughters are presenting. There are musicians galore. Will.i.am is a regular. There are thoughtful sessions like a panel of CEOs discussing automation and impact on jobs. In contrast, there are endless juvenile comments laced with words like super, awesome and cool.

Somehow it works. I wrote in The New Polymath

During a customer panel at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in November 2009, at one end of the table sat a ball of color—D.A., of the indie band Chester French, with his bob of red hair and purple trousers. At the other end was Joe Drouin, ClO of Kelly Services, which places 650,000 contract staff around the world, in a dark suit and white shirt. Quite a contrast in size of customer and dress code. That’s Benioffs democracy in action.

With today’s politically charged environment, many events have moved to neutral, bland formats. Dreamforce has gone the other way.

Not everyone is a fan. My friend Ray Wang tweeted

MyPOV: sometimes it would be nice to be at
a tech conf where the program is about the
tech not the politics and social agenda of
CEO #DF17

Another analyst told me when there are so many “filler” sessions it is a sign a vendor does not have much to discuss about their products or strategy.

With 2,700 sessions I think they can have plenty of both. Marc is a big boy and knows the risks he is taking and if the format will hurt him with customers or investors.

I can safely say this focus on what Marc calls “core values” is helping their recruitment. I have been impressed to see so many confident African-American ladies on stage. So unusual in tech. In turn their comfort and confidence is likely helping attract others. James Governor shared with me one such story.

I have long believed that employers who are racist, sexist, ageist hurt themselves by artificially limiting the labor pool they are open to. Salesforce is the opposite. Watching a CEO openly welcome the “rainbow coalition” has to show up in a wider diversity in applicants. Good for them, and ultimately good for their customers and investors. So long as the majority of the 2,700 sessions and the company continue to stay focused on product and direction.

Raising the Bar - for clouds, renewables and digital - Part 3

My blogs, now 12+ years old, my 6 books and much of my consulting in those years have cataloged and celebrated cloud computing, renewable energy and digital transformations. I have been a big booster of each, but think we are at a point with each where we need to ask for much more.

In Part 1 I covered cloud computing and in Part 2, renewables in the energy sector. Now let’s look at the phenomenon of Digital Transformations.

People talk as if “digital” is a recent phenomenon. Steve Jobs known for his string of amazing Macs and iPods and iPhones actually contributed more to the world with his digitization of art at Pixar, codecs which delivered hi-def music in the iTunes store and other digital form/factors. The progress we are seeing with machines and Facial Recognition and Voice Transcription are a result of decades of digitizing images and accents. Marty Groover, an Operational Technology Manager at Caterpillar which has been reimagining the factory with IoT and robotics told an SAP event recently “we have been going digital since the 1980s”. He called his project a Business Transformation project, not a Digital Transformation.

Another of my peeves is we have too many consultants with what I call low  “digital credibility”. They use Borders, Blockbuster or Kodak as examples. Executive eyes rolls as they hear yet another vendor try the FUD “If you don’t work with us, you will get Amazoned or Netflixed”.

Far better to talk about “digital phoenixes” which have gone through traumatic times and bounced back. On the New Florence blog, I have examples of technology and Lego, Marvel, BP salvage operations after the Gulf spill, how railroads have been reborn. In my books,I have examples of how Aircell has been reborn as GoGo  the wi-fly service, how Delta Airlines has reinvented itself with technology, how GM’s OnStar has repeatedly been recast, how Corning seems to have major impact on mainstream technology every decade or so and others. Many of these examples started their digital transition a couple of decades ago.

Malcolm Frank at Cognizant implores audiences to do “Digital that Matters”. If you are doing a digital project and you are not making your products smarter, rethinking your business models and customer channels, rethinking your plants and supply chain, you are likely doing small “d”.

Technology has long focused on efficiencies and cost savings. Today, it allows for a top-line, revenue focus, yet way too many projects define their scope too narrowly. In that sense we are repeating a sin from the mid 1990s. Dr. Michael Hammer was a rock star in the early 90s with his reengineering books and articles. His rallying cry was “Don’t automate, obliterate”. In just a few years, that zeal had evaporated. ERP vendors and systems integrators convinced companies packaged software defined “best practices”. Just implementing the software would be “reengineering in a box”. It was not, and many companies ended up in worse shape because of the massive ERP overruns. Others just updated their corporate HQ functionality and forgot about their R&D labs, their shop floors, their logistics. We risk similar with today’s narrowly defined digital projects

For years now, pundits have said technology budgets are being taken over by the CMO. That is their narrow definition of digital – implement a social sentiment analysis technology or roll out a mobile consumer focused app.  Much better payback has come from the product side of the house. It is not unusual to find in auto makers more software engineers who report to product engineering/R&D than do to the CIO. It is not uncommon to see in companies seriously making their products smarter that the spend with contract manufacturers like Flex and Foxconn and product design firms like IDEO and Frog exceeds the spend with IT outsourcers and strategy firms.

And even if you do small “d”, a common mistake it to just look at packaged software vendors and one of their services partners. My colleague, Brian Sommer and I have been researching what we call “custom-crafted” processes. With SMAC (social, mobile, analytic, cloud) software and increasingly sensory, automation, blockchain technology you can custom design processes which are much better aligned with your changing industries. The big learning we have realized is if you go down this path you cannot just do that just once. For best results, you have to continually upgrade it like a packaged software vendor would to keep up with newer waves of technology and changes in your industry.

At best, your digital project will dramatically reshape your top line and your organization’s competitiveness. At worst, you will repeat the mistake of the 90s and end up with newer technology but not much better processes or efficiencies. Raise the bar for your digital project. Think Big D.

Raising the Bar - for clouds, renewables and digital - Part 2

My blogs, now 12+ years old, my 6 books and much of my consulting in those years have cataloged and celebrated cloud computing, renewable energy and digital transformations. I have been a big booster of each, but think we are at a point with each where we need to ask for much more.

In Part 1 I covered cloud computing. Now let’s look at renewables in the energy sector. While clouds have been targeting on-premise systems for a couple of decades, renewables have been targeting fossil fuels for much longer. After the 1973 oil crisis, Brazil began promoting bioethanol from its sugarcane as a fuel for driving. Even after a much later start, the US has been the largest producer of ethanol from its corn since 2005. The first electricity-generating wind turbine was invented in 1888. Photovoltaic cells for solar energy started even earlier in 1876. Yet, by many metrics, renewables have not done as well as clouds replacing the incumbent.

Renewables missed out on a significant wave of utilities which went from coal to gas in the last decade. They have also not made much of a dent in energy consumed by the transportation sector – airlines, shipping, trucking etc. They have missed out on blanketing with solar panels the US south and southwest with its plentiful sunshine.

Renewables have historically depended on an emotional sale and governmental support. Their competition is not exactly popular – try to find many fans of OPEC, Big Oil and Dirty Coal. But the renewable industry harps on that. Elon Musk, widely respected for his work on electric vehicles and solar batteries, recently said on a trip to Australia “And we will have the choice of the collapse of civilization and into the dark ages we go, or we find something renewable." Dark Ages?  Sounds like he is trying to match US Energy Secretary Rick Perry for sensational comments. Or the usual scare talk around Climate Change. Living in Florida, I hear talk of more frequent and ferocious hurricanes. Reality check: we had a decade where No hurricane made landfall. Disruptive as this year has been to Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, this hurricane season may not even crack the top 5 most active (the season ends in November). Or the positioning of Electric Vehicles as “clean”. They are clean in Norway or Canada where hydro sources contribute most of the fuel for their utilities. In the rest of the world, utilities we depend upon to charge the EVs still largely depend on fossil fuel.

And renewables have always depended on subsidies – corn subsidies in the US, utilities paying consumers above market rates for solar generated energy in Germany, EVs needing massive charging infrastructure investments around the world.

Renewables are getting another major shot. Companies like Google have been signing over the last decade Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) - large-scale, long-term contracts to buy renewable energy. China and India are adopting solar and wind power in large chunks. Puerto Rico making a fresh start on its electric grid after Hurricane Maria is seriously looking at renewables. There are many other big opportunities.

Renewables are getting this chance because the price of solar and wind has dropped very nicely in the last few years as this graph shows.

 
You can argue whether the chicken or egg came first. Or whether falling renewable prices are leading to greater demand or the other way round. I give credit to the US shale boom. That has not only kept global oil and gas markets in check, but also put pressure on renewable pricing. That's healthy for a balanced energy (and national security) policy for fossil and renewable fuels to counterbalance.

You hear a number of people talk about Peak Oil and raise the specter we are running out of hydrocarbons. I prefer to see it as a phase of Steady Energy. We are enjoying an equilibrium in the market. Renewables need to sell competitively in this market and get away from the emotional talk and over dependence on subsidies. Take advantage of the recent momentum and convert markets they did not in the last go around. 

Next up, I will cover the hype and promise around Digital Transformations.

Raising the Bar - for clouds, renewables and digital - Part 1

My blogs, now 12+ years old, my 6 books and much of my consulting in those years have cataloged and celebrated cloud computing, renewable energy and digital transformations. I have been a big booster of each, but think we are at a point with each where we need to ask for much more.

Let’s start with clouds which have been maturing nicely for two decades now. NetSuite and Salesforce were founded in the late 90s. AWS was born out of an internal Amazon project starting in 2000. 

It’s been quite a ride. Earlier this year, I wrote

Salesforce has the honor of becoming “the first enterprise cloud software company to break the $10 billion revenue run rate". Amazingly, just a short 8 years ago I was blogging about its “second billion”. They have gone from strength to strength.

But consider that in 2009, Marc Benioff told the NY Times

“Every time someone buys a server, a switch or a data center, I have failed”

The reality is even with every major and minor vendor offering some version of cloud, 75% of CIOs are still buying servers, switches and data centers. Part of the challenge is cloud applications have largely focused on horizontal processes – accounting, procurement, CRM, HCM etc. Industry books of record – utility billing, retail merchandising, hospitality reservations, healthcare patient records, insurance claims processing, advanced manufacturing shop floors and most others - are still on-premise.

Every industry event, I ask cloud vendor CEOs why they all focus on the crowded horizontal space and ignore so much of the white vertical space. They all have good reasons – not enough customer scale in individual industry applications, they are building industry features and analytics into their horizontal capabilities, they have partners working on industry extensions. The reality is those messages are not resonating - customers continue with majority of their industry applications in legacy, on-prem mode. In SAP Nation, I described the “ring fence with clouds” strategy a number of customers have adopted. The ring-fence by now should have spread to the living room, but it’s still on the edges. 

Geography is another challenge. Europe, Asia and other continents significantly lag N. America in cloud adoption.  While they have cultural and regulatory objections to the cloud model, most vendors have not customized, or spent enough selling outside the US.

When it comes to infrastructure, clouds have done a nice job penetrating development and test environments, much less production environments. We need many more Netflix examples where Amazon or Microsoft or Google is their “data center”.  Or even Oracle and IBM which have long term understanding of so many customer IT nuances. And the waters are muddied as virtualized machines on-premise are being positioned as private clouds.

Another area of promise continues to be the ability to benchmark across wide populations of customers on cloud platforms. The reality is much useful data is locked up in their on-premise systems and we don’t have consistent master data definitions.

While the unconquered vertical, geographic, data center and benchmarking markets reflect the next big opportunity, a growing concern is that of cloud economics. Things were so promising just a decade ago. I cited Timothy Chou who started Oracle’s online unit in the 90s in The New Polymath

“The average enterprise application costs over $1,000 a user a month. Most company’s IT budgets are now fully allocated to managing the software they bought over the past twenty years.

Now if you take that same software and standardize the delivery, you can get the cost to under $1oo a user a month. And furthermore if like sales force.com, Concur, Taleo, Successfactors, or NetSuite you engineer applications for even higher degrees of standardization, then the cost (not price) goes to $10 per user per month. But that’s not the end of the story—back of the envelope; Google’s cost to deliver is less than $ 1 per user per month.”

There was also excitement about low capex, and the variable IT cost model of cloud computing. That has gradually been eroding. Now cloud vendors expect multi-year contracts, and hardly deliver any productivity across those years. Six Sigma and CMM are not terms you hear at many cloud vendors. So, clouds have become another fixed IT cost.

Amazon started off very well, delivering price cuts just about every quarter. But now, managed services partners have jumped on the bandwagon and dilute its attractiveness. Salesforce is actually confirming its service partners make $ 4 to 5 for every $ 1 it charges. Not very comforting to customers who thought that went away with on-premise systems.

It gets worse. Customers are now in mixed-mode with some of their applications and infrastructure in the cloud, the rest on-premise. Others are seeing their infrastructure now fragmented across multiple clouds.  All this means increased integration costs and duplicative support resources.

I find most investors focused on clouds as a mature market and demanding when it comes to ARR and other metrics, when they should be encouraging more R&D to get into the white spaces. They are also allergic to capex investments. Here’s the irony – clouds promise to reduce customer capex. The vendor has to pick up the capex load. There is no imaginary banker to fill the gap.

I remain a big fan of the cloud model. But like my friend Frank Scavo likes to say “You don't get a pass just because you're SaaS.” Cloud vendors will have to step up – in broadening their reach and in recommitting to the economic model which made them so attractive to adopt. Buyers and analysts like me need to keep the pressure on cloud vendors.

Next up, a similar challenge for renewables in the world of energy.

“The Definitive Guide to Connected Manufacturing”

Plex has a neat publication for the new world of Advanced Manufacturing (see many examples in the resurgence that Greenville, SC is showing as a factory town) and where we are seeing the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Plex calls it Connected Manufacturing.

They sent me a glossy copy, but anyone can download a PDF version here

I am quoted in the publication

“Connected Manufacturing is about putting the modern shop floor with its robotics, sensors, wearables and 3D printing at the center of your business universe. Doing so allows you to deliver much smarter products, delights your customers with highly personalized offerings and turbo charges your supply chain.”

While most ERP systems have their genesis in the MRP world, most have drifted away from the shop floor and largely deliver back-office, corporate financial, procurement and HCM functionality and emphasize their cloud delivery models.  Don’t expect to get from just that the massive efficiency advanced manufacturing sites are reporting.