Enterprise Apps Unpacked

There's little doubt that AI is starting to eliminate jobs. Recent headlines confirm it. The trend presents a special risk to the manufacturing sector just as baby boomers retire in droves and more companies seek to build up their workforces and reverse the decades-long preference for cheap overseas labor.

But there are positive aspects to AI's impact on manufacturing jobs. Many workers are learning to use it to do their jobs more ...

ERP sustainability software mostly focuses on data collection and reporting requirements of environmental, safety and governance (ESG) policies and typically isn't intended to control the business processes that impact the physical environment.

But other digital technology has been used for years to monitor and optimize resource use. Now IoT sensors are increasingly paired w...

The internet transformed corporate learning from a paper-based, in-person process to one that is largely delivered in digital form, on demand from nearly any device or location.

More recently, generative AI has provided learning and development (L&D) teams with a tireless assistant that can crank out educational content in minutes. Now AI-powered search is sparking another transformation as employees increasingly use it to find...

Generative and agentic AI are rapidly infiltrating enterprise software. But both are prone to data management issues that can hobble their effectiveness and lead to AI hallucinations and faulty decision-making that carry significant risks for businesses.

In this episode, we examine an innovative approach that aims to solve these data problems by basing AI models on standard, industry-specific business processes and compliance guard...

Procurement has become a strategic priority with significant impact on the bottom line. It's a data-intensive process that requires communicating with large numbers of suppliers, products and services – the kind of complex, transaction-heavy workflow that is uniquely suited to being automated with generative and agentic AI.

In this episode, we examine how AI can make procurement more effective and efficient, where it fits in the pr...

AI's growing ability to take over human tasks has many people worried about losing their jobs. Some companies are addressing these concerns by educating employees on how to instead use AI as a helper that frees them for more creative work and adds value.

In this episode, we explore ways to encourage AI use without mandating it, the kinds of training that work best and how to develop a curriculum that covers different experience lev...

Digital twins – virtual representations of real-world things – are a hot topic, and they're becoming more capable with the addition of AI and geospatial awareness. In this episode, we explain how AI-enhanced spatial digital twins work, how they're being used today, what it takes to deploy them, and their potential uses.

Featuring: Eric Liu, founder and CEO of TwinMatrix Technologies

In today’s episode, we'll also cover:

• How sp...

What separates successful enterprise technology implementations from costly failures? Here on Enterprise Apps Unpacked, we’ll do a deep dive into strategies that actually deliver results. Every other Monday, veteran IT journalist David Essex interviews corporate leaders, industry experts and vendors—the people who are truly in the know—about important developments in ERP, HR and supply chain systems and the other applications that ...

SAP has faced numerous challenges in recent years, but three big ones stand out: moving its on-premises products to the cloud; convincing customers to adopt its current ERP platform, S/4HANA Cloud; and meeting the unprecedented demand for artificial intelligence by developing practical AI applications.

SAP touted significant progress on all three fronts at its annual Sapphire conference, which was held on consecutive weeks this mon...

An emerging technology called spatial computing combines virtual reality and augmented reality to enable location-aware digital interaction with the real world. It has big potential, but practical applications have been slow to arrive. A new offering from Dassault Systèmes, a French maker of 3D design software, could begin to change that.

Called 3DLive, the new app, expected in summer 2025, integrates the vendor's 3DEXPERIENCE prod...

For two glorious years, generative AI held sway as the AI darling among ERP vendors. But impressive as Gen AI might be, it's mostly limited to generating content and not really capable of the process management and decision making needed to reach the holy grail of AI: Fully autonomous artificial intelligence.

That level of technological innovation is the promise of so-called agentic AI: smart "agents," such as AI-driven chatbots an...

It's been said that the main job of a chief information officer is "keeping the lights on" – making sure an organization's IT systems are up to date, reliable and running smoothly. But CIOs of software vendors sometimes play an additional role as early users of products under development. The approach is often called Customer Zero, "drinking your own champagne" or "eating your own dog food," and advocates say it can improve innovat...

A case can be made that for the past decade and a half, SAP has been almost entirely focused on two things: getting customers to adopt its next-generation ERP platform, S/4HANA, and shifting its development efforts from on-premises systems to the cloud – and getting customers to follow.

Now, with the calendar turned to 2025, the December 31, 2027 deadline -- when SAP says it will stop supporting legacy on-premises ECC and R/3 syste...

ERP vendors have been eager to ride the generative AI wave, and it has become commonplace for them to assert that machine learning and other types of AI will revolutionize the way people interact with business applications and data. AI is already enabling natural language data queries and commands and starting to take over workflows that cross ERP modules. Chatbots are evolving from simple logic machines to become "smart" agents ca...

ERP increasingly serves as the hub of organizations' environmental sustainability strategies. But so far, it has mostly been used to standardize and automate the collecting and reporting of environmental, social and governance (ESG) data for customers, investors and regulators. There's a growing sense that ERP can be put to greater use if it's more closely integrated with enterprise technology that has a direct impact on sustainabi...

Supply chain sustainability is an ambitious strategy for managing the environmental, social and corporate governance impacts of product sourcing, manufacturing and delivery. But the inherent complexity of supply chains makes it difficult to ensure that each component in a product, from raw materials to subassemblies, finished goods, packaging and transportation, meet the environmental and labor regulations of countries and internat...

Every major ERP vendor has strived to move its on-premises applications to the cloud and entice its customers to follow. Most still struggle to replicate the capabilities of their legacy ERP systems in software as a service (SaaS), and new products built in the cloud from the ground up tend to appeal more to first-time buyers. Cloud migration remains the industry's biggest challenge.

Oracle, which in most assessments ranks second t...

Warehouses have long been the center of some of the most sophisticated information technology. RFID tags and readers, warehouse control systems, automated conveyors, voice picking and mobile devices are all commonly used to move goods and manage inventory with greater efficiency and precision.

Nowadays, the emphasis is on adding more autonomous technology that takes over some of the drudgery and risk from warehouse workers. Robots ...

Artificial intelligence and digital twins are probably the two most hyped information technologies of the 2020s. Yet both are already delivering practical benefits in fields ranging from industrial design and manufacturing to customer service and healthcare.

They are especially powerful when used together, with each helping to improve the other. Digital twins – virtual representations of real-world entities or processes – can suppl...