Glovia ERP Brings Global Scope To Medium Sized BusinessesWhile the ERP market is dominated by Oracle and SAP, there is a considerable second tier niche for smaller companies, who still have vendor relations to track, supply chain management, product life cycle organization, warehouse management and customer relationship management to track. All ERP systems try to integrate these functions into a network aware system that allows customization to specific organizational functions; the degree to which they succeed, and the degree to which they scale (and thus how much they cost) is largely a function of their architecture. Glovia ERP is a product that grew out of Fujitsu's in-house ERP solution, and it differentiates itself not on features - it has similar functionality to other ERP solutions - but on its multi-language and multi-currency support. This can be a killer feature if you're a medium sized business with offices in North America and East Asia, where native language support allows the local staff to be brought up to speed on the ins and outs of the management software in less time. While all ERP software is built (to some extent) on supply chain, accounting and warehouse management, Glovia is built extensively around manufacturing process (not surprising, given that it's from Fujitsu). It provides extensive support for product development and design, and integration across multiple engineering departments, along with sales and support services. It has extensive modular support for all aspects of modern manufacturing, and is particularly well suited to companies working in the field of electronics design, development and deployment. Glovia's rollout is also surprisingly robust. The tactical deployment of the software includes doing it factory by factory, with later hooks for implementation into divisional level interchanges. It is built off of a robust implementation of an SQL database architecture, and has a number of implementation modules that can be deployed for added functionality. In particular, Glovia's ability to link manufacturing to customer response is a godsend for companies that want to run lean organizations with light to medium inventory levels. It has the ability to communicate sales projections directly to manufacturing leads and vendor controllers, allowing the entire process of inventory management and process control to be streamlined and made fluid. The major downside to Glovia is price - while it's cheaper than a full SAP implementation, it is not a cheap solution to implement; the ability to do tactical rollouts and build from the bottom up as it's implemented in specific locations helps spread the costs out, compared to a complete SAP driven reorganization, and its engineering focus makes it the wrong fit for certain types of businesses. All that said, if you're planning on doing business in consumer electronics, or anything that puts technology in the hands of consumers, Glovia is the niche leader in this space for ERP solutions and is worth considering.
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