Author: Manoj Ranaweera

There is a great debate taking place within number of prominent North American blogs about supply chain management vs. spend management. These being, Tim Minahan’s Supply Excellence, Jason Busch’s Spend Matters. Dave Stephens’ Procurement Central and Dave Bush’s eSourcing Forum. There may well be others.. In UK, procurement and supply chain management are the terms most commonly used. Spend Management is used by Ariba and Marrakech. Obviously, if we consider US terminalogy, Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) forms part of the “spend management” solutions (as far as Ariba and perhaps others are concerned). What about “financial supply chain management”?…

Very interesting question! The competitive landscape changes according to the response given. What is the primary business of ebdex? We are in the business of allowing organisations to exchange structured documents with their trading partners (suppliers, customers, partners, resellers, etc) utilising investments already made in technology (no need for new hardware or software licenses). This is achieved by integrating with accounting/ERP/CRM/other systems at both ends of a transaction through ebdex Document Exchange. Another way to put this is: if system A has structured documents and these documents are required by System B, then ebdex is interested in reading from System…

Is Open Source software really free? My limited knowledge suggests you still have to pay for support. Same can be said for record beating Solaris 10 from Sun Microsystems (in fact all Sun Software is free and you just pay for support). So now you have a real choice. Sun offers an alternative to Windows with the Solaris Enterprise System, a unified platform of Solaris 10, Java Enterprise System, developer tools, desktop infrastructure and N1 management software. Sun claims “Solaris 10 includes more than 600 features that make it the most efficient, secure, and reliable operating system ever built“. Sun…

With the imminent launch of ebdex Document Exchange, we are currently recruiting External Sales Consultants on revenue share basis. You have the opportunity to earn well over £100,000 per annum. If interested, please get in touch through http://www.ebdex.co.uk/jobs.html. Please state three reasons why we ought to consider you for this role. We are looking for motivated individuals that have demonstrable track record in closing deals. Your role include pre-sales, sales and post-sales activities and may also lead into customer relationship management (CRM). We are especially interested in those who have worked for accounts and ERP software vendors. Sector specialists are…

I just spent few minutes trying to understand the power of blogging in making “Manoj Ranaweera” famous. Here are the results to my astonishment: Search word: Manoj On Google – Not within Top 10 Google UK – 5 (ecademy) and 7 (ebdex) Search word: Ranaweera On Google: 2 (blog), 4 (deal architect) and 6 (ecademy) On Google UK: 1 (ecademy) and 3 (ebdex) Search word: Manoj Ranaweera Google: All top 10 positions – 1 (blog), 2 (deal architect), 3 (ecademy), 4 (blogger.com), 5 (business two zero), so on … For Manoj, unfortunately not in the Top 10 globally due to…

SSA Global announced signing of a definitive agreement which allows the company to be acquired by Infor, creating third largest ERP vendor. The combined entity will have over £1.6bn sales revenues. Infor has recently acquired number of companies, causing concern within customer base for product continuation. Tags: SSA Global, ERP, Infor, acquisitions

So, you are a start-up bringing your first product to market and potentially every business on the planet is a target. How do you decide which companies to target initially? This is when customer profiling become important. Customer profiling focuses you to identify the type of company you believe you have a higher chance of converting to a revenue generating client. How do you go about accomplishing this given UK alone has more than 2.1 million registered companies? You need to apply number of criteria to reduce this number to about 50 companies to initially target. Once you got your…

I just got back from listening to Martin Beaumont, chief executive, Co-operative Group Ltd at Manchester Business School. Martin spoke passionately about the corporate turnaround that is taking place within Co-op Group under his leadership. Their vision is to be the best co-operative business in the world. How does this vision relate to typical UK business? Very differently. Because his stakeholders include co-op members and focus is not just on revenue, profitability and growth. To get your head around this, first you need to understand what a co-operative is… “a co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to…

A friend just introduced me to “the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint“. Guy Kawasaki is right! It is true. Most start-ups are poor at delivering a clear strong message to VCs. VCs are not interested in working with companies that does not have the right management structure, etc because its hard work and they have many other propositions to choose from. Many start-ups, specially those in the technology space, falls into catch 22 scenario, i.e. cannot develop product, generate revenue, let alone acquire clients without external funding. You have no chance of getting funding if there is no product, no revenue…