Blog

Recent months have provided a vivid reminder of why it’s so important to have an IT team paying close attention to your security at all times.  While IBM i is one of the safest environments around, the Log4j virus showed yet again that no ecosystem is immune to serious security risks. 

2022 appears set to be a crossroads for many organizations. The past two years have been incredibly challenging for businesses, including a rapid shift to remote work, unprecedented supply chain crises, and more. We continue to be inspired by the extraordinary adaptability we saw from our clients in response. While the COVID crisis is by no means over, we have seen more and more organizations become well-adjusted to this “new normal.” 

ERP software is a strategic linchpin for manufacturing and distribution organizations. Employees interact with this mission-critical software every single day. The right ERP capabilities can play a key role in enabling a more agile, growth-oriented business. And a poorly managed system can directly hamper day-to-day efficiency, limit operational awareness, and even introduce critical risks to security and data integrity.

KBM ERP software continues to provide value to hundreds of manufacturers, but finding support for this legacy software is no longer easy.

In this blog, we look at how 3rd party support can help optimize your KBM implementation. A targeted optimization effort can enhance your ERP functionality and fix lingering issues while avoiding the cost and disruption of moving to a new ERP system.

JD Edwards enjoyed a longtime working relationship with IBM, resulting in many companies that rely on IBM i to run ERP solutions like JD Edwards World, OneWorld, and Enterprise One (with World running exclusively on IBM i).

IBMi 7.4, released in April, 2019, offers valuable new features that make this upgrade especially important. In particular, the 7.4 update offers some essential features for ensuring the most secure IBM i environment possible, including enhanced hashing for SQL queries, improved system tools, passwords, and more. 

As the global business community navigated the COVID crisis, we saw a major shift in attitude toward remote work. A forced experiment with this new model pushed companies to address implementation challenges as fast as possible, finding solutions to issues that might have caused companies to hesitate about expanding remote work in normal times. 

In this blog, we discuss a report on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IBM i and Power i servers. PSGi’s ground-level experience working with a variety of manufacturing and distribution companies across North America suggests that this IBM pairing can be extremely effective, generating substantial long-term ROI. This TCO report provides data to back our experience (and in the time since, IBM has confirmed that this ecosystem will be supported through at least 2032). 

“Competitive advantage cannot be understood by looking at a firm as a whole. It stems from the many discrete activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, delivering, and supporting its product.” - Michael E. Porter, Harvard Business School Professor and originator of the Value Chain concept. 

In this blog, we take a look at Value Chain Management, a vital strategic concept for manufacturers today.