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“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. 

Many IBM i-based systems have been successfully performing their business function for decades. Even though the Power i platform has a stable future through at least 2032, IT leaders sometimes assume that antiquation has come with age for this 30+-year-old product family. 

In our experience, this assumption is false. IBM i is not only a stable option that can continue performing well in support of business-critical systems but an inherently flexible system that can be readily integrated with a variety of new capabilities.

We often hear about the long term future of the Power i server as a source of worry for our clients. 

Businesses that rely on this platform should know that its long term future is officially secure: Power i and IBM i will continue to be supported by IBM for at least another decade (as we optimistically surmised back in 2016).

Businesses value the Power i running IBM i for its exceptional stability. From the hardware itself, to database-level architecture, the Power i offers a legendarily reliable platform. That’s precisely why so many organizations utilize it to run business-critical applications.

We have even heard an urban legend about a company that mistakenly plaster-walled off their Power i server during a construction project; they didn’t realize the mistake because the system continued performing flawlessly without much attention for years. But if this legend is true, they were very fortunate!

Remote monitoring is essential for ensuring the stability, reliability, and consistent performance of business-critical IT systems managed by a third-party provider. Attentive monitoring is the key to quickly resolving issues before they result in operational disruptions and minimizing the impact of disruptions if they do occur. In many cases, a smart monitoring approach can even automatically resolve routine issues using automated scripts.

In this blog, we break down some key considerations for organizations considering remote monitoring for applications and infrastructure.

Covering everything from production volume to the complexities of warehouse management, these metrics are a vital tool for managing the complex workflows of a manufacturing operation. 

PSGi works closely with our clients to manage the software necessary to utilizing metrics as effectively as possible. This blog provides a quick introduction: you can view our comprehensive guide here.

“While manufacturing is a historically slow-moving and conservative industry, COVID-19 has created new challenges that are requiring manufacturers to innovate at speeds they never have before. Supply chain disruptions, social distancing on high-touch assembly lines, limited ability to travel and the need for oversight add significant complexity to today’s processes.” -- Forbes

Effective, resilient supply chain management has always required the capability to respond to a changing marketplace. Disruptions force businesses to adapt. And doing so successfully requires getting some very complex decisions right. “Moving to this supplier to Asia will decrease components costs, but how will shipping, tariffs, and lead time be affected?”

The COVID-19 crisis is forcing businesses across the globe to adapt to sudden operational disruption. IT, tasked with supporting the rapid, largely unplanned move to remote work, is truly on the front lines of the
effort to adapt day-to-day ops to a “socially distant” economy. 

Existing disaster recovery (DR) plans simply didn’t envision this type of scenario. The most common way to conceptualize the “disaster” in IT DR is a physical threat to your technology infrastructure: events like a flood, fire, or a storm that destroys key servers. In this context, businesses need a plan for scaling up alternative infrastructure as fast as possible. 

The pace of change for ERP software is often dominated by urgent business imperatives: a new acquisition demands a major migration or implementation project, a new customer introduces a sudden need for more expansive reporting, or a new government regulation requires more robust data protection measures.

As data protection regulations proliferate and technology systems become more and more indispensable for day-to-day operations, security is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the job description for enterprise IT teams.