Managed Services Many businesses are led to believe that there are only three options (outlined below) available to support your EnterpriseOne implementation. We offer a fourth option: Aellius Managed Services - a holistic approach that blends the best features of the below three options and tailors services to what you define as your business-critical processes. All services are performed remotely over a secure VPN, and we function as an extension of your business applications department. Our goals are to maximize your uptime, monitor your business-critical processes (and provide long-term fixes where necessary), automate repetitive CNC tasks, and provide a cost-effective way to keep highly skilled technical professionals available to you after your initial implementation is stable. We have in-house tools, including Aellius LynX Monitor, which can be configured to make sure the appropriate personnel at your location are alerted (via email) to conditions that you define as crucial, thus keeping you in the loop while we are working on any issues that may arise. For example, you may want to have someone alerted when a certain type of report has been waiting to run for a certain amount of time. Typical contract terms are 2 to 4 years, and pricing is based on the complexity of your software and hardware environments. In addition to providing services around your EnterpriseOne needs, we offer (as an add-on) support services around our Aellius LynX products. For a free quote, please contact us. The other three options are: 1. Hire and maintain full-time IT staff and keep all support in-house

Pros:

You maintain complete control.

Cons:

It is nearly impossible to hire resources that meet all of the required skill sets necessary to maximize your uptime. Assuming that you are lucky enough to find the right people with the magic blends of skill sets while staying within your budget for FTEs, you will find a few more significant hurdles: keeping them trained not only on JDE but on all of the requisite software and platform-related skills and surviving without any one of them when they attend such training, take some well-deserved vacation time, or have unplanned absences. Also, it is never advisable to have upgrades performed by in-house staff. JDE upgrades are far more complex than most upgrades, and may involve coordinating upgrades of other software at the same time. The types and numbers of objects changed and replaced during such upgrades varies, and there are always some development and functional tasks that must carefully be coordinated. Unless installing and upgrading JDE is one’s full-time job, it will be next to impossible to anticipate what items may go wrong (which consultants will likely have seen at other install/upgrade sites) and there are other aspects to consider (such as project management, testing business-critical processes, etc.) with every upgrade and service pack.

2. Retain on-site consultants perpetually

Pros:

Assuming that your implementation went smoothly, these resources are quite valuable and likely know your business, your staff, and your hardware and software intimately.

Cons:

This is majorly expensive and often not sustainable forever. Also, it may be quite challenging to find the one person (or even two) who possesses the right level of expertise and blend of skills (everything from functional application support to CNC to upgrading to development outside of JDE) so that all projects are thoroughly analyzed and designed to meet your specific needs and still completed as efficiently as possible.

3. Completely outsource (ASP and/or off-shore) this function

Pros:

You will be relieved of the day-to-day tasks and the perpetual training necessary to keep your uptime maximized. The burdens of security and disaster recovery will be on someone else’s head. You may (or may not) save money, depending on your specific needs and the contract terms.

Cons:

You may run into problems with “cookie cutter” solutions and/or inflexible contracts. There will be one or more extra layers of communications opportunities, depending on how the ASP staffs. Also, you are unlikely to be assigned a primary and/or secondary support resource and may find it frustrating to be one of many clients a given support individual prioritizes help for on a particular day. It may also be challenging to ensure that each person you deal with at the ASP knows the nuances of your business and what processes you have defined as business critical. You will likely have your software installed on a shared server (i.e., different clients installed on various partitions of the same server). Another potential downfall: short-term fixes or (“band-aids”) may be applied to repeat issues, when thorough diagnosis and long-term resolution would better suit your needs.