31 Things of Due Diligence
Need money? This is a rhetorical question and one that seems to be on the mind of many business owners today. We keep it pretty simple in our consulting practice by studying common requirements of Chartered Banks, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, business acquisitions and mergers, the process of going public and there are 31 things that every one of these processes require and the more attention to detail you take on these things the higher your chances of getting funded.

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The Next Step to More Success - AMSI
You are a person who has worked hard, made good business decisions, you are making good money, you don’t have much debt, you have good customer demand, but you want more from your business. Living in the Calgary area where there are many oil and gas service companies, high tech companies, and other successful businesses, I see many companies that are making “good” money, but want to move up to the “great” money. I also hear, particularly lately with all our financial meltdowns, “I’ll never qualify for a loan”. That is a myth and if you have the roadmap in place you get the capital to take your company to new heights.

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The Responsibility Matrix (Circle Dot Chart)
Years ago I sat in a presentation by the best Project Manager I have ever met. I had worked with several people that ran multi-million dollar projects in the US Air Force and had delivered on-time, on-budget projects, but they all seemed to do so with great difficulty and I was resigned to this being “just the way it goes”, then I met Mr. Ron LeFleur. Ron made Project Management look easy, even though he had several horrendously difficult projects in his life. We had the distinct pleasure of sitting with Ron for three days and learning his secrets. At the end of his presentation he told us we had all his secrets and every one of us can now do the job just as well as he ever did. I still think he was special and gifted, but his little session helped me more than all the training and experience I had up to that point. I had even sat through extensive PM training in the Air Force which was the equivalent to PMP training that is available today.

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New AlwaysOn Network, ERP CRM SFA BPM
I just wanted to announce that we started a new network for AlwaysOn Network Members to Blog about Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Force Automation (SFA) and all things pertaining to automating our business processes. A few topics that come to mind are:

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ERP Should Make You Free
The very essence of a well designed ERP system is to free you from the dependencies of making all the mundane decisions over and over again and have the confidence that your system is helping you to run your business in the most efficient and profit producing manner known to man. I just finished reading an excellent article by Briony Smith of www.itbusiness.ca and it was a revelation, particularly for me as a person in the ERP business and providing ERP systems, consulting, and implementation services. The article is compelling right from the start with the following quote;

“A recently released survey of Technology Evaluation Centre  newsletter subscribers sponsored by Sliedrecht, Netherlands-based ERP company Agresso found that, out of the 900 respondents, 70 per cent feel their ERP systems put them at a disadvantage.”

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I have been working in the public information business for a while now and am very clear about privacy laws and just how sacred personal information is and how important it is to handle personal information very carefully indeed. The amount of information we are gathering about our customers and contacts is growing exponentially, probably because we can. If you only knew how much information is captured and actively used by Data Warehouses, Wal-Mart warehouse is at least 500 terabytes, according to an eWeek.com article I read, At Wal-Mart, World's Largest Retail Data Warehouse Gets Even Larger. Short answer to the question is no, but if you do collect information you better take very good care of it.

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Simple Formula: ERP = Instant Growth
This simple formula is a given for me as I build ERP systems for a living….but as I said this to a potential client the other day it kicked off a very interesting conversation and intense scrutiny of that claim and I will outline some of those discussions in this Blog. The reason why ERP is a “secret advantage” for big business is because they can afford it. Now with new software development tools, the internet, and a growing rank and file of users, the secret is out of the bag and it is ERP. I will now step off my soap box (no software pun intended) and get to the area of my concern. How can I best explain the advantages of ERP to the SMB owner who wants to grow to the next step and has exhausted all other avenues?

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Building Bridges to Your Islands of Data
It wasn’t too long ago that data and information were completely isolated to office buildings and peer to peer connections. Some in the industry call it a “data silo”. Over the last few years many data mining and business intelligence systems have been completely liberated by becoming web enabled. I was recently speaking with some government officials about creating a “super database” or as my colleagues in the business intelligence world call it, a Data Warehouse. The super database will likely be a very large and complex database, but the very idea of making this data available to people who need it to keep track of high risk energy pipelines is compelling. What better way to make sure that we don’t have an accident that could harm our population, harm our environment, and interrupt our flow of energy.

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Why Do We Need ERP and Business Process Automation?
Somewhere along the line we started talking about "Serious Businesses". I can remember clearly the day we decided to write this on our website and brochures, we were trying to reach out to those companies that were ready to take the next step. Let's face it, we are all "Serious" business people so this comment was not meant to slight anyone or the way business is conducted, it was meant to make people stop and assess their choices and decisions they are making in everyday business. There comes a time when the business starts to be larger than the people who started it and requires multiple people working together, sometimes in multiple locations, multiple time zones, and it just begins to press us to seriously consider how to make our lives easier and to be able to grow our business with more profits. So having said that I would like to make a case for a few of the reasons why we need ERP and Business Process Automation.

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