In this first issue of Business Applications Digest, find advice from industry insiders on mastering the five success factors for enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrades, choosing the best fit between 'best of breed' business intelligence (BI) and built-in ERP tools, and how to take advantage of the latest Software as a Service (SaaS) trends. 

See how midsize companies around the world are reducing costs, creating more accurate reports, gaining deeper insights into their businesses and improving productivity and efficiency with IBM Cognos Express, the powerful, integrated reporting, analysis and planning solution purpose-built for midsize businesses. 

This eight-page Buyer's Guide on Business Intelligence analyses the factors CIOs and senior IT professionals will need to consider as they plan their BI strategies. 

This paper examines the relationship between business and IT groups within the typical enterprise and explores how the implementation of a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) allows both groups to find common ground. 

About 50% of companies have an application performance monitoring (APM) system in place, and those that don't are likely losing customers and revenue. Quest Software has made vast improvements to its Foglight APM line, including supreme simplicity and virtualization capabilities. Read this and learn about the research behind these advancements. 

This brief paper outlines how Cognos FSR automates and streamlines the financial statement reporting (FSR) production process by gathering and connecting information from a variety of sources to construct an application database of all of your data. Learn how to overcome the challenges of scalability, process accuracy, increased workloads and more. 

Learn how important it is to address the different BI needs of your business constituents, so they have insight when and where they need it. 

This paper highlights the results of a study commissioned to derive what business execution practices are actually driving shareholder value. Read this now and learn why companies that aligned its goals, rated users on the achievement of them and leveraged business execution software to increase their execution achieved elevated stock returns. 

Empower your organization with a full range of financial capabilities, relevant analytics and metrics, and fully auditable process management. See how Workday enables detailed drill-down analysis through multiple dimensions for quicker and more informative insights. 

In this e-book experienced technology writer, Lauren Gibbsons Paul shares her insight on utilizing BI in the manufacturing field. 

Read how Mercury’s users can now create the most critical reports that they were previously relying on a Legacy Reporting Platform to produce. These include sales commissions, weekly sales, a rolling 12-month sales report, and an inventory summary report. 

Read about how Mayflex used IBM Cognos Express to replace a complex spreadsheet system, improve time-consuming budgeting and forecasting processes, compare actuals against budgets at various levels and save time for end-users through automatic system updates.