Louis Columbus

Louis Columbus

Louis Columbus has a diverse background that includes business strategy, marketing, product management, industry analyst, sales and technology leadership roles in start-ups and large-scale enterprises. He’s also an active member of the Enterprise Irregulars, a group of enterprise software analysts, bloggers, and executives. Louis also teaches graduate-level courses in business strategy and marketing at Webster and Loyola Marymount universities. He is a regular contributor to the Forbes.com as Enterprise Software Strategist and his own Software Strategies blog. Louis has published 16 books on a variety of operating system and software topics and spoken internationally on many aspects of cloud computing and enterprise software.

How the Internet of Things (IoT) is Revolutionizing Inventory Management

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August 16, 2024

The greater the speed, scale and accuracy of data collaboratively shared across supply chains, the stronger supplier networks become. The world’s best-performing supply chains, as defined by Gartner earlier this year in their annual Supply Chain 25 List, are all using digital transformation technologies including the Internet of Things (IoT) and predictive analytics in full production environments. IoT is revolutionizing every aspect of these world-class supply chains.

Louis ColumbusHow the Internet of Things (IoT) is Revolutionizing Inventory Management
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Current State of the CPQ Market

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August 8, 2024

CPQ strategies continue to bring greater accuracy and speed to every aspect of sales cycles, from pricing to product configurations. Considered to be one of the hottest areas of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), CPQ strategies are unique in that they provide unequivocal evidence of their value across an enterprise. The more complex the sales cycles, product configurations and channel selling structures, the more CPQ selling strategies pay off. Gaining greater insights into customer requirements and being able to quickly anticipate and act on their needs is essential for winning additional deals.  CPQ is the catalyst of sales growth many companies need to excel at, as every aspect of customer relationships is becoming more complex, faster and more context-driven than ever before.

Louis ColumbusCurrent State of the CPQ Market
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BI Adoption and Implementation Strategies

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July 31, 2024

In business intelligence, there’s an unusual paradox in BI software today. The market is projected to grow at a rapid pace for the next four years, but is currently lingering. Traditional factors that often lead to BI adoption success are starting to lose influence.

Today, relying on a VP or C-level executive to champion a BI initiative to success isn’t enough. What’s needed is a more coordinated approach across organizational, process and technological areas of a company’s BI implementation roadmap strategy to get the greatest value possible. To increase the probability of success for business intelligence adoption in an organization, it’s important to take into account a series of factors found from an organizational, process and technological perspective.

Louis ColumbusBI Adoption and Implementation Strategies
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5 Factors Driving Supply Chain, Inventory Management and Warehouse Management Convergence

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June 6, 2024

High-performance supply chains are the lifeblood of any company’s operations, and the cornerstone of strong customer relationships. Supply chains that excel at execution successfully orchestrate supply chain management (SCM), inventory management and warehouse management (WMS) systems to fulfill strategic goals. Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) customers now expect real-time responsiveness through any of the selling channels they choose to purchase through. By using SCM systems as the foundation to unify inventory management and Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), more companies can deliver real-time responsiveness and excellent experiences to their customers, through any channel, any time.

Louis Columbus5 Factors Driving Supply Chain, Inventory Management and Warehouse Management Convergence
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Exploring Supply Chain Technology Stack’s Inflection Point

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The progression from a series of integrated applications that support relatively simple supply chain processes and workflows to technology stacks designed to scale across global operations is accelerating. Application and infrastructure middleware and platform providers now have software designed just for streamlining the creation and fine-tuning of supply chain technology stacks. IoT spending is predicted to accelerate mainly as a result of supply chain technology stacks, as is the proliferation of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Louis ColumbusExploring Supply Chain Technology Stack’s Inflection Point
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Manufacturing Business Intelligence is Creating a New Era in Business Analytics

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Do you ever look around and realize we’re living in the future? Recent years have seen an explosion of new business technologies that feel like something from science fiction. This is especially true for the business analytics (BA) industry. Rapid gains in analytics, big data, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are fueling a new era of manufacturing business intelligence.

Louis ColumbusManufacturing Business Intelligence is Creating a New Era in Business Analytics
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Market Guide to Cloud WMS

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Supply chains are the lifeblood of any business, sustaining the ability to compete for new customers while fulfilling orders and commitments to existing ones. For any company to grow, they have to excel in every aspect of supply chain management (SCM), from planning and logistics to fulfillment and optimization, including warehouse management. The competitive intensity in every industry is growing, making supply chains and the warehouses that enable them more important than ever. In ever-increasing numbers, businesses have adopted cloud WMS solutions to improve their supply chains.

Louis ColumbusMarket Guide to Cloud WMS
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Building a Warehouse Management System Business Case

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All businesses put a high priority on making their supply chains efficient, economical and a strong contributor to profitable growth. The gains made throughout a supplier network are, at times, marginalized by inefficient distribution, storage and warehouse locations that don’t have a Warehouse Management System (WMS) in place, or are relying on one built for business requirements of the past. In high-performance supply chains, the WMS orchestrates every aspect of optimizing multiple warehouse locations, from receiving and storage to inventory management, order processing, shipping and Material Handling Device Control. In many ways, the WMS is the core of any supply chain and supplier network.

Louis ColumbusBuilding a Warehouse Management System Business Case
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