On a personal note. I will be speaking this Friday at The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) Conference in Las Vegas on the subject of Process Improvement and ERP--Making the Investment Pay off, Finally! I am a last minute substitute for my friend, Dick Kuiper, of AQA Research, who put together some excellent material on the subject. Now I get to go and deliver it. Here's the abstract:

Process improvement and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) should go hand in hand. But many times, it is difficult to connect the two--in fact, the majority of ERP systems implemented over the past 5 –10 years have failed to deliver on the promised benefits for this very reason. Organizations must deploy a solid process improvement strategy if they want to realize the benefits of an effective ERP system. ERP, being a set of business processes that build upon process improvement initiatives, enables companies to dramatically improve customer service and productivity, both internally and externally, while sharply lowering costs and inventories. This session will assist the participant with identifying process improvement initiatives while planning an ERP implementation or re-implementation endeavor.

This is normally where I would invite readers to register and attend, but the conference is already sold out.