10 Things To Know About ITO: Determining if IT Operations Outsourcing is Right For You

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper offers 10 important things to know about IT operations outsourcing to help you understand the relevance of ITO outsourcing, determine if ITO outsourcing is right for your organization, evaluate outsourcing partners, and be aware of important factors that influence the success or failure of ITO outsourcing engagements.

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A Best Practices Assessment

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

The Best Practices Assessment ensures that people know what management think is right, and they have a series of recommendations for improving their business processes to achieve what is right. This implies that once the Best Practices Assessment is complete that the Best Practices are made known to all involved persons. A Best Practices Knowledge portal on the company Intranet, along with training how to use it effectively, is in itself a Best Practice.

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A Component-based Knowledge Management System

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper will define knowledge as ideas, information and the relationships between various ideas and information.

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A Targeted, Top-Down Approach to Sarbanes-Oxley Data

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

With the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley 404, CEOs and CFOs must attest to the data that appears on corporate financial reports. This paper describes a top-down, targeted approach to achieving confidence in that data.

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A Taxonomy Framework

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Taxonomies are classification schemes for things: concepts, objects, actions, and events. They are built using controlled language sets. The result is a single source of the truth and an unambiguous starting point for communications between groups or individuals who typically use different terms to describe the same or similar things. Most business architectures require multiple taxonomies. Initial iterations should start small, leverage existing efforts, and be built manually. Once they become large enough, taxonomies benefit from specialized tools to mine documents for taxonomy terms and to classify documents according to their content.

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A Taxonomy Roadmap

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Building a prototype taxonomy combines a classic pattern for software development with steps used to assemble information products.

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Achieving Best Practice Performance In Automotive Parts Distribution

A White Paper Prepared by RedPrairie and CIBER, Inc.

Globalization and structural issues have caused the automotive market to become more competitive than ever, with pressure to deliver increasing levels of service at lower costs. The companies that establish themselves as dominant players in this market will have a streamlined supply chain that can deliver extraordinary customer service levels. Additionally, the flexibility to handle a variety of value added processes as easily as standard processes will be a requirement for success.

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Actionable Data Governance: Talk is Cheap, But Can You Really Implement a Sustainable Data Governance Program?

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

There is so much written right now about data governance. Who needs data governance? In truth, some organizations (usually very small) do not need a robust data governance program. However, the rest of us do need to consider things like who is using the data, where is the data being used, and the accuracy of the data. Along with all those ‘data’ issues come business rules, data policies, and usage guidelines. Not the easiest endeavor – data governance!

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Agile Development Brings Benefits in Tough Financial Times

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Agile software development has become a mainstream practice that can reduce cost and accelerate revenue compared to traditional phased development methods. When the economy is in turmoil and budgets are shrinking, Agile can help an organization get more for every dollar of development spending. Experienced Agile teams are more productive than traditional development teams, resulting in more efficient use of people, the most expensive element of software development. An Agile Enterprise can gain significant competitive advantage by getting products to market sooner. All of these advantages can be explained in terms of Agile principles and practices. Experienced Agile Coaches can help ensure success when implementing Agile.

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An All-Domino Application for SQL-Like Querying of Notes Data

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Can you query a Notes database the same way you can an Access --- or Oracle, or DB/2 or Informix --- database? Can users choose a database, pick a "table," select fields, construct criteria, and get back a results set ready for analysis? For Notes as it comes out of the box, the answer is no. However, using an application created by Keith Nolen --- AllDomino Query --- the answer is yes.

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Are You Ready? An Emergency Management Perspective for Governmental CIOs

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Governmental CIOs often think of emergency readiness in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery for daily governmental processes. For IT departments at the state and municipal levels, however, disaster readiness requires much more than BC and DR. IT support during a disaster is a critical component of response and recovery operations and can easily make the difference between success and failure, as Hurricane Katrina so clearly demonstrated. The full range of IT roles in emergencies must be understood, supported and exercised.

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Best Practices for Assembling Integrated Taxonomies

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

What do you do if one group in your enterprise calls an apple an apple, another calls it fruit, and a third refers to it as produce? You need to create a collection of their specialized taxonomies -- their vocabulary sets and classification schemes. The price of failure can be great, since bad integration of data can be worse than no integration. Companies attempting enterprise integration should provide their knowledge workers with an Enterprise Meta Data Toolkit. Assembling this toolkit involves acquiring universal taxonomies if applicable, and collecting others from functional groups across the organization.

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Best-of-breed Warehouse Management Systems vs. ERP Applications: Is the Gap Narrowing?

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of best-of-breed and ERP providers and potential future trends in the WMS space. This paper provides the specific functionality, technology, and risk criteria you should consider to help you select the best WMS solution for your organization.

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Business Impact Analysis: Foundation For Operational Risk Management

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper explains the relationship of BIA to each of the elements of operational risk management (ORM). It describes the components and process of BIA, and demonstrates how BIA can be leveraged to drive ORM programs and expenditures. The intended audience includes organizational senior managers, operational risk managers, and functional managers.

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Business Intelligence Best Practices: Transforming Data into Information

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

The introduction of information technology systems decades ago helped organizations worldwide benefit from more efficient operations and greater productivity. Over the years, companies have acquired volumes of data in these applications, but much of this data is trapped in multiple, disparate systems which cannot easily communicate. As a result, firms must expend considerable effort to tap into the full potential of these data assets to strategically maneuver the business in a rapidly changing and competitive marketplace. The latest evolution in IT is “business intelligence,” which promises to help businesses better tap into and leverage their data assets. But what, exactly, is BI? How can it help? How is it implemented? And what can it do for your company? Essentially a primer on BI, this paper describes BI, how it can help you, and best practices to consider when launching or refining a business intelligence initiative.

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Conquering the Challenge of Global SAP Implementations: SAP Rollout Strategies and Best Practices

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Implementing SAP on a global scale presents many challenges and issues that require careful planning and preparation. This whitepaper provides strategies and best practices on how to proactively manage challenges that arise for an international SAP project. It also evaluates various approaches to template development plans and rollout strategies. This whitepaper is a hands-on guide, based on real-life lessons learned, that IT and business leaders can use to achieve successful international SAP implementations.

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Effective Application Outsourcing: The Importance of Provider / Client Relationships

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Success with the outsourcing of information technology to key service providers continues to elude some organizations. By examining commonalities found through multiple successful outsourcing engagements, conclusions about the definition of how the engagement is managed (governance) can be drawn and applied to future engagements.

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Ensuring & Maintaining Data Quality: Data Quality for Data in Motion & Data at Rest

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Businesses that apply mature Information Technology processes understand “Data Quality as the foundation of Business Intelligence”, and therefore are aware of data quality problems. At the same time, there is a common misconception that data quality is expensive and is not required through early maturity stages. However, this has the opposite effect of accumulating bad data in the operational data stores and data warehouses, which then requires a huge effort to fix. This whitepaper, useful for data stewards, enterprise architects, project managers, and IT executives, examines how the data quality problems arise even in the most controlled environments and the measures to be taken to ensure and maintain data quality in operational and data warehousing systems.

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Ground Rules of Conflict Resolution

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Conflict resolution will have a positive impact on the ultimate success of a project if effective steps are taken to ensure the productivity of confrontations. Steps for effective resolution involve establishing approaches specifically geared toward the encouragement and facilitation of differences between project team members. Encouraging employees to face conflicts and manage resolutions may well be the most important steps in a smooth and complete implementation project.

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Higher Education Disaster Readiness: Customizing Effective, Affordable Solutions

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

The increasing range and impact of threats to school systems today are driving the requirement for higher education institutions to provide more comprehensive and robust emergency readiness and response than has been expected of them in the past. There is much to be done to create emergency management programs that are effective.

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How a Managed Services Provider Can Help You Leverage Technology to Compete More Effectively

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Minimizing downtime while containing technology costs are ever more important in today’s global, web-enabled economy. Demands for around the clock service, rapid changes in technology and the difficulty of recruiting and retaining staff with the right skills and qualifications can be frustrating obstacles with negative cost implications. A Managed Services Provider, or MSP, can help mitigate these risks.

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IT Asset Rationalization & Shared Services Management

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Given the current global economic climate, companies are trying to run off the extra fat from everywhere. This includes IT budgets being squeezed and IT roles being switched to keep-the-lights running roles (operations instead of innovation). In this kind of ecosystem, it is no wonder that more and more IT initiatives are focused on bottom-line, and less focused on innovative top-line growth.

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IT Security Operational Maturity: Why You Need More Than Personal Heroism and Silver Bullets

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper illustrates the many business drivers shaping IT security, emerging risks, and the need to transform your security program into one that’s operationally mature. After reading this white paper, you’ll understand how to direct investments in your organization’s IT security program to achieve security results that are consistent, reliable, effective, affordable, and auditable.

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JDA MMS: Maximizing ROI and Getting More from the Same

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

If you are a retailer using JDA MMS, you are likely to benefit from some of the features discussed in this paper. You need to work with a partner that can help identify critical functions and make a feasibility study of implementing them end-toend. This white paper will help realize that you can do lot more with JDA MMS and explore unchartered possibilities and revenue opportunities.

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Lean Principles and IT Demand Management

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

IT spending level is typically based on historical or competitive benchmark levels. Given the current global economic climate many IT organizations face frozen budgets and cost-cutting efforts and this puts a squeeze on many innovative initiatives in the backlog. The only way for folks to get more done for less will be to plan and prioritize the IT portfolio based on strategic fit, business value, risk, and complexity.

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Managing Third Party Risk

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Some sources of risk that may not be top-of-mind include your service providers, web hosting services, contractors, outsourcers, supply-chain nodes, consulting services, and travel services—any number of outside entities having custody of or access to your sensitive information. If your extended enterprise includes these third parties, you need a way to manage this risk.

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Master Data Management: Managing Data as an Asset

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

With an increase in the pace of business, organizations have already built up Business Intelligence systems to aid efficient decision-making. Globalization and mergers and acquisitions have served as catalysts for organizations to realize the criticality of data and data integration. With this background, many organizations have begun to treat data as one of their key assets. This white paper explains how core business entities known as master data can be considered organizational assets and how to manage these entities holistically.

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Optimizing the Value Chain: Collaborative Customer Knowledge in Global Insurance

A White Paper Prepared by TowerGroup

Customer information, the foundation of customer relationship management (CRM), must be treated as a corporate asset that allows organizations to compete in a complex and rapidly evolving world.

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Organizational Alignment: Empowering The Business

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

The term Organizational Alignment brings to mind many different interpretations when spoken of in the context of an Information Technology (IT) organization. When applied to an organization as a whole, it addresses consistency of purpose and activity throughout the organization as a means to achieve organizational objectives. A similar context is true with respect to an IT organization except that an IT organization typically supports multiple parts of the organization, each of which each have their own strategies woven into a cohesive organizational strategy. When Organizational Alignment principles are applied within IT disciplines, resources create and deliver sustainable business value enabling business units to achieve their objectives.

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PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper is designed to provide an overall informational perspective of the implementation of PeopleSoft’s Enterprise Portal into an organization.

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Practical Considerations for Evaluating the Benefits of a Low Cost Country Sourcing Strategy

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Is low cost country sourcing still a viable alternative for domestic companies that are looking to improve their bottom line? It is imperative for companies to consider all of the financial and risk management factors in determining the best source for new and existing parts and components.

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Process Automation for the Procurement of Direct Materials

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This paper will present an analysis of a plan-driven procurement process for direct materials. This analysis includes not only the activities and steps in such a process, but also the data sets associated with each activity. Automation of this process will be explored to highlight where an organization can find process improvements that lead to positive impact on the bottom line. Several recent studies are referenced to identify the benefits companies have obtained by automating the plan-driven direct procurement process. Purchasing executives can use this information to analyze their own direct material procurement processes to determine what benefits might be obtained.

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Quantifying the Benefits of the Missouri Project Oversight Program

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

In June 2001, the State of Missouri, pursuant to the State’s project management strategic initiative, hired CIBER, Inc. to develop a project management oversight approach that would provide an efficient (low cost) and effective (proactive, collaborative, federated) means to oversee the State’s many important Information Technology projects. After several years of implementation of the methodology as developed in the Missouri Project Oversight Program on more than 11 different projects (seven Missouri, two Colorado and two CIBER internal projects), there have been numerous successes and valuable results attributed to the impact of CIBER’s oversight activities.

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Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in Supply Chain: Roadmap for the Future

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

RFID technology is one of the hottest topics for retailers, manufacturers, and other industries where added visibility and control over items in the supply chain can provide competitive advantage. In our white paper, we introduce the concept, explain how it works, and offer some ideas for how to put it to work in your organization.

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Realizing the Promise of Information Technology: Realigning IT With the Business

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper examines the complicated relationship between business and IT. It identifies specific methods executives can employ to align IT’s abilities with business goals to create greater competitive advantage at a lower cost.

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Reducing the Excess: Using Vendor-Managed Inventory to Improve Productivity Without Sacrificing Customer Service

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

In this white paper, we discuss several aspects of vendor-managed inventory, including the business drivers behind its increasing popularity, risks associated with VMI, and implementation considerations. In addition, we provide a case study of a VMI system recently implemented at a major auto parts distribution company for use with its customers (auto dealers). After reading this white paper, you will have a greater understanding of the “what,” “why,” and “how” behind VMI, and will be able to determine if VMI is right for your organization.

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RFID: An Introduction and Analysis of Gen 2 and SAP Auto ID Infrastructure

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Implementing RFID systems presents many challenges and requires careful planning and understanding of several different technologies. This white paper introduces RFID systems, RFID components, and the new EPC™ Class 1 Gen 2 specification, and discusses advantages of Gen 2 over Gen 1 protocols. The final part of the paper discusses implementing RFID using SAP Auto ID Infrastructure (AII) and integrating RFID to the SAP R/3 back end.

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SAP Supply Chain Execution Solutions: IM, WM AND EWM - Which Solution is Right for You?

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

There are currently three options available for the SAP user who wants to optimize warehouse processes, including inventory management (IM), warehouse management (WM) and the latest development, extended warehouse management (EWM). This white paper describes those three options to help you determine which option best meets your organization needs.

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Selecting a Warehouse Management System: Strategies and Tactics

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Learn how to leverage supply chain software to reduce costs, improve profitability and drive bottom-line results across your supply chain processes.

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Success Starts with The Vision

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

The companies with 20/20 vision at the start of the change journey are those that will travel well and arrive at the destination of successful, profitable benefit from the change. Addressing the “What, Why, When and Who” in strategic visioning, at the start of any organizational change initiative, is the required first step to acquire clear vision before the change journey. Well-executed strategic visioning mitigates the risks of initiating changes that sacrifice past experience, significant sunk costs, employee morale, and the company’s internal sense of identity.

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Successfully Implementing a PeopleSoft Financial Management System for a Department of Transportation

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper sheds light on how to centralize and standardize core business processes, and why CIBER can provide you with the recommendations and guidance that are distinct to departments of transportation.

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The 7 Stages of Highly Effective Data Governance: Advanced Methodologies for Implementation

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Data governance is gaining attention from companies involved in business intelligence and service-oriented architecture projects. There are many different levels of data governance maturity among firms, so this paper may be helpful for companies who want to learn more about data governance, who want to assess where they are in the data governance maturity model, and who want to identify what they must do to attain the next level of maturity and realize data governance benefits.

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The Devil Is In The Details: A Change Management White Paper

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper provides an overview of a practical and executable change management program with successful techniques that removes the 'devil' from change management and change resistance.

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The Five Key Ways Transportation Management Systems Can Rapidly Reduce Costs by up to 30 Percent

A White Paper Prepared by HighJump Software and CIBER, Inc.

Maintaining competitive advantage in today's demanding business environment requires continual process improvement and cost reduction. Many companies focus on transportation in an effort to control supply chain costs and help ensure timely shipments. Recently, however, effective transportation management has become more complex due to several industry trends.

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The Ongoing Debate

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

For many businesses the question is not whether to employ a distributed delivery strategy for IT services. The question is how to optimize the distributed delivery strategy to meet critical business objectives. Today, there are a myriad viable distributed delivery options.

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The What’s and How’s of ETL Architecture

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This paper is basically a high level description of a highly technical subject - Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Architecture. It is written for IT management and professionals to address and explain an area which often has been overlooked.

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Turning Brown into Green: Achieving Effective Business Process Improvement Using CIBER’s Brown Paper Methodology

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

Businesses do not launch software and business improvement projects because they have nothing better to do. They undertake them with the objective of creating incremental business value. The objective may be increasing productivity, improving customer service, gaining competitive advantage, reducing costs, or all of the above. Improve and align business processes with the organization’s vision, goals, and objectives and the desired results will follow.

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Using a Consultant in Warehouse Management Systems Software Selection: Prudent Choice or Waste of Money?

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

This white paper provides the business rationale for considering a consultant to help you with your WMS software selection. It also provides practical and tangible steps to develop a beneficial relationship with a consultant—from building a framework of responsibilities, to defining your costs, timelines, and deliverables to negotiating a contract and measuring results.

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Using Metadata and Taxonomies to Enable Enterprise Integration

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

To manage the risk inherent in enterprise integration efforts, the enterprise needs to be able to name and describe enterprise data. This requires a meta data strategy and approach. In determining the appropriate approach to managing structured and unstructured meta data, IT should look to successful approaches to integrating structured and unstructured data. The organization should consider a Meta Data Tool Kit that includes a collection of taxonomies – the classification schemes used for concepts and objects and the terms employed in those schemes. These taxonomies help knowledge workers from different functional groups, with different backgrounds and skills, to work from a single source of the truth.

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Voice Beyond Selection Extending the ROI Benefits of Voice Technology

A White Paper Prepared by Vocollect and CIBER, Inc.

This white paper explores the reach of voice technology beyond its birthplace in selection and into all areas of the warehouse. From receiving to put-away, to replenishment and line loading, voice technology can provide the ability to streamline processes, improve operational performance, and rapidly deliver the most compelling ROI.

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Warehouse Slotting Systems: Top 10 Most Frequently Asked Questions When Choosing a Slotting Package

A White Paper Prepared by CIBER, Inc.

As a supply chain systems integrator, CIBER is often asked about the benefits of warehouse slotting and slotting packages available (both integrated and stand alone) in the current marketplace. This white paper will address several of the most common questions posed regarding Warehouse Management System (WMS) slotting and slotting packages, and will provide answers based on CIBER’s 16+ years of implementing, integrating and supporting WMS and warehouse slotting packages.

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