ShortList Spotlight: OpenText Brings Integrations, Scale & Security to the DAM Party

Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement, and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI. With over 30 years of marketing experience, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation, and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform everything from…...

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Liz Miller talks Constellation ShortLists, unpacking the category of Digital Asset Management (DAM) for High Volume Commerce and its leading solutions. DAM has always represented the last mile of hashtag#technology that pulls everything together. It's where the intersection of planning, assets, documents, etc. can meet and be deployed. And in today's world, DAM has to be used everywhere and available at scale.

💡 Liz highlights OpenText as a leading DAM solution for usability, scale, security, and speed. Watch the full video to learn more about using OpenText in your vendor selection ?

Check out the full Constellation ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gnwk89qf

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript has not been edited and may contain errors.)

Liz Miller back again to talk more constellation shortlists. This one I'm going to tell you right now. This has to be one of my favorite categories, digital asset management for high volume commerce, and yes, one of the reasons why damn is one of my favorites, I get to say damn all the time, and no one's gonna scold me for cursing. Sorry, mom. But for me as a marketer, especially as a marketer that was working in any type of commerce field, damn has always represented that last mile, that last mile of technology that pulls everything together. It tends to be that intersection point of where all of your hard work and all of your planning for all of the assets, all of your creative, all of your documentation, all of your product renders, everything that you've done goes someplace can't just be in a big bucket.

Damn represents that place where all of your work meets all of that strategy and then can be easily deployed the new kind of what's different in dam today is that it has to be used everywhere. It has to be used everywhere, across the organization and in high volume commerce. That means some really interesting parts of an organization that's perhaps doing product renderings, prototyping, 3d modeling. You're dealing with people who come from across the enterprise and are dealing with very, very different assets. And all of those assets have a place, but they also have to be able to move at a scale that is churning what feels like every single day. And that's what makes high volume commerce a really interesting place to specifically look at, damn solutions. And I gotta tell you, there's like, 50 to 60 that I look at every single year for this specific shortlist, and it is everything from just simple content storage all the way to up to some of your most sophisticated and, quite frankly, complex solutions that are needed in a commerce setting.

So let's dive in. We're talking about scale. We're talking about usability. We're talking about integrations, integrations into tools that range from everything from your ERP, your supply chain, your warehouse management, you need to know every single thing that's going to be out there that needs to be cataloged, that someone may need an asset to go with, but you also need speed, speed and scale and flexibility, and that's why these solutions are really hard to list. And quite frankly, there's one brand I want to talk about, one vendor that for years, had been kind of the mainstay on the list, but in recent years, drop just below, just below that list that would appear on the shortlist.

And that's open text, and it's not they got bad. It's not that they were somehow not really worthy competition to all of these shortlist vendors. It's just a lot of new players that hit the market, and our executive network was really talking about those, implementing those and really enjoying them, but the call to reassess open text and to really take a deep dive into some of the new innovations that have been placed in the solution really became very loud and clear from a couple of our clients that said, listen, not only have I stayed with Open text, but I'm expanding what I'm doing with open text, so I want to dive into that and talk a little bit about that. Today, open text has been a mainstay, not only in content and content management, but also in asset management. There is a deep understanding as far as how to manage, maintain and support Asset Delivery, as well as asset organization and asset management, and that's really important.

But some of the things we really need to talk about when it comes to OpenText and some of the new, let's say, new mindsets as an organization, they have. The number one thing, integration, integration, integration. OpenText really understands that it is part of a much larger ecosystem, especially when it comes to its commerce clients. You are dealing with platforms and solutions that are not typically integrated and managed into, say, some of your other asset management or some of your other creative management solutions. This is a very different beast when it comes to commerce. And OpenText really understands that. But the number one thing interestingly that every person I talk to, every customer and every end technology user that's using OpenText, media management, it's got to be the integrations. It's probably the first thing everyone mentions to me that everyone who is creating within the organization, they might be doing 3d modeling. They might be doing product prototyping. They might be doing your traditional asset creation and creative asset development. Everyone is able to utilize and integrate easily and quickly into open text. So you might be in Photoshop one moment it was. Trader in the next you might be in PowerPoint, but you also might be in Premiere Pro. You also might be in texture. You might be creating massive 3d models. You are still going to be able to integrate quickly, reliably, and have the uptime and the scalability that you need to be able to pull your assets into the central repository. And let's also point out something really important here. The second thing everyone brought up to me was one word simplicity. There is a big difference between simplicity and simplistic. I bring it up a lot because it matters, right? You can't be simplistic in your tool can't just have a bucket someplace you stick things when it comes to high volume commerce brands, there is a demand there. There is a demand for speed and for scale. And OpenText gets it right with this all inclusive subscription pricing. Customers actually volunteered to me that there was never the sense they were going to get a gotcha invoice. We all know what we mean by that, right that the layers on unexplainable costs.

Why do I all of a suddenly have to play that? Yes, I know my storage got bigger, but the subscription pricing and the way that OpenText has structured a lot of their pricing and their availability makes sense to not only the CFO, but also to the Chief Digital Officer, to the Chief Marketing Officer, to everyone involved in this new CX, this new asset ecosystem. Everyone understands what the expectation is, and everyone understands where that invoice is going to be. And that is wildly important, especially when commerce can change on a dime. The other thing that's a differentiator, at least in my own analysis, is a lot of the AI models that are used here, I think a lot of times, especially in modern conversations, when we talk about dam, we really quickly get into a conversation around generative AI and asset manipulation, right? And yes, dams have to have that. You have to be able to personalize. You have to be able to use the right image for the right situation, for the right implementation, but you also have to be able to have standard data. You also have to be able to translate. You have to be able to have data standardization that is not just normalized, but it's also harmonized across all of your metadata, across all of the categorization, and if you're in high volume commerce, you know just how much that takes. Right?

Again, with Media Manager, you can extend a lot of these media support. And it's this limit, this idea of this limitless media support, that's so important that you can really extend well beyond, say, marketing assets or your product and your commerce assets you're looking again prototypes, Lydd models, complex video documentation, it allows you to think about your content and your assets differently. Do we really need multiple locations where we're putting all of this, or can we start to harmonize this so that the data that we're pulling into our system starts to grow and build, and in true AI fashion starts to actually make things like tagging, things like categorization, that much smarter and that much easier, because at the end of the day, we still have to think about damn as being that last mile to experience delivery, Whoever is having the experience our shopper, our retailer, our partner, our market, people, internal to the organization. It's supposed to be easy to use, and I think somewhere along the line, especially for a lot of damn solutions, we lost that idea and we lost that understanding, but open text has done a really nice job of bringing all of that back and bringing in innovations and solutions that feel purpose built for the setting that we're in. Because at the end of the day, we're really here to create profitable relationships with our customers and a lot of times and a lot of experiences. We have to do that through assets. We have to do that through what they see, what they hear, what they experience, what they're searching for. Does it make sense these AI models and all of these tools and the intention behind these actions from OpenText make me understand that. Yeah, they get it. They absolutely get it. But there's something else I want to bring up about OpenText that I think is really important, and it certainly weighed very heavily when I started looking at this short list, it's the strategy for the rest of the company.

In recent years, OpenText has put in a lot of investment into really becoming a security company. And for those of you who've heard me get on my soapbox before, y'all know I really love security, but it's super important when it comes to commerce and assets, when it comes to a damn. You don't want something that's just rule based, role based, oh, sure, people can't get in it. You want an organization that, to its core, fundamentally understands, respects and implements security, security measures that allow access, that allow that identity of the user who can. Get into the system, but also who understands what's getting into your system. So the fact that there are native aggression integrations across open Texas platform and its portfolio is really important, and it's really important for someone who is looking at a damn solution to look at security as a massive measure of what's important to bring into your organization.

So with that, hey, congratulations to OpenText, back on the shortlist, certainly back on that literal shortlist of solutions that here at Constellation, we recommend that executives start to look at to make that buying decision around solutions and complex solutions like dam for high volume commerce, just a little bit easier. You. 

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Ultra Tool & Manufacturing: The importance of IoT, automation

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights
Constellation Research

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research, where he leads editorial coverage focused on enterprise technology, digital transformation, and emerging trends shaping the future of business. He oversees research-driven news, analysis, interviews, and event coverage designed to help technology buyers and vendors navigate complex markets with clarity and context. ...

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Andrew Loescher, Ultra Tool & Manufacturing Automation Specialist, shares the importance of #automation and #optimization of the shop floor. Andrew is a SuperNova award finalist for Constellation Research and tells his story to Editor in Chief Larry Dignan.

View the full case study here: https://www.constellationr.com/node/33436/vote/application/view/1068

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Full video transcript (Disclaimer: this transcript is not edited and may contain errors)

Hi, I'm here with Andrew loscher. He's Ultra he's an automation specialist at ultratool and manufacturing. So first off, congrats on being a supernova Award finalist. Let's just start a high level. What does Ultra tool and manufacturing specialize in? Sure, ultra tool and manufacturing specializes in on time, high quality metal stampings, sheet metal stampings. We also build high quality tools for the stamping industry as well as we provide a full fabrication department for customers who are looking for smaller runs of sheet metal goods. We also have a value added department that can add nuts, bolts, weld parts of the sheet metal, parts that we stamp. And how large is the company? So we're about right around 100 employees. We're right around $28 million in sales per year.

Okay, so I know you were trying to, you know, scale things up and, you know what? What were your challenges in doing that and just sort of getting the data you needed to optimize? We really started the journey about four years ago now. So what kicked off the journey was really just hearing a lot of the talk about IIoT right away. We had some conversations with a company at the time called cores engineering. They were bought by Plex was bought by Rockwell, but so they provided a solution for us. But really, even before they provided a solution for us, they helped us really figure out how we could benefit from smart technology. Plant monitoring on the floor as I talked with representatives from at the time Coors engineering about what you know, plant monitoring in general, can do for you. One of the most powerful things that they had said at the time was really it can do anything for you. It just takes a team of people who have eyes on the floor, who can see what the problems are, the inefficiencies are. And once you really have that kind of mindset looking for those inefficiencies, there's there's always a tool, there's always a smart tool, or some logic you can build behind the scenes to improve those inefficiencies and save money.

So did you have any infrastructure in place to, you know, measure these processes and manufacturing in place to begin with? Or is that something that you worked with Plex to kind of just integrate some of our machines are fairly smart, at least the stamping presses. They have mountains of data that you could pull from them. They all are driven by industrial computers, PLCs and we had Plexis ERP ahead of time, so we kind of had these two pieces. We had the ERP was working behind the scenes, and we had our machines, but we didn't really have anything tying them together. So really, the first time, I personally looked into one of our stamping presses to figure out what data we could pull from it, I was I was pretty surprised and very excited to be honest about what we could get from that machine and feed into our ERP system, or just create a dashboard for our own visibility. So Plex really provided that that intermediate piece to connect our machines to our ERP system, and that that connection was mostly a software layer, yeah, mostly a software layer. I really all we had to add was switches in any of our older machines that didn't have them, and we standardized right away how we were going to communicate. So we had stamping presses that didn't even have a PLC, that were just built off and relays all the way up to a new, new servo stamping press that has, you know, way more technology than we'd ever look at or need to deal with. The presses kind of come with a monitoring system that we just upgraded those across all of our presses. So, so really seamless implementation, because we just really needed to upgrade those boards on each press and then connect an Ethernet cable and you're good to go. So how has this changed your processes, and how you go about optimizing keep. Biggest change for us was, again, just getting into a mindset of what were our processes that were inefficient, first of all, and prioritizing which ones we felt we could make more efficient with this, with this technology, and then getting people on board and train to deal with that. So right?

The first step in the process was just getting our key players, managers, supervisors, together in a room and just kind of having a roundtable discussion on what everybody's problems are, what if, what inefficiencies were there specifically right away related to monitoring and recording production on the plant floor and interfacing with Plex. So we were trying to take away anything that an operator had to do specifically in Plex manually so that they could focus on making parts. Really just took away some processes, to be honest, like recording production, scrapping parts in the system, and printing labels. Have you been able to tweak the processes from your learnings initially, I guess, how often do you go and kind of tweak how things are done? I would say, from an implementation standpoint, the Plex engineers that take on the implementation are very hands on, very thorough, also very capable and interested in training people within our company to tweak background logic and parts of the automated processes, especially with our some of our machines did require fairly custom logic. So what used to be called Mach two and a Plex automation and orchestration has a pretty, pretty good set of templates, logic, templates and things that they've built out to work for customers. But with some of our machines, there was quite a bit of custom, custom building behind the scenes. Their engineers helped out with but I kind of picked up the ball and was able to learn how to build that logic behind the scenes, which was really helpful for us, and I know it has been for other companies that I've spoken with, so that, you know, even little things here and there that come up, they're able to build additional logic, or tweak logic, or use some kind of history of transactions to make make the processes even better. What? Um, what have the returns been like? What?

What have been some of the benefits you've been able to quantify? Yeah, so right away, the ROI for me was really just in recording, production and printing labels. So just on our stamping floor alone, we have 13 stamping presses. 10 of the 10 of them are automatic. And some of those, some of the, some of the jobs that we run, I mean, we're making parts anywhere from really 20 up to 200 strokes per minute, parts per minute. So we have some people that are making, you know, hundreds and hundreds of boxes every day. So for that person, have to walk up to their computer and type in how many parts they've made, and then, you know, click through a couple of screens in Plex, which, you know, Plex is great, but it's still all extra work. So they're trying to record production, print a label, apply a label. And I would say, probably in at least a third of our jobs, they're stopping the machine to have to do all that. So now all of that is done, recording production, recording scrap, printing labels, all that's done automatically, so an operator just can walk over, quick, pull a label off, slap it on a box. So the return on investment. On that process alone, paid for, paid for the mach two product, but Plex ano product for us, just in one year's time, if we have all of our machines running on our shifts, and again, it kind of depends on the job, if it's if it's one where the press is stopping or not. So we're really saving money. We were seeing returns upwards of $48,000 a year just on label, printing itself and production recording. Now we're also planning on building, building a lot, quite a few other initiatives out. We have some pretty good ROI numbers for some additional logic that we built in house to track track setup time for machines, so if an operator z is struggling with a setup previously, we didn't really have very good real time visibility into that to have a supervisor go out and assist. So. Something maybe turned into a five hour setup on a machine, maybe a complex setup where now we can track what's going on there via machine statuses and send out the correct people to assist the operators so they can get a machine up and running faster. So we saw a really good ROI numbers on that as well, and decreased setup times because of that.

So the How long will this scale out take? We've had the product or about two and a half years now. We've just done stamping the build out, wasn't it was probably over a couple months. So our the way we did it was, let's roll this out on two machines to start out with. So we just get our feet, our feet go on, and we get people seeing how it's working. Because once you kind of build out the one or two machines, especially with us in our stamping facility, our presses are mostly the same. So we were able to build out just, really two, two machine templates that we could then apply to the rest of our presses. So after we had those two kind of done and taken care of and running well, an implementation for another one was less than a day. It's really just applying that template to another work center, testing it out for an hour or two, and then just kind of letting her rip. We do have, like I said, we have our full fledged fabrication department and a value added department with spot welders, welders press brakes, whole bunch of different machines that we also plan on implementing at some of those implementations will be simpler. For example, our spot welding machines, we plan on also recording production, and that's kind of already something we've done. So applying that to another work center is just a matter of really getting one piece of data from the machine. Hey, am I stroking up and down? But in addition to that, we have we have other initiatives that we are going to get going. We plan on building a dashboard to track cycles on all of our spot welders, so that we know how many times a consumable, like an electrode on a spot welder, how many hit sets, how many strokes it's made because they wear out.

So that can be a problem if we have, if we're not changing those in a certain time frame, then you might start getting bad parts. So now we can have a dashboard with real time visibility into how many, how many, how many strokes a machine has made, so that we can be proactive and change machine consumables when we need to. All right, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Larry.

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Workforce Management ShortList SpotLight: ADP

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the&nbsp;cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.&nbsp; Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization &amp; Innovation&nbsp; Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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As #enterprises face longer and more flexible working hours, they need help tracking time, scheduling attendance, and managing worker attendance. Leaders need tools to help their operational managers make better #workforce management decisions. #ai is also changing enterprise #automation substantially. Vendors need AI-based automation in the core workforce management automation areas – with tangible success.

💡 With this context in mind, Holger Mueller highlights his Workforce Management Suites ShortList and why ADP made the list! Watch below ??

View the full ShortList here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gVnH6M2t

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Video Transcript (Disclaimer: This transcript has not been edited and may contain errors)

Hello everybody. It's Holger Mueller Miller here from Constellation Research, here to speak to you about two things which are near and dear to my heart, which are the hard things in HCM and the things which make enterprise move farther faster. The hard thing in HCM is payroll and workforce management. We're going to speak about workforce management today, and we're going to start about constellation port lists. What are constellation shortlists? All about?

They are about us looking at a number of vendors in the space in the workforce. Managers paid about 30 or 40 vendors, which we typically speak at least twice a year. In many cases, like the ones on the shortlist, we go to their conference. We go to their analyst events. We speak to them almost on the monthly level. We help customers to select software and selection processes for their offerings. So we're very intimate, familiar depending on the frequency and popularity of the solutions.

So what is relevant for that is that it helps you as an enterprise, when you listen to us, to accelerate your software selection and enterprise acceleration is near and dear to my heart. It's my research area. How can companies become faster, move faster, become more agile, accelerate overall return, better shareholder value, create better employee experience, better customer experience. All these things are crucial part of enterprise. Explorations and shortlists are important part because you need to select software and be on top of that software.

So let's look of the shortlist which we published just in the space about workforce management suites, and let's look about what are the critical capabilities there selection criteria which we look into. So first of all, everybody has a strong time and tenants management, it's basically the building blocks of any workforce management solution. If you do not have that, then you're not able to run workforce management has to be complete, has to be easy to use, has to be mobile, has to be available for all employees and also gig workers. There has to be strong scheduling. That's where the rubber hits the road. If you don't have strong scheduling capabilities in a workforce management product, your managers will struggle, your schedules will struggle, not a good position to be in.

So this is why it's critical to have strong scheduling capabilities and at least three or more of the following five areas, workforce planning and forecasting, compliance management, reporting, payroll interface, because that's where and ultimately, your employee satisfaction hinges on and because you're no longer working with just normal employees, strong gig worker support. So additionally, there's geographical and adoption parts. There has to be support for more than four continents. It has to be more than six and a half 1000 customers and more than 2.3 million users, and everybody's working on a smartphone in 2024 everybody is having that in their pockets. Your employees and gig workers do that as well. So very strong mobile platform support is absolutely essential and critical.

So what are we talking about? One of the shortest vendors, and congratulations. Here is ADP workforce management. What is setting apart from full length criteria? What's setting ADP workforce management apart from a capability perspective compared to the other products which are also on the shortlist, and everybody has their own differentiators. So first of all, it has a strong full capabilities and time in 10s, as well as absence management, as I said, very critical to make it part of a working workforce management system that will legal the input box are really working, and they do for the ADP solution here, you have to have good enough scheduling, and scheduling is super critical to make basically workforce management really work. You have to support your managers and schedule as well to make this a successful offering overall. All the other components can be great. If scheduling doesn't work well, then it's critical ADP does good to very good scheduling in what matters also very much in a very modern, compelling user experience. And that is so important, because people don't want to spend too much time figuring out how to schedule things. They want to be able to use things right away and actually successfully. From that perspective, reuse templates, find people who are the right people, easy way of fashion.

And ADP has done, like in general, across the ADP solution, a very good job on the user experience for that which differentiates it compared to the other members of the shops. ADP has very strong labor forecasting, which is not a surprise to a certain point, because labor statistics are very close to ADP. ADP is better at many governments at forecasting labor trends because they have so much payroll data. And the integration of the two are very, very strong in terms of the labor forecasting capabilities in the ADP workforce management product. And, of course, table stake for ADP, nobody surprised, but still worth mentioning, one of the best, if not the best, payroll integration from all the workforce management products. That sums it up. From my perspective, what's also important is not. Forget it's not only about the technology, it's about the mix of people and technology. You have to get that right, select the right workforce management product, which we're helping you with.

The shortlist for Workforce Management. ADP is a very strong content out there. Check out the overall shortlist to have a look. I mentioned the differentiators for you, but you also have to think about the people on this so otherwise you won't be successful. This is Holger Mueller from Constellation Research. Thank you so much for watching. What you think about the shortlist? What do you think about ADB, workforce management? Please don't be shy. Reach out to me. Love to hear from you. Thanks for watching you.

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