IT systems are part of the gender pay gap problem With digital process optimization and automation, they can also be part of the solution The gender pay gap is a news item that’s not going away. And that’s for very good reasons. Equal pay matters for commercial and economic prosperity and productivity, as well as […]

As we sit in the middle of the next serious virus, Covid-19, questions about how to approach this outbreak come flying in from all sides.  Many people are rightly concerned, but how do we quantify the situation? If you listen to the pundits, who are paid to scare you, I’m sure you read this article […]

How Liam Neeson got me to program my first bot Doug Erb It was the Super Bowl in 2015 and Liam Neeson is on a commercial promoting a game that my children had been playing a little. I enjoyed playing games when I was younger, and thought this one looked interesting, plus my kids wanted […]

Automating at scale: can you see the big picture?  Why some organizations live to regret starting small with RPA By Gautame Vasista At the start of the RPA journey, most organizations tend to focus in on individual processes, or even a part of a process. First stage RPA projects typically have a small scope, investigating […]

Best foot Forward at UiPath’s visionary ‘Reboot Work’ event 7 highlights from UiPath Forward III, October 14-16 2019, Las Vegas We’re just about recovered from the high-energy, high-inspiration three days we spent at UiPath’s Las Vegas conference. What a gig it was! We met some amazing people, shared our views with peers, tech specialists and […]

Automation raises ethical questions for HR leaders That’s exactly why they need to nurture their specialists We spotted a thought-provoking article in Personnel Today, the UK’s leading free-access HR website. It considers the implications of automation and AI on the workplace and highlights the possibility of undermining equality and gender pay principles when bias becomes […]

Meet the people who’ll make your RPA happen Tech skills are just a small part of what they need to be effective RPA jobs are big news for IT people, from high school leavers to senior level transformation specialists. CIO community The Enterprisers Project published an article this week that articulates the growth in RPA […]

We had a blast this week on our stand at Intelligent Automation 2019 in Chicago, USA. The appetite for RPA and robotic operations is huge and we were busy from morning to night talking to customers and partners about how they could apply RPA to their critical business processes. There were some real lightbulb moments […]

The discipline of HR is of course a very personal one. It’s about attracting, retaining and sustaining workforces to get the best from them. There’s a reason why more and more organizations are appointing People Directors rather than HR Directors. Very positively, the focus is more and more on understanding and serving individuals and groups […]

Trying to explain RPA to co-workers or budget-holders? Here’s a simple example that should open their eyes to its transformative power for your business. The RPA bot chews 45 days out of this process – and the step by step comparison spells out exactly how.     Want more irrefutable evidence and concrete examples? Download […]

While we’re evangelical about the benefits RPA can bring, we’d be the first to counsel that it takes careful planning and an informed approach if you want to drive maximum value out of the technology. So we say bravo to Forbes’ Naveen Joshi, for his excellent and well balanced article Leverage RPA, But Plan For […]

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is getting in on the RPA act. One of its leading hospital trusts has just launched a Centre of Excellence to promote use of RPA technology. Robot surgeons it is not. In fact the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Foundation NHS Trust has more prosaic but no less important goals […]

Here are the headlines from Gartner’s Market Share Analysis: Robotic Process Automation, Worldwide, 2018 (published June 2019.) The RPA software market grew 63.1% in 2018 to USD 846m It’s the fastest growing enterprise software sector RPA is growing along industry and functional lines Legacy systems integration is a key driver for RPA adoption Digital transformation […]

According to the Sales Management Association’s report, Salesperson Retention and Turnover, “Businesses retain just 71% of salespeople annually, on average.” You don’t need the HR Director to tell you the exact numbers: every business manager knows that attrition and high staff turnover eat into profits, slow down productivity and damage morale and company culture. So […]

October 16-17, 2018 | 590 Madison Ave | New York, NY When: Wednesday 9:30am Speakers: Tim Rassette – Information Technology Manager – Sprint Rebecca Rodriguez – Director of Services – Lanshore Join Lanshore as we dive into how to Architect the system of the future and how to ensure you allow for holistic reporting and […]

TORONTO – June 11, 2018 – servicePath, a leading provider of configure-price-quote solutions for Managed Service Providers and other technology companies, announced today that it has partnered with Lanshore LLC, a reseller, implementer and managed service provider of Sales Performance management solutions. “We are very excited that Lanshore has chosen to partner with us for […]

Phones have become an essential part of everyday living, we may try to deny, but most of us are completely reliant on them and probably everybody you know has one. With this massive increase in phone ownership, over the past 2 decades  a very competitive market has developed. The combination of numerous network packages coupled […]

The Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle took place on May 19th, 2018 4:00 am PST and 29.2 million Americans were awake to watch the ceremony. The Royal Family is constantly watched for their public and private affairs, and this event was no exception. Every detail of the day and ceremony was thoroughly […]

I sit in a room with a high-profile company and customer.  Listening intently and asking them relevant probing questions.  As the customer describes the process, journey to this point, and the pains it has caused, I notice something out of the corner of my eye.  It’s a young woman with a closed notebook, on her phone […]

Should we increase commission on a new product that we have in our offering to see if this will correspond to an increase in revenue and what will be the underlying cost of our projections? Pretty simple question, yet I bet if I asked for the proof behind the answer, it would take a fair […]

For a fleeting few months, I thought we were all doomed.  I had just gotten back from a conference (Money 2020) in which there were a physicist, various owners of companies and many brilliant engineers.  The first day of the conference I sat in awe, listening to what was happening with machine learning.  How we […]

With the Winter Olympics in full swing, we’re sticking to this theme for our blogging – this time looking at what a person might consider if someone tells them they are skating on thin ice.   The phrase ‘you are skating on thin ice’ typically brings images of imminent disaster. Figure skaters are always skating […]

Wayne Gretzky Yet another famous quote from the greatest hockey player of all time – Wayne Gretzky.   Okay, but what does skating and a puck have to do with anything you do in business?  Perhaps you don’t play or understand hockey so why would you even care about such a quote. “I am a busy  […]

So would I rather go zip lining in Costa Rica or spend time working on the topic of Sales Performance Management? I think you already know the answer hands down.   Ziplining in Costa Rica is awesome, and I can’t wait to do it again.   Okay, so with that said, how is ziplining in Costa Rica […]

Regardless of the Sale Performance Management system you implement there is typically a period of post go live support.   If you use a third-party integrator it could be as short as the warranty period covered by your Statement of Work once the system is stood up in production.  If your implementation project team is in […]

Last week we just finished covering the user acceptance testing stage so the next step is to cover is how do we actually go live with the sale performance management system.   The stage that gets us there is the deployment phase.   Like many other phases, work on this stage actually starts before the preceding one […]

Okay, we are at part five of our seven-part series on Project Management in the Sale Performance Management Space.   We Scoped, Designed, and Built/Configured our Sale Performance Management solution, now we turn our attention to the User Acceptance Testing.   If we have done everything correctly up to this point then executing the User Acceptance Test […]

Last week we covered Design and in the weeks before that we discussed Design, Discovery, and Pre-assessment/Scoping / Kick Off, this week we are going to cover Build/Configure/Unit Test  The Plan The rules/formulas were worked on in design stage.  It is one thing to write the words down in a design document or even read […]

Last week we covered Discovey and the week before that we discussed Pre-assessment/Scoping / Kick Off, this week we are going to cover Design At this point the project team has asked the probing questions – now they need to communicate it back to the client and let the client know what the project team […]

Okay last week we covered Pre-assessment/Scoping / Kick Off, this week we are going to cover Discovery. This is the brain dump.   You want to get everything out of brains of the existing system users and future stakeholders, and try to ensure you know what they expect you to build for them. Questions, Questions, and […]

  Okay you have chosen a compensation management package to implement in your organization, now comes the part where the rubber begins to hit the road.   You have plans you want to implement, you have numerous employees who you want to motivate, track performance on, and compensate.  You have transaction data available that you want […]

We at Lanshore LLC have done a lot of implementations of Sale Performance Management systems over the years so we decided to share a little of the insight we have gained over that time. We will be breaking this insight into a seven part blog series that tie into the main areas of any project […]

 It’s time for this business owner to break out the pen and paper and start writing.  The summer is upon us and unless you’re in the travel industry, your sales have probably slowed down a bit. That deal you were going to close in Q2 just pushed because the prime contact decided to go on his […]

Lanshore LLC, a Houston TX based organization, has acquired its first round of funding by Third Coast Bank. Lanshore, a rapidly growing Value -Added Reseller for Sales Performance Management Solutions, is happy to announce this new venture with Third Coast Bank, SSB.  This funding will enable Lanshore to accelerate its already rapid growth. Mark Warne, CFO […]

In today’s fast paced world of international globetrotting, to meet the constantly shifting needs of the client, one wonders if climate change even comes into the equation when selecting the right consultants or consulting companies to get the work done. I am not here to preach that consulting companies or their clients must be carbon […]

Did you know that according to the website savetheamericans.org, 1 in 4 Americans get no paid vacation 59% of American feel vacation deprived and Americans leave over 5,000,000 vacation days unused I was in the movie theater early last week to watch the last installment of the Star Wars story (Rogue One) and prior to […]

“Half of Figure Skating is Opinion, convincing judges.” –  Scotty Hamilton Olympic Gold Medalist.   Okay, so you may say what does that have to do with Sales? But this quote could be applied to the sales process.   Their reality is that if you are working on a Sales Prospect, you can do a ton […]

In case it has escaped your notice, there is an election in the US, we are surrounded by a storm of campaigning. We all have our opinions on politics, social events and other people. Many people take to social media, television and the bar to promote their opinion. Having that opinion is perfectly fine and is everyone’s […]

Successful ICM project? Its all about data… We have been having an internal discussion, what are the most critical aspects of an ICM project, the differences between success and failure – Teamwork? Executive sponsorship? Architecture? Reporting? The view of our most experienced ICM project managers; it’s all about the data. Customers buying an automated ICM […]

Lately I’ve been hearing and reading a lot about work-life balance. I think this is a concept the majority of working adults struggle with, add more pressure if you have a family or if you are still on an educational path. I personally catch a lot of heat from the people around me about failing […]

I am writing this blog with a very serious look on my face, after all, I am supposed to be working on fixing a myriad of issues and demands that I am painfully aware will not be possible. But when the room’s mood is grim and somber, you can’t be jolly-eyed and bushy-tailed, you know? I feel […]

I usually write about sales, how to make improve performance etc. Today I’m going to take a slight departure from that, to my personal experiences and a lesson I would like to share. I’m sitting here writing this blog, whilst listening to “in the living years” – quite possibly the saddest song ever written, for […]

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take – Always keep shooting for your goals but preparation prior to taking the shot is important too. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”, is a famous Wayne Gretzky quote.   While it is hard to argue with the logic that you cannot score a […]

Sing along with me “I was born in a small town”, we all know that John Cougar song.  I spent the last two weeks in my small town that I grew up in, Highland Indiana.  I walked down the streets with my trusted companion Spot and took in the small town air.  I saw my […]

I have a lot of discussions about ‘wanting to be a team leader’ or ‘wanting to be a project manager’ or simply wanting a pay rise. In nearly all cases the conversation comes round to that person’s contribution in their current role – How have they performed? What have they done that increases their chances? […]

Robots and automation seem to be making everyone obsolete.  Some of us will remember the Terminator movie with Arnold or the Matrix, which predicted such events.  Even recent thinkers, who are on the forefront of technology and brilliance like Hawkings, Musk and Gates, question the power and impact of artificial intelligence.   I sat with a […]

After reading ‘Shine’, ‘Drive’ and an assortment of other books recently, about commissions and motivation for my white paper, I have come to some interesting theories, some of them more general and some on the subject of motivation. My first observation is that in order to write a book, or have an opinion on employee […]

The ‘Internet Era’, or whatever this period will be named in future times, has resulted in a seismic shift in our working environment.  People can do and access almost anything from a system perspective, remotely (if we disregard the bane of my life, company security access considerations). We have conference calls, Skype, Facetime and a […]

You read this occasionally and hear it discussed in industry events, that commission in it’s current form, the carrot for performance is dead.  In the UK, you can’t even say the word commission without getting evil looks like you offended the Queen.  In the states, it’s subtler, but more studies come out from places like […]

We wake up every day going to work, meeting people, acting important.  Some of us manufacture drama to get us through the day.  Is it imperative that we find meaning in our jobs?  How do you find meaning in commissions, and being part of that team?  How can we make our job interesting, and does […]

“Improving the Bottom Line”, “Increasing Sales”, “Embracing Social Media” – I see countless articles on making the work place more productive, increasing turnover and general performance. I see few articles on making the most out of our best resources – our people. Even less is written about a subject close to my heart: harnessing the […]

Another case of events in my personal life making me think of useful lessons in my professional life. While helping my son do his homework, some editing needed to be done.  Not wordsmithing, but actual editing of video they had taken (budding actors everywhere this day).  Luckily one of the children that came to do […]

I’ll start this out with I am the very proud father of 3 boys. Recently I have been really made to think by middle son, Thomas, who seems to have a budding desire to become an entrepreneur.  Tom came to me a week ago, asking several questions on business in general and how to sell […]

In most companies, the need for a CPQ is driven by the desire to produce quick and accurate proposals. The ability to move quicker than the competition helps to establish a perception of responsiveness to the needs of the prospects . If that responsiveness is coupled with a smooth proposal and contractual process which ensures […]

Today I would like to talk about why people fail to use their CRMs. First of all, it is a known fact that internal CRMs are viewed as a Big Brother of sorts, they are perceived as a way for upper management to keep an eye on everyone within the sales department. More often than […]

“What do you do when the price of a barrel stays below 42?” a CIO’s Survival Guide to Long Term Low Oil Prices Exploration and Production Companies as well as Midstream companies of all shapes and sizes are having to adjust to the realities of Long Term Low Oil Prices (LTLOP) . Participants in the […]

More than four years ago we met with some experienced business advisors and they suggested that, as we at Lanshore were a start up, we ought to focus on one industry and then expand into other, complementary areas.    At the time, we had two verticals we wanted to work in because our management team and […]

The 4 point report writing guide Although a report within ICM systems can be one of the most powerful and useful tools, if you don’t use it correctly, it will be useless. I have outlined below several key points to include when considering a report build. Priorities When building a report, having a detailed knowledge […]

I’ve been seeing reports of global economic meltdown and that we should all prepare. A lot of us remember the disaster of 2009.  At that time, I was part of a company, which was losing substantial amounts of money and had no sales pipeline in sight. We had one client, and that customer was tenuous […]

In my experience, there are two key things that affect organic end user adoption: convention & delivered value. I have seen many technically elegant CPQ implementations that have suffered low user adoption because the convention adopted is unfamiliar to the end users. For example, imagine a project led by the IT department for laptop sales. […]

It’s Friday 2:30 p.m. and the phone is in your hands:  What’s her phone number? Her birthday? Coffee or tea? Patriots or Broncos? They seem like a typical teenager’s questions on his first date, but they could also be important snippets of information to have handy when calling the CEO of your best client. This […]

I have always tried to follow the principal of K.I.S.S.. However, it is not always as easy as it sounds. There are situations that call for more and even times where we all forget to try the simplest and most obvious solution. Why do we tend not to see what is staring us right in […]

Before going into models for sales forecasting, there is key point which must be considered. Are you producing a sales plan or forecasting revenue that will be closed? The reason for asking this is that, in my 20 years of experience of working in this area, many companies seem to confuse the two. What they […]

  I have been implementing Commission software for around 16 years now, and seen a fair amount of implementations with different software packages.  There are some general things that happen, regardless of the space-time continuum in these projects.   You have to know what you’re calculating. What you want to show people. And how to […]

I was going through the book store today and came upon a book that I had always been interested in getting.  The book “The New New Thing”, by Michael Lewis, is a book about the rise of Silicon Valley.  This isn’t a blog about the book per se, although I’m sure one will come up […]

We are at that time of year when we reflect on the past year and think about the future.   For businesses that means planning and change.  For people, it might mean some of the same.  That is not what this blog is about.  I wanted to single out some of the nicest acts of kindness […]

How do we make things easier: Ok, so you want to make life easier for your salespeople, and more importantly, get past some of the issues we discussed that their lack of interest in entering deals can cause. Since we are going to discuss making things easier for them, I will skip over concepts that […]

The administrators of systems that require data entry by sales people loathe the overachiever. We all know this person, they blow their quota out of the water, go to countless club trips, and make a wad of money that would make Al Capone turn over in his grave. Yes, this person gets praise heaped upon […]

Every year, every month you see it happening. A company is frustrated with their existing software plagues us all. It starts with a few minor glitches, maybe an outage. Maybe you go further back, to the implementation which took longer than expected. Whatever the case, there was a seed of discontent that was planted and […]

Having done many implementations of Commission systems, we’ve found that one of the most prevalent reasons people implement has to do with clarity of commissions. Most feel like their sales people walk around all day not having a clue how or why they got paid what they did. I suspect this has a lot to […]

Mark Twain is quoted as saying that “History never repeats but it often rhymes”.   Whether history repeats or it rhymes, it is historical data that is causing many energy trading organizations to take a look at Predictive Analytics. So, what exactly is Predictive Analytics and why do we care about it when we think about […]

Doug Erb to present at AA-ISP’s  Insides Sales Commissions: What Color is Your Carrot? Most inside sales resources are coin operated to a certain degree. With that, one of the main levers that you can move up and down to try to motivate action and maximize moral is the commission structure that you put in place. […]

After sitting down with a recent customer, looking at how to determine ROI for one of these number crunching, report building systems, I thought I would write this blog. The intention here is that there are several points that an organization can look for ROI. I will describe, in some detail, what I find to […]

With large projects in the US ramping up, and many of the Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) vendors continuing to have brisk sales in the first half of 2015, it begs the question: where have all the true ETRM experts gone? By ETRM experts I don’t mean the “Johnny come lately” types who entered […]

These days it seems like when people aren’t spending their free time trying to figure out what the Cloud really means to them and their organizations, they are spending the rest of their time trying to determine what “Big Data” will mean to their organization and to them. Okay, maybe that is an exaggeration but […]

In an earlier blog I talked about Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs).  They are of course they are a tradable contract instrument that represents the generation of 1 megawatt hour (or 1000 Kilowatt-hours) of electricity, as long as that generation is from a renewable source.  RECs are interesting from the point of view of the additional […]

We have seen it coming for some time now, we knew that many of the big banks were making plans to reduce their footprint in the commodities markets thanks to increasing regulatory pressure.   The banks used to be big consumers of Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) systems and services. In the ETRM space we […]

Every company in the sales and commissions world needs data in order to create their annual sales plans. How much are they selling? How much was sold in certain state or country? Which product had the major acceptance in the market? Which sales representative sold the most? How can we compensate our sales force based […]

For those of you working in the U.S. Energy sector, you already know that not everyone agrees about climate change and what is or is not causing it.   It is not my intention to weigh into the controversy about climate change, but one of the important outcomes from this debate has to do with the […]

I’ve been part of product demos and watched them. This is an obvious game of cat and mouse. As a software vendor, if you are any good, you are doing your best to keep in constant contact with the customer. This will help you devise a demo that looks and feels exactly like what the […]

Throughout history, developing a brand new territory to establish a commission’s plan has been a challenging task for the Sales Department of all companies. With the advent of international trade agreements and globalization, the customers have been scattered to remote locations. Those remote sites might be in different cities, states, or countries. Sales representatives have now many different […]

Usually you will develop your Sales Performance Management system scorecard off questions you submit in your RFI and RFP, if you chose to go that route. There will be some more in depth questions and examples that you will have that might have not been included in the RFI/RFP documents and they will have a […]

When selecting and implementing a Sales Performance Management system there are many critical steps in the process.  In this blog I will cover what is the most essential step: the stakeholder buy-in.  Why is this most important step you ask?  Well, without the interest of this group the project is destined to fail.  I remember […]

I keep hearing how irritating it is to get call after call from unsolicited people known as “Cold Callers”.  How people have logged into national “do not call” registries.  That it does more harm than good to get a call in for a company… Enter the social revolution, it will make you a billion dollar organization…Or […]

Often you hear about lead response time.  This refers to the time it takes for a new lead, be it web or some other method, to get a call about whatever you can sell to them.  The conventional rule of thumb is you need to follow up while the coals are hot, and that is in the […]

By Chris Bucholtz Who here likes math problems? If your hand isn’t raised, I’m with you – there’s nothing I dislike more than crunching numbers. That’s why I’m glad I’ve never had to manage a compensation plan, especially using the old approach (e.g., manually, or with simple spreadsheets). Even accountants are glad those days are gone […]

Ok, so you have rightsized your organization for the sales growth you would like. What’s next? Now we should talk about rightsizing your marketing outreach.  Most people seem to think that they will make one call and customers will fall on them; anyone that has taken a shot at this knows that this is clearly not the […]

Tired of buying ACD IDs? Tired of buying Dice conversions? You don’t need to any more. You only need one adapter. A single source of truth for both your real time and historical needs.  Get the right tool to manage and predict your customer behavior and focus on what really matters, making their experience a […]

We all know that in sales there are often price concessions given to customers. This can be in many forms, from a simple discount to a more strategic B2B negotiation. In the latter case, sales may have to get approval from several people to allow for specific price concessions. This approval could require not only […]

Most of the people that are starting a job in a Nearshore team don’t know what to expect or how to behave in a company that uses this kind of strategies to supply services to their customers.  In this kind of companies you will work with people with different skills like financial and accounting, call […]

By Chris Bucholtz In the old days – like, all the way back in 2005 – sales and marketing existed in a very different world. The universe was just starting to tilt the balance of power away from the seller toward the buyer, but buyers hadn’t quite caught on to this. That meant sales and […]

Have you ever arrived to your new job or gotten a new position and you need to manage a system or follow a process to complete your tasks but you don’t know how to do it? You ask your boss for assistance and he/she sits with you for a long period of time explaining how […]

By Chris Bucholtz   In the old days – like, all the way back in 2005 – sales and marketing existed in a very different world. The universe was just starting to tilt the balance of power away from the seller toward the buyer, but buyers hadn’t quite caught on to this. That meant sales […]

Most of us leave the numbers to the CFO or someone that is effective with numbers to tell us what to do.  This isn’t practical for small to medium sized businesses as they most likely wear multiple hats.  I talked about forecasting a in an earlier blog and promised to get to the process to […]

We will have a series of blogs that cover the fundamental questions and exercises that companies need to do in order to get their sales engines moving.   There will be a heavy focus on lead sourcing and qualification.  There will be a substantial revue of traditional methods (beating the street and cold calling) mixed in […]

In these days where the sales teams have become the main income generator for the companies, it is important to know some of the facts that improve the sales performance. 1. Sales Process – Documenting your sales methodology and best practices both for salespeople and sales managers provides an excellent base for improving your selling system. Once documented, the […]

Many of us have faced the situation where our boss lives and works in another country. How do you do in order work efficiently and without a close supervision? Here’s the answer: First of all, when you get hired in a company that has multiple offices over the world, your boss will introduce him/herself to […]

If you have never worked in a Nearshore team you will find the experience different and enjoyable. When a person has only worked in a public or local business cannot imagine how different is to work for an international company as part of a Nearshore team. First of all, you will deal with people from outside […]

 There are two main places where I have personally seen the most benefit of having a multicultural group: our larger organizations that need help in several languages and understanding business concepts that are in different areas in Latin America, and also with our partner organizations trying to service and penetrate that segment.  Yes, that’s my […]

Handover and Maintenance: The beginning of the end or just the beginning?  Most of the reasons you have enlisted a Nearshore team is the cost and a lot of the times this handover will go to this team. So how do you do this in the best fashion? Well, it all comes down to how you […]

Well, this is where we hit the pavement.  The User Testing stage causes a lot of us much heartburn, when our Nearshore team gets exposed to the end user, who can often be unrelenting to people from their own country.  In some of the worst cases that I have seen in the past, offshore teams […]

The Configuration and Testing stage is usually when you expand your team and add several additional resources from your Nearshore team.  In doing this situation, the first thing I have every team member do is read the SOW or set of contractually obligated items that the customer has requested.  Once this has occurred, they should […]

Again, this article is in the spirit of integrating your team so that you can have a lower total cost of ownership utilizing Nearshore resources.  In my prior blog I wrote about when to have your initial team start up in requirements.  Here we are discussing moving from requirements to the design stages of the […]

As you read in an earlier post, the IEA seems to have signaled that a return to higher prices in the short term seems unlikely.   Is this the start of a total collapse of oil market as some might suggest?   Probably not, but what it does signal is that it is time for even the new entrants […]

The west’s energy watchdog has recently indicated that global oil prices could continue to fall into 2015 despite the expectation that some unconventional oil production could become uneconomic at prices under $80/b.  The IEA also went as far as to suggest that oil markets were entering a “new chapter” in their history. If the IEA is […]

Over the next series of blogs I will cover how to lower your total cost of ownership for systems and services related to the implementation, configuration and ongoing maintenance of your corporate support structure. Recently I covered the best way to get the team up and going for a project (this included finding the correct […]

In order for any Nearshore organization to be successful, there has to be a level of dedication to that team greater than just the start up of the company.  In my experience, our Nearshore group was not successful until we dedicated a leadership level team member to the group on a scheduled and consistent basis.  […]

At this point in time you have hired the people and they are ready to start their new career in your organization.  The most effective way that I have seen in getting a team up to speed is a three-pronged approach. 1.       Training related to the specific job set they will be doing.  As stated in […]

In the very beginning of building your Nearshore team, it is important to understand the role that they will be playing within your organization.  Most often I see them setup as testers, developers or software configuration experts. However, knowing what you expect for this group to be will help you identify what type of person you […]

The evaluation started off with several countries but was narrowed down to 4.  Those four countries come with their own positives and negatives.  To start off I want to go over the first two countries that were disqualified and why.  I looked at Brazil, and for better or worse, my neighbor who works at a large […]

When doing project implementation work or even systems support models, the cost benefits of nearshoring have been revealed.  Over a decade ago we saw many IT organizations sending their operations to India in an effort to provide substantial cost savings over there US-high cost counterparts. I myself can remember bidding on a project in 2011 […]

Often in the ETRM industry, many dominant player focus on the high end of the market, creating a challenge for mid- and lower-market players looking to implement an ETRM system. They’re in need of a cost-effective solution in a short time frame, but are at a disadvantage with current market offerings. Once you’ve found a […]

By Nearshoring, you can cost mitigate and reduce errors due to proximity of time location. Gone are the days of someone looking at the ticket overnight only to have that ticket not correct that day and have to burn hours waiting for the development team to get up.

Often in the ETRM industry, many dominant player focus on the high end of the market, creating a challenge for mid- and lower-market players looking to implement an ETRM system. They’re in need of a cost-effective solution in a short time frame, but are at a disadvantage with current market offerings. Once you’ve found a […]

Most of us leave the numbers to the CFO or someone that is effective with numbers to tell us what to do. This isn’t practical for small to medium sized businesses as they most likely wear multiple hats. I talked about forecasting a in an earlier blog and promised to get to the process to […]

Have you ever arrived to your new job or gotten a new position and you need to manage a system or follow a process to complete your tasks but you don’t know how to do it? You ask your boss for assistance and he/she sits with you for a long period of time explaining how […]

The landscape for solutions in the Energy and energy trading space has changed; it only takes a glance at the advantages that hosted solutions offer to understand why.  Whether you are a newcomer to the industry or have been around for a while, you are most likely always looking for ways to simplify your process […]

With all of the recent expansion in the midstream market, the demand for engineers has drastically risen; we’ve never needed quality engineers more than now. With tighter regulations, more environmental justification, federal agencies and higher performance demands, many midstream companies are sourcing from engineering firms – but choosing the right firm can be complicated. Lanshore […]

In today’s progressively intricate energy trading market, businesses need sophisticated, functional capabilities to solve daily value, credit, regulatory and operational risks. Furthermore, these trading platforms must be flexible enough to adapt and respond to new challenges and opportunities that might arise. While most energy trading software focuses on catering to larger companies, smaller companies need […]

Mid-Market traders shouldn’t have to settle for less efficient software, halfway solutions or average implementations that don’t fully address all of their needs. Given the nature of industry, Mid-Market companies need the same or even better tools to compete and even outgrow their larger trading counterparts. Reality dictates that Mid-Market companies suffer from the gap […]

Dodd-Frank is coming, are you ready? Does your company have a solution ready for the challenges of position limits? Every financial institution and commodity trader will be affected. Will your business fall to regulations or rise above your competitor?

Evaluating a new system for your ETRM needs can be an overwhelming process with a never-ending list of requirements. Most ETRM firms benefit from an implementation that provides practical solutions for valuation, position reporting, logistics and scheduling and accounting. Regardless of the company’s specific needs, any system should consistently address both user and business needs.

Traditionally, organizations look to offshoring to cut costs for outsourcing services and often manufacturing. As economies shift, it is becoming less cost effective to implement offshoring services and companies are re-evaluating their outsourcing strategies. Offshoring is becoming a less common practice due to the difficulties in project management, longer lead times, complex transportation logistics and […]

About 13 months after the previous version was thrown out by a federal judge, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “CFTC, proposed a new set of regulations that now looms as a game changer for many markets in the economy, including the energy and commodity trading industry.