ATLANTA – Enterprise service automation is the next big thing, at least according to PeopleSoft president and CEO Craig Conway.
“Service spending is big (and) service spending is hard to manage,” said Conway at this year’s PeopleSoft Connect Conference. “It’s an entire suite devoted to the management and control of service spending.”
According to the Center for Advanced Purchasing, 54 per cent of corporate purchasing goes towards the buying, managing or selling of services. Yet, according to Ram Gupta, executive vice-president, products and technology for PeopleSoft, “It is the most uncontrolled spending in the company.”
While the official launch of the PeopleSoft 8 Enterprise Service Automation (ESA) suite was held today, PeopleSoft has already signed 80 customers, including Ford Motor Company, which required help in controlling its spending on temp work and contractors.
According to Conway, Ford spends US$780 million a year on temporary and contract workers, yet they have no way of knowing how many of these workers they actually employ annually or at any one time.
The applications in PeopleSoft 8 ESA include services procurement, resource management, contracts, projects, expenses, mobile time and expense — Palm, travel, staffing front office, pay/bill management, workforce analytics, and financial insight analytics.
Other announcements at Connect include the release of PeopleSoft Mobile Agent, which the company says is a pure Internet approach to mobile computing, as well as the acquisition of the intellectual property and certain assets of Cohera Inc. Cohera has created a catalogue management content integration software tool.