Choosing an ERP or business system for a small manufacturer
What ERP actually does, when a small business needs one, how to choose a system by starting from your problems, and how to implement it without the classic failures.
10 min read
Insights category
Technology
Software, AI, digital systems and technical developments.
Articles in Technology
Cyber security basics for small businesses and workshops: threats, the Essential Eight and a response plan
Plain-language cyber security for small businesses and manufacturers: common attacks such as phishing and invoice fraud, the Essential Eight controls, backups, staff training and what to do when hit.
10 min read
Owning your website and digital presence: domains, hosting, security, backups and professional email
Digital foundations for small businesses: owning a website not just social pages, choosing and protecting domains, hosting, HTTPS, backups, professional email and partners.
10 min read
Privacy policies for small business websites and apps: what to include and why it matters in Australia
What a website or app privacy policy should cover, how the Australian Privacy Act and its principles apply to small businesses, cookies and analytics, overseas transfers, data security and complaints.
10 min read
Turning business data into decisions: customer, operations and quality data for small firms, used responsibly
How small businesses can capture and use customer, sales, operations and quality data with CRM and ERP tools, start from questions, protect privacy and security, and avoid common traps.
10 min read
Acting when you can't see everything: beliefs, filters and partial observability
Many decisions must be made without knowing the true situation. How beliefs, Bayesian filters, Kalman and particle filters and belief-state planning handle partial observability.
10 min read
Bayesian networks: mapping how causes and evidence connect
Bayesian networks represent uncertain relationships as a map of influences. How they work, how they support diagnosis and prediction, and what they can and cannot tell you about cause and effect.
10 min read
Be careful what you reward: designing objectives for decisions
Automated systems and people both optimise what they are measured on. How objectives go wrong, how to balance multiple goals with trade-off analysis, and how to design rewards and KPIs that work.
10 min read
Decision making under uncertainty: agents, observations and actions
A plain-English introduction to how people and machines make decisions when outcomes, models, situations and other actors are uncertain, and the main ways to design decision systems.
12 min read
Learning from experts: imitation learning and its limits
Systems can learn by copying expert demonstrations. How behavioural cloning, cascading errors, expert correction and inverse reinforcement learning work, and what they teach about know-how.
10 min read
Looking ahead: tree search, rollouts and planning by simulation
When problems are too large to solve completely, decision makers plan from the current situation by looking a few steps ahead. How lookahead, rollouts, Monte Carlo tree search and re-planning work.
10 min read
Reinforcement learning explained: learning good decisions from experience
Reinforcement learning lets systems learn decision strategies by trial and error, guided by rewards. A plain-English guide to how it works, its main methods, its risks and where it fits in business.
10 min read
