CIOInsider India Magazine
Forward-Thinking Enterprises Trust Capable ERP Systems As The Key Contributors To Their Business Growth
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ERP systems transform, integrate and scale businesses better today than they ever have. It's the only system that tackles all the processes that are essential to running a business and eliminates those that aren't. And cloud has made ERP solutions more affordable, and easier to implement and manage.
Pre Digital Era
For people in services organizations in the early Nineties, trying to use ERP was like dealing with a digital Frankenstein's monster. Here was little choice in how they could do things and they needed to skill up massively to find their way around its vastly complex system. If this Old ERP could have spoken to them, it would have said, "Do it this way or not at all."
What's more, with its complex coding and complicated user interface, old systems needed an army of technical super-users to understand, use and man-age it. These complexities created a constant challenge for ERP vendors and their customers. Because vendors were bound by the capabilities of unwieldy systems, the conversation around implementing ERP was about training: how can we teach users to operate and get value from this complicated, inflexible piece of technology?
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, driven by disruptive competition, an exponentially increasing rate of change and heightened customer expectations, this is hardly a blueprint for success.
Post Digital Era
What's really changed the game for ERP is developments in AI and machine learning that are now enriching it beyond recognition. Yet ERP still has an image problem. It's time that changed.
What we need to consider is that in the Every-thing as a Service (XaaS) world, start-ups and organizations on digital transformation journeys are not restrained by ERP anymore.
As technology solves various challenges, the
business landscape is presenting more pressing demands with every passing day. Companies wishing to keep pace with this evolution need to and are definitely getting equip themselves with business solutions that would help them align and prepare for present and future challenges and business growth. The following top 5 trends according to me, to be watch out for as we usher in 2019.
1. Augmenting Human Capabilities
With BI taking the front seat, the new ERP systems manifest as more intelligent solutions that are expected to provide deep and real-time insights of core business areas and assist organizations in bringing greater success in terms of operational efficiencies, productivity, and sales. The advanced ERP software solutions activate automation with superior predictive intelligence capabilities. This is experienced platform-wide, across the complete spectrum of core business operations. The business intelligence and analytical features are added to form integral parts of the systems. Thus, the new ERPs satiate organizations' quest to find reliable tools that are not just used for capturing data, but also help businesses to make meaningful sense of the information and augment human capabilities.
The business intelligence and analytical features are added to form integral parts of the systems
Every organization is different and so is their business needs. Customization of ERP systems to support these requisites often takes an extensive amount of time. The future ERPs would wipe out this one-size-fits-all approach. As a result, instead of investing in software modifications, ERP users would receive industry-ready solutions, tailored to support unique industry requirements. Beyond this, the standardization of components enables businesses to make the deployment process significantly swift.
3. Increased Importance of Security
With the world witnessing data security breaches on a massive scale, businesses are becoming more inclined to invest of reliable and strong security mechanisms. The year 2019 would witness this inclination tilt faster as organizations would want security mechanisms that apart from protecting business data, do not hamper access and usability, so that the speed and functionality remains intact.
4. Power of Real-Time Insights
The modern ERP architectures are changing. They now support real-time responses that make inherent sense. To enable this at scale, new ERPs leverage on in-memory computing and analytical processing, which allow systems to generate reports from data captured as close to real time as possible. This smart application infrastructure would successfully transform the way traditional ERP systems executed the processes, thus equipping businesses with the power of real-time insights to make more successful planning and forecasting.
5. More Personalized UI
Forward-thinking enterprises trust capable ERP systems as the key contributors to their business growth. Unlike legacy ERPs, these solutions must be flexible enough to support personalization and can be integrated to have more intuitive user interfaces. Future ERP applications need this transition to provide more assistive and conversational user experiences.
Your ERP software is no more just a record-keeper anymore. The addition of business intelligence ingredient has converted it into a powerful tool that has every capability to improve operations and execute impeccable services.
