As per the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 2020 survey 77 percent respondents agreed that “Most financial approvals will be automated in the next five years”, 74 percent agreed that intelligent automation was the key to regulatory compliance and that companies who will deploy emerging technologies will grow 58 percent faster than those who do not. Research shows that business leaders say their current ERP system does not meet their present requirements, let alone future plans.

As a change maker, is it time for you to consider this for your enterprise?

What are the key differences between the legacy ERP and modern ERP? Have you wondered when the right time is to consider a Modern ERP?

The 2000 decade was dominated by the ‘Inpremise’ enterprise resource planning which had extensive customization of business processes. These were multi year projects making implementation’s large and expensive and remained under utilized.

The world is far more complex and competitive than those times when legacy ERP was introduced. Growing volumes of data collected from operations and finance for reporting need to drive critical business decisions. In order to survive, deliver ‘USP’ and enable growth the organization’s people, products and processes need to be agile.

There is no doubt that legacy ERP has been the backbone and delivered the administrative control to run the business for a decade or two. Considerable amount of investment has been done on them however, these ERP’s were not designed for usability, mobility insights and user convenience, aspects which directly impact how you fare against competitors in providing service to your end consumers.

In order to have greater operational excellence and sales success it is imperative to evaluate new

generation or modern ERP systems which harness the technological and generational change taking place in the IT industry.

When is the time for ‘Modernization’ Ask yourself the following questions.
•Is the current ERP system supporting operational goals?
•Is it able to provide ease of collaboration and information?
•Does it carry on being the single source of truth that cascades all operational functions?
•Does it provide information transparency in real time to various management and operational roles?
•Are the dashboards configurable and mobile accessible?
•Are users increasingly dissatisfied and expecting the ERP to become a Smartphone app?
•Has the management reporting become too cumbersome because of ERP limitations and users are moving to alternate methodologies of representation.
•Is there a constant need for infrastructure upgrades?
•Is the Cost of maintaining the ERP and system fees increasing annually?
•Does the system reporting provide answers to key business questions or do they remain unanswered?
•Does the ERP system address increasing financial and compliance requirements impacting the organization?
•Is the system enabling growth, expansion and winning customer confidence?
•What is the competitor doing?

Once you have answered these you may need to acknowledge that your current system does not support your business objective and you need to have a modernization strategy that suits your business and time for modernization has come.

Key concerns which a modern ERP should address
•Since its primarily going to be in cloud, Ask yourself a few questions when evaluating options
•Is the platform secure, scalable and robust to mitigate data security and efficiency risks?
•Does it collaborate People, Product and Processes seamlessly?
•Does it have all the required components, or will you need to integrate with other products? • How does it handle customizations, regular upgrades and new ERP functionalities?
•Does it have the ability to become a single source of truth and deliver KPIs to lower and middle management with ease and convenience?
•How good is the user experience?
•To what extent is infrastructure investment required.
•While you move from Capex to Opex model what is the TCO?

Modern ERP systems work on cloud infrastructure, capitalizing on infinite resources scalable at a click, delivering data analysis and insights required for business critical collaboration and decision making. We now stand at times when the cloud landscape and business environment is experiencing rapid evolution coupled with mobile platforms, our work from anywhere and anytime culture requires our ERP systems not tied to legacy back office, In-premise environments. To enable growth organization’s need to be data driven and have insights, thus the very foundation from which one is operating needs to be rebuilt. It needs to be modernized. Maybe the current onpremises environment is holding you back.