Bino George, head – Pre-sales at Infor, says enterprises today are thriving in an era of technology-led business growth. New technology solutions are being leveraged to create a competitive edge for organizations and those that consider ‘change’ as implausible lose business momentum and become irrelevant.
However, for the longest time now, businesses are used to consuming technology that is only customized to make-it-work in different nature of businesses. This requires extensive, expensive system integration work to make the software meet the company’s needs. There is a dire need to provide solutions which cater addressing very specific solutions and challenges faced by different industries.
Purpose-built over custom-made
Imagine an environment where all the business processes are tailor-made to perfectly suit each functional requirements. Just like every component in an assembly process is designed for specific purpose, business software needs to be designed and implemented keeping these aspects in mind. For example, a business process in a bakery business will have completely different requirements as compared to one required for a retail house or an automobile company. “One size fits all” is undoubtedly a concept whose time is long gone.
In the ever changing business and technology landscape, where human led functions are soon becoming obsolete, business management software like ERP are increasingly proving very effective into streamlining processes.
According to a research report on the technology adoption trends among manufacturing enterprises in India, ERP is the largest priority for spend in a CIO’s budget with significant growth expected over the next 5 years. The complex nature of business dynamics are forcing organizations to strategize and react faster. However, there lies a void across industries in terms of implementing smarter technology.
Adopting industry-specific ERP
A flexible Industry Specific ERP system can lead to the complete overhaul of business processes and enable the agility needed to—quickly, easily, and cost-effectively – enable change in the enterprise. Specialized solutions having Micro-vertical focused that are simplified according to the needs of a particular industry and can help enterprises becoming operationally efficient. This will further equip enterprises to optimize cost to deliver results at a faster speed.
Additionally, there is the creation of a highly disciplined workforce that has full visibility into the entire process and hence creating highly-dependable and consistent outcomes. The system also has the potential to take the business one step further by employing actionable insights. The increased specificity of the business application should be drawn from analytics-based information, and with just a click of a button, decision makers should be empowered today make important decisions.
Cloud vs on premise ERP
A key challenge faced by CIOs with regard to the adoption of ERP is whether to move it to cloud. ERP till date has been hosted and implemented on–premise at the client site.
However, according to a study by Gartner on ‘Adoption of Cloud ERP, 2013 Through 2023’, which extensively investigated about companies ranging in size from $10 million to $10 billion across North America, EMEA, APAC and Latin American markets, has revealed that cloud ERP is the potential replacement for aging core ERP systems that are out of support supported by old technology platforms such as mainframes. With cloud-based solutions providing numerous advantages, organizations can drastically free up their capital investment on IT infrastructure while gaining the flexibility to stay updated with the latest technology innovations and meet the ever-evolving business needs.
Journey to the future
As CIOs embark on a journey to render their enterprises relevant in an age of exponential technology evolution, a cloud-first strategy should be at the heart of business transformation. Industry biggies viz a viz Fortune 1000 companies are seen to be adopting cloud, among others, in order to witness non-linear growth. CIOs are set to play critical role in equipping their organizations to not only driving business momentum but also gain competitive advantage in this hyper competitive environment.
By Bino George, head – Pre-sales at Infor
