The Confluence of Cloud and ERP
Cloud computing is
unquestionably changing the landscape of how traditional enterprise software is
being licensed and implemented. Enabling ERP functionality into service-based,
on-demand workloads is not only transforming time to implement, but the
economics is dramatically changing where much of the costs are spread over longer
periods of time rather than large upfront costs. This can be a tremendous
benefit to organizations. Additionally, although there are security,
compliance, and privacy considerations, moving critical applications to
industry leading data centers can help improve organizations business
continuity, disaster recovery, performance and scalability capabilities.
The
Role of Big Data Analytics
The application for Big Data
is extending into many different areas. ERP is no exception. However, with any
analytics initiative, it’s important to understand the underlying performance
and trending metrics the organization is focused on capturing. From there, they
can better align their big data programs and be better positioned to improve
their ERP process and system changes.
Fostering
Innovation
Firstly, organizations need
to determine how they want to foster innovation. What are the areas they are
lagging behind in? How can they improve their go-to-market services,
differentiate themselves, and improve their competitive advantages? Once those
business models are identified, they can look to ERP to see how it can support
these new processes.
For example, at Horizon’s
Solutions, we are changing business models to support the continuing shift
towards cloud computing. This new model requires changes in ERP to support
areas such as subscription based billing and new customer support services. We
are adopting and driving new functionality in our enterprise systems to support
our evolving capabilities.
The
Rising Technologies
We encourage organization’s
to first look at what business improvements they need and are willing to make.
This can be in the form of process improvements, customer experiences,
organizational communication, and collaboration. From there, specific technologies,
whether in be in the areas of financial management, trade and logistics,
relationship management, customer service, social, or mobility can be leveraged
and implemented.
The
Changing Role of CIOs
The experience as a CIO
(Chief Information Officer) as well as working with other CIOs is that business
value has to take center stage to an organization’s continuous improvement.
Technology moves quickly and there is a lot of it to choose from. Understand
the organization challenges and associated opportunities, develop business
stakeholder commitment, take time to understand process, the people, and
company priorities.
As a modern-day CIO, it is
important to continue developing both business and technical acumen. Of the
two, we found that business and people skills are critical to influencing
transformation and driving fundamental improvement. Technical acumen is still
very important and I recommend continuing to evolve these skills even if the
focus is wider across a broader set of areas versus deeper in one specific
technology.
Curbing
the Cost Exigency
There are varieties of ways
to help mitigate the cost of ERP. Licensing is clearly a big component to the
overall expense of running enterprise software. It is important to regularly
assess appropriate licensing. When possible, try to limit intrusive
customizations that add complexity, more maintenance, and risk
upgradeability. These all contribute to increased costs. A move to cloud
services can also help reduce costs, however this is not always the case. It
depends on which cloud services are leveraged. Moving to a full-fledged
SaaS solution eliminates the need for expensive hardware that is compounded
when running dev, test, and production environments. However, using IaaS to
simply move on-premise servers to cloud servers becomes a little trickier when
analyzing costs. It may not be cheaper, but dollar for dollar you will likely
experience more value when running in the cloud. This value comes in ease of
scalability, ability to dial-up and down performance, improve disaster recovery
and business continuity through geo redundancy.
The
IoT Factor
IoT as it relates to ERP will
have different meaning to different organizations. I think where there is
commonality is in IoT’s ability to provide real time, intelligent connectivity
to backend processes that can drive proactive process improvements.
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