Digital Disruption in ERP – Time to think beyond graphic user interface

Ever since the likes of Uber became largest taxi operator without even owning a single taxi or AirBnB became largest hotel room space seller without owning a single hotel, the power of digitalization has become too evident to all.  These organizations (and there are much more like them such as Alibaba, Ola etc.) have utilized technology to their advantage and have disrupted the business models completely. The examples of digital disruptions in all business categories are only increasing and core IT applications like ERP or Supply Chain Management are going to get impacted very soon. Infact, one of the long pending demands from ERP users (all of them whether it is SAP, Oracle, Microsoft or others) is that the user interface is too complex and non-friendly and users need to remember lot of things, navigation etc. for their daily operations. This makes them take longer time to complete their work, is not fun to work in ERP and with new users coming in – there is a learning curve for them. There has been decent number of attempts by large ERP players to make the user interface more friendly but have met with little success. SAP has even tried to sell different UIs to user organizations but success has still eluded them.

Salesforce, Netsuite, Workday, Ramco etc. led the first wave of digital disruption in ERP space by introducing niche products but now is the time to think beyond that. With the advent of Google Play, Cortana and Siri, a new door is now open for the ERP players to try and integrate their products with either these or develop their own voice controlled user interface and do away with graphic user interface slowly. The users should be able to command an ERP on the transactions just by speaking to them either standing/sitting in front of their desktops/laptops or their mobile devices while traveling. The production users will get the ability to talk to ERP and take the production of items to next stage while making the transactions talking to their watch which will be integrated with ERP. Similarly, the sales team can book the orders while talking to customers onsite and ordering their mobile device or the watch to prepare an order in ERP and provide the available to promise” date to the customer right away. This way, the complaint of users that they have to run business operations as well as run ERP as two separate tasks and takes time, will fade away as they will be able to conduct normal business as well as run ERP, almost with single activity and there will be huge reduction in post business regularization of transactions in the applications. The application data will start matching with actual data (like inventory at all stages) as ERPs will help the users more in their business in real time. With all ERP products now available in Cloud models, integration with mobile devices like phones, watches have already become easier due to availability of internet connectivity almost everywhere, this idea may carry the ERP products through the next wave of innovation where they disrupt their business models themselves before somebody else comes with this digital disruption and these giants have to fight for their survival.

 

Trend: Blend BPM with your ERP to save cost

ERP is a well known business transformational system and almost all of the best in class organizations have deployed it to conduct their business. We all know that ERP is not one of the economical solutions and takes lot of organization's resources while deploying and after deployment to maintain and continuously improve the design, data structure and configuration. These days after just concluded recession, the focus on cost is more than ever and every investment needs to go through a magnified scanner before they are approved. While continuous improvement and innovation is essential to stay ahead of the competition,  it has now become more important to come out with a ROI based approach and there is when the role of BPM or Business Performance  Management comes into picture.

BPM has multiple definitions, but if we state it simply - it is meant to manage the performance of business through a set of processes that defines goals, KPIs, metrics etc. against which a business is measured. Though the metrics decided by business can be measured by using ERP itself but lately it is seen that usinf much evolved BPM solutions have started making a considerable impact on the way these measurements are done and corrective actions are taken. The ROI of these solutions is also much improved as BPM solution deployement in most cases is economical. Till some time back, BPM solutions were being used for categories like:

• Strategy Management
• Financial planning, budgeting and forecasting
• Reporting and consolidations
• Profitability and cost management

In addition of above categories, now BPM is increasingly being considered as the essential extension of ERP in areas like Supplier payment processing, credit management, sourcing etc. and it is time that we also start looking at the positive and the negative aspects of using a BPM solution to complement our ERP deployment and take more and more benefit from it.

ERP Trend: Changing role of ERP in the eyes of a CIO

Few months back, we left the worst behind and the economy started showing signs of a recovery though not a smart one but slowly and steadily it has started moving in the right direction. Most of the CIOs survived 2009 by cutting costs with the help of ERP and of overall IT operations but 2010 has come up with a new kind of challenge that is to grow and expand, keeping the capacities as more or less same. This challenge has come up for the organizations as they are still cautious in their approach in expanding operations by investing more due to the slow pace of economy recovery and doubts in the minds of experts that it will sustain or not. They do not want to lose the opportunity to encash the recovery but also are practicing restraint in investing.

This has changed the approach CIOs also and they have started initiatives of increasing productivity from the same infrastructure in addition of continuous efforts to reduce the costs (or increase the cost efficiency). So the economic conditions required CIOs to shift their focus from cost-efficiency to raising resource productivity and the ERP solutions, this year, will be more focused on increasing the productivity of staff, operations, and infrastructure and this will be pertinent for existing ERP deployments as well as ongoing or yet to start projects.

The model that is gaining ground and will gain more ground in coming months is like described below: