Part 7 of the 鈥�鈥� series

ERP technology may not be new, but the debate on modernizing legacy systems is just beginning to heat up.

The tipping point for some executives is when they realize their existing ERP architecture cannot keep every aspect of their operations working well in unison. Early indicators of problems such as delays in reporting, complicated and long upgrade cycles, inconsistent data quality and integration issues are often too late, as the business is already damaged by the time they are realized.

When assessing whether an ERP is modern enough, the discussion should center around two questions:

1. Are information silos and inconsistencies causing a lack of trust in data integrity?
2. Is the business culture willing to address institutional and system challenges that case a fear of change?

Embracing this line of thinking encourages organizations to acquire real-time insights and act with confidence. In her market spotlight,聽, program vice president of Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce at IDC, observes that “more intelligence brings greater power to the organization and sets up competitive differentiator for the business.”

Setting the stage for consistent and trusted intelligence

Let’s face it, running an enterprise on data-driven technology alone is not enough to keep up with the competition. Data needs to be converted into insights and connections that fuel a system of automation, split-second fast and informed decision-making, and real-time adaptation to market dynamics.

As business requirements evolve, so must the underlying digital architecture that supports them. Leadership must invest in ERP capabilities to develop a more complete, connected, cognitive, and compliant system. While necessary to improve operational speed, efficiency, and reliability, each of these capabilities alone cannot ensure the company will keep up with evolving demand, ward off risk, and provide a protective barrier against disruption.

Organizations need an architecture that unlocks deep insights from across the operation. This digital landscape not only keeps data sources synchronized and insights accessible, but also accommodates business models in real time. Furthermore, when embedded with intelligent technologies such as machine learning, the ERP system becomes continuously curious. It learns from data and transaction patterns and recommends actions and changes to processes systematically and automatically.

This level of operational strength, in many cases, is found in Intelligent ERP. According to聽, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting, the uniformity of processes and data can result in significant business value. Such outcomes may include lower operating and training costs, better process control, improved risk management, more accurate and comprehensive analytics, faster time to value, and greater user acceptance.

Securing a competitive edge with deepening digital capabilities

In the past, processes were designed and optimized based on taking on defined opportunities or overcoming challenges. For example, bidding out the shipping of products to a less-than-load (LTL) carrier makes sense when shipments have a certain weight, size, delivery date window, and destination. Determining which inventories should be shipped with this approach is best done by analyzing and defining business rules. Plus, a routine should be created to quickly and accurately find products that meet the criteria and hand them over to an LTL carrier bidding process.

But things change, especially technology. By replacing existing legacy systems with Intelligent ERP, employees, customers, and partners can benefit from a network of continuous insight and automated awareness based on real-time data, predefined business rules, and analytics connections. These capabilities pinpoint new patterns, adapt workflows and processes accordingly, and triggers notifications when potential risk emerges.

Take, for example,聽. Using Intelligent ERP, the rising automaker of American luxury electric cars created a supply chain that revved up its transformation efforts to secure 100% customer satisfaction. By adding cloud solutions to a digital core of聽, Karma runs fast, efficient, and flexible operations with clear visibility into customer interactions and vehicle performance 鈥� from design to manufacturing and delivery. The business also simplified customer and dealer engagement by streamlining transactions, such as vehicle order and warranty claims.

The reason why Karma’s adoption and use of Intelligent ERP worked so well comes down to planning and architecture. The technology includes a comprehensive data set of information and holds it in memory to continuously search for patterns. Systems are then tightly integrated within themselves and with business networks to access device data for deeper insights. In the end, supply chain processes are connected, secure, and analytical enough to drive a modern era of agile and fast operations.

According to Mikael Elley, Vice President and CIO of Karma Automotive, “From order through delivery, we have one system of record, one version of the truth, and one platform to ensure 100% customer satisfaction.”

Winning the digital transformation long game

With Intelligent ERP, all companies have a distinct opportunity to differentiate themselves with best practices, insights, and awareness embedded in the applications employees use every day. That level of intelligence is what should be the basis for any real discussion on the value of modernizing ERP.

Now that鈥檚 the kind of talk businesses need to drive meaningful transformation.

Explore today’s business challenges and the best way to move with resilience and intelligence in the IDC market spotlight, “,” sponsored by 麻豆原创

This article first appeared on , Forbes.

The post What鈥檚 So Modern About Intelligent ERP? appeared first on 麻豆原创 India News Center.

But it doesn鈥檛 have to be this way. Just imagine: what opportunities are you missing now by not allowing your company to follow its true direction?

With preparedness and precision, many organizations embrace today鈥檚 chaos by innovating new products and services, opening a new sales channel, creating new customer experiences, or rethinking their business models. They are not only finding new strategies to survive a challenging economy, but also emerging more resilient and ready when better times come.

However, such an edge can prove to be difficult to achieve for more than half of companies. According to IDC market spotlight, 鈥�,鈥� only 48.3% of surveyed executives believe they can drive new levels of efficiency and effectiveness and enable transformational business models.

Emerge stronger with a model of intelligence

For all the effort devoted to improving organizational processes and front-office operations, companies that embrace intelligent technology to improve productivity, cost efficiencies, and process cycle times are the ones with the most significant advantage. IDC states that digitally transformed enterprises have 8x more revenue and 2x more profitability, while small and midsize businesses are more likely to report double-digit growth and higher profitability.

How do these intelligent enterprises get through the long tunnel of uncertainty and emerge stronger? IDC research indicates 10 critical characteristics enabled by their core digital foundation, an intelligent ERP:

• Modern: Take advantage of on-demand access to agile, configurable, quick-to-implement, and scalable technology to help your employees work anywhere and anytime.
• Connected: Unify end-to-end processes with accurate data to gain transparency and make your business more resilient. By coupling ERP data with other enterprise applications, you can create strategies that are more effective and make a significant impact across the company.
• Agile: Gain visibility into what鈥檚 happening throughout your organization by providing in-depth insight into different lines of business. Leveraging simple, interactive, and intuitive technology enables mobile workflows that add flexibility to your employees鈥� lives.
• Compliant: Follow corporate and statutory policies to the letter with solutions that are updated regularly, helping you stay in front of evolving requirements in every area of business, including manufacturing, production, and the supply chain.
• Capable: Unlock value everywhere by focusing on industry-specific requirements with proven best practices, enabling new business models as your marketplace evolves.
• Cognitive: Turn analytics into insights and bring value in real time by analyzing substantial amounts of data using machine learning, deep learning, and robotic process automation. The result: clearer overviews and added value.
• Collaborative: Empower your workforce with a single source of real-time information to make strategic and operational decisions faster 鈥� fostering a collaborative culture of seamless insight sharing and intelligent, forward-thinking analysis.
• Innovative: Optimize the impact of core business processes by combining the benefits of the cloud with your corporate data sets, leading to new insights and quicker breakthroughs.
• Scalable: Move through the ebb and flow of uncertainty by scaling capabilities with technology priced through a subscription-based pricing model.
• Real-time: Run like the rest of the world 鈥� fast, forward-moving, and progressing 鈥� by making decisions based on your current performance and through a lens of predictive analytics.
  Throughout this blog series, we will examine each of these characteristics of an intelligent enterprise and how an intelligent ERP can bring them to life.

In the meantime, explore today鈥檚 business challenges and the best way to move with resilience and intelligence in the IDC market spotlight, 鈥�,鈥� sponsored by 麻豆原创.

The post Why The Time Is Now to Become an Intelligent Enterprise appeared first on 麻豆原创 India News Center.

Intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP), such as 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, is ready for the challenge.

The current economic and societal turbulence has unquestionably affected us all. But we have faced similar economic challenges before, 聽even though, in technology terms, it happened almost an eternity ago. So much as changed since the Great Recession of 2007.

Any best practice, cost-alignment strategy, or technology used to navigate uncertainty back then are no match for today鈥檚 challenges. The workforce is dynamically adjusting to a new world of 聽remote work, life-balance changes, new income models, activism, and rising pressure to run sustainable and responsible operations. Meanwhile, traditional requirements still need to be addressed, including keeping costs low and efficiency high, which may seem counterproductive.

How can companies transform in ways that fulfill today鈥檚 social expectations and drive the speed and agility to handle economic uncertainty without adding risk? According to聽, the answer is turning to intelligent digital tools and advanced analytics 鈥� such as those found in intelligent ERP 鈥� to bolster productivity and boost growth.

Evolving the Mindset on Digital Transformation

For a long time, companies have implemented various technologies to increase their speed and agility by focusing on one or more of the following:

• Internally focused ERP capabilities for financial operations
• Point applications that serve specific functions, such as customer resource management (CRM) and human resources (HR)
• Business intelligence tools
• Custom solutions designed to enable unique industry and regional processes
• Business networks to manage procurement processes and contingency labor
• EDI and connectivity engines
• Support of multiple databases
• System of spreadsheet, email, and productivity technologies
• Security processes and software

These elements have served businesses well. However, the world has changed dramatically since 2007, and a fragmented architecture cannot provide the speed, agility, and tight and seamless integration needed to remain competitive today. A multi-vendor road map and ongoing maintenance upkeep, testing, and integration can create a series of system delays and inconsistent capabilities that make the application landscape rigid, fragile, and high risk.

Competitive differentiation happens only when the technology framework supports continuous innovation, always-on availability, and consistent processes across internal and external systems and provides the intelligence and insight to seize opportunities. While this goal may appear lofty, businesses can acquire the demanding depth of digital capabilities across a wide variety of disciplines, working together harmoniously.

Delivering a Much-Needed Edge with Intelligent ERP

Intelligent ERP solutions such as聽聽are designed to provide a holistic approach to unite the entire system infrastructure with integrity, innovation, integrated data, and security. Organizations benefit from a simplified architecture, end-to-end processes, and industry and business model innovation 鈥� all enabled by seamless, out-of-the-box integration and a built-in intelligence platform.

The seamless and consistent experience of intelligent ERP gives a harmonized, 360-degree view of the business and its customers. Users benefit from instant insights and a range of automated planning, forecasting, and simulation capabilities. Real-time analytics are embedded along every step of the decision-making process. Leveraging advancements such as predictive and artificial intelligence within an in-memory database provides decision-makers with the means to respond and adapt flexibly to evolving organizational needs.

The more decision-makers rely on intelligent ERP, the greater the need and urgency for data security and integrity. But a business intelligence chain is only as strong as its weakest link. By focusing on points of integration and making them consistent and part of the ongoing road map, companies can help ensure the integrity of their current system landscape as well as future evolution.

For example, 麻豆原创 S/4HANA runs on the 麻豆原创 HANA in-memory database. It is a complete ERP and equipped to extend integrated cloud solutions and out-of-the-box integrations, which unlocks the enterprise鈥檚 intelligent IT backbone. Analytics capabilities immediately pull real-time insights from Big Data, tapping into embedded machine learning and artificial intelligence. Then, with process automation, that knowledge becomes action across the value chain. Furthermore, deployment in the cloud provides the secure setup and operations needed to manage tasks, a consistent business model architecture, and central identity provisioning and authentication.

Building Resilience by Redefining Intelligence and Transformation

Companies that evolve and value business intelligence are often well-positioned to emerge stronger from any degree of economic uncertainty. They are the ones that rely on a highly connected intelligent ERP 鈥� especially 麻豆原创 S/4HANA 鈥� to extend coveted digital capabilities beyond the enterprise and enable a competitive edge with speed and agility.

By delivering competitive differentiation through the system integrity of intelligent ERP, organizations can help ensure every point of integration is no longer limited to the technical exchange of data. The entire enterprise landscape can share a single source of information and consistent user experience that matches the way people work, harmonizing every resource serving employees, customers, and supporting network operations.

Discover how 聽can help you build secure and maintain a system platform that strengthens a company鈥檚 resilience to and plan for whatever comes next. Read 鈥�,鈥� from the聽Harvard Business Review.

David Sweetman is senior director of Cloud Global Marketing at 麻豆原创.

This article was originally featured on Global 麻豆原创 News Center.听

The post How to Strengthen Every Link of Your Business Intelligence Chain appeared first on 麻豆原创 India News Center.