Cloud ERP: Today you face a choice. Be a disruptor or be disrupted. Beat or be beaten by the opposition. And while you are weighing the options, every new digital development is making your margin for error smaller. What you could have dealt with 10 years ago, before the availability of real-time data and digital channels, is now enough to be fatal. Company size, market share and market cap are not the only metrics that matter to a company. Digital value and innovation are increasingly important and with good reason. It's about being able to create digital value and innovate – and that's no longer just a nice-to-have.
If you're like me, and billions of others, you expect customization and personalization. You're unique. Your needs are unique. Why should your car or your Nikes be just like all the others? If you don't meet this demand for customization, a competitor – new or old – will. And as rivals squeeze your margin, your legacy IT system is dead weight on your agility and ability to deal with the massive complexity spawned by this move away from standardization.
But forget about your ability – or otherwise – to cope with massive complexity for a moment. Maybe you have confidence in your legacy solution. Maybe it enables automatic invoice matching, fraud-detection and predicts delivery dates to free your people from labor-intensive processes. Even if it does, ask yourself the following: are you confident it has a simple, intuitive interface that users can figure out before they abandon it and go looking for one that meets their expectations?
If not, this is a problem because it's not helping you to become smarter, more agile and ultimately future-proof. Putting Cloud ERP at the core of your digital value creation is the key to overcoming this challenge. Countless businesses and industries across the world are making this shift, allowing for:
- A record-keeping system from which all of your Line of business Cloud assets can be driven.
- A massively intuitive and simple UI.
- Speed of deployment – measured in weeks not years.
- Lower cost of ownership which frees up money to invest in innovation.
Most importantly you get constant access to the latest innovation. That means the flexibility to respond immediately to the constantly changing requirements of your business. For example, just imagine what your staff will be able to focus on as AI and machine learning take automation to new levels?
Perhaps the compelling event that convinced you to choose a Cloud ERP has already happened. Perhaps you've seen newer, more agile and responsive rivals steal your customers. Perhaps the complexity of your business has made a suitable response impossible? Or perhaps you can see the risk and want to act before the worst happens, or maybe you don't even know if it has happened or not.
Making the move to Cloud ERP means you can innovate intelligently and instantly. No more waiting for insight or integration. No more solution gaps because third party or custom apps are delayed or impossible to navigate. No more waiting to be disrupted without the ability to get ahead of the game and be the disruptor.
The author is President of SAP S/4HANA Cloud at SAP. Views are personal.
