Are you an IT leader, with a title like CIO, CTO or VP of IT? As the person who oversees your company’s information operations—and takes the heat when things don’t go right—you are undoubtedly in the midst of executing on a cloud strategy. (If you’re not, we need to talk…) There could be more to the cloud than you know, however. Having worked with IT leaders on virtually every aspect of IT management, we can confidently share that cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) should be high on your list of projects to implement.
In our experience, cloud ERP is business management software that makes your life a little easier. We say this because we understand that you are responsible for keeping technology tools running. You participate in and guide vendor contract negotiations for all new hardware and software. You oversee IT operations. You develop budgets and then manage IT expense and capital expenditures (CapEx). Financial forecasts are in your job description, too. Your teams are on task to ensure that software and hardware are up-to-date and properly maintained. Security and compliance may even be part of your mandate.
On each of these fronts, cloud ERP can help you work smarter and, in many cases, more economically:
- Maximizing IT spend and uptime—By eliminating CapEx and reducing overhead for ERP administration, you are free to allocate your IT spend where it can deliver the biggest business results. The cloud provider is responsible for ERP availability, so you can rely on their resources, which are most likely greater than yours, to assure uptime. Learn more about ERP cost savings.
- Get the most business value out of ERP without dealing with support issues—With a unified, multi-module architecture, cloud ERP gets rid of many common pain points associated with running disparate business systems, e.g. poor analytics and technology that’s unsupported, overly rigid or proprietary. These are all big resource sinks, as you know. Cloud ERP lets you not worry about them so much. If your cloud ERP is cloud-native, meaning it was built for the cloud, the solution will be able to deploy functionality to mobile apps and responsive webpages.
- Customize ERP to your unique requirements, but remain flexible—Cloud-native ERP solutions are designed to be adapted to client requirements without creating costly and complex change projects down the road. Acumatica, for example, lets your team employ widely-used Microsoft developer tools to create custom functionality. You can also easily integrate cloud ERP with third-party systems and external entities using standards-based APIs.
- Deliver data analytics and data visualization, without commencing a massive business intelligence (BI) project—Cloud ERP contains built-in data analytics and reporting capabilities, so it lets you easily provide people in your organization with access to the data and tools needed to develop insights and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Keep the system, infrastructure and end user secure—The cloud ERP provider has excellent security policies and practices. They typically build multiple levels of security in the standard product and use cloud data centers to back up your system in multiple locations.
The cloud ERP provider will establish KPIs so you can keep on top of how your cloud ERP solution is performing. These might include data points regarding on-time and on-budget projects, ticket resolution times, rates of uptime and IT staff productivity.
If you would like to learn more about how cloud ERP can make you more effective in your IT leadership role, let’s talk.
Additional ERP Resources
10 Signs Your Business Needs ERP Software