Flex your cloud-enabled ERP

The world of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is ever-evolving. For some finance operators, investing in the right ERP system, or a cloud-based counterparts, can be a tough decision.

While many finance organizations realize the importance of modernizing their ERP systems, some see it as a heavily convoluted effort, and not one they’re willing to dive into without guidance. They let their system age, and the total cost of ownership (TCO) rises. It might feel like there’s never a “right time” to undertake modernization. But the right time was yesterday.

Other, braver organizations and finance operators eagerly take a go at implementing cloud-based ERP systems on their own, but they fail to unlock the greatest possible value of these capital-intensive projects. Integrating these systems in a way that delivers enterprise-wide value will require alignment with peers and stakeholders. Moreover, making solid ERP purchasing decisions and implementing them effectively requires core ERP competencies and a clear understanding of how to limit cloud cost waste.

Huddling around the virtual water cooler with finance operations and transformation gurus has revealed one thing for sure: IBM Consulting knows too well that it can be daunting for organizations and their stakeholders to effectively embark on this process. We’ve seen the ERP decision paralyze customers with on-premise ERPs, and we recognize what it takes to move to a cloud-based ERP system.

The primary aim for many should be ERP readiness and preparedness

After you’ve done your due diligence, you’re ready to implement and scale. Make sure you have explored modern ERP options and identified that these will yield the desired benefits. Then partner with finance transformation consults to assess the feasibility of implementing the new system. Last, enable and empower your team to take on the new transformation and accept a new operating model.

During this process, you should recognize that ERP transformation is less about choosing a specific technology and more about choosing the right technology to achieve desired outcomes. Consider these insights when identifying new and enhanced ERP systems, and set goals for current and future business needs to help realize the value of a cloud-enabled ERP.

Why is a cloud-enabled ERP best?

ERP is an essential part of a business and IT strategy. It’s the backbone that connects all aspects of a business. With a cloud-enabled ERP, you can:

◉ Integrate critical business processes

◉ Automate labor-intensive workflows

◉ Discover new patterns, insights and data anomalies using machine learning

◉ Stay competitive with a next-generation infrastructure and integrated technologies designed to help you run your entire business and finance operations more efficiently

For many organizations, the top consideration is operational efficiency. No matter what the starting level and regardless of the sophistication of the ERP, the suite of available options can be tailored to help meet identified needs. Moreover, the digitization of critical processes will allow businesses to propel and improve how technology is used. This allows for greater value realization and incremental investment throughout the journey as processes are refined and workforces are enabled to manage the new ERP system.

Organizations don’t need to face the risks of a cloud migration by themselves

Cloud computing can make organizations more competitive. But an estimated 32% of cloud spend is wasted. To reduce TCO and minimize the cost of implementing systems, many organizations partner with finance transformation experts.

If you’re among the few who have completed or earnestly kicked off an ERP deployment on your own and have realized planned savings and ROI, kudos, you are well on your way. If not, working with a partner with core ERP competencies will help you address unforeseen integration and value realization challenges. Keep in mind that a cloud-first approach reigns over on-prem these days — because it can also help improve your finance organization’s agility and time-to-value.

It’s also advisable to get help exploring many valuable cloud-enabled ERP applications that can help with broader system adoption. Whether it’s an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or another, the ideal approach is a solution that can be set up in a matter of weeks (from plan to complete) with expert advice from your business transformation consultant.

As we’ve personally seen from our clients, once you get buy-in from critical stakeholders and peers, you can rapidly accelerate the modernization effort and often see lower TCO, increased agility and improved productivity.

What if my on-prem ERP system is at the end of its useful life?

Clients often come to IBM Consulting with an aging on-prem ERP solution. With their on-prem warranty nearing end-of-life, an IBM Consulting client in the mining industry set out to migrate their ERP landscape. In this particular case, they partnered with IBM to deploy Oracle E-Business Suite, enhance analytics, implement multiple non-production builds — including upgrades for their operating systems and data base — and migrate their service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications to OCI.

Their commitment to the adoption of a sustainable and scalable cloud mode helped them eliminate mundane tasks. Not only did this lead to a significant reduction in TCO, but this client also realized a notable improvement in the health of the overall operations. In addition, by using intelligent workflows and artificial intelligence (AI), this client achieved a 34% cost saving and 75% improvement in ancillary benefits.

Another client in the business intelligence and publishing industry considered attempting an ERP migration on their own. After long internal deliberations, they chose to engage a consultant instead. They uncovered greater value after IBM Consulting helped them migrate multiple environments from on-prem to cloud. By accelerating their migration to cloud, they improved system reliability and performance in just under three and a half months — well ahead of their anticipated date of completion.

What are some additional innovations and advancements to keep on the radar?

The combination of cloud, data and emerging technologies (such as AI) is radically reshaping business processes into intelligent workflows. But those that operate in a silo tend to experience more challenges and may fail to realize the synergies between these advancements. Increasingly, the tight collaboration of CTO, CFO and CIO needs to come to bear given that many IT organizations lack the financial management capabilities to fully measure and manage cloud value.

Enterprises of all sizes and industries can extract the most value from a new ERP once the system has been implemented. For example, by leveraging intelligent workflows, you can further modernize and take advantage of continuous innovation to meet the ever-changing technology landscape.

Getting started is a challenge. One way ERP clients are deriving value quickly and at scale is through use of IBM Garage Jumpstart sessions, which provide a framework for accelerating their digital and finance transformation. These serve as a convenient platform for generating innovative and relevant ideas. In my experience, we can bring in the practice leads, technologies and experts to help turn those ideas into business value in a matter of weeks.

The level of engagement in these sessions is exciting. Customer pain points come into focus and teams are empowered to take calculated risks. As we’ve witnessed, clients who come in fully educated and engaged in the adoption of leading technologies like cloud-enabled ERPs are bound to achieve their desired outcomes. We help speed up solution development and measure and quantify that value.

In 2022 IBM was named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Oracle Cloud Application Services, Worldwide. Our team of finance transformation consultants can help you successfully implement and flex your new cloud-enabled ERP.

Source: ibm.com

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HR 3.0: It’s time to reinvent HR

The human resources (HR) profession plays a heroic role in business. As companies deal with issues such as public health, resilience and rapid business transformation, the HR department has become more important than ever.

Historically, HR departments have largely been administrative, with responsibility for hiring, pay, compliance and basic job design. To push HR beyond traditional roles, forward-thinking companies need to focus on the employee experience and drive reskilling, cultural transformation and an evolution to new models of work.

Our research clearly shows when businesses make this shift, they far outperform their peers. That’s because employees who feel a sense of belonging, purpose, achievement and happiness at work are likely to perform at higher levels and to contribute above and beyond what’s expected of them. Unsurprisingly, they’re also less likely to quit. 

But today’s enterprises are far from universally able to create these experiences for employees despite investments in human resource management software, digitization and technology. There is also little evidence employees are more deeply engaged—or happier—than they’ve been in the past.  

Businesses that undertake strategic digital transformation have an unmatched opportunity to reinvent the employee experience and to put people’s needs first. As companies move data and applications to hybrid cloud environments, they can simultaneously transform processes, workflows and mindsets to become people-centric organizations. This transformation is referred to as HR 3.0. 

The HR 3.0 transformation

Companies are deploying new technologies at scale—especially those referred to as “exponential” because their impact scales so quickly—to make use of the massive volumes of data produced and captured by devices in an Internet of Things (IoT). Businesses use these technologies, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, to build new business platforms and restructure the flow of work across extended ecosystems. 

The global pandemic ushered in a massive shift in where work gets done and with diminished human contact due to staff working offsite, enterprises must become inherently humanized, build engagement with remote employees, foster trust in in a climate of uncertainty and cultivate a resilient workforce capable of facing whatever the future may hold. 

HR 3.0: A business imperative that turns HR into an agile consulting organization

In its studies of hundreds of global companies, IBM found HR departments fall into three categories:  

1. HR 1.0, the traditional departments focused on compliance, administration and efficient service delivery.

2. HR 2.0, when teams have moved toward integrated centers of excellence and focus on training and empowering business partners to deliver solutions.

3. HR 3.0, which only 10 percent of companies have achieved, turns HR into an agile consulting organization, one that not only delivers efficient services, but also practices design thinking to push innovative solutions, cognitive tools and transparency.

IBM research shows why a radical reinvention of human resources is critical for organizations. More than two thirds of the executives we surveyed believe that the global HR function is ripe for disruption. Even more convincing, the best companies in the world—those outpacing all others in profitability, revenue growth and innovation—are extremely confident and committed about the need to reinvent HR.  

More than 2/3 of executives surveyed say the global HR function is ripe for disruption. 

We uncovered widespread agreement on five common characteristics that underpin HR 3.0: 

1. Deeply personalized experience-centric design 

2. Skills placed at the core of the enterprise 

3. Data-driven decision making powered by AI 

4. Agile practices for speed and responsiveness 

5. Consistent transparency to preserve trust and reduce reputational risk 

Employee experience is central in HR 3.0, as it drives a company’s overall enterprise transformation. The HR function becomes more automated and AI-driven, more data-centric and consultative and more agile.  However, achieving this future vision is not easy. Only 30 percent of companies tell us they are living some of the principles today and only one in ten are leading in all five. 

The exciting thing about our findings is that HR 3.0 is not an idea: it’s a reality you can achieve by deploying design thinking and highly intelligent cognitive tools, with a focus on transparency, inclusion and change.  

Every organization is rethinking work, ways to support people and the roles of technology and leadership. In a business landscape characterized by near constant disruption, HR 3.0 is the next evolutionary step.  

Below are areas with associated implications and impacts for the organization on the HR 3.0 journey.

The journey to HR 3.0 helps enterprise be resilient, responsive and inclusive by focusing on talent, employee needs and experience. Using AI, employees experience a consistent work life that develops, aligns with and informs a culture of inclusion.

Source: ibm.com

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QAD turns cost centers into profit centers with IBM Cloud

Cloud has been an important part of our strategy at QAD for well over a decade. In fact, among the established global manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain software providers, QAD was one of the first to offer cloud-based solutions, starting with QAD Supplier Portal in 2003 and then ERP in 2007.

Despite our early start in the cloud, it took several years for cloud ERP to reach critical mass in general and in particular the manufacturing markets, which are QAD’s focus. IT departments, comfortable with running their own data centers, were cynical about cloud’s ability to deliver the right level of availability, scalability, security and performance.

Driving manufacturing cloud ERP adoption

There were two key drivers behind increased cloud ERP adoption. First, the recession in the late 2000s forced IT departments to move away from being cost centers and toward being profit centers. For example, IT departments found ways to increase speed to market, added efficiencies to processes and provided decision-makers with useful analytics. This segued into the second driver of the move to the cloud: removing the burden of running ERP and allowing more time for business differentiation. Moving to QAD Cloud not only provides support 365 days a year, but also delivers 99.987 percent application uptime, disaster recovery and a complete suite of Defense in Depth Security.

Another milestone in QAD’s evolution toward the cloud came in 2015, when we unveiled an initiative, called Channel Islands, to begin rearchitecting our applications and the underlying platform for the cloud era, for Industry 4.0 and for smart manufacturing. We also started to take better advantage of emerging technologies.

Moving to a global cloud provider

These drivers have sustained cloud growth of roughly 30 percent year over year for several years for QAD. While we were already working with a few cloud providers, it became clear to us that we needed another cloud provider that was strong outside of North America. IBM, which had acquired SoftLayer a few years earlier, and which had an excellent reputation for cloud management, was operating IBM Cloud in places like Australia. We investigated further and found that IBM had international cloud facilities in several key regions that matched well to our expanding customer base, including Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong.

IBM was also a front-runner vendor based on its system availability run rate. Its data centers are at the high-tier classification and are designed to provide the highest level of availability and security that manufacturers need. These factors, coupled with its crisp and consistent execution, made IBM the obvious choice.

Maximizing IBM Cloud collaboration opportunities

IBM’s delivery of service has continuously met our needs. We have service level agreements (SLAs) with IBM, and we extend those SLAs to our customers. Our track record working with IBM has been excellent. The company understands that the job is not done by simply delivering to current SLAs. We have weekly operational calls with IBM to align our business and track the KPIs that drive our excellent service to our customers. We also collaborate at monthly strategic meetings to discuss short-term technology roadmaps such as improvements to our VMware deployments to ensure we maintain the highest availability. Finally, IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat cements our relationship even further since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the primary OS used for QAD Adaptive ERP in the cloud.

Speaking of collaboration, I was recently invited to join the an IBM customer advisory board. In that role, I’ll be providing feedback as the voice of the customer and the voice of the customer’s customer. With this kind of input, IBM can continue to provide technology that supports the next generation of ERP and supply chain solutions. IBM has had a really open mind in terms of working from the outside in when it’s developing on its cloud technology roadmap.

What is the number one benefit to working with IBM? Understanding that the highest availability is assumed, and that teamwork and collaboration produce results that exceed the SLA in terms of service delivery. IBM provides enterprise class service delivery to us and we extend that to our customers.  Whenever we pick up the phone and ask for guidance or support, it’s always there. I cannot think of a single time when we needed IBM and IBM wasn’t responsive.

Continue reading

QAD turns cost centers into profit centers with IBM Cloud

Cloud has been an important part of our strategy at QAD for well over a decade. In fact, among the established global manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain software providers, QAD was one of the first to offer cloud-based solutions, starting with QAD Supplier Portal in 2003 and then ERP in 2007.

Despite our early start in the cloud, it took several years for cloud ERP to reach critical mass in general and in particular the manufacturing markets, which are QAD’s focus. IT departments, comfortable with running their own data centers, were cynical about cloud’s ability to deliver the right level of availability, scalability, security and performance.

Driving manufacturing cloud ERP adoption

There were two key drivers behind increased cloud ERP adoption. First, the recession in the late 2000s forced IT departments to move away from being cost centers and toward being profit centers. For example, IT departments found ways to increase speed to market, added efficiencies to processes and provided decision-makers with useful analytics. This segued into the second driver of the move to the cloud: removing the burden of running ERP and allowing more time for business differentiation. Moving to QAD Cloud not only provides support 365 days a year, but also delivers 99.987 percent application uptime, disaster recovery and a complete suite of Defense in Depth Security.

Another milestone in QAD’s evolution toward the cloud came in 2015, when we unveiled an initiative, called Channel Islands, to begin rearchitecting our applications and the underlying platform for the cloud era, for Industry 4.0 and for smart manufacturing. We also started to take better advantage of emerging technologies.

Moving to a global cloud provider

These drivers have sustained cloud growth of roughly 30 percent year over year for several years for QAD. While we were already working with a few cloud providers, it became clear to us that we needed another cloud provider that was strong outside of North America. IBM, which had acquired SoftLayer a few years earlier, and which had an excellent reputation for cloud management, was operating IBM Cloud in places like Australia. We investigated further and found that IBM had international cloud facilities in several key regions that matched well to our expanding customer base, including Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong.

IBM was also a front-runner vendor based on its system availability run rate. Its data centers are at the high-tier classification and are designed to provide the highest level of availability and security that manufacturers need. These factors, coupled with its crisp and consistent execution, made IBM the obvious choice.

Maximizing IBM Cloud collaboration opportunities

IBM’s delivery of service has continuously met our needs. We have service level agreements (SLAs) with IBM, and we extend those SLAs to our customers. Our track record working with IBM has been excellent. The company understands that the job is not done by simply delivering to current SLAs. We have weekly operational calls with IBM to align our business and track the KPIs that drive our excellent service to our customers. We also collaborate at monthly strategic meetings to discuss short-term technology roadmaps such as improvements to our VMware deployments to ensure we maintain the highest availability. Finally, IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat cements our relationship even further since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the primary OS used for QAD Adaptive ERP in the cloud.

Speaking of collaboration, I was recently invited to join the an IBM customer advisory board. In that role, I’ll be providing feedback as the voice of the customer and the voice of the customer’s customer. With this kind of input, IBM can continue to provide technology that supports the next generation of ERP and supply chain solutions. IBM has had a really open mind in terms of working from the outside in when it’s developing on its cloud technology roadmap.

What is the number one benefit to working with IBM? Understanding that the highest availability is assumed, and that teamwork and collaboration produce results that exceed the SLA in terms of service delivery. IBM provides enterprise class service delivery to us and we extend that to our customers.  Whenever we pick up the phone and ask for guidance or support, it’s always there. I cannot think of a single time when we needed IBM and IBM wasn’t responsive.

Continue reading