digital transformation, cloud ERP, business transformation, cloud

B2B companies have had digital transformation on their radar for years, but many have been reluctant to pull the trigger. The analysts say businesses need to move to a more flexible cloud infrastructure, yet there’s always the worry about what you’ll lose in time, effort and expense. 

But consider this – there’s been way too much disruption in the past few years to stand pat. COVID-19, supply chain issues, workforce changes – companies like yours have had to adapt in so many ways to survive, maybe by resizing your organization, making different products, changing to different distribution channels, or even more radical changes.

Adapting to Change with an Adaptive ERP

Your on-premise ERP system wasn’t designed to flex to all the new ways your organization is operating today. And when older systems are no longer well-aligned to processes, inefficiencies slip in. Workarounds take more time. When employees have to learn new, less efficient processes, it takes them more time and they make more mistakes. Data quality can suffer and data to support the new processes might be missing because there’s no place to put it, so information to support major business decisions may be flawed or unavailable. Companies dealing with these issues will see their costs go up and their effectiveness suffer. Ultimately, they’ll become less and less competitive and may break down.

Adaptive ERP systems in the cloud are built to bend with change. They do so at several levels:

Personal – Today’s user demands the ability to increase their efficiency when working with a process, and changing colors, display density, placement of fields on forms and language are all ways to do that. An adaptive ERP delivers those custom experiences.

Role-based – To drive greater efficiency, a more flexible ERP serves up multiple options, such as a quick order entry form for basic orders and an extended one for more complex ones, can present just the menu items that are required for a role or can hide information that’s not required.

Process-based – Adapting to process changes quickly and effectively is a big part of maintaining productivity. A more adaptive ERP structure can provide visual layouts of processes so that all employees, new and seasoned, can understand the changes made.

Built-in best practices – It may seem like an oxymoron, but standardization actually drives flexibility. When business models change frequently, starting from a proven set of rules that is aligned with industry best practices helps an organization get up to speed more quickly.

Purpose-built capabilities for manufacturers – ERPs focused on manufacturing should be able to support multiple models. Rapid deployment of new or changed business models in response to disrupted processes becomes possible since you don’t need to start from scratch each time.

Support for unique needs – Any aging ERP will have customizations, like last-mile requirements, that create lock-ins and get in the way of upgrades.

Modern, agile ERP platforms provide built-in capabilities to provide powerful, unobtrusive extensibility to core ERP capabilities. With the right cloud-based ERP, all the foundational capabilities are already there; the extension automatically builds on the existing security model, is built into the (role-based) menu system, provides the same user experience and leverages the same analytics, query and reporting capabilities that the core system provides. Automatically! That saves time and effort in the development, deployment, maintenance and learning of the extended capability and helps with adapting to change.

Adapting to Growth with QAD ELEVATE

The growth that comes with success brings with it additional complexities. The flexibility to scale in support of international or global expansion and compliance requirements is part of an adaptive ERP’s built-in capability, and is as critical as the ability to support volume growth. ERP solutions built to support global organizations and delivered via the cloud will do a better job of supporting manufacturers. 

QAD supports digital transformation initiatives and the adaptive ERP infrastructure that businesses need now. QAD recently launched the ELEVATE program, an easier, more streamlined way for our customers to upgrade from on-premise ERP to adaptive ERP in the cloud. The upgrade process, typically itself a source of disruption, is now achievable more quickly and at a lower cost.

Click here to learn more about how painless a move to the cloud can be.

What will be the next disruption to hit manufacturers? It’s hard to tell. So, better than trying to predict what can’t be foreseen, building in the capability to adapt to disruption quickly when it happens is critical in the battle of the fittest.

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