With large, well-known enterprises on one end of the competitive landscape and rising startups emerging on the other, growing businesses face an interesting dilemma.

Every single competitor is working to deliver the best products, 24 x 7 services, and responsive customer experiences. But at a time when time, capital, and resources are extraordinarily tight, growing companies need to make a permanent shift in their ERP strategy to address evolving needs and fuel sustainable growth. Take, for example, this research finding from . Although revenue growth is understandably a top priority for 41% of surveyed small and medium-size businesses, 35.4% identified legacy applications and custom code as top barriers to meeting that goal.¹聽And in most cases, the most problematic technology is an ERP system implemented years ago as a system of historical records, outdated insights, and little to no visibility into future opportunities and risks.

So how do you know whether your business is part of the 35.4% that has outgrown legacy ERP? According to聽, program vice president of Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce, growing businesses should watch out for any of the five warning signs.

Sign #1: Massive data left unused

Every organization collects large volumes of data every day, internally and externally. But when growing companies move from a legacy ERP to a more intelligent one, they are usually caught off guard when they see how much valuable, much-needed intelligence is left unused. Worse yet, frustration across the leadership team intensifies when it considers opportunities missed from not tapping that wealth of knowledge.

Understanding the importance of getting the most value from all data,聽聽quickly realized that its legacy ERP couldn鈥檛 generate the comprehensive insight needed to increase profitability and gain a substantial edge over the competition. The consulting firm, which helps clients digitalize their operations throughout Spain and beyond, gained total visibility over its customer projects 鈥� standardizing processes, increasing profitability, simplifying system maintenance, and accelerating the introduction of new innovations.

Sign #2: Disconnected user experiences

Connecting employees, suppliers, and customers to relevant resources and data points is critical to meeting everyone鈥檚 expectations. Unfortunately, most organizations have spent years developing and adopting different ERP tools, such as custom functionality and spreadsheet-driven analytics. In return, the ERP landscape becomes so overly complex that applications, processes, and data are challenging to maintain and integrate.

Most times the only way to unravel these challenges is to start with a clean slate. For聽, this line of thinking led to the implementation of a cloud-based intelligent ERP.

To energize rapid growth, the home furnishing holding group enabled responsive order-based production, visual traceability of product quality, an integrated management center powered by personnel, data, and target process and real-time financial online processing. Furthermore, IT costs were reduced with the ease, efficiency, and standards of a cloud-based intelligent ERP while engaging employees in innovative, well-rounded work.

Sign #3: Delayed actions and process bottlenecks聽

Every employee wants to think, understand, and move swiftly with data-driven insights and confident decision-making. However, most legacy ERP systems are batch-oriented, limiting real-time information availability even if an add-on is designed to augment the system with real-time data.

Data timing is of the utmost importance, especially when managing the finances of a high-pressure business like that of聽 The expanding bio-venture research organization streamlined its finance processes by enabling automatic updates between a cloud ERP solution and its banking software and automating the reporting of business partner details to tax authorities.

Sign #4: Inflexibility to scale operations up or down on demand

Businesses that respond to the ebbs and flows of operational performance and market demand with balance and ease are well-positioned to lower costs, optimize employee engagement, and yield a high rate of customer satisfaction. When using an ERP that is intelligent enough to keep up with every twist and turn, organizations can scale business needs 鈥� such as production capacity, pricing models, and workforce augmentation 鈥� with precision.

聽has seen firsthand the value of replacing a highly customized business solution with a modern ERP from a trusted provider. The specialty business of high reliability, harsh environment connector design, manufacturing, and supply chains gained dramatic efficiencies that will serve as the foundation for scaling operations to support sales growth set to double current revenue within five years.

Sign #5: Decisions that routinely lead to less-than-optimal outcomes

Without the effective use of Big Data, companies can get swallowed up by their competition quickly.聽They must make decisions by sensing what is happening now and what may occur in the future and setting the right course of action to take on opportunities and mitigate risk.

Without access to a real-time, complete data set, guiding the business is extraordinarily tough. Instead, people require a combination of transactional ERP data and data from the applications of other organizations and third parties to feed their analytics tools and derive insights that inspire timely and productive action.

Take, for example,聽. The parent company of a food industry group implemented a modern ERP to increase its steady annual growth sustainably, ensuring social, economic, and environmental responsibility. With company-wide integration and oversight, its workforce engages in better decision-making at all levels.

Is it time to move to Intelligent ERP?

Ultimately, having the right technology goes in hand with moving a business forward proactively, automatically, and in real time with situational intelligence and data-driven analysis. And when your operations run with such efficiency and effectiveness, your organization has the strength of its employees, suppliers, and customers behind it as it conquers the next challenge as an interconnected team. That鈥檚 the beauty of moving from a legacy ERP to Intelligent ERP 鈥� gaining critical capabilities to ignite present-day and future growth.

To learn more on how deliver critical business capabilities that current systems lack,聽.

The post 5 Warning Signs Of A Growing Business That鈥檚 Outgrown Its Legacy ERP appeared first on 51风流India News Center.

鈥淲丑别苍听COVID-19聽and the lockdowns took the headlines, we at 51风流naturally gave it a lot of thought,鈥� says Uwe Grigoleit, senior vice president and general manager for 51风流S/4HANA. 鈥淗ow would our customers cope with it? What would that mean for ongoing implementation projects with 51风流S/4HANA?鈥�

It did not take long for the answers to arrive. Projects would continue as planned almost without exception. Decision-makers from a wide range of companies and industries have recognized that they not only have to react quickly to the crisis and its consequences, but also must build resilience and potential for the future.

Unleash Possibilities Quickly

In this unprecedented situation, many organizations need to reorganize critical processes and map them digitally. It has become apparent that legacy enterprise management systems can be more of a burden than a help. There is a lack of necessary financial and operational transparency to safely adjust to the new normal.

鈥淢any companies have realized that they now need to focus all the more on their core business and strengthening their resilience, instead of spending valuable time and resources on managing IT systems and running their own data centers,鈥� Grigoleit says.

51风流and its partners are well prepared for this. Every implementation project and go-live of 51风流solutions can be supported and executed remotely. It therefore came as no surprise that 75 percent of all 51风流S/4HANA Cloud customers that had planned to go live in the second quarter of 2020 went live. Currently, there is one go-live of an 51风流customer with 51风流S/4HANA every hour of every business day.

More Resilience and Innovation Through the Cloud

While the on-premise edition of 51风流S/4HANA is functionally very comprehensive and modular, the cloud solution is more straightforward. This can be a big advantage, especially if time is of the essence. Standardization allows companies to more efficiently establish end-to-end processes based on best practices. This way, 51风流S/4HANA Cloud provides value faster and offers superior flexibility, scalability, and agility compared to traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This results in more resilience and capability for innovation.

In financial terms, too, moving to the cloud solution offers major advantages. Traditional, in-house models for data centers require a huge investment 鈥� capital expenses or CAPEX 鈥� in equipment, software, and a workforce to run and maintain everything. 51风流S/4HANA Cloud switches IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model. From an accounting point of view, this means that only operating expenses (OPEX) arise. These expenses, unlike CAPEX, do not have to be depreciated or amortized over their useful life, but can be directly deducted in the relevant tax year. Less CAPEX also means that companies have more budget available for other important business investments.

Combining the Best of Both Worlds

Depending on individual business requirements or strategic vendor relationships, existing 51风流customers can choose between public and private cloud or hybrid models with 51风流S/4HANA. 51风流can serve hybrid, or two-tier, ERP scenarios from one common code base and one single semantic model. This allows 51风流customers to set new strategic priorities and to move individual capabilities to the cloud quickly while other areas of the business remain on premise.

From the user鈥檚 perspective, the transition to a hybrid model is hardly noticeable. Unified user interfaces (UI) help ensure that the user experience remains consistent when switching between cloud and on-premise systems. They can find their way around immediately and work productively because, for example, the capabilities for analytics and reports look and function the same.

To support companies in their decision to become intelligent enterprises with decisively more resilience, agility, and responsiveness, 51风流offers custom-made聽, which create perspectives and inspiration for process optimization and innovation. Proven best practices of 51风流customers illustrate what can be achieved with 51风流S/4HANA, namely making companies more resilient and fit for the future.

Oliver Schoenborn is Interim Head of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Product Marketing.

This article was originally featured on聽Global 51风流News Center.

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