Month: July 2020

Why Cloud ERP during uncertain times

 

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) bring numerous challenges and complexity across all departments. But IT teams are often charged with providing the underlying infrastructure that will allow the organizations to operate successfully under a new configuration.

This is a big ask and typically occurs with little warning, and regardless of how much ongoing work exists in the day job.

There are plenty of factors that can further complicate this scenario, including when the company is acquired or merged is in a different country with unique reporting and regulatory requirements.

While part of an important growth strategy for the organization, these moves can put tremendous pressure on already taxed IT staff.

Additionally, an outdated IT infrastructure may not easily accommodate the planned integration.

If it is not designed to handle this scenario, that’s when you risk creating organizational silos of data and an extended period to reach your goals.

Avoiding complexity in mergers and acquisitions for IT Departments:

If IT needs to jump through various hoops to provide comprehensive reporting and visibility into the new partnership, the opportunities for errors increase, valuable ROI is lost, and the goals of the M&A activity may be missed.

By moving from on-premises enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, organizations can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your IT workforce efforts.

Since cloud solutions are designed to be scalable, flexible, secure, and manage variable workloads, they are ideally suited for M&A activities.

Liberty Steel UK was part of an acquisition by Liberty House Group that deployed CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise in both the UK and China, supporting over 1700 employees in those locations.

One of the key benefits identified by Liberty was the offsite deployment of the cloud solution, which freed their IT staff to focus on the strategic initiatives of their growing company.

If you find the themes covered in this blog post “Avoiding complexity in mergers and acquisitions”  relevant to your business, we invite you to download this eBook on how to avoid business-damaging scenarios caused by outdated IT systems.

 

Why Cloud ERP during uncertain times

 

We continue our blog series on the importance of business continuity by recognizing how the loss of technical expertise can have a potentially damaging impact on organizations with legacy IT applications.

Over time, each organization builds an enterprise ecosystem that uniquely addresses its needs.

This is the natural progression of enterprise business solutions as technology and tools advance.

Avoid disruption from loss of technical expertise: the challenge emerges when only a handful of people understand how to manage and maintain that system successfully and perhaps only one individual truly understands the complete picture.

As these enterprise solutions and corresponding data are the very core of the business, any scenario that puts it at risk is dangerous.

For many organizations, the realization that your go-to people, those who truly understand all the nuances in your enterprise ecosystem, are no longer there comes too late.

Whether this loss comes through resignation, retirement, health issues, or merger and acquisition, you will need to find replacements.

How can your organization ensure the continuity of day-to-day operations with the potential loss of technical expertise?

One of the ways to mitigate this risk is to accelerate cloud migration.

Avoid disruption from loss of technical expertise with a shift to the cloud, your organization is supported by solutions that are continuously updated, and by investment in IT personnel that would be difficult for some of the largest organizations to match.

A small army is dedicated to monitoring your organization’s applications and data to ensure they are optimized and protected.

A recent CIO tech priorities survey by IDG showed that “despite increased budgets and interest in new technologies that can positively impact business in the future, organizations still face familiar challenges to adoption.

The top challenges that IT leaders encounter are lack of sufficient budget (48%), lack of staff (46%), and lack of skill sets (42%).”

By shifting the responsibility of managing and maintaining your critical IT solutions over to a cloud provider with modern applications, your organization can create an opportunity to reset expectations and priorities for your IT staff.

Babbitt Chainwheels is a manufacturer and distributor who relied on a legacy ERP for years.

While the organization faced a number of business challenges, one urgent situation was the impending retirement of its IT staff.

To protect and grow their business, they invested in a cloud solution that would relieve much of that burden.

If you find the themes covered in this blog post relevant to your business, we invite you to download this eBook on how to avoid six business-damaging scenarios caused by outdated IT systems.

 

Why Cloud ERP during uncertain times

 

Even when you do everything right, the unexpected can happen.

Natural disasters strike, equipment fails, and human errors occurs.

While steps were taken to mitigate risk, when disaster strikes, it’s still up to you and your team to race to recover, to ensure actions to get back online are taken correctly, and time is never on your side.

If your organization previously reviewed and dismissed the value of the cloud, it’s time to reevaluate.

Decisions that seemed to make sense last year or even last quarter, likely look very different through today’s lens.

In this Post we focus on critical system failure and how unexpected outages can bring a company’s mission-critical operations to its knees.

Losses can be initially staggering and ultimately far-reaching, impacting not only revenue and productivity but also long-term brand value.

How to avoid critical system failure? It’s been estimated that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, with $140,000 per hour on the low end and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.

Absorbing the activities to resolve the issue itself and then putting in place actions across the organization to recover from the critical failure and its consequences can derail an organization for an extended period of time.

But what if you could offload that preparation, training, and responsibility to an organization you trust to manage it all for you?

With a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, experts who are contractually committed to ensuring your business continuity are shouldering that burden.

Not only can you remove that task and worry from your list, but when a failure of some kind inevitably occurs, you will likely never even experience a disruption.

Such is the type of redundancies and fail-safes that SaaS organizations put in place.

But also, with that shift of responsibility, your team can instead focus additional time on other strategic initiatives with higher business value.

By moving from on-premise enterprise infrastructure to the cloud, you can avoid a potentially devastating business impact while simultaneously optimizing your workforce.

An Infor customer in the distribution industry found themselves facing a catastrophic scenario.

They relied on a legacy on-premises solution for over 30 years. How to avoid critical system failure ? while it had been dependable for decades, the day the system failed, there were no longer any technicians familiar with the solution and no feasible way to recover.

The owner decided the only logical step forward in that critical moment was a move to the cloud, which allowed them to recover.

In hindsight, it would have been ideal to begin that transition to the cloud years earlier, but they are now benefiting from more than peace of mind.

In this uniquely challenging environment, operational continuity has never been more important to your business.

If you find the themes covered in our blog post relevant to your business, we invite you to download this eBook on how to avoid business-damaging scenarios caused by outdated IT systems.