When it comes to enterprise IT, awareness of the scale and scope of things that could go wrong and planning to mitigate them are no longer luxury extras – they are an absolute necessity. Organisational IT infrastructures are too operationally critical, too dynamic and complicated, and also targeted by malicious cybercrime for their managers to sensibly risk not having a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place.
Getting started with a new ERP system? No doubt you are excited to start harnessing a raft of benefits, from process and resource efficiencies to new forms of business intelligence. However, there are some hurdles to get over before you get there. Plenty of ERP implementations hit obstacles along the way – but so many of these are easily avoided. Here are some of the most common.
Integrating your ecommerce and ERP systems can unlock a whole new era of streamlined business processes, sophisticated business intelligence and, ultimately, sustainable business growth. However, it can also be a complex and costly process to undertake – so you need to not only be sure the time is right, but also plan your integration down to the last detail.
In this extended blog, we’re helping you decide whether the time is right to integrate your ERP and ecommerce systems, and guiding you through the key considerations when it comes to planning, undertaking and evaluating your integration.
Customer experience should be a critical priority for any business. No matter what your size or sector, no matter whether you are selling to other businesses or directly to consumers, customer experience is the quality which makes you memorable, reliable, and keeps those customers coming back.
You might think that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software has more to do with the behind-the-scenes operations of your business than how your customers interact and engage with you. But in fact, ERP software has everything to do with your customer experience – and, chosen and deployed well, it can make said customer experience stand head and shoulders above the competition. Let’s take a closer look at how.
Developing your own software, whether in-house or outsourced? This can be a powerful way of ensuring that you deploy applications which are genuinely tailored to your needs or which deliver functionality that you cannot find off-the-shelf. The trouble is, measuring the return on investment (ROI) on a specially developed application can be tricky. And with many software development cycles taking many months and involving a great deal of manpower, you want to be sure that it was all worth it.
First, a primer. Drop Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) into a search engine and you are likely to be overwhelmed with information – not to mention a bewildering array of choices when it comes to software.
Unified communications is a business solution that describes the integration of multiple services like video conferencing, data sharing, emails, voicemail, presence, voice, instant messaging, and SMS. It aims to provide a consistent interface and experience for users, no matter what the media or the device used.
The question of how best to modernise legacy technology systems is one of the most common, complex and impactful challenges faced by business owners today. Whether an organisation has grown slowly and steadily or experienced a phase of rapid extension; whether its development has been entirely organic or has involved mergers and acquisitions, and whatever the ultimate scope and sector of the organisation in question, the chances are that its enterprise technology, both hardware and software, includes some legacy elements. Sometimes lots of legacy elements.
Achieving digital transformation is a key strategic goal for many businesses. It’s a broad objective, tweaked and tailored to suit the context of the organisation in question. Generally speaking, however, digital transformation involves not merely deploying more digital technology, but deploying it in ways that make business processes more efficient, drive the development of new products or services, or collect data to generate new insights and strategies. Digital transformation done well can help companies to innovate and optimise, and ultimately stay ahead in a competitive world.
The chances are that your organisation’s IT infrastructure includes a few (or more than a few) legacy applications. It is a natural consequence of organic growth, after all. And surely it can’t be causing your organisation too many problems?
