There is no better time to consider moving your ERP system to the cloud. Here are 10 reasons why you will benefit from the transition.
1. Enhanced security
When cloud-based solutions were first introduced there were many concerns centred around security. However, over time it has been proven that the cloud provides a more secure environment in comparison with on-premise ERP systems. Cloud solution providers bet their reputations on providing secure environments for your employees to work in, so keeping ahead of the latest security threats is a major focus and investment for them.
With a cloud implementation, your business will be able to leverage the focus on keeping systems compliant and data secure and instead invest resources in taking your business to the next level.
2. Enhanced access to information
The cloud has been a major enabler of workforce mobility, putting the right processes and data securely in the hands of your workforce where and when they need it. Cloud solutions provide easy access to self-service portals with integrated and enhanced interaction capabilities and collaboration tools. This provides ease-of-use for your employees and allows them to collaborate and remain productive where ever they are.
For example, employees are able to access customer information via cloud-based CRM software from their smartphones or tablets while on the move or at home, allowing them to quickly share information with other authorised parties anywhere in the world and use integrated voice and video calling to reduce sales cycles and drive down travel costs.
3. Flexibility
The cloud offers businesses the ability to switch focus from managing their own local infrastructure to pushing forward with innovate initiatives that will disrupt their market. If your current IT solutions are consuming ever-growing infrastructure and people capacity, then achieving business growth and exceeding customer satisfaction becomes increasingly difficult. The cloud can offer businesses instant scalability, flexibility and round the clock support, enhancing the efficiency of your employees in the workplace.
4. Insights
With the modern data tooling utilised by cloud ERP solutions, your business can easily implement tracking mechanisms and quickly build customised reports that analyse information, giving you real-time insights. With these insights your business is able to quickly react to changes in the market, increase efficiencies and build action plans around the data to meet organisational goals.
5. Increased collaboration
Collaboration, for all organisations, should be a top priority when organising a team. Cloud computing makes collaboration a simple process. Team members are able to view and share information easily and securely across a cloud-based platform. Implementing a cloud-based solution will enable your team collaboration to become seamless and efficient. With enhancements like mixed reality becoming commonplace and integrating directly into your employee's familiar workplace tools – visually driven collaboration can shorten time to market and reduce product development costs.
6. Quality control
Poor-quality and inconsistent reporting are detrimental to the success of a business. Within cloud ERP solutions, all reporting documents are stored in one place and in a single format, accessible by all verified users. Consistency with data can be maintained with a clear record of any revisions or updates created by human error. Equally, managing information in silos can lead to employees accidentally saving different versions of documents, which leads to confusion and diluted data. Cloud solutions overcome this by leveraging enhanced content storage, classification and sharing.
7. Disaster recovery
In today’s market, a small amount of unproductive downtime can have a resoundingly negative effect on your business, leading to lost productivity, revenue and brand reputation.
While there is no way for you to prevent or even predict the disasters that could potentially harm your organisation, there is something you can do that helps to speed up your recovery. The cloud provides enhanced high availability of solutions by design, quick data recovery for all types of emergencies and support around the clock for your critical operations.
8. Loss prevention
Compared to traditional on-premise deployments, modern cloud solutions provide enhanced abilities to control and track who has access to what data and from where. As part of a cloud solution deployment organisations need to consider their identity management solution as a priority and to extend their thinking around security to how both company and worker-owned devices are managed.
The ability to control what data can be stored on devices and to be able to track and prevent data from moving outside of your organisation's network with ease are key considerations when choosing your cloud platform provider.
9. Automatic software updates
Many cloud-based applications can automatically update themselves, without the IT team having to manually kick-start the software updates. This can save considerable amounts of time for your IT department and money spent on system maintenance. It’s important to remember though that a well thought out application lifecycle management strategy is key to optimising system up-time and remaining compliant with policies around testing and business continuity.
10. Competitive edge
Cloud computing is becoming the approach of choice for most businesses, however, there are still a few who prefer to keep everything local. Implementing a cloud-based solution puts you at an advantage over your competitors, as an integrated cloud platform offers the ability for you to efficiently manage security and capacity challenges, scale as and when you need it, whilst only paying for what you consume.
All of this enables adopters of cloud solutions to focus on improving their offering to customers and provide best in class working environments to their employees and partners.
So, how can Columbus help you embark on your journey?
Columbus’ experience and accelerated services approach can help quickly adopt the next generation line of business applications. Our system integration expertise will enable you to utilise the common data platform to build a harmonised solution from operations, to eCommerce to HR, to IoT.
Ultimately, this will enable you to realise the full potential of your assets and enable you to digitally disrupt your market.
ERP implementation isn't the end of your journey
The brave new world of business application software is rapidly transforming how businesses source and implement all kinds of critical systems. Cloud-based applications offer practical alternatives to the bulky, inflexible and expensive systems that have traditionally dominated the sector. Many companies are starting to become disruptive in their approach by providing a sophisticated, flexible, highly mobile and easy to use application that builds on a traditional ERP solution.
These distributed business applications combined with an agile approach, enable faster implementations with a higher ROI and reduced risk for greater responsiveness to your customers and independence from old-style IT organisations.
Learn more about it all in our brochure - which you can download below.