There seems to be much debate about changes in the ERP market. I've talked about ERP, business management systems and enterprise systems in previous articles, but none of these clearly fit the bill of the class of systems currently evolving. HansaWorld is one of the companies now proposing the term IBP - Integrated Business Platform.
Why a platform? A platform because the core business system is a platform on which all business functions will be integrated, including any and all peripherals connected to the business, including external systems. This is possible if the core system is built using open standards as well as proprietary technology.
A big scare for customers is where the IBP vendor locks the customer into a specific environment, whether intentional or not. Many systems currently only run on one specific operating system, forcing customers to install that operating system on all client machines. The trend today should be to be operating system independent, in order to allow greater flexibility in the future.
According to Computerworld UK, there is also movement towards open and open source business systems. The software becomes a commodity, and it's the services and skills of the implementation partners that are key to any implementation. However, open source systems still have a long way to go to prove that their business model works for larger customers, since ERP houses focusing on open source software lack considerable revenue from their software sales, and thus typically have more difficulty attracting the right kind of skills to deliver complex systems.
One of the main benefits of an integrated business platform, rather than a collection of interfaced systems, comes to light in a discussion on www.cio.com:
"When you start talking about data integrity and just how 'clean' your enterprise data is, you'll usually hear about the goal of getting to 'one version of the truth' with your ERP data. As usually is the case, the bigger the company, the more systems it has with more employees that need to touch those systems, and the more complicated it becomes to keep data accurate and timely. Most of the time, companies don't want to know just how dirty their data is. But when companies do start 'peeling back the onion' in an attempt to remedy their data ills, what they typically find is a hodgepodge of systems and anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of financial and HR data sources.
“Therefore, the job of new data management techniques, such as master data management (MDM), is to rectify those inconsistencies by creating an integrated and standards-laden system that automatically fixes data discrepancies. (Beware: It's not easy.) Because ERP systems are the backbones of most businesses, they are a key piece of any data-management overhaul. General ledgers, financial data repositories, reporting applications, purchase orders, invoices, customer contact information, inventory data, performance management tools-they will all be apart of any company's data management initiative."
As is clear from the above discussion, it is more important than ever to try and have a single system that takes care of data integration. Once you have a fully integrated system the chance of messy data becomes much less. You are one step closer to that "one version of the truth" That's where the IBP is the future!
Nowadays modern business systems are not merely financial transaction processing systems. They have become much more advanced over the years and now offer a platform for managing every transaction within a company. This includes financial transactions such as journals, stock transactions such as stock movements or delivery notes or manufacturing transactions such as production operations.
It also includes CRM transactions such as e-mails sent or letters that were written. The most advanced systems even include notably subtle transactions, such as calls being answered or customers waiting in a call queue. The Integrated Business Platform thus connects to all areas of the business.
Smaller companies have to compete with large enterprises with delivering the same customer service that the customer has come to expect from a large enterprise. So they need the same systems, but not at the same complexity and cost. What small and medium businesses need nowadays is an IBP that delivers the above-mentioned functionality out of the box. Simply running an off the shelf accounting package with a couple of spreadsheets and numerous sticky-notes stuck somewhere is not good enough.
The bottom line is that there is more and more data available for analysis. This data can tell a company a lot about its customers, and companies are using this data to refine their product offering. While this might impact on customers' privacy, there are tangible benefits for the customer in that the product offering is more tailored to what a customer actually might want to buy. If I am a 60, I do not want to find an ad in my inbox that tries to sell me the latest Hip Hop album (well - some might...)
If I am 26, I do not want to find an advertisement for a motor yacht in my inbox since I probably won't be able to afford it for 40 more years (well - some might...). So you see, it's all about targeted advertising. The company that gets this, and executes it well, is the company that is going to win, since its cost of getting new customers and keeping them is the lowest.
It's no longer good enough to segment your market. You have to segment your market to the detail of the single individual, and to that individual's feelings and moods. It is so important to know how your customers want to be contacted, that you give them the tools to access your product offering at any time, and that you speak to them only when they want to. To achieve this, all your staff has to send the same message to your customers, and they have to deliver the same quality service.
All this is very difficult to achieve if you have disparate systems. Only a single fully integrated system will be able to achieve this objective, and only if you take care of the system, of your staff and all business processes in the same manner.
Take a look at your business systems. Do you find a hodgepodge collection of systems that are kind of glued together? Or do you find a single integrated business platform on which you can build the transaction processes and data collection points you require?
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