The enterprise resource planning (ERP) market is evolving at a rapid pace as a result of technology innovation. At the same time, most businesses are changing themselves as they try to keep up with the frantic pace of the digital era.
So says Jeremy Waterman, managing director at Sage ERP, Africa, who notes many companies are realising legacy systems are not only failing to meet their business needs, but are also expensive to support.
According to Waterman, companies are spending most of their IT budgets keeping legacy systems running, and have little money left over for growth initiatives.
"Legacy ERP systems are becoming more difficult and expensive to maintain and upgrade as new layers of technology is added on top of them," says Waterman. "The user experience becomes fragmentary and unsatisfactory because legacy code bases were not designed for mobility, the cloud, self-service business intelligence and other current technology trends."
As a result, IT departments are rapidly moving away from heavy legacy systems, and redirecting their investment into more agile systems, sometimes to the detriment of established ERP vendors, he says.
Waterman explains there is now a move towards private and public cloud solutions, as well as more modular ERP software, in favour of the monolithic solutions of old.
Moreover, the advent of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has really revolutionised ERP systems. Modern ERP systems have been designed to take advantage of this convenient and affordable technology, he adds.
Waterman says businesses want ERP solutions that allow them to mobilise core business processes.
Also, end-users want solutions as responsive, easy to use and flexible as the mobile apps they use on their smartphones. And they want them to be available on their smart devices when they need them, he adds.
Digital disruption is a growing challenge for every industry. Upstart companies, like Uber in the taxi industry and WhatsApp in telecoms, are changing the ways businesses operate - creating new benchmarks in terms of efficiency and convenience.
"This is a customer revolution, and it's all about customer experience, which is the sum of the user experience. This will give rise to agile new business models as existing businesses try to keep up."
According to Waterman, these business models must be underpinned by ERP solutions that deliver mobility, rich data for analytics, and rapid implementation. "There is a definite shift towards simpler, more modular solutions that are quicker and easier to be deployed, and which are suitable for consumption over the Internet, concluded Waterman.
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