Guest Blog: Sage ERP X3, Making ERP Relevant
Sage ERP X3 Investments
We know that increased competition is forcing every business to be unique and different. So how do businesses increase the relevance of ERP solutions, and how do they use ERP as a foundation for innovation and differentiation? These are the challenges our customers face on a day to day basis.
To maximize ERP investment businesses must reinvent their ERP solution to support their strategic enterprise initiatives. The growing complexity of every business is driving business applications to provide more comprehensive and complete capabilities. So this means the business tools and solutions we, at Sage, must evolve to address these changing business requirements.
Current ERP Trends
There are four key trends that are making a large impact on current ERP technologies:
• Social
• Mobile
• Cloud
• Information management
These four trends are influencing the need to drive ERP toward user centricity and away from traditional monolithic ERP architectures.
At Sage we understand this and are investing in the functionality and technology that will best support customers’ need for productivity, improved customer service, and revenue growth, with a strong focus on simplification and being cost-effective.
From a functionality perspective, we are investing in enhanced financial processes and richer core functionality to limit the need for add-ons to adapt to specific countries or reporting needs.
Reducing Operating Costs
To help customers reduce operating costs and enhance productivity we have further developed the integration of electronic document management capabilities, with our OCR solution (document capture). We are integrating advanced CRM and Business Intelligence features to help improve visibility, adapt to customer preferences and improve customer service. We are also developing industry specific solutions, to better adapt to industry-specific requirements without complex integration.
From a technology perspective, we are investing in the infrastructure and platform that will enable customers to take full advantage of cloud deployment, mobile devices and simple integration with other web service enabled applications.
We will start by rewriting our Web Client to make it easier to use. This will include powerful data visualization capabilities with new HTML5 and Ajax graphical representations. It will be browser and device agnostic, and much more efficient, whether online or in stand-alone mode.
This is an ambitious overhaul of our current platform to help customers become much more productive in using our solution, but also to become more agile as they deploy our solution on multiple locations or devices, or extend the functionality they need.
Personalization
Personalization being intuitive to use and simple to access becomes key. We are focusing on the the usability of Sage ERP X3 to ensure new and existing customers can get the most value from the solution and the new functionality.
The user defined job roles and the graphical navigation of business processes were a first step in that direction. We’re adding to this with better MS Office integration allowing active collaboration on documents as well as the capacity to fully personalize the UI, at the user level.
We are also investing to improve the installation, upgrades, updates and pre-configuration of Sage ERP X3, which will allow a faster deployment and a simplified system management.
Relevant ERP
Our intention is to simplify employee interaction with business processes and ensure users are satisfied with their ERP solution. Of course our customers have to support their primary strategic business initiatives and be sure that relevant users have the functionality needed. The challenges today are to deliver a relevant ERP project for all types of users and increase ERP usage. Business application usage has changed from “a few IT experts” to “everyday business users.” Ease of use is key to user adoption.
By Benoit Gruber on 21 January 2014. Originally published on the Sage ERP X3 Blog.