Recent surveys have pointed out that 70 percent of the companies that were in the Fortune 1000 list just 10 years ago have now vanished. The question is: Why is this?
One of the main reasons is that they were unable to adapt to change and didn’t have the ability to react to unexpected and unforeseen circumstances and evolve their businesses accordingly.
You must have an ERP solution that allows you to have the agility to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine.
True business agility can be seen from two perspectives:
- Being closer to your business; and
- Having the flexibility to capitalize on change.
Being closer to your business sounds obvious but we have all read about horror stories when companies have implemented unsuitable solutions! However as companies continue to acquire, dispose and merge, you need to be able to look across multiple areas of your business in an effective way.
You need to be able to respond to things before they cause you pain in your business; and you need to be able to foresee business risks and opportunities before your competitors do.
With flexibility, it is more than just to being able to add custom fields and forms to your application either.
Our role, as a business application vendor, is to make it possible for our customers to upgrade, extend/change in a much shorter time and at a much lower cost than before.
This is achieved by constantly adding more and more functionality into the standard applications so that that we provide a better fit, out of the box. When a customization is required, it also means that we need to provide a more cost effective way of doing it, and to this extent the architecture of the solution needs to be flexible.
IFS Layered Application Architecture (LAA) makes a clear separation between core code and customizations. It means that partners and/or IFS can develop modifications without touching the standard code, meaning a lower total cost of ownership can be achieved when upgrading.
One of our customers, Spang and Company, recently upgraded to our latest version, IFS Applications, and the result was a win-win situation as Spang explains in this video:
As Brian Buddemeyer, IT Director at Spang and Company states, “Being able to adapt is absolutely critical to the success of our business.”
Having the ability to get better information and see problems and exceptions when they come up (as opposed to after the event) is another real benefit that they have seen with IFS. In addition to this they can give answers to customers almost instantly which allows them to go faster, respond faster and deliver faster.
Like IFS, Spang and Company want their customers to be happy, and our partnership together ensures that both of us are doing our utmost in achieving our goal.
In summary, IFS enables the agile enterprise by bringing you closer to your business, allowing you to act quickly to capitalize on changes in the market.
You, as a business, need to decide when to take advantage of it.
I’d like to show you how you can gain from true business agility, too, just as Spang have done.
Next week, on Wednesday June 9, 2015, Nick Castellina, Research Director for the Aberdeen Group’s Business Planning and Execution practice, and I will jointly be leading “Select Flexible Enterprise Software and Be Prepared for Business Challenges,” an online event that is designed to help you be best prepared to go faster, respond faster and deliver faster.
We’ll offer you insights in how to select the most flexible enterprise software and help you better understand the following:
- How to support changing business challenges and new business models by having an enterprise software that enables agility.
- The key factors in selecting flexible enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM), and enterprise service management (ESM).
- Cutting risk and making better decisions with the right data.
- Selecting software to improve use, accuracy, and understanding, turning data into information into knowledge.
Please join us in this free online session – places are limited so register now.
