Breaking Silos: How Cloud ERP Solution Is Creating Unified Enterprise

The enterprise culture is rapidly changing with organizations focusing more on creating a unified platform that facilitates collaboration and promotes a healthy corporate environment. Earlier corporate was divided in silos with minimum communication; let alone collaboration. As companies grew, pressure mounted on internal departments to cater to the growing base of customers efficiently. To resolve the issue corporate took the easiest way, i.e. to implement custom software/applications for different departments. The end result of which was standalone applications and disparate corporate structure. However, implementation of ERP software solutions helped breaking that conundrum and let enterprises see benefits in building integrated corporate.

Enterprise resource planning or ERP software integrates facets of a business to make business management easier. It collaborates between operation, development, production, finance, inventory, sales and marketing. It offers the back office solutions and when integrated with CRM interface helps companies levitating customer relationship.

The emerging trend of cloud ERP solutions

 As cloud is transforming the landscape of enterprise IT, corporate are becoming reliant on it to offer complete enterprise application solution. Many have already moved their suite of enterprise applications to some kind of hosted service and others are likely to follow suit soon.

Cloud computing has helped organizations derive benefits from a scalable, agile computing environment that also ensure interoperability, portability and mobility.

Cloud ERP solutions make use of cloud computing climate to run, store and manage enterprise application suite. It is more flexible than traditional model, offers cost advantages and allow originations to acquire additional resources/server space on cloud as demand escalates without human intervention. It has helped inducing competitive advantages to a corporate environment. Following is a list of advantages of cloud ERP solutions to help you understand how it’s changing the face of modern enterprises.

Solution for all: One of the greatest advantages of cloud ERP is that it has brought enterprise application solutions to the reach of enterprises of every size. Lower initial investment, predictable monthly charges, and easy deployment are the few factors which have encouraged small and medium organizations to adopt integrated business structure.

Easy on pocket: ERP implementation has always been expensive, which has put off many organizations (especially the small ones) from adoption. Cloud enterprise solutions have dissolved that barrier. Unlike legacy software there is no upfront investment and the monthly expenses are often predictable and much less.

No server, no hardware: The feature that marks cloud software solution from their traditional, legacy counterparts is that with SaaS software the responsibilities of providing, managing and maintaining hardware and software infrastructure rest on the vendor. That means, that the user in no longer required to host own data center, server and other associated hardware instruments.

The service provider taking responsibility of maintaining the software also means that the user always receives updated and upgraded versions.

Faster deployment: Cloud ERP solutions are easier to deploy and often require less time for implementation. This means it will also eat up less time of the team engaged in the deployment process. It also cut chances of project implementation overrun.

Improved focus on business: Easy and faster deployment would mean less engagement in the implementation process and more focus on your core business. When you need quick solution for enterprise planning, web-based solutions are your only way.

Smoother integration: Cloud solutions are purposefully designed to offer superior integration with other business intelligent applications to ensure easy interoperability.  It is such designed to collaborate with current and future additional applications.

Greater accessibility: Cloud has ensured that information is always available to the user at any corner of the world and at any time of the day. Any authorized user can access the information stored in cloud ERP software from any internet enabled device.

Data storage and back-up: You need a solid back-up plan to safeguard your data if disaster strikes. Manual backup system can be time consuming and laborious. On the other hand, an automated solution is expensive. But cloud solutions offer integrated data backup and recovery facilities.

Lesser staff requirement: When the hardware maintenance and software management are outsourced you would need a smaller team of IT staff to run the whole IT operation of your company. The in-house IT team then can focus more on innovations and developments.

Customization: SaaS ERP software is adaptive to changes. Its features can be amended or augmented to meet the demand of a particular industry and most remarkably, these changes can be done at the user’s end. Unlike legacy software, which requires the programmers to be deployed at your location to customize the application, cloud ERP customization can be done without serious technical intervention. Moreover, one enjoys the freedom of readjusting provisioning with the changes in user base.

Constant updates to advanced versions:  Cloud ERP software companies strive continuously to offer improved, feature enriched versions to users. Legacy ERP updates cost lots of money – the main reason for companies to procrastinate upgrading it to more modern versions. SaaS ERP solutions have solved this problem as these get constantly updated by the developer and the cost is normally included in the monthly charges.