Page 30 - Logistics News - July August 2023

ER P

Others rely on implementation partners to provide industry- consider these underlying platforms with the same level of
specific configurations and extensions for vertical industry importance as functional capabilities.
requirements. Each approach has pros and cons. Confirm
the approach your selected vendor is proposing and check New products from the same vendor or a
with references to see how well that approach has been new vendor?
executed for them. Switching would imply moving to a new vendor and ERP
suite. However, leading ERP vendors have invested so
Investment in EAP and technology. Functional heavily in modernising their ERP suites that the newer
capabilities are still important, but just as important today products often have significant differences from their
and in the future is the underlying enterprise application legacy ERPs. Even if you remain with the same vendor, the
platform (EAP) and technology. There is significant overlap approach to take if moving to a newer SaaS ERP should be
between this topic and support for composability. This that of re-implementation – not upgrading.
point is related to how well the ERP vendor leverages its
underlying technology to deploy things such as process Change management is usually easier if you stay with
analysis and automation as part of the normal upgrade the same vendor. However, transformation can sometimes
cycle. What this means is the applications themselves get be easier when switching vendors. The adoption of new
smarter and recommend automating repetitive processes business models is sometimes easier when you leverage
as part of the ERP suite’s normal release schedule. the fact that you are changing vendors – so processes have
Significant gains in productivity are delivered as a matter of to change.
course.
Readiness for implementing SaaS ERP
Support for composability. Composable ERP is the Modern ERP is delivered as SaaS on multi-tenant cloud
future. This demands a fundamentally reliable SaaS infrastructure, which enables leveraging advanced
ERP suite built on a state-of-the-art EAP, permitting technology and the rapid deployment of new features and
vendors to develop and deploy new capabilities capabilities. Once you have decided to replace your ERP
rapidly. It’ll offer an ecosystem of services to deliver system, there are organisational changes required to make
experiences and capabilities fully integrated into sure you are successful.
the back-end ERP. This includes sophisticated API
management for complex integrations, embedded AI/ New features and functions are deployed multiple
ML, low-code/no-code development and integration for times per year. New roles will be required to evaluate
deployment by power users, process intelligence and vendor-delivered functional enhancements and technical
hyper-automation. capabilities such as process automation. Consuming
new features and capabilities requires more frequent but
It is absolutely imperative that any ERP suite selected in lightweight change management and testing – especially of
2023 and beyond has a leading EAP. Organisations need to extensions and integrations. •

28 JULY/A U GU S T 2023 www .l o g ist i csn e w s .c o .z a