Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Raphael Bres, Vice President, Product Management for Financial Management at FinancialForce
5 Trends that Will Reshape ERP in 2019
The business environment is rapidly evolving in
this digital age and ERP vendors must evolve too if they want to remain
competitive. As we head into 2019, here are five emerging trends that promise
to reshape the market and give rise to ERP systems that better address the
concerns of today's businesses.
AI will
improve the user experience
Today, ERP systems typically use AI technology
to generate predictions, such as how much revenue a company is likely to
generate in the next quarter or what the financial picture looks like in the
coming year.
In the next couple of years, we see AI use cases
that are not prediction-related. Rather, they will focus on improving the
end-user experience and their productivity.
For example, AI can help ERP users to
auto-complete certain fields or automatically detect and correct mistakes. AI
can even enter a transaction on behalf of a user. The combination of AI
and business processes automation is called Robotic Process Automation 2.0
(RPA) and takes place when the AI technologies that
are aiming to work and react like a human being alleviate end users from
cumbersome and low value tasks.
This kind of AI application is critical because
it allows users to spend less time on grunt work and more time on value-add
tasks. Users are then more productive and satisfied, and there are fewer manual
errors and anomalies that slow down the business.
ERP
systems will become more customer-centric-and less product-centric
In today's services economy, customers want the
latest and greatest for the best possible value, and they only want to pay for
what they actually use. That means it's not just about winning the customer,
it's about making sure the customer is happy so that the customer keeps buying
more and renewing again and again. It is about winning with a customer journey
strategy.
To achieve this, ERP systems must be
customer-centric rather than product-centric. Ultimately, the ideal ERP
solution will offer a complete view of your business within the context of the
customer journey. And this is only possible when all data exists within a
single platform. After all, customers want to do business with one company, not
five distinct departments. Customers don't like to get bounced around from
department to department, so businesses need to align Sales, Marketing,
Services and back-office functions because customers expect vendors to know
everything about them, regardless of who they spoke to in the past.
Therefore, companies need to lean on data, analytics and intelligence to
enable customer engagement. Customer-centric ERP
means there is one place to find everything you need to know about the customer
and one place to serve customers with instant answers, immediate resolutions
and positive experiences every step of the way.
Blockchain
will augment ERP systems
ERP systems will increasingly incorporate
blockchain technologies. This is not only about the cryptocurrency use case
that most people are familiar with. Instead, this is about using decentralized
ledgers concepts and immutable financial data to create a highly secure
platform in which financial records can be freely shared with trusted parties.
There are several emerging examples where
blockchain can be applied to financials, such as using the technology for the
approval chain of financial reporting or ever-changing contracts or
keeping the true history of assets regardless of the ownership. As the adoption of blockchain further accelerates in the
enterprise, expect to see even more creative use cases arise in the coming
year.
Analytics
and financial reporting will unite
ERP has traditionally been weak in the area of
financial reporting. But that is quickly changing. In 2019, the best ERP
systems will focus on uniting analytics and financial reporting in a single,
combined solution leveraging the latest advances
of in-memory computing and business intelligence technologies. This kind of solution will deliver accurate, faster
reporting with a superior user experience-including the ability to build up and
extract value from larger stockpiles of customer operations and financial data.
For example, a consolidated income statement
with multidimensional filters could be refreshed in seconds, even if there is a
large volume of data, on any dimension without any pre-aggregation needed.
Additionally, in-memory intelligent analytics and reporting will become
increasingly imperative for modern businesses as they look for new ways to
deliver insights that can help them thrive at speed and drive greater customer
success.
Enterprise-grade
ERP will embrace the midmarket
Whereas in the past, the most advanced ERP
systems were only available to the biggest companies that could afford a very
high total cost of ownership, in 2019 the best ERP technologies will be
available to everyone. The most cutting-edge ERP systems will take advantage of
advances in cloud, AI and analytics, and will be available to midmarket
companies at a low total cost of ownership. ERP vendors that move away from
expensive solutions and make their enterprise-grade solutions available at a
reasonable cost will be richly rewarded by the midmarket.
The ERP market has experienced its share of
change over the years. The coming year looks to be no different. 2019 promises
to be an exciting year filled with innovation-and rewards for those ERP vendors
that are alert and agile enough to take advantage.
##
About the Author
Raphael
Bres is Vice President, Product Management for Financial Management at
FinancialForce. He is responsible for driving product strategy and working
closely with the development teams to deliver on the product roadmap. He also
has market-facing responsibilities including Go-To-Market plans, sales
enablement and the successful roll out of the Financial Management applications
to customers.