The adoption of the right type of smart technology can often make a significant difference to problems in the short term and allow the organization to expand and grow without incurring high costs. This article looks at several examples of where the intelligent application of computing power has made big differences to businesses in the short term, but also technologies that help the organization along the way to a brighter future.

The machine brain

Just a few years ago, artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning was the basis for academic research. But today, AI software can be deployed in practical use-cases in many different verticals.

One such vertical is farming. Lanka Prime Agri had many concerns: high labor costs and indeterminate methods of identifying problems with its melon and corn crops. Managers decided to team with Pristine, a SAP Business One gold partner. Together with its partner, Lanka Prime began to deploy the latest drone technologies to get high-level overviews of crops at speeds that humans walking the fields could never match.

With SAP Business One helping run back-office operations and being the central controlling point of all data, drone footage could be fed to advanced AI algorithms. Pests and crop diseases were diagnosed quickly by software, which could also advise on the right pesticide or fungicide applications.

Furthermore, the ML (machine learning) routines helped identify early signs of poor growth and show human operatives where fertilizers would be most effective.

With SAP Business One helping control costs and automate procedures, Lanka Prime Agri quickly cut costs of human labor and expenditure on treatments.

Farmers’ inefficiencies were cut because SAP Business One helped them form Agriculture Activity Plans for all holdings on a plot-by-plot basis.

And for company managers, there was the ability to draw real insight from the data gathered right across all lands controlled by the company.

Another AI success story comes in the form of Darling Digital World. It used technology to help its staff, leveraging facial recognition in real-time, so customers could be identified as they arrived on premises.

Information was retrieved instantly by SAP Business One’s databases, informing store staff via mobile of each customer’s history and preferences. Instead of every customer being a stranger, teams could hit the retail store running, with highly attractive, tailored offers and packages personalized for all visitors.

And because all retail businesses now operate online too, customers could also easily buy online and pick up in-store, allowing Darling staff to cross- and up-sell.

Darling Digital World’s choice of Avaniko as SAP Business One Accredited Partner proved critically important, as the consultancy business was able to roll out gamification of sales results to staff (to improve performance) and provide managers with stores’ performance metrics.

The human factor

For GMM Coatings, technology has helped human operators make fewer mistakes and increased its access to background information so human employees could perform in their roles better.

Source: SAP Business One

Errors and oversights meant raw materials were often mis-issued and poorly tracked within the business. Inefficiencies in inventory occurred and, therefore, stock valuation suffered. This was compounded by dispatching errors.

The company installed IoT devices (designed and developed by partners) at key points in the business, especially on weighing machines, producing data that resided in SAP Business One. From here, accurate information could get applied and be used in all departments, from operations to sales and dispatch, with precise tracking of weights and quantities pinned against gate prices.

Streamlining operational abilities helped save significant costs, made back-office auditing and checking simple, and achieved low labor costs.

GMM Coatings chose Qnomix Technologies, a trusted partner for SAP Business One implementation and customization. It was able to integrate the SAP stack with other technologies which GMM alone could not have achieved.

Conclusion

SAP Business One is a highly capable product for small and medium size companies that require integrating their core business processes, production facilities, operations, and logistics through technology to overcome business criticalities.

To learn how SAP Business One can be the core of your success, get started with an SAP experience today.

The post SAP Business One shows how technology helps appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Key departments in business are especially feeling the pressure to be more agile in their systems and working practices on a daily basis. Foremost among these are enterprise finance functions – the powerhouses which drive the organization. Software solutions which are installed locally or suite-based are no longer fit for purpose; enterprise requires rapidly deployable, scalable, and robust financial management applications which can be integrated with other domains as needed.

Antiquated in-house systems can pose a multitude of day-to-day problems for personnel, such as issues with posting journals or subledger reconciliations. Businesses grow organically, and complex internal structures may not be in synergy with the legacy ERP systems which are ceasing to provide value.

Finance departments are finding themselves under an increasing amount of regulatory pressure, meaning legacy systems may not have the necessary abilities to reflect new national or transnational legislation. Only centrally-updated cloud systems can reflect this changing picture.

The place to achieve a new, proactive deployment stance is in the cloud – and today’s leading technology providers, like Oracle, support public, private and hybrid clouds. Abstraction layers both make the cloud platform amorphous, but also allow rapid changes in scale as dictated by business requirements.

Platform-agnostic cloud financial management applications can be part of a broader cloud-ERP offering, of course, and in the case of Oracle ERP Cloud solutions, Finance departments specifically get revenue, risk & project management capabilities, as well as procurement systems. These functions co-exist with other departments’ deployments in the same cloud space, with integrations and data exchange baked into the solutions’ underlying structures.

The key to this interoperability combines cloud development methodologies (where scalability and ease-of-deployment are givens) along with Oracle’s significant background in business-led architecturing.

A survey which looked at business costs (software, hardware, personnel, and training) over a three-year period, undertaken by Nucleus Research, showed that on average, initial costs for on-premises ERP were 2.4 times higher than Oracle ERP Cloud.

Oracle’s history of financial management solutions, in particular, shows a unique breadth of offerings – some readers will be aware of NetSuite Financials (part of a more extensive ERP suite), for instance – but the company’s experience and longevity were explicitly cited in a recent Gartner survey. Respondents noted the maturity of Oracle’s cloud platforms as a key reason for their satisfaction with Oracle ERP Cloud.

Oracle’s investments in technological, marketing, training and support in the cloud ERP space have positioned it as a clear market leader – the same Gartner survey placed Oracle as a Leader in its “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises.”

One area in which Oracle leverages new technologies in the cloud is in the inclusion of impactful machine-learning capabilities for Finance departments. With Oracle ERP Cloud, the software can consider payment history to intelligently suggest supplier discounts – this type of value-add gives a real business advantage to users of the solutions.

Additionally, the enterprise can take advantage of the type of tech paradigm which users now come to expect as a matter of course. With built-in self-service for account settlements, mobile bill/invoice presentation, mobile expense entry and automated supplier invoicing, interactions can be mobile, and data flow into the cloud in real time. Finance staff are freed up from repetitive bookkeeping tasks and can be retasked into more strategically-valued roles.

Add localizations for over 50 countries and support for 25 languages, the Oracle ERP Cloud leverages Finance departments’ inherent strategic ability to create business advantage. As the center of the enterprise, Finance departments which are cloud-powered by Oracle can make significant difference to the enterprise.

Oracle has a market-defining vision of how core financial management systems and processes can improve by moving to the cloud. With a strong presence in the market and multiple proof-points of successful deployments by customers, its offerings are used to create and support finance transformation initiatives.

Read Gartner’s compelling evidence for yourself in its Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites report. And to speak to a representative, get in touch today.

The post Complete vision & an ability to execute: leveraging the Oracle ERP Cloud for your Finance Department appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Technology touches every aspect of the enterprise, so IT and digital infrastructures have to reflect and second-guess the changes through which the business goes. Part of the issue is the cultural realignment that’s sometimes necessary: changing the technology won’t make things change. Technology supports the change made in everyday business processes.

Most organizations today have at least one core IT system that acts as the backbone of the whole enterprise.

For medium and larger businesses, ERP systems like SAP span multiple divisions and departments. SAP often powers collaboration and communication and acts as a single source of truth. From the central ERP, the business decision-makers can create change, and also monitor results, often in real-time.

When a large ERP provider like SAP announced its discontinuation of support for SAP Business Suite on Windows (and UNIX), this formed the catalyst on which many enterprises embarked on larger digital (and business) transformation exercises.

By moving to SAP S/4HANA on SUSE Enterprise Linux, companies are presented with an opportunity to adapt, refresh, and invigorate a significant part of their digital systems.

Is migrating SAP onto a Linux-based platform an overwhelming problem? Perhaps not. Linux is, as IT professionals know, running most applications and services already, especially those in the large public clouds. But nevertheless, the transformation over to a new platform, for such a business-critical system, might seem overwhelming or risky to businesses.

The great news is that there are several specialists that will not only help organizations transition their SAP solutions to a Linux-based cloud, but also help and advise if that change is made in-house. Furthermore, the provider of the fastest, most secure, and most optimized SAP solutions on Linux is, without doubt, SUSE. This is a company that always puts business first, and so can guide the entire process.

As something of an SAP specialist, and with long experience at an enterprise level of helping organizations with their IT strategies, the company offers overarching reinvigoration or reinvention of IT right across the enterprise.

So before you make the leap from SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA on Linux, there are a few thought processes to run through, according to the company. Regardless of your organization’s size, SUSE knows the central (and vital) role SAP plays in the way your business runs. Therefore, either with the company’s help or as part of your internal strategizing, you should consider:

Determine which is the best migration path for your business

Some organizations may take SAP’s actions as a signal to move everything into the cloud. SUSE can help decide whether this should be done wholesale (rarely), or more likely, in a stepwise, cautious manner, with extensive road-testing and sandboxing.

Determining that migration plan will be a core part of the digital transformation process – a journey that’s effectively continuous in today’s business environments.

Assessment of the skills already in-house, or required

Are the right training programs in place? Does your team possess the skills both to migrate SAP to Linux, and indeed, to fully support and implement any further digital changes, upgrades, reassessments happening at the same time? Is any outside help required, and if so, should that be on a part-time or fixed-term basis?

Realize the benefits of Linux and open source

Any return on investment of a digital transformation project should take into account the potential opportunities for optimization and efficiency offered by an open yet established platform like SUSE Enterprise Linux. Linux is both powerful and extensible, and by nature, completely personalize-able according to an enterprise’s individual requirements.

Its platform-agnostic nature is a plus-point, but not all Linux distributions are the same. SUSE has optimized its offerings for SAP and holds many benchmarks for the ERP – this is a market leader in its field.

Plan, perform risk analysis, test

Risk analysis, ahead of time, helps decision-makers avoid obvious mistakes. The team at SUSE have, to use the phrase “been there, done that.” With on-tap expertise and the technology to produce massively positive results, even for enterprises with no open-source experience, the planning phase can be a guided process.

Options, possibilities

The move to SAP S/4HANA opens up many new possibilities offered by the open-source Linux. But only SUSE also offers tight integration with SAP. There’s simply no need, in any case, to jump into the unknown alone.

With expertise across multiple platforms, in IoT, Edge, DevOps, systems, networks, and cloud, the SUSE team brings technology and business together.

If your business has SAP at its core, Tech Wire Asia recommends this supplier of SAP migration knowledge and enablement. Whether it’s a full IT transformation or the first steps into big data, you’ll need a technically-accomplished, but business-focused partner to drive the project.

If you recognize that an SAP redeployment onto Linux is the perfect opportunity to develop a fuller, more impactful digital realignment (if not a full transformation), get in touch with a representative local to you today.

The post Seize the opportunity to transform SAP and the enterprise, with SUSE appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Whether it’s making the leap to cloud-based hosting for SAP or continuing with in-house provisions, the choice of server platform is paramount. While Linux is seen as an agnostic platform (one distribution is largely similar to every other, being based on the same kernel), there are significant differences in the flavor of Linux chosen.

And as business-focused IT professionals know, the computing service provision space is highly competitive. Locating a reliable host and OS that will be optimized for S/4HANA is no simple task, given the choices currently on the market.

Furthermore, finding a provider with the agility and elasticity that’s required by modern business demands in SAP provision is no easy matter. Such a business-critical system, at the heart of many enterprises in the region, needs the capability to quickly scale, without any negative impact on users – and by proxy, affecting the end-users’ experience.

In this area, one company that has a significant degree of experience is SUSE, whose Enterprise Server has had SAP-specific features and extended capability for many years.

With a zero downtime, and agents like SAP HANA Topology and SAP HANA, the optimization tools of choice specific to SAP make the transition to the new Linux-only topology safer, but the end results much faster, too.

The platform, and the company behind it, come well recommended by companies from all over the globe that have made the change.

“In the past it took at least eight hours to run a report, whereas now we get them at the click of a button. This cuts time spent waiting for reports by around 99.99 percent — accelerating planning and decision-making. We have far more control over access levels since moving to the new platform, boosting security. We’ve also seen performance more than double, and we need only three people to maintain the SAP landscape, versus five for the legacy system.” Head of IT, Southern Petrochemical Industries Corporation (India). Read the full story here.

Any transformation project with a major or minor SAP component is much simpler when working with SUSE.

The company currently has no fewer than 111 SAP HANA benchmarks for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP and has become the go-to provider to offer support and guidance for large migration projects. Those transformative projects have often included the whole IT stack, providing structures that are wholly business-oriented rather than ones that come from a purely technical stance.

SUSE provides business-centric consultation and execution which powers full IT transformation exercises, allowing a safe and impactful transition. And at the end of the day, end-users, customers, and internal stakeholders each reap the benefit both of the SUSE Enterprise Linux power and of the support and guidance on tap during the migration.

Whether it’s the implementation of a software-defined infrastructure, providing faster access to resources, or helping to promote newer DevOps methodologies, SUSE helps deliver new and legacy applications on a better and more agile platform that’s SAP-centric.

Enterprises all over the world are turning to SUSE for its long-term support guarantees, and its reputation as the Linux platform that’s tuned to SAP, and to the business too.

SUSE offers solutions to help transform the data center or migrate to any cloud, and the company provides businesses with the agility, stability, and reduced costs that are fit for 2020 and beyond.

The specific skills on offer from SUSE cover all aspects of digital transformation projects, not least ones which have, at the forefront, the transition of SAP from Windows to Linux.

To learn more about SUSE’s offerings in enterprise Linux, SAP, and broad-reaching digital transformation project oversight, get in touch with a representative who speaks your language today.

The post Moving SAP can be the start of digital realignment with SUSE capability appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Back in 2015, Bill Gates presented a TED Talk where he issued a warning about how the world won’t be ready to face the next pandemic. When the video resurfaced recently, many were shocked at just how accurate a prediction it was.

The Microsoft founder pointed out that not having a foolproof plan of action to fall back on when unexpected threats or risks escalate would lead to our demise.

Although he was referring to a lack of preparedness among global healthcare systems and governments, there are lessons businesses can take on the importance to be ready for unexpected and unfavorable circumstances.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

With many organizations caught entirely off guard by social distancing measures, it was clear that many businesses had never considered circumstances where part or all of their operations would have to go ‘remote’, let alone much of an entire economy.

While many might have had an enterprise risk management (ERM) strategy in place, many failed to execute, despite there being a high chance that countries around the world could follow that of China.

Many businesses outside China saw lockdown orders being enforced, the changes that took place and the disruption caused to businesses, but didn’t take the chance to assess their ERM policies and evaluate contingency plans.

“The biggest problems with a pared-down, formulaic approach to ERM often don’t emerge until it’s too late.

“Complicated flowcharts and in-depth policy manuals intended to guide escalation decisions during a crisis are often difficult and time-consuming to follow; they aren’t a substitute for an effective ERM function,” said Gartner Practice Vice President, Matt Shinkman.

What makes ERM effective?

According to research by Gartner, businesses that can tackle emerging risks with agility already have a clear set of action plans composed – not merely theoretical practice modules.

These businesses are ones that pay close attention to ERM systems – ones that leverage the right technology to help them identify risks and assess how these risks will affect enterprise goals, capital, and workforce resilience.

In making ERM systems effective, businesses must strive to craft procedures and policies that are based on possible impacts, as well as having leaders that examine specific risks and can mobilize action efficiently.

These qualities can significantly influence how an enterprise can adapt to the changing circumstances, protect business assets, secure the trust of stakeholders, ensure business continuity and possibly, foster growth opportunities.

Readying to respond

In building an “impacts-based” response procedures, the business must set a threshold that could signal a need for escalated actions. Turning to data and adopting predictive analytics capabilities can definitely help.

Businesses should ask themselves: If the situation worsens how can employees be protected? What happens if manual workloads can’t be carried out anymore? How can customers continue to be served? The answers to these questions should be in the form of credible action plans and procedures.

Next, it’s important to empower executives with risk management skills. Having them understand how emerging risks can impact their teams and then, the operation can guide these leaders in better examining possible threats.

Empowering them with the responsibility to decide on the course of action will make them naturally more alert but, of course, having a comprehensive understanding of business risks would be the first step here.

A bleak perspective on how ready their teams are can be costly to the entire operation.

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“Risk is like cholesterol, there are good and bad kinds,” said Shinkman.

“But the good kind helps an organization to take bigger, riskier growth bets — which is the single biggest differentiator of profitable growth.”

With that in mind, it’s important to note that investing time in ERM systems is not only for the sake of surviving a unforeseen crises, but it’s an essential business model criterion that will benefit the enterprise tremendously in the long run.

The post What COVID-19 taught businesses about risk and readiness appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

API — or application programming interface — helps organizations (banks) provide pre-authorized customers and partners with access to information they hold.

Think of APIs as special types of sockets on a wall at a bank through which customers, those with the right kind of plugs, can connect to and access some kind of information.

In recent times, with open banking gaining traction, API — the enabling technology for most open banking programs — has become even more popular.

Recently, Citi announced that CitiConnect, its API banking platform for institutional clients, has reached a new milestone. Since its launch, Citi has moved more than US$26 billion for clients using a set of over 50 unique APIs.

The bank said that the pace of CitiConnect API adoption is accelerating, with 18 million calls in November 2018, growing to over 157 million calls by August 2019, representing a growth rate of 750 percent.

Of the total API calls, the majority were from companies located in the Asia Pacific and European regions, reflecting the rapid growth of instant payments schemes in these areas.

While the company’s press release cited clients such as Flatio and Moni Online, whose services and business were made possible by CitiConnect APIs, Tech Wire Asia interviewed Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions Asia Pacific Head of Digital Channels and Data Sanjeev Jain to simplify the benefits of APIs to those banking with Citi.

“Citi’s set of over 50 unique APIs enable clients to seamlessly access and connect to a growing number of solutions, directly through their treasury workstations or enterprise resource platforms (ERPs) as well as other systems or platforms used by clients for their day-to-day business.”

“Interconnectivity and access to real-time information are fundamental to efficiency and decision-making and APIs enable this connectivity.”

According to Jain, having real-time access to the status of a payment or balance in an account helps increase visibility and transparency into critical business processes, making treasury and commercial functions more agile.

Further, information received via APIs also help optimize working capital, increase sales growth and improve the overall customer experience that institutional clients provide to their customers.

The CitiConnect solution offers APIs for both data-driven services and transactions. Examples of data-driven services include self-service reports, real-time FX information and account services including statements and proof of payments. Transactions include payments, request-to-pay, and WorldLink transfers.

“Through these APIs, we are able to provide enhanced connectivity and more integrated solutions to our clients.”

In the past couple of years, APIs have been instrumental to those banking with Citi, allowing the bank to bring the full value of instant payments and real-time banking to its institutional clients across the globe and helping them evolve to new business models (example direct-to-consumer) and enter new markets or businesses.

According to Jain, traditional clients seem to be increasingly evolving their business models to be more digital and directly customer-facing while digital natives continue to expand the breadth and depth of their services and the geographies they serve.

“More instant banking services are becoming available in multiple markets across the world, and particularly in Asia, and API technology is a strong enabler of business and consumer innovation.”

Jain sees APIs as the connective tissue of the real-time ecosystem and critical catalysts in enabling new and emerging business models.

“We expect future use cases to emerge as newer business models and strategies emerge.

“We also expect to continue to see the growth of ecosystems in the digital as well as the traditional economy, which would mean we would be able to provide services to our clients and their ecosystems including partners, merchants, and other relevant stakeholders.”

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Of course, APIs are key to making this possible which is why, as those banking with Citi move towards reaching their end customers directly, Jain believes the bank’s services will support those — moving beyond servicing B2B flows to also support consumer to business flows.

“APIs are a key enabler for our clients to improve and enhance their interactions with their end-consumers,” said Jain, expecting more transactions to take place in the future, beating their own milestone and helping more customers evolve and transform their business models.

The post Here’s how APIs delight institutional clients banking at Citi appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

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And accordingly, businesses are pulling out all the stops in deploying the latest digital technologies, such as cloud computing, ERPs, AI-powered data analytics, and robotic process automation in an effort to improve their operational efficiencies.

However, despite all the enthusiasm and investments, DX success seems to continue to be elusive. One McKinsey study, for example, said that only about 30 percent of companies that have embarked digital journeys have succeeded in improving their business performance.

This appalling success rate could be attributed to many things, but one of the most glaring factors is the lack of a single source of truth, especially when transparency and access to real-time data play a critical role in DX.

Before automating critical business processes such as procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, and hire-to-retire, companies need to ensure that these processes are based on accurate and robust financial data, which is often not the case, as indicated in this study.

It is bad enough that only 38 percent of the professionals trust the accuracy of their organizations’ financial figures, but what is worse is the fact that a big majority of them (69 percent) feel that leaders have made critical business decisions based on inaccurate financial data.

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Addressing the data discrepancies

Businesses should realize by now that DX built upon flimsy processes and outdated data is more likely to fail.

To remedy this, leaders should first look inwards and figure out how they can fix the financial data discrepancies.

Simply put, companies should look to modernize and transform their finance and accounting departments, as part of their DX project.

Far too often, these two departments are mere afterthoughts in transformation efforts and are forced to use “bolted-on systems” and “finicky customized processes” which is more of a liability than an improvement.

As a result, the digitalization happens at different paces and fortifies the siloed disconnect between operations and data.

Beyond that, businesses also end up missing out on the golden opportunity to carry out an organization-wide transformation and modernize every department at the same time with a fully integrated system, such as an ERP solution.

Modern ERP solutions that boast of unprecedented customization capabilities with add-ons for the different departments within an organization quickly solve data discrepancy issues, collapse all the silos, and provide the elusive single source of truth.

Furthermore, these solutions could also be integrated with accounting automation tools such as RPA, improving efficiency as well as reducing the risk of human errors and enhancing data integrity.

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In short, many digital transformation projects fail, partly because decisions pertaining to them are made based on inaccurate, outdated financial data.

Thus, the accounting and finance department should play a more significant, foundational role in all digital transformation process, and one way to do that is to transform these departments first.

The post Why some experts believe digital transformation starts with finance appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Companies that capture enormous data about customers and users in physical and digital environments can finally tap into those repositories to create intelligent insights using ML-powered solutions.

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Since a lot of these solutions are offered as a service (SaaS), they’re affordable and provide SMEs with a fighting chance against larger organizations that are investing heavily in customized digital-first solutions to beat the competition.

For example, despite lacking the scale of some of the larger competitors, small-scale manufacturers using ML might be able to fine-tune their processes and drive efficiencies to provide great production value to customers — at competitive prices.

Why machine learning is a game changer

In the digital world, efficiency, operational visibility, and trust are incredibly important. Organizations that fail to provide these tend to lose out to competitors.

ML levels the playing field for small and large organizations because it not only helps achieve efficiency as we’ve seen previously, but also helps provide operational visibility and earn the customer’s trust.

Most organizations collect gigabytes of data every day but don’t really put it to good use. According to a survey cited by a recent Harvard Business Review article, 72 percent of organizations have yet to forge a data culture, 69 percent report that they have not created a data-driven organization, and 53 percent state that they are not yet treating data as a business asset.

What this means is that a large number of businesses in the world are not using data to predict the future state of their operations.

As a result, SMEs that use ML to gain visibility into their future will find it incredibly rewarding — now is the time for them to make the most of this opportunity.

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Once organizations gain visibility into their operations, they can provide customers with accurate answers about delivery schedules and pricing — because they now have an in-depth understanding of their business which translates into insights that can support customer’s questions about pricing and supply.

At the end of the day, the reality is that ML provides incredible opportunities to all kinds of businesses, and with ML-powered solutions becoming more affordable as a service, the technology can provide significant advantages to CX managers and operations professionals.

The post ML can help SMEs gain efficiency, operational visibility and trust appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

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Many well-meaning companies often fall into this trap and exhaust all their funds, resources, expertise, and commitments into an ambitious project without clear objectives, or end goals in minds.

Worse, they could be focusing their efforts in areas that do not add any value to the organization, and either of these scenarios will result in companies not being able to complete their digital transformation agenda.

While this problem is not inevitable and is entirely avoidable, an organization must first be aware of what is digital transformation exhaustion, and how it occurs.

How DX exhaustion occurs

Digital transformation exhaustion occurs when businesses take the technology first approach as a foundation of their digital agenda.

For instance, a company may start their journey by developing technology platforms first, in hopes of expediting its initiatives. And to that end, they could migrate to the cloud, procure a new ERP system, and develop powerful APIs, in the hope of laying the foundation for the transformation that they want.

While the foundation is crucial, these implementations are just the foundation, and they could have exhausted all the resources in just laying the foundation.  Instead of structuring their transformation efforts in a modular and progressive fashion, they have effectively gone all in the right at the get-go.

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These foundations, while necessary, also does not deliver any obvious immediate benefits, and in many cases may inflate the operational expenditures, which could further exacerbate the situation.

Thus, it could be argued, technology first approaches as discusses could be costly for companies and which could deprive them of the fund requires for solutions that actually improve their business.

Beyond that, with the development of new technologies, businesses are also lead to believe that deploying these platforms will quickly transform their operation and deliver value.

It may be a difficult pill to swallow, but the most significant aspect of a successful digital transformation agenda is not the technology or platforms, but the transformational shift in the business model, workflow and culture, which are the augmented with appropriate technological platforms.

Steering clear of DX exhaustion

To ensure digital transformation success, companies have to deploy solutions that can deliver tangible business value, while at the same time, serve as a foundation to an agenda of continual improvement.

A shift in mindset is a first step toward achieving this. Businesses have to figure out the business problems for which they need solutions, and how much they are willing to spend for it. They need to start with their desired results and work backward to the right technology that will deliver it.

Furthermore, other factors such as flexibility, scalability, and ease of deployment should also be taken into consideration, as these initial implementation will also serve as both springboard, and foundation for the organization’s future initiatives.

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In conclusion, the technology-first, value later approach may lead to digital transformation exhaustion in any organization.

And thus, businesses first need to identify the business problems and areas they want to improve, establish a clear objective, and work backward towards finding the appropriate digital solution, to ensure a sustainable digital transformation agenda.

The post How to avoid digital transformation exhaustion appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

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For example, Singapore’s Inland Revenue Authority (IRAS) aims to transform the taxpaying experience by connecting all the different parties digitally and leveraging innovative tools to achieve greater security at the back of the country’s drive towards a cashless future.

Similarly, Hong Kong’s Inland Revenue Department (IRD) has started pursuing the digital agenda. Recently, they extended the eligibility of e-filing facilities to encourage usage among corporate taxpayers whose revenue exceeded than HK$2 million (US$0.25 million).

These transformations are changing the dynamics between tax administration and taxpayers, and for enterprises, there are internal changes to be made.

While many businesses have embraced these initiatives, some organizations are yet to completely digitize their finances and may feel a sense of urgency in investing in a digital solution.

But instead of acquiring a uni-tasking finance or accounting software, businesses might benefit more by deploying an agile, scalable, and flexible enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.

Enabling digital accounts

Despite all the buzz surrounding digital transformation in recent years, many enterprises are still relying on outdated accounting processes using traditional spreadsheets, which are inherently inefficient.

Further, complex taxing schemes such as the value-added tax (VAT) creates further headaches for finance teams, to track the sales and revenue from different items within their catalogs.

By deploying an integrated ERP software, many of their processes and account will be digitized, while internal processes will be more streamlined.

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Finance teams no longer have to deal with the challenges of information silos, as centralized data storage will afford the full visibility of financial and transactional records.

More robust and reliable records

Manual processes using spreadsheet and paper records are prone to human errors to accounting, something a properly deployed ERP solution could quickly fix.

The software practically eliminates the chances of human errors, while increasing data integrity by restricting unauthorized edits and changes.

Role-based access levels and data security measures such as end-to-end encryption adds another layer of protection to company data, that ensures sensitive company information stays safe.

Broader transformation

As finance is just one aspect of most ERP software, the solution can serve as a springboard for companies to embark on a slightly expanded digital journey and transform other areas of operations.

Modern out of the box ERP systems come standard with functions to streamline sales, supply chain, rostering, HR management, and even business process management.

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While it may be challenging to take on a full-fledged transformation strategy, ERP allows businesses to take on an incremental, piecemeal approach.

Thus, as tax administrations around the world are progressively becoming more digital, companies that are lagging in the digital journey have to eventually also move in the same direction.

And deploying ERP software is a good starting point.

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