This document discusses the imperatives for modern ERP software. It summarizes that ERP technologies should enable responsiveness and collaboration through mobility, allowing workers to access systems anywhere at any time. It also emphasizes that collaboration fosters innovation by allowing teams to work together. Finally, it concludes that modern ERP software needs to provide flexibility through deployment options, simplicity to avoid business challenges, and responsiveness to both external demands and individual employee needs.

1. | |March 2015
8CIOReview | |March 2015
9CIOReview
The Imperatives
for Modern ERP
Software
By Robert Sieger, Sr. Vice President, Technology Services, Creative Group,Inc
T
echnology solutions make it possible to build
better relationships with people inside your
organization and those you work with externally.
Using solutions that support mobility and social
collaboration, you can strengthen your relationships with
your customers, partners, and employees. Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) technologies enable you to be
more responsive and collaborative in your relationships.
Epicor ERP solutions have been developed with these goals
in mind.
Mobility for the Modern Worker
Keeping pace with the speed of business is rigorous
but essential. Mobility enables business whenever and
wherever, to support improved interactivity to make
business persistent, pervasive and decisive. Fast and
efficient transactions and business convenience provide a
foundation for successful business relationships.
The days of coming to the office, logging into an ERP
system, and then leaving it all behind at the end of the day
are long gone. Work has moved beyond a PC in a cubicle
or office: to the customer site, on the plant floor or in the
warehouse, in the field or on a supplier visit. In today’s
always-connected world, users demand access 24/7, with a
consistent experience that flows between devices. Support
for touch and gestures and the ability to fully interact with
business systems—beyond simply drilling into analytics—
is becoming the new normal.
CollaborationInspiresInnovation
To succeed in today’s globally competitive
business environment, companies must
innovate. Collaboration is the path to innovation
for breakthrough ideation. The principles of
ERP are founded on the benefits of working
together. Examples might include collaborating
around a project, a customer incident, a quality
issue, a procurement challenge, or a planning
event. The greater the connections, the more
business value creation. Collaborative synergies
speed go-to-market strategies for innovative
products, services and partnerships.
Responsiveness to Demands
Today, businesses want ERP solutions that
provide the ease of use, insight and flexibility
that make them faster, more productive, flexible
and responsive to operational, customer and
strategic demands. Being responsive to external
demands creates an outstanding customer
experience, paving the way for longer profitable
customer relationships.
Internally, end user demands for greater
control over the user experience are increasing.
Individuals expect to be able to manipulate
screens and dashboards in a manner that is
relevant to a particular role, task or point in time.
The ability to "sculpt"
your application to each
individual employee's needs—without
the need for custom development work—ensures
that your employees maximize their efficiency.
Simplicity Supports
Relationships
Your focus should be on running
your business and
building stronger
relationships with
your customers.
Your business
software must
be easy to
deploy, use
and manage,
helping to
leverage business
o p p o r t u n i t i e s
as opposed to creating
business challenges. Epicor ERP simplifies
your work with unprecedented ease-of-
adoption, and delivers more accurate, more
transparent, more powerful information, in real time, so
you can focus on what matters most to your business.
Freedom of Choice
Business is a series of choices. As you grow and scale
your business, you want a solution that empowers you to
be agile and change course as needed. Whether launching
a new product, updating business processes, or entering a
new market, you should have a solution that supports your
choices and enables you to implement them effectively and
efficiently.
With a single solution able to be deployed on premises,
hosted, or in the cloud, Epicor ERP provides extensive
deployment flexibility. Epicor is one of the few vendors to
have architected a fully multi-tenant software as a service
(SaaS) and on premises version out of a single product, and
is the only vendor that has deployed it to customers.
Conclusion
The rise of consumer technologies, easy-to-use apps, and
social networks has created new imperatives for business
applications. A consistent innovator in global ERP,
Epicor offers solutions built entirely on a true service-
oriented architecture. Using this approach, “services” are
self-contained, platform-independent pieces of business
logic that can be dynamically located, invoked and used
to configure and reconfigure processes, and improve
integration of applications. Epicor’s agile architecture
enables distributors to remain nimble and better able to
adapt when business needs change. Combining choice,
simplicity, responsiveness, and support for collaboration
and mobility, Epicor ERP is leading the way in meeting the
needs of modern business.
With a single
solution able
to be deployed
on premises,
hosted, or in the
cloud, Epicor ERP
provides extensive
deployment
flexibility
Robert Sieger