The cloud is a great enabler, bringing high scalability, improved service availability, and operational cost optimization for organizations of all sizes. But more importantly, it is an equalizer for businesses across industries. As the SaaS delivery model matures, it is much easier and affordable to consume on-demand advanced business capabilities, levelling the playing field for small and mid-tier businesses.
No wonder, currently, the mid-market enterprise management trends are undergoing a visible shift as companies are increasingly leveraging Cloud Based ERP Solutions to build connected business operations, compete at scale, and fulfill their customer expectations. As your competition gears up for a cloud-first future, how should you respond to keep pace?
Why Should You Consider Switching to A Cloud-Based ERP System?
There are more than enough reasons to consider investing in a Cloud-Based ERP System as your next digital transformation objective. Here are a few of them to explain why you should be replacing your ad hoc enterprise management application suite with a cloud ERP for the Mid-market:
Reduced upfront investments: The most enticing benefit of Cloud Based ERP Solutions is that they can convert your hefty, one-time capital investments into an adjusted stream of operating expenses, reducing the financial burden on your business, and permitting more predictable cash flows. An on-premises ERP deployment involves unavoidable upfront investments in hardware and application and additional recurring investments like licensing, maintenance, training, and upgrades.
Instead, a Cloud ERP for the Mid-market like SAP Business ByDesign involves a one-time installation charge and is available through a simple per-user subscription, drastically trimming your Total Cost of Ownership. Thus, while you may not have enough funds to commit to an on-premises ERP deployment, a cloud ERP for the Mid-market can still make advanced ERP features available and set your digital transformation plans rolling at a much-reduced price tag.
Simplified deployment: Even today, ERP implementation remains a high-risk endeavor, with market stats indicating that almost half of the projects fail to meet their stated objectives. Given the inherent complexities of deploying such applications on-premises and the dependences involved therein, it is not uncommon for implementation projects to creep beyond mission scope, inflating costs and bringing innovation to a standstill!
However, Cloud ERP for the Mid-market are primarily turnkey solutions architected to meet such challenges head-on. These are adaptive, responsive, and ready-to-deploy applications built to reduce time to value for the customer. For instance, while standard, on-premises ERP deployments can take nearly a year, Cloud Based ERP Solutions like SAP Business ByDesign adopt an ERP suite-in-a-box approach to deploy and bring value to your business within a few months.
In fact, now, function-specific SAP Qualified Partner-Packaged Solutions are available that can be deployed within just a few weeks. The accelerated and simplified implementation puts mid-market entities at a remarkable advantage, reducing the chances of losing business opportunities to downtime.
Improved Collaboration: One of the most important benefits of an ERP is to break information silos and establish a single source of truth for driving enterprise transformation. Cloud Based ERP Solutions take it a step further by tapping into cloud capabilities to make such collaborations more seamless and efficient.
Whether you are looking to orchestrate your mission-critical workflows, harness real-time operational data to deliver insights for your decision makers, manage your resources better to reduce waste, or tightly integrate your ERP landscape with third-party systems, Cloud Based ERP Solutions are designed to accommodate all such requirements using cloud-native resources keeping the cost of innovation to a minimum and allowing you to respond meaningfully to market shifts.
Further, an ERP for the Mid-market like SAP Business ByDesign has built-in mobility, allowing your teams to collaborate and be productive on the go. Whether your employees are in the office or on the field, it allows seamless system access from all Android or iOS devices.
Assured disaster recovery and data security: Concerns around safekeeping often prevent businesses from confidently putting their confidential business data on the cloud. However, Cloud Based ERP Solutions usually guarantee a degree of data protection and integrity that may not be otherwise possible for on-premises systems due to cost and technical limitations.
For instance, your business data in Cloud Based ERP Solutions is maintained with redundant backups across geographically separated data centers resistant to fire, flood, or theft. Therefore, even in case of a catastrophic system failure, you can resume business as usual with minimum delay using the cloud data backup.
Similarly, Cloud Based ERP Solutions leaders like SAP are among the largest investors in data security worldwide, maintaining complete ownership of the security aspects of their cloud ERP products. It includes system-wide synchronous and scheduled upgrades to consistently plug security gaps, installing multiple layers of military-grade encryptions, fail-safes, and security best practices, having your ERP landscape safeguarded 24X7 by teams of crack cloud security experts, and much more. Consequently, while it reduces your business investment in data security, Cloud Based ERP Solutions can provide peace of mind and reliability, unlikely for on-premises ERP deployments.
Final Note
Choosing an ERP is a complex decision. It’s understandable if you are still unsure whether switching to Cloud Based ERP Solutions would be an ideal next step for your business. How about having a certified consultant with years of experience implementing cloud ERP for Mid-market companies globally, guide you through?
In fact, as an SAP Gold partner, at Percipere, we have made a name for ourselves in partnering with small and mid-market organizations like yours to choose the right cloud ERP solutions. We invite you for a free discovery session to realize the benefits that Cloud Based ERP Solutions can bring to your business.
