In the world of business, collaboration matters: each of us knows that. And, perhaps naïvely, we expect our ERP systems to deliver that collaboration. Yet, a moment’s reflection tells us that workflow is not the same as collaboration, and that whatever other advantages an ERP system confers, it’s evident that instant real-time interaction between people, functions and businesses is not among them.
So says Steve Winder, Epicor Software’s regional vice president for UK and Ireland, adding that one of the biggest challenges facing ERP providers at present is how to deliver that improved collaboration.
“Collaboration within the enterprise provides a competitive advantage,” he points out. “This is particularly true in highly volatile and fast moving markets, or where complex processes are used, as collaboration provides increased transparency and joins ‘silos’ of departments together. And it’s not just for larger enterprises: small and medium-sized organisations will benefit too, even though the collaboration challenges they face are intrinsically more manageable.”
Moreover, he explains, the benefits of collaboration extend beyond the immediate workplace, and apply right across the business and its extended supply chain.
“By bringing people together from different departments, different locations, or different companies in order to share their expertise, collaboration can stretch beyond the four walls of a business,” he notes. “With collaborative conversations creating new insight both within an organisation and with customers and suppliers right across the extended supply chain, collaboration enables smarter and faster decision-making.”
And yet, however powerful the imperative to have those collaborative conversations might be, ERP systems have historically struggled to provide them.
“ERP systems have always been good at dealing with structured processes, and today, it’s fair to say that most ERP systems perform the standard business processes very well most of the time,” he observes. “The challenge arises when you move away from these standard structured business processes, and into unstructured business processes. That’s when collaboration fails, and problems arise.”
Such as? And what sort of problems? It doesn’t take long for Winder to crisply highlight a couple of scenarios in which ERP system’s collaborative failings become manifestly clear.
“Take customer service, for instance: a customer phones up, raising an issue to do with making changes to an ongoing order, or asking quality-related or technical questions about a previous order. Most of the time, an ERP system won’t have the answers, and so the standard response is to say: ‘We’ll get back to you.’ And that can take time, because the ERP system lacks the required person-to-person interaction that is required in order to resolve the customer’s query.”
Nor is sub-optimal customer satisfaction and responsiveness the only danger: new product development and introduction is also very much about collaboration between departments and functions within the business, again in an unstructured manner for which it is difficult to codify standard processes. And the challenge is only compounded, stresses Winder, when these different functions and departments are geographically separate, as is often the case in larger enterprises.
Seeing the 'first mover' advantage
“It’s not difficult to see how improved collaboration might see businesses bring new products to market sooner, or even bring better products to market,” he observes. “Time and again, we see the ‘first mover’ advantage enjoyed by innovative businesses which manage to accelerate their new product development timescales, and somehow seem to have the knack of launching innovative products way ahead of their competition.”
In fact, sums up Winder, opportunities for improved collaboration can be found right across the business – each one building the case for collaboration as an enabler of business growth, business profitability, and business competitiveness.
“Right across the business, collaboration can make a huge contribution: increased sales, access to new markets, faster product development, increased capacity and improvements in efficiency and effectiveness, as well as cost savings, through improved knowledge transfer,” he emphasises. “And the companies which understand this concept, and go on to actively embrace the challenge of collaboration, will be the ones which will benefit the greatest.”
So how, then, should businesses go about, to use Winder’s phrase, ‘actively embracing the challenge of collaboration’? Technology is clearly key, offering a powerful set of communication tools and mobile devices that provide an information-rich collaborative experience wherever people happen to be.
But it would be a mistake, stresses Winder, to visualise enterprise collaboration through the lens of the sort of consumer applications that most of us routinely use, seeing it as analogous to (say) Facebook, or Twitter, or similar social media collaboration and communication tools.
And that’s because much of the information that people within the enterprise will be sharing and collaborating around is held, yes, within the enterprise’s ERP system.
“The trick is to recognize that ERP systems have the data that businesses need, but not the processes that they need,” he observes. “Duplicating that data within some other collaboration system would be a retrograde step, and doing without it would be pointless: what’s required is a way of building social collaboration processes into the ERP system, rather than throwing away the investment in the data, or building some kind of parallel collaborative community.”
And handily, points out Winder, next-generation ERP systems now increasingly have ‘social business’ functionality built in – a way of augmenting ERP with the tools that are required in order to provide the information-rich collaborative environment that a growing number of businesses are recognising that they need.
“The tools provided in modern ERP platforms not only offer a lot of flexibility in how businesses can collaborate, but also allow the users to personalise them, and choose how and when to use them,” he says. “This simplicity and ease of access increases engagement, collaboration and continuous improvement to boost productivity and provides a significant opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.”
Take the latest version of Epicor ERP, which was designed with social working in mind. Featuring Epicor Social Enterprise, it brings concepts that will be instantly familiar to users who use social media tools at home as individual consumers, says Winder.
Users can ‘follow’, comment on, and share information that’s relevant to them, connecting to data and other parts of the business in new ways, leading to improved processes, better decision-making, and closer relationships, both within the business and externally, with customers and suppliers.
Collaboratively engage with others
“And it’s real-time, just as in the consumer world,” he enthuses. “That’s the game changer: so when the customer comes on the phone, and wants to know something about an individual invoice or order, it’s the work of a couple of clicks to see the entire organisational context of that invoice or order—and then be able to collaboratively engage with others in the business to ask for further information, or make changes. Plus, you’re doing it inside the ERP system; you’re not picking up the phone, or sending an e-mail, or walking over to ask someone. And going forward, it’s just as straightforward to subscribe to, or follow, that invoice or order, being instantly updated with further developments.”
Nor, concludes Winder, is this hyperbole: according to a study earlier this year by analyst firm Aberdeen Group, businesses with social ERP are 250% more likely to have real-time collaboration across departments and divisions than business which don’t have social ERP.
“Collaboration is the future of ERP,” he sums up. “Embrace it.”
