| | March 20158CIOReview | | March 20159CIOReview

The Imperatives for Modern ERP SoftwareBy Robert Sieger, Sr. Vice President, Technology Services, Creative Group,Inc

Technology 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 WorkerKeeping 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 f loor 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 f lows 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.

Collaboration Inspires InnovationTo 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 DemandsToday, businesses want ERP solutions that provide the ease of use, insight and f lexibility that make them faster, more productive, f lexible 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 RelationshipsYour 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 ChoiceBusiness 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 f lexibility. 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