CIOTechOutlook >> Magazine >> December - 2016 issue

Business Demands: Blending of Business and Technology as a whole


With over 18+ years of techno functional experience in managing IT landscapes for automobile component manufacturing, Garment manufacturing & exports, Retail & Distribution, ecommerce vertical , Tarun Bali ispresently working as IT Head at The Body Shop India and Srilanka. He is responsible for creation and execution of IT, CRM & digital strategy with Omni channel business approach building integrated people, process and application driven organization.

Adaptation and business case: Industry small or big has to understand that technology is the only answer to make business sustainable, complaint and viable. To stay competitive and successful in market enterprises has to ensure substantial business scale , cost reduction , process optimization , data accuracy , consistency , adaptation for high velocity of change and off course timely execution of services and efficiency in products developments. This can be achieved by implementing ERP’s because these applications are built on best industry practices with consistent data, product and services deliveries with seamless department connect. This also ensures data accuracy by avoiding multi facts of information held with silos departments. Most of the ERP’s are configurable to adopt changes as per business needs without going into major customization.

Once process is right, analytics, CRM & mobile can add digital flavor to it. After GST in place which is being built on digital platform requires consistent and quick information flow from industries to authorities so it become almost mandatory for industries irrespective of size to ensure their readiness to become compliant and beneficiaries.

Commercial viability: Traditional on premise ERP implementation and support requires high investment on hardware, application and manpower which some time become non-viable and expensive investment for SME’s. Last option is to depend on silos application with lot of manual working in complex application environment. For every problem there lies the opportunity which helps IT company to re-strategies’ their business model to become cloud solution providers with rental based application delivery model offering solutions as service like hardware, platform and application on cloud. Commercials are derived on monthly Opex model as per subscribed feature and usage putting less pressure on cash flow and are scalable.

Global Competiveness: SME’s has to compete with big domestic player as well as global companies who are setting local manufacturing units with high depth in technology implementation. Customer is the only reason for the business along with money which demands customer centric approach by offering consistency, convenience, customization of products and services with relevant products offerings instead of mass developments & subscription which can only be facilitated by technology.

Fragmentation of ERP software: By definition fragmented business software applications may cause problems as departments are forced to navigate through multiple silos applications. This slows down processes, reduces agility and increases opportunities for errors.Concept of cloud ERP’s are no longer the product of one vendors and work as fragmented applications featuring multiple modules hosted on different locations , environment . But it can be connected with each other creating one single unified view. These module specific cloud applications are originally built on platform sharing model to help organization for creating one ecosystem independent on language, OS and hardware. One size cannot fit for all as business are force to use multiple applications and providers.

Digital transformation and IOT’s, Big Data readiness: ERP’s are initially developed for internal workforce and stake holders within confined place and timings. But rising cloud infra with the proliferation of digital, big data and internet of things demands traditional closed loop architecture approach to become more open ,agile platform thinking approach with readymade API’s and connectors to talk and share info with any complex application environments. New age ERP’s are even adopting major change to become DRP’s (Digital Enterprise Resource Planning) accessible to internal as well as external customers with 24X7 availability offering consistency ,transparency and convenience.

Real time data capturing through IOT appliances and passing just in time info to analytical cloud helps enterprise to timely deliver products & services relevant to customer needs as timings are more important than product and service itself. Traditional ERP’s should complement these new age applications and hardware’s by opening direct API’s to connect in seamless environment.

Conclusion: Clouds main shortcoming is the lock-in of company confidential data in the servers of third-party service providers, and the inability to easily accomplish tasks that require intersecting data from multiple such sources and failure of one may cause trouble for others.

Selection of cloud solution provider should be dealt carefully with reference check, market credibility and their long term vision. Before subscribe for the services one should ensure SLA’s, NDA’s, exit clause, data dispose policy on exit, migration assistance with proper signed off. Data security certification, data access policies of internal employees should be thoroughly checked and evaluated before proceedings with final agreements. Cloud services must possess audit trail features with creation of logs for each and every transactions to track data access, change, update and download. Information should be available as and when required by the business.

On The Deck

CXO Insights

Customer Experience - A Game-Changer In The...

By Hemanth Sheelvant, Founder, Business Head, iero, Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Software

The Golden Opportunity

By Duncan Ash, Senior Director, Global Financial Services, Qlik

An Exploration into OpenStack Technology

By Amarjeet Manchanda, Director – Solution Architecture, Red Hat

Facebook