Investing in the Technology to Enable a Customer-Centric Strategy

How to upgrade systems and software without sacrificing performance

Technology is vital to business success, but continuing to make the investments and keep them updated is an added step that many companies fail to take.

In a study from SAP and Oxford Economics, 84% of businesses acknowledged that digital transformation is critical to their survival over the next five years. But only 3% have completed company-wide transformation efforts.

Such efforts take time, and depending on the size of the organization, they can cost millions of dollars. There is also the risk of interrupting key business operations along the way. These factors are often enough to discourage organizations from making necessary improvements and upgrades.

Nevertheless, growth requires a careful balance between staying technologically current and providing a consistent customer experience. Here are some of the ways you can upgrade your systems and solutions without sacrificing performance.

Why investing in new tech is important

This is obvious information for the network managers and IT specialists out there, but it’s important to reiterate how investing in and maintaining technology can impact all areas of a business.

If company leadership needs to be persuaded to invest in upgrades and new technology, increasing security is usually a very compelling reason. Every new version of any solution has improved security functions and corrections from previous versions. Continuing to run old software just to save money puts your company and its assets at risk.

New hardware and software can drastically improve productivity as well. Investing in the right programs can streamline operations, reduce downtime, and improve the likelihood of everything running as it should.

Using technology to create customer-centric solutions

Creating an IT strategy centered around the customer experience is the best way to control future growth. You don’t necessarily need all the shiny new gear and every top-rated application, but you do need the right systems in place that fit with your strategy. Your goal should be to streamline processes not just implement new technology for its own sake.

This requires regular audits of current systems and hardware as well as an honest evaluation of how to provide your customers and vendors with what they need. Two of the biggest opportunities you have to streamline processes, improve overall business functionality, and give customers a better experience lay in your ERP and CRM systems.

SAP S/4HANA, for example, is the latest ERP suite developed by SAP, and millions of businesses all over the world are making the upgrade from ECC over the next few years. Although this will be the biggest IT project of the decade for many organizations, it’s a perfect example of why investing in new technology is so critical to future growth.

Compared to its predecessor, SAP ECC, S/4HANA is simpler, easier to use, faster, and more cost-effective. From an IT perspective, this system allows companies to centralize hardware and network resources to simplify overall business processes. From an end-user perspective, SAP’s Fiori UI embraces a modern and accessible design for easier use. The platform’s improved speed also facilitates better reporting, predicting, and integration with customer-centered applications.

From an overall business perspective, transitioning to S/4HANA gives companies the technological advantage they need to plan and react faster than ever before. All of this combined makes S/4HANA the next technological step for many companies in their transition to a customer-centric model.

Use integration to support your business strategy

As you build your business and consider which technologies are worth the investment, think about your integration strategy and how these various applications can work together. Connecting applications unleashes the true potential of your systems and makes your investment much more effective.

Integration between an ERP system like SAP and a front-end system like Salesforce is a perfect example. While this integration largely benefits customer-facing employees, it also offers great advantages for operations, marketing, and finance departments.

enosix provides bi-directional access to SAP data natively within front-end systems like Salesforce. Our framework is installed in the SAP ERP (ECC or S/4HANA) app layer as a certified add-on      and      uses our custom Rapid Integration Objects (RIOs) to unlock your data.

Although Salesforce is the leading CRM choice for many businesses, enosix can connect to most other systems by exposing our RIOs through a REST API. This drastically reduces the integration time, which is key for many businesses who put off integration solutions for fear of disrupting operations.

Giving employees access to real-time      data and the ability to execute SAP transactions through the front-end system enables your business to interact with customers, collaborate as a team, and make better decisions more effectively. enosix is built to scale with your business, so as you invest in new technology and develop your customer-centric strategy, we’ll be right there with you.

Schedule a free demo today to learn more about enosix’s pre-built integration solutions.