Agile systems needed to ride the wave of disruption

You would have to have been living under a rock to have not heard about Uber and Airbnb and the disruption they are causing the taxi and hotel industries around the world. No industry is immune from the Uber effect. Potentially disruptive technologies go way beyond online information services and include 3D printing, drones, next-generation batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, wearable devices and the Internet of Things.

Your organisation needs three things to benefit from disruption and not fall victim to it: you must know your business and be prepared to change; be agile and respond quickly, as changes are hard to predict; and employ low-drag systems which push you forward, not hold you back.

Basically, to ride the wave of disruption - which can supercharge business growth when identified and employed effectively - you need an agile system and you need to work like mad. How do you know if your system is agile? In IFS’s experience, your main run-the-business system or ERP application should meet the following seven criteria.

1. Give visibility into and integrate information across the enterprise. You can’t change or improve what you can’t see. To truly know your business, you need to consolidate all your financial and operational information into a single system.

2. Provide a ‘single source of truth’ for operations in real time. If information is not real time, it cannot drive new services or processes in real time. Capturing information at the source and communicating it immediately is vital.

3. Facilitate customer service, including new services and apps. Can you optimise your service operations with integrated enterprise service management (ESM) software with mobility support? If not, how will you empower your customers?

4. Present information tailored to people’s roles in an easy-to-use way. As more information becomes available, can you easily distil it down to what is needed for a particular job role or project and present it in a user-friendly way?

5. Support digital devices that can be used everywhere and anytime. Is your ERP system accessible and useable across all devices - from PCs to laptops, tablets, smartphones and smart watches - and easily extendable to new devices?

6. Quickly integrate new technologies relevant to your business. Integrating disruptive technologies into existing business systems presents challenges. Is your supplier continually demonstrating new solutions to overcome challenges as they arise?

7. Be easily tailored to adapt to changes in your business. Expensive customisation - when deploying systems or adapting them to business changes - are a drag on agility. To enable change, minimise customisation and use systems that are easily configured to meet new business requirements.

Ensure that your ERP system meets these seven key criteria and, like Uber, you will be well on the way to riding the wave of disruption and not being wiped out by it.

Rob Stummer is Managing Director, Australia and New Zealand for global enterprise applications company IFS. He holds a Master in Information Technology from Melbourne University and has acted as a consultant to many of the region’s top 500 companies.