At the end of 2022, analysts were kicking back and venting steam to clear their heads for the new year. That led to drama-laden posts, stating “ERP is Dead” among others. Are they actually? Wow, we’d better check the pulse and see if ours are still breathing!
A little hyperbole never hurt engagement, so the post, appearing on IT research firm Gartner’s blog is pretty much on par for the course. Naturally, there might have been a brief moment of panic before we realized that it refers to classic monolithic ERP products. But, now we’re racing into 2023, it can’t be a bad idea to check that you can futureproof your resource planning tools.
To clarify, Gartner analyst Tonnie van der Horst stated in his post that “What is dead in ERP is the large and monolithic suite; ERP deployed as a wall-to-wall single vendor solution. Extensive Implementations supporting Finance, HCM, Procurement, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Logistics, Order management, and even CRM..”
Highlighting the path to cloud and composable ERPs, he promotes the flexibility and customization of modernized classic ERPs like Oracle and SAP/Hana, and presumably modern offerings like Infor’s CloudSuite and those from other players. Other posts in his blog series will dive further into these topics, so it will be worth keeping an eye out for.
The 2023 ERP shifting landscape
But if you’re running a business today, you need your ERP alive and kicking now. As the post highlights – “What is the (financial) impact when your ERP would be down for 24 or 48 hours?
A grocery wholesaler answered: ‘Oh, that is easy, we would be out of business in 48 hours.’”
Today’s ERPs are resilient, cloud-native creations, adaptable to growing businesses through broad and powerful business capabilities. When it comes to the increasing number of ERPs delivering ecommerce or retail features, plenty offer the basics, but leave it up to third parties to provide now-vital, market-specific, features.
Traditional ERPs were fine when IT dictated what software workers could use, and everyone sat in neat rows at corporate HQ. Now we see teams innovating with software at a frantic rate to create a competitive advantage, often working from home or in hybrid roles, and using multiple devices to access cloud services.
Working to keep in front of all that activity, ERPs are composable, able to add new services and import data from multiple sources. All while appealing to a broad audience. Take Infor, tagging widespread sectors like manufacturing, consumer, distribution, public sector, energy, health, and hospitality in its Industries list.
Any one of those markets could have sales and ecommerce as a priority, while nimble and scalable operations are critical to any type of organization’s success. Infor notes this and promises: “Organizations are facing business complexity amidst the demands of fast-paced change. Outdated, heavily modified legacy solutions add to the pressures. We are here to help you find your unique path to the cloud to unlock capabilities that optimize your business.”
Ensuring that payments are excellently managed
Companies adopting Infor CloudSuite can do so through a range of providers, implementation specialists, and support teams to deliver the right ERP for their business. Even then, many will find features they need to add, or the existing ones are not mature or quite what they need.
At this point, especially in the ecommerce and retail area, where every cent is critical, minimizing the amount spent on payment processing and chargebacks is vital. While CloudSuite and other ERPs are loaded with risk mitigation and cost management tools, a fast and focused payment and chargeback service, as we offer at Cartis Payments is not likely to be high on their agenda.
Our service integrates quickly with CloudSuite and other business tools through an API, ensuring that you have all the tools you need, whether you’re an enterprise, a high-growth business, or one starting out on the path to greatness.
And all we focus on is payments, so we’re not worried about beefing up your supply chain or distribution features – we deal with banks and payment processors to ensure you never miss a sale, and any problems are resolved faster and less expensively.
Get in touch to find out how Cartis Payments can deliver the payment services (US$/CAN$) your ERP needs and deserves.