It All Adds Up: New IDC Analyst Connection Discusses the Value of ERP
For years we’ve talked about the benefits of ERP and how organizations can reduce operational costs and increase revenues through operational efficiency, greater personal productivity, and more informed decision making.
To back this up with detailed facts, we talked to IDC analysts about the productivity benefits of ERP solutions. The findings are outlined in an IDC Analyst Connection that not only confirms the financial benefits of enterprise ERP, but also quantifies these benefits with remarkable precision, highlighting exactly which features and focus areas will give your organization the most value. You can read the full IDC Analyst Connection here.
With the launch of the new Dynamics AX coming up, we’ve had extensive discussions with our customers about how their organization can get more value from their ERP investment. Based on these interactions, a few points in the IDC study particularly resonated with me and are relevant to the issues our customers are facing today.
1. User adoption is the key to unlocking value. IDC research shows that the return on your investment in ERP scales linearly with the number of users:
- Increased productivity drives $1,141 per employee in additional revenue.
- Better, faster decision making as a result of data analysis can capture $2,628 per employee in additional revenue.
- And improved accuracy and precision saves $170 per employee. That’s a return of nearly $4000 per user.
2. User adoption depends on ease-of-use. ERP has traditionally been considered hard to use, even being noted as one of the key barriers to adoption when it comes to legacy applications. This is an area where Dynamics business solutions have made significant progress. We have customers consistently connecting their Dynamics solutions to their legacy ERP applications, just so people can have an interface that is understandable and easier to use.
3. Extending the organizational reach of your ERP solution—rolling it out to users beyond Finance and Operations, and connecting ERP to Sales, CRM, HR, and other operational systems—will multiply the number of users, and multiply your ROI. Breaking down the silos between departments and divisions is key to the success of a business. When collaboration is possible, tasks are completed faster, and a company becomes more agile and competitive.
4. Rapid deployment reduces implementation costs and contributes to user adoption, according to IDC. Long ERP implementation cycles remain one of the biggest challenges of enterprise organizations. A typical ERP implementation can take 6 to 12 months to fully implement. Given the pace of business, these long timelines are no longer acceptable. This is another area that is a core focus for our team. This is not something that will change overnight, but with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services, we are shifting the implementation paradigm and enabling people to deploy quicker than ever before so they can be more agile and get faster time-to-value.
I encourage you to look over the IDC Analyst Connection, consider how it applies to your organization and let us know what you think. With Microsoft Dynamics business solutions, we are taking significant steps to help people be more productive—and your feedback is crucial to that process. We’ll have more to share in the upcoming weeks about the new Dynamics AX and how organizations can derive even more value from their ERP investment.
Read the full IDC Analyst Connection
Citations:
IDC Analyst Connection, Achieving Greater Productivity through Business Solutions, August 2015
IDC Infographic, sponsored by Microsoft, Gaining the ERP Edge, 2015
