Tech Trends 2013 Preview: Reinventing the ERP Engine |
ERP is not dead (again). In fact, it may have a whole new lease on life – revving up data architectures, hardware architectures, deployment architectures and business model architectures at the very core.
ERP has redefined itself time and again, adding new business departments to the transactional suite and adding analytics, mobile and social feature sets to the core transactional mission.
That’s important. But not this year’s trend.
ERP may be no stranger to reinvention, but the underlying engine has remained fairly monolithic. Even the mainframe to distributed evolution didn’t change some things at the core. That’s different now, opening new possibilities for the routes over which commerce can run.
What if things that used to take days took seconds? Changes in ERP engine are happening to do exactly that – engineered systems, appliance computing, in-memory architectures, cloud deployment and scaling options, GPU cores and MapReduce algorithms, solid-state storage density and durability.
If you really got ERP cheaper and faster, what would you do? Run MRP many times daily? Close the books in seconds? Optimize delivery routes on-the-fly in response to new orders, traffic, or customer preference? Implement many hot/hot instances for resilience in locations around the world? What would it mean for business agility, capability and competitiveness?
The answers to these questions are the real “so what”. The infrastructure enhancements may yield expected benefits around efficiency, TCO and maintainability – important factors, for sure. But the overhauled engine can be so much more than a technology upgrade – and needs to be to keep competitive advantage.
To learn more about Reinventing the ERP Engine and what the future may hold, subscribe now to receive the next installment of Tech Trends – Deloitte Consulting LLPs annual review of the leading technology trends impacting business today and into the future.
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Bill Briggs Director Deloitte Consulting LLP |
