Intelligence is the future need of the ERP. Why?

Experience is a crack shot story that tells the essence of anything. Even about ERP. From a user experience perspective, it began to heat me about the facts and features when I understood about intelligent ERP via S/4 HANA. I used the free trial version of the intelligent ERP instance provided by SAP and eventually, I decided to write this blog-post.

With an unprecedented boost in the digital framework, it has created alchemy to run the business across several platforms, technologies, and processes with an integrated approach. This is clear now that only a data-driven ERP is not sufficient to run the business comprehensively in the digital framework due to lack of extensibility. However, the enterprises running for a long time must have accumulated massive inertia in the process, technology, and the organization. This can lead to damage to the business because it is hard to calculate the delay in delivery, predict the future transaction, and estimate the operational cost. So the inertia must be broken.

Digital infrastructure is a network and a source for data, insights, and transactions. A certain degree of operation is required to harness the potential of the digital framework to transform the data into information, insight to the awareness, and transactions into a pattern. This means that the ERP must have the learning ability to read the patterns, analyze the transactions and make a decision for action. It should recommend and automate the awareness from the insights available in the network of digital infrastructure. So the imperative is, ERP must have the learning ability by itself, the skill to process the data, and making it available to the user in the form of useful information irrespective of whether the user is interested to use hands-free UX or system on-premise.

If anything has to operate to this level, it must be intelligent enough and hence the intelligent ERP for business.

Ten relevant questions must be answered if it is intelligent ERP:

1. Can the ERP make decisions on real-time data?
2. Can the risk be managed effectively?
3. Does it handle the process control?
4. Can it fulfill the expectation of the user experience better?
5. Can it lower the operational and training cost?
6. Does it have analytics embedded and can process real-time data together with the integrated data?
7. Does it have the ability to automate the upgrade and the awareness?
8. Can the ERP use machine learning and AI to recommend something?
9. Can the ERP fit in any business trends, be it fashion, defense or media?
10. Can the ERP monetize the data and optimize the business?

The answer to all ten questions above is a big YES given by an intelligent ERP.

Indeed, intelligence is the future need of ERP.  S/4 HANA is such an example of an intelligent ERP. With built-in adaptability to function with machine learning, AI, and analytics, the in-memory database offers real-time processing speed and a simplified data model. It consists of intelligence that can even deal with the next-generation process. Several industry areas; from Energy to Manufacturing, from Financial Services to discrete industries, and from consumer to public industries S/4 HANA is capable to provide solutions to all.