Imagine running a business without using any business software (includes custom built solutions and POS as well). Entry of enterprise software, roughly four decades ago, was the beginning of the end of such a nightmare. In its early days, enterprise software made collecting and organizing data easy. Besides, it also provided the soft-infrastructure to improve productivity. Then came business processes and then analytics. Today, it has become virtually impossible to run a business efficiently without the help of suitable software - be it financials or payroll or CRM or supply chain or POS or any other part of a business. Even more valuable are the insights that are provided by the various BI Suites. But is that all it takes to run an efficient business tomorrow? Will all this be sufficient to remain competitive? The answer is a big ‘No'!
Some of the key drivers that shape the next generation businesses include:
- Shorter turn-around times for informed decision making
- In today's competitive world, it has become absolutely essential to make the right decisions fast. To make the right decisions, we need up-to-date data; and to make the decisions right away, we need tools that enable us to act on the business - irrespective of where we are.
- Deeper insights based on real-time data
- Business intelligence solutions help in analyzing business data to find patterns, spot opportunities, predict sales and provide a host of other insights into the business. With the business environment becoming more and more dynamic, it is important that the insights are based on real-time data (not historic). Insights not acted upon are nothing but wasted opportunities. So, it becomes even more important that these insights are passed on in real-time for decision making.
- Sustainability and Operational efficiency
- Paper based offices might soon be a thing of the past. However, a significant portion of information originates outside the organization's physical boundaries (for example, forms used at an offshore centre, the sales team, marketing campaign results, etc.). Capturing all this information outside the organization on paper, and then transferring the same to the enterprise systems for further processing, is highly inefficient. Not only does such a process degrade the operational efficiency, but also results in large amounts of paper work, thus increasing the carbon foot-print of the organization. In short, to create a sustainable, operationally efficient organization, it is important to keep the cost of information transfer as low as possible while increasing business user productivity.
Enterprise mobile solutions are one step in this direction. Keeping in mind that most business users are not restricted to the organization's physical boundaries, faster decision making, backed up by real-time data and insights, is possible only via mobile solutions that connect to the enterprise systems seamlessly and allow real-time information and decisions to be exchanged with the business backbone.
SAP NW Mobile, together with Gateway to SAP NetWeaver Mobile, is a platform that enables secure access to business data in seamless online-offline scenarios. Some of the key features of the platform include shared data access, conflict resolution, authorization and identity management, powerful data distribution based on the business data and scenario (more Distribution Modeling in Data Orchestration Engine - 1 & Distribution Modeling in Data Orchestration Engine - 2), standards based device connectivity options, comprehensive administration and monitoring portal, etc. Further, the model based development paradigm greatly reduces the time taken to develop, deploy and manage mobile applications.
More information about SAP NetWeaver Mobile and Gateway to SAP NetWeaver Mobile can be found here.
Gone are the days when enterprise mobility was considered a luxury. Today, enterprise mobile solutions have become a strategic necessity to make a business ‘best run'!
