And boy have things changed!

About 10 years ago I remember talking to a prospect who was absolutely adamant, he wanted a system that would enable his business to be agile as possible, as he forecast the pace of change will only speed up, and at some future point, he added, only the most agile of businesses will thrive. That was real foresight in my opinion, as agility has proven to be one of the most sought-after attributes for Manufacturers and Wholesale Distributors worldwide.

I have worked in IT Sales now for over 30 years. And from my perspective, I see things have really changed. My first job was working for an IBM reseller and my first ever sale was for a hard disk drive for a financial company who needed extra capacity. They paid the princely sum of £30,000 for, and get this, for a 13.2 MB drive. This thing was the size of a washing machine, with aluminium platters ¼ inch thick. Fast forward to today and you can get thousands of times more storage on a key ring and pay less than you pay for a decent coffee.

During the last 25 years I have worked in Business Software of one flavour or another and things have changed enormously here too. When I think back to the green screen applications that were a wonder of their time (MRP & MRPII), and fast forward to today, there is simply just a world of difference. Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, ERP/Cloud Computing, all great innovations that can make a massive difference to the companies that deploy technologies of this nature.

As an example, Oracle NetSuite is one of those systems that provides a really high level of agility, it supports many different business models, it’s a bit like having 4 ERP’s in one unified platform, so customers can easily scale horizontally as well as vertically.

So when things change, as they have done, and as they always will do, isn’t it better to be on a flexible and agile platform? As my prospect said, it could be the difference between thriving or merely surviving.

Proof Point - Judging by the growth rate of Cloud ERP providers and my employers in particular (Oracle NetSuite), it appears more change is afoot, the world is most definitely moving to the cloud and leaving behind a plethora of legacy on-premise systems.

If you are thinking about Digital Transformation for your business, please reach out to me on jowen-lee@netsuite.com as I may have something you may just come to value enormously i.e. a faster growing, profitable and agile business.

#NetSuite ERP #ERP #Innovation #UK Manufacturing #Distribution