Third-party Maintenance Companies are Killing Your Future ERP Innovation

If you are a company with an ERP solution in-place, you are looking at a very bright future. A future where the newest, latest and greatest technologies are coming at you. Your ERP solutions providers are there to support you in your company's growth. These ERP vendors are building software specifically designed to help your company in this new digital age. The old legacy technology is just outdated, and it needs to be refreshed, just like our phones, our bodies, and our minds.

Unfortunately, there are third-party maintenance companies who are taking organizations down a road that will eventually kill innovation within that organization. These so-called “third-party maintenance companies” are telling you and other organizations like you, that status quo is “good enough”. That is not what true innovative technology and business partners should be doing. “Good enough” is socialism. If you want to be a socialist company with zero updates or innovation for the next 15 years, then you're going to be in trouble.

I deal with these horrible “third-party maintenance companies” every day. I listen to their stories on how they help an organization stay on an old antiquated and outdated SAP system. They tell the companies that they will maintain old systems day in and day out for organizations at 90% savings.

Unfortunately, that 90% of savings is a lie a flat out lie.  No third-party maintenance company can provide these kinds of services legally and ethically. I know who these companies are, their executives and their sales team. And they are slick as snake oil. If you really want your company to grow and you think that your firm is cutting-edge, then you need to stay away from these organizations.

Let me give you an example. I personally know of a third-party maintenance company that took over the support for a company running SAP ECC 6. This company is actively looking to grow and innovate its technology footprint. Unfortunately, because they are under contract with the third partner maintenance company that forces them to continue to use outdated technology. The third-party maintenance company lied to the organization. They will not be able to succeed while they are stuck using old ERP solutions. They will have to continue to rely on the third-party maintenance company to try to create custom code to connect everything while paying more costs and losing out by not having access to new innovative technology.

If they would have stayed on a simple upgrade plan from SAP (yes there's a cost to that), instead of believing this third-party maintenance company, they would be able to upgrade their SAP environments around the globe right now. SAP and other software providers have development teams around the globe, upgrading and updating the software every day of the year. To be so naive to think that a software application like SAP, Microsoft or Oracle should not get a license revenue maintenance because of the updates and upgrades that they are providing to an organization is asinine.

Don’t allow your company to fall further and further behind but signing a long term (up to 15 years) contract with a third-party maintenance company. While there will always be a cost to a licensing and maintenance agreement, staying with old legacy technology will cost more at the end of the day.

Don’t let that slick snake oil salesmen sell you.

About the Author - Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more.

Under Chris’s leadership, Approyo has been named to the Inc. 5000 three years in a row (2016 – 2018) and named one the SAP Solution Provider of the Year in 2018 by ACQ5. In 2018, Chris was awarded the Gamechanger of the year by ACQ5, one of the 10 Most Inspiring Business Leaders by Mirror Review and one of the Rising Entrepreneurs of the Year by The Technology Headlines.

Approyo CEO Chris Carter to speak at the 2019 CloudEXPO

We are excited to announce that Approyo CEO, Chris Carter will be speaking on Wednesday, June 26 at the CloudEXPO in Silicon Valley. Chris's session, The Growth of Cloud Usage in the ERP World, will dive deep into the enterprise cloud computing world.

The Growth of Cloud Usage in the ERP World
GCP, Azure and AWS are dominating the "cloud" world, well now they are attacking the Enterprise with partnerships with SAP. Learn how and why these cloud firms see the enterprise ripe for the attack.

Wednesday, June 26, 4:20pm - 4:55pm
Register: https://sched.co/K6Ut

About the Cloud Expo
Now is the time for a truly global DX event, to bring together the leading minds from the technology world in a conversation about Digital Transformation. DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society's most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy.

DXWorldEXPO® has organized these issues along 10 tracks, 22 keynotes and general sessions, and a faculty of 222 of the world's top speakers.
DXWorldEXPO® has three major themes on its conference agenda:

Technology - The Revolution Continues
Economy - The 21st Century Emerges
Society - The Big Issues

Global 2000 companies have more than US$40 trillion in annual revenue - more than 50% of the world's entire GDP. The Global 2000 spends a total of US$2.4 trillion annually on enterprise IT. The average Global 2000 company has US$11 billion in annual revenue. The average Global 2000 company spends more than $600 million annually on enterprise IT. Governments throughout the world spend another US$500 billion on IT - much of it dedicated to new Smart City initiatives.

For the past 10 years CloudEXPO® helped drive the migration to modern enterprise IT infrastructures, built upon the foundation of cloud computing. Today's hybrid, multiple cloud IT infrastructures integrate Big Data, analytics, blockchain, the IoT, mobile devices, and the latest in cryptography and enterprise-grade security.

Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. DX is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

Advantages of implementing a Cloud ERP Solution

For most companies, the big question is not if but when they will adopt cloud computing for the bulk of their IT operations, including the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software they use to manage inventory and product manufacturing.

Rapid deployment 
By using cloud computing, your growing business won’t have to purchase, install and maintain server equipment which can be tedious and time-consuming. The cloud provider will take care of all security and maintenance, saving time to allow you to focus on what your company does best.

Scale upwards
The speed of cloud scalability means that you can quickly evolve your IT infrastructure to be as powerful and expansive as you need it to be the minute an opportunity for growth presents itself. You can scale up immediately and get to work faster as your business increases its headcount and volume of data. Read more about cloud ERP scalability and flexibility here.

Better Business Intelligence
Cloud technology allows organizations to access data remotely without complex technical configuration or robust IT staffing. Over the past two years, the number of organizations deploying business intelligence (BI) in the cloud has doubled. Cloud BI adoption is especially prevalent among sales and marketing departments as they rely on real-time data to understand and improve the customer journey.

When it comes to data access and data storage, cloud ERP has several advantages over on-premise ERP. Cloud technology is more scalable for storing large amounts of data and can provide access to data gathered by IoT technology.

Speed-to-market
No matter what industry you’re in, the market demands fast service, product and service reliability and transaction predictability; crucial factors that can put your business into a disarray if not handled properly. Moving to the cloud allows you to push products to the market much quicker.

Implement Quickly
Investment of new hardware and slower updating is not needed for cloud-based systems that utilizes the web, because updates are implemented without human-interaction.

Non-Physical Servers
Maintenance of hardware is not essential, simply because there is not physical hardware on-site at all. This is a big plus for operations that have to constantly maintain hardware and can instead further their focus on other areas within the production facility.

Agile workforce
With a cloud-based ERP, your staff will be able to access data and make decisions on the fly wherever they are. Since data is not locked up in individual employees’ machines, you can give teams 24/7 access at home, on a plane or event at a client’s location for a meeting. They will have the power to do more and collaborate.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Transform Finance with SAP solutions and Approyo

Enterprises today are increasingly experiencing a new normal of volatility that is fundamentally changing how they engage with their investors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and employees. This volatility is driven not only by traditional areas of currency exchange risk and commodity prices but also by macroeconomic volatility and rapidly changing consumer and employee preferences. Additionally, tax policy volatility and complex regulatory requirements are challenging finance to capture, analyze and provide deeper and more relevant real-time information.

The role of finance itself is evolving towards active engagement with business partners, simplifying and automating processes, enabling new questions to be asked that were never possible and delivering new insights during the decision-making process. Leading finance organizations are driving digital transformation and fundamentally changing the way they bill, collect, report, and pay taxes, and how they plan for and manage a constantly changing business. Finance’s role is expanding as it leans into innovation to creatively adapt to change, manage volatility, and to find new opportunities to create value.

SAP S/4HANA is the finance innovation platform that enables today’s digital business by bringing business processes and analytics together into a single, smooth, digital motion. It provides the foundation for continuous innovation by allowing customers to benefit from newest SAP Leonardo innovations as they emerge along with the ability to leverage extended finance for procurement, workforce management, travel & expense management, etc. The time to innovate and transform is now and SAP supports a live business for all roles of the office of the CFO.

SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation
Provides a non-disruptive path to adopt SAP’s latest finance simplifications and innovations for customers with heterogeneous landscapes, out-of-maintenance, and/or highly customized SAP systems. It provides a unified financial and management platform to centralize process execution, planning, and reporting based on the same (single source of the truth) data. Benefits include advanced reporting at the segment, entity, or grouplevel; business-modelagnostic rollups for reorganizations and M&A modeling; scalable local and central process execution (complementing process execution in source ERPs); and a starting point for finance shared services across business units.

Transformation platform for the digital enterprise
Create an advanced digital data architecture (universal journal), a platform to include future innovations, asingle source of the truth for both transactions and analytics, and a digital core to include integration for workforce, network, customers, and new innovations enabled by SAP Leonardo, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Fieldglass solutions.

Rapid value creation with minimal disruption
Massive simplification and optimization within SAP S/4HANA can be deployed with minimal business disruption to accelerate business value and capture and eliminate the need for overly complex processes. Additional value can be achieved by deploying solutions and templates within SAP Activate methodology, standardizing master data using the SAP Master Data Governance application, and focusing effort on the reduction or elimination of legacy custom code.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com