The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, set out to provide relief to businesses in emerging regions as the pandemic roiled global markets. Stephanie von Friedeburg, MD and COO of the IFC, looks back on the year in a recent podcast where she reflects the following:

“There's been a substantive hit on supply chains, trade shocks. And so our trade finance business, which has always been a core of our business, has grown very substantially. And we've seen it in the poorest countries in particular, where we know that we need to continue to keep trade flowing. So we've seen an increase in trade finance in that relief piece. We've also seen many of our existing clients needing working capital and needing liquidity, and we believe it was important for us when we typically don't do a lot of liquidity or working capital, but important for us to step in and help our existing clients to withstand the crisis, keep them solvent so that when we come out of the crisis, we can rebuild faster and better.”

Improve business productivity and agility

Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are helping businesses around the globe—including your competitors—revolutionize their operations. Distributors of all sizes are adopting technology that is designed to better manage business processes on an integrated and real-time basis. Technologically advanced ERP systems are an investment in your company’s operations, efficiency, intelligence, and productivity. Every feature of a modern ERP system ultimately ties back to these improvements, which enable your organization to become more productive, more competitive, and better positioned to meet your customers’ needs.

As these business systems evolved, they met the needs of their times, but their functionality was directly limited by the available technology. Today’s ERP systems might be better called digital operations platforms (DOP) to reflect their agile, artificial intelligence (AI)-based, and experience-driven nature, as well as the critical role they play in cloud-based, digital businesses.

Technology advances have transformed what an ERP (aka DOP) can do for your organization. Modern ERP systems provide a live view into what is happening and how it impacts your business today, as well as in the months and years to come. This helps you to focus on the future instead of the past.

Why a modern ERP makes business sense

In today’s fast-changing business environment, modernization can have a strategic impact on your business. Without access to a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, it can be difficult or even impossible to support new business models and keep up with evolving customer demands. Whether you’re planning to upgrade your current ERP system or implement a brand new one, getting your system up and running quickly is the key to obtaining a fast return on your technology investment. No matter how complex your organization is, a variety of agile implementation practices can speed transformations—and deliver game-changing returns.

With the rise of innovative hotel software in a radically changing era, trend lines continue to slope in favor of an integrated hotel management system that emphasizes mobile and guest-driven processes, all managed above location in the cloud. But there are many organizations who continue to stick to the on-prem status quo.

This hesitancy to change is a barrier for many organizations to see the benefits to their businesses in the long run, particularly in an era when alignment across all hotel properties is as essential as ever. To help address that, here are 4 common hospitality cloud software myths to better understand and then dispel while competing in a fast-moving and constantly evolving hospitality industry that is set to face new challenges.

It's not just about technology, it's all about responsibility

The technical aspect of different delivery methods described in the previous blog post in this blog series of, is of course an essential part of the factors to consider when choosing the right ERP solution for your company. However, what is perhaps even more important to understand is the division of responsibilities between supplier and customer when it comes to the different options. There are major differences between the delivery methods, but there may also be differences within the specific method.

ERP Delivery methods from a responsibility perspective

Below Håkan Strömbeck (Senior Industry & Solution Strategy Director at Infor), describes the different ERP delivery methods from a responsibility perspective. The description is made from a general perspective for all option, except for the "multi-tenant" option which is described based on how things work at Infor.

Adaptability and quick turnarounds on strategy had never been more vital during a challenging decade for the restaurants and food services industry so far. The good news for many is that so many organizations rose to that challenge, with restaurant technology playing a singular role in helping them to continue to meet demand and to serve guests via multiple channels, specifically using advanced restaurant point of sale and integrations with mobile ordering.

As much as the industry landscape has been defined by challenges and disruption, it’s also allowed decision makers to consider how present conditions help to anticipate what the rest of the decade might look like. This has meant looking at the basics, the essentials for successful restaurants to best consider and the continuing role restaurant technology will play. Over the last few weeks, we’ve published several posts that explore these factors. Here’s a summary to consider.

Building a Power Team:

The first major step in the journey toward adopting a new ERP system for your organization is assembling an effective project team. A well-appointed team can help you not only select the best possible ERP system suited to meet your organization’s needs but also mitigate employee resistance and secure leadership buy-in.

Assembling an all-star team for your ERP project is critical to your implementation success, so do not take these decisions lightly.

A critical lesson many organizations have learned when measuring the success of analytics initiatives is that speed of deployment and widespread user adoption are key factors to consider. These are key benefits of analytic applications delivered with or embedded in ERP systems or business applications.

Analytic applications provide pre-built business intelligence (BI) and analytical capabilities that promise to democratize analytics because most of the hard work in transforming data to insights has already been done. However, the historical challenge these applications faced was that they weren’t built with agile cloud technology or modern data architectures that could keep up with the growing complexity, scale, and changing requirements of the line of business (LOB)-driven analytic requirements.

Why settle for anything less?

Distributors often operate behind the scenes, making sure other businesses have what they need. The projects they support continue because tools, equipment, and supplies are where they needed to be. Patients have procedures because instruments are available. Structures are built because materials are ready. Restaurants can serve customers because food, drinks, plates, and pots are on hand.

Recent events revealed just how critical the distributor’s role is in the supply chain. In reality, it’s extremely complicated to seamlessly move such high volumes of goods. Especially as expectations and behaviors have evolved in the last decade, distributors have had to adapt their solutions, processes, and levels of service.

Historically, many distributors would customize enterprise resource planning solutions to meet their unique requirements. This approach, however, created an unwilling in-house IT cottage industry dedicated to supporting the infrastructure and modifications, instead of strategic initiatives. We see this during evaluations with prospective Infor customers; when distributors compare our CloudSuite solutions to their current footprint, we typically discover that hundreds if not thousands of their current modifications would no longer be needed. Because our solutions are designed for the distribution industry, the best practices those companies require are built in. For example, when HVAC and industrial product distributor, EMCO, moved to CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise, the company removed over 4000 modifications. EMCO no longer needed to maintain customizations and project manage long upgrade initiatives. That fluctuating, unpredictable overhead goes away forever because EMCO’s new mutli-tenant cloud solution is automatically updated monthly. Their technology is always current and always adding new distribution functionality to align with nuances and needs of this industry

The ability to execute, seamlessly and in real-time, is critical as your company works to develop a continuous supply chain. Being uniquely capable of connecting multiple facets of this execution -- not just to an order management system but also to TMS for transportation management and WMS for warehouse management will be key components to implementing continuous supply chain execution.

Integrated multi-party source-to-settle process

Sourcing execution or the ability to establish real-time connectivity to suppliers is key. What we are really speaking to here is the need to orchestrate end-to-end physical and financial operations between order management, global trade management, transportation, warehouse, product traceability, and even payables management.

Streamlined manufacturing

Manufacturing execution is focused on streamlining processes, driving better decision making and gaining productivity. Supply chains must optimize and automate the manufacturing process from raw materials and components to finished goods. Having the ability to anticipate and optimize lead times is crucial for downstream improvement.