 | By Alex Volpi, Technology Advisory Practice Leader |
More than ever, businesses are investing in technology. Worldwide IT spending is totaled $4.2 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.6% from 2020, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.
Companies are constantly bombarded by the term ‘Digital Transformation.’ Overhauling manual internal processes, retiring legacy business software, and implementing modern cloud technology is the goal for many business leaders, but this change is not something that can be completed overnight, and the global IT spend trends reflect that.
As companies are still being impacted by the ever-changing situation that is COVID-19, IT spending is accelerating ahead of revenue expectations due to the fact that successfully deployed software solutions have a clear impact to business outcomes and the bottom line.
So what are companies investing in? Let’s take a look at some ERP trends for 2022 and what businesses are investing in right now.
ERP Trends to watch in 2022
1. Cloud Acceleration:
Cloud-based or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) software is not something new. Cloud-based software drives more efficient work practices, saves time, reduces the total cost of ownership, and helps companies to change the way they work by allowing end-users to work from anywhere. With many companies formally implementing hybrid or fully remote work policies, taking ERP and your other software applications to the cloud has become mandatory for business continuity. In 2022, we will continue to see an uptick in Cloud usage not just for ERP applications, but for data storage, and other ancillary business applications.
2. Low-Code & No-Code Software:
Every business is different, the role of end-users at every business is different, and the requirements you need your software to support change over time. Have you ever been completing some of your day-to-day tasks and wished you had an additional text field to input the customer’s invoice number, or a new drop-down list with your custom set of options? With low-code and no-code software, end-users are typically provided a list of personalization options where they can plug & play with the available configurations to personalize their instance. Compared to traditional legacy development and change management cycles, pre-configured building blocks that facilitate functionality components make it easier and faster to personalize applications without requiring IT support or technical work to be done.
3. Fully Mobile ERP:
Fully mobile business applications is not a new concept, but is something that has yet to be perfected. With most individuals being provided or already owning a cell phone with more than enough processing power to run business software, we would be hard-pressed not to take advantage of the computer that we take with us everywhere. Software vendors have continued to invest in developing usable mobile software applications. The fact is more and more businesses are moving their applications to the cloud making mobile software deployments and rollouts seamless. There will come a time when vacation requests, expense reports, purchase requisitions, inventory counts, IT tickets, among others are handled from your mobile device, if they are not already.
4. Artificial Intelligence:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) contributes greatly when it comes to transforming and building software applications for the next generation. Whether we are trying to automate repetitive tasks or be proactive with problem-solving, AI can help end-users mitigate inefficient processes. Precisely, AI-enabled ERP systems using machine learning, natural language processing, and chatbots can help you achieve your business goals by reducing costs, cultivating highly productive employee teams, and improved operations. How nice would it be to use a conversational chatbot? Something that lets users speak to or send messages within an ERP application to generate orders, enter expense reports, update job status, and confirm a product receipt in the warehouse? Well get ready, it’s here!
We are already in a digital transformation era where interoperability, agility, and hyper-connectivity are the must-have attributes of not only ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software, but all other software applications your business uses. Businesses have no other choice but to adopt innovative and bleeding-edge technologies to not only keep up with their competition, but to also retain talent within their organization as employees are becoming more and more accustomed to workplace flexibility, and technology enables that.