AUGUST 20179MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSRole as a CIO The best advice I can provide to any of my colleagues is to always have an open mind and be willing to accept change. A short eight years ago, my CEO said to me, "should we be considering Cloud?" After I picked myself up off the floor, my initial answer was "NO." Cloud computing was new, unsecure, bleeding edge, and most of all not very robust in the offerings that were available. After some deep thought and analysis, I went back to my boss and said, "I stand by my answer of `NO'. Cloud, will take decades to advance and will probably be no better than what we see in B2B, B2C or B2E solutions." Obviously, I was naïve, short-sided, and yes dead wrong in my thinking. My perspective in this area has changed dramatically. I am a firm believer now that Cloud computing is the future, and not just for ERP. I would like to think that I learned my lesson and I can live by my own advice. When my new boss asked me to work with R&D on IoT, Machine Learning, Big Data/Analytics and Augmented Reality, I didn't say "NO." Instead, I embraced the opportunity to understand what this meant, and better yet what I could learn from this seemingly uncharted territory.Curbing the Costs I believe Cloud computing has the best opportunity for mitigating the rising costs of ERP. Many companies will jump into the on premise ERP pool, without a life vest, only to find that in a short period of time, their ERP is not at the most recent patch level. They only find this out when they log a support ticket with their ERP vendor and the response is "you need to upgrade to the latest patch level." Start planning on moving to Cloud now, and let the ERP vendor be responsible for upgrades.Moving to the Fore We've all heard, "implementing the ERP software isn't the difficult part, it's the change management." I believe this to be true, but I also believe that change management shouldn't stop once the implementation is complete. ERP implementations are difficult, and once complete, most organizations leave them as is, without change to the system or organization. While this is understandable, it shouldn't come at the expense of driving as much value as possible out of the investment that went into the original implementation. Companies implement ERP systems for a reason. In most cases, it's to gain a single view of the customer, or to improve supply chain efficiency. While these benefits need to be realized to justify the original implementation, organizations need to continue on the Change Management Journey. Don't give up on the opportunities to leverage and optimize where possible. The good news is, whatever changes are needed, there isn't a scary ERP implementation looming over the change. ERP implementations are difficult and once complete most organizations leave them as is, without change to the system or organization
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