AS THE country faced head-on digital transformation because of a market shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are beginning to cash in on a new wave of technology investment to improve everything — from internal operations to customer service.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will be among the major projects businesses will undertake now, and the first step will always be choosing the best vendor with the right tools and preparing the business for implementation.
With this, global IT services and solutions company Alliance Software Inc. and accounting and consulting firm Reyes Tacandong & Co. jointly hosted a webinar with market leader in enterprise application software SAP Philippines, and technology company Microsoft to further guide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in their digital transformation journey.
For Mark Louie Contreras, senior manager of Reyes Tacandong & Co., SMEs’ digital transformation would anchor in a call to action.
“Digitize or die,” he said.
Contreras explained that for business and process owners to get it right the first time, a process review should be ensured before anything else.
“While technology improves the effectiveness of business processes, it also magnifies the gaps in the process design. Performing a process review first ensures that the gaps are addressed, and the processes are optimized before the software is configured and implemented,” he said in a presentation.
In terms of a cloud native, dynamic all-in-one business management for SMEs, Raj Singh, product marketing manager of Microsoft, introduced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, an all-in-one business management solution delivered on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Singh explained that the goals of ERP modernization would be to optimize team productivity with a cloud native, seamless, integrated processes and tasks, leverage infused artificial intelligence to contextualize financial data to make better decisions and extend the ERP with ease with security at the core.
At the same webinar, SAP Business One was also introduced as a seamless all-in-one cloud ready ERP solution for SMEs. SAP Business One is fully integrated to Alliance WebPOS and leverages on the joint strengths of SAP and Alliance in the retail industry.
“We want to be able to reach the Philippine SMEs as best as we can. SAP is normally seen as a very expensive solution for big conglomerates, but actually 80 percent of our base is SMEs,” Eddie Riviello, business development manager of SAP Philippines, said during a webinar.
Riviello said the partnership between Alliance and SAP, both market leaders in POS and retail services, using SAP Business One as a platform for power innovation and harness operational data would help Filipino businesses. (PR)