How Cloud Migration and Digital Transformation Impacts Corporate Culture
For the better part of the last decade, cloud migration and adoption have hogged the headlines. Part of a massive, steady shift toward digital transformation initiatives, analysts had long projected as much as 20% annual growth in cloud adoption as enterprises across industries and markets sought ways of maximizing their operating efficiency while minimizing costs across their most fundamental operations.
It felt like a steady and natural progression from the old days of siloed systems, segregated functional teams, and top-down decision making. Then, the COVID pandemic hit and turned the world upside down overnight.
Remote work suddenly became the norm, rather than a fringe benefit offered by select, progressive companies. Collaboration became increasingly more difficult, as employees previously accustomed to huddling in meeting rooms suddenly became videoconferencing experts who had to get creative with sharing information and ideas. And decision making suddenly became more urgent, desperate, and based more on gut instinct than verifiable data because executives were working from incomplete information.
While the pandemic has surfaced a number of previously hidden organizational or operational weak points, it also shone a spotlight on how cloud migration and digital transformation might permanently reshape their corporate cultures even after the crisis has passed.
Now, business leaders across industries focused on supply chain management like manufacturing, distribution, and retail are increasingly exploring smarter and more strategic investments in digitizing their operations. They’re realizing that it’s the key to fostering a corporate culture of collaboration, efficiency, and empowerment that will help them remain competitive and profitable for years to come.
Old-School Processes Are Ill Suited For New-School Operations
Like other stalwart industries with deep roots and long histories, manufacturers and their supply chain partners have traditionally done pretty well relying on their tried-and-true legacy systems. But times change and so have the demands of the global economy, directly impacting most heavily the organizations that haven’t changed with them.
Today’s manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and their supply chain partners need the agility, visibility, and insights to quickly (and properly) respond to each of those challenges, but are held back by on-premises legacy systems that:
- Include too many disparate systems and create an unwieldy, hard-to-manage IT environment with an ever-expanding perimeter. The widespread footprint makes it nearly impossible to efficiently aggregate data, effectively analyze it, and properly operationalize it. As the largest users of ERP platforms, it’s no surprise that manufacturers and their supply chain partners complain of poor ERP implementations — they fail as much as 50% of the time, cost up to four times the budgeted cost, and take 30% longer to implement than expected — and exacerbate disjointed posture creating huge visibility gaps across the organization that prevent meaningful collaboration, insights, or action.
- Rely on outdated systems that just can’t keep up with the demands of today. They’re old, clunky, and inflexible. They’re often over-provisioned and lock users into a single vendor environment, limiting functionality. Worse, they’re frequently closed ecosystems that make connecting and operating with other systems time-consuming and extremely challenging.
- Lack robust security, creating ongoing concerns about data breaches that can cost a business nearly $4 million dollars and take months to resolve. In today’s environment, a single breach jeopardizing the safety of private customer data or proprietary business information and risking even a moment of downtime can lead to the collapse of the entire business.
- Cost both money and time because they require constant monitoring, fixing, updating, and upgrading. And the company’s already overworked IT team is fully responsible for all of it, taking them away from higher-value activities and unnecessarily wasting time and resources that could be better spent on strategic initiatives that increase profitability.
- Can’t provide real-time data that executives and line of business leaders need to shorten order fulfillment timelines, generate accurate forecasts and projections, and coalesce the entire organization around improving the customer experience.
Modern Systems For The Digital Enterprise
As many successful, digitally-transformed organizations can attest, migrating mission-critical systems does more than just digitize systems — it catalyzes changes across and throughout the company.
Cloud-based ERP systems are more efficient, cost-effective, and secure than their legacy counterparts. More importantly, these connected technologies responsible for helping teams manage everyday business activities such as accounting, procurement, and supply chain operations enable more widespread automation that eliminates common data entry errors, accelerates processes, and avoids business bottlenecks that plague less digitally-mature teams.
These solutions are easier to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) and other core systems to create a constantly updated and accurate single system of record. Simpler and more secure access to data — cloud tools feature native access, identity, and usage controls that complement firewalls and other data security measures — help organizations connect the many moving parts of their operation, providing better visibility into operations, and accelerating strategic decision-making for more predictable, sustainable growth.
The result is a faster, more agile, and responsive organization that everyone in every department can be proud of. They’re each empowered with tools, information, and workflows that support better cross-functional collaboration as well as the ability to manage their specific business processes more efficiently. Importantly, integrated cloud solutions enable any member of any team to proactively identify opportunities for improvement so they can work quickly with other departments to take action that enhances core operations across key areas like sales, order management, and customer service.
Bringing all the data, people, and tools together in an integrated, cloud-based environment better positions individual teams and the company as a whole to address the challenges of an ever-changing business landscape confidently and properly.
Dawn Of A New Day
Undertaking a digital transformation initiative can feel like an endless and impossible task, but many business leaders are realizing that it’s also essential to remaining competitive and profitable in the Digital Age.
Adopting cloud-based solutions and a cloud-first strategy can help organizations thrive in today’s unpredictable and evolving global environment. It unburdens overworked IT teams of managing day-to-day technical operations by automating updates, upgrades, and security patching while also breaking down traditional data and operations silos to dramatically improve cross-functional collaboration, overall business agility, and strategic decision making across the organization.
Shifting away from outdated, inflexible, and underpowered legacy systems toward responsive, flexible, and integrated cloud-based solutions eliminates many of the daily challenges and obstacles preventing businesses from responding to the changing demands of the market. More importantly, these tools fundamentally reshape the corporate culture by uniting everyone in the organization in a common cause and imparting upon them a renewed sense of purpose, pride, and ability.
Contact us today to learn how ArcherPoint’s comprehensive suite of cloud-based solutions can help transform your business and culture to compete in the volatile global economy.