Category: Insights

With a new management team in place in 2017, combined with escalating competition and increasing custom requirements from customers, Welfit Oddy decided a more modern and agile ERP system was needed that would encompass all the business requirements into a single system environment and data source.

“Conducting a rollout during the 2020 lockdown hindered education, but Welfit Oddy still pushed on for the go-live,” said Guy Warren, ICT manager at Welfit Oddy. “Overcoming challenges, it proved a success. Previously, everyone had operated in their own silos and looked after their own areas, without considering the up/down stream implications. Using remote education, we helped get everyone onto multiple sessions to learn about the new environment. To compound the scenario, load shedding was initiated by the government due to the electricity supply challenges, so managing remote learning with varying electricity outage schedules was not easy, but proved to be the right thing to do.”

Since then, there have been a number of optimisations for continuous improvement. Welfit Oddy recognises it is impossible to meet everyone’s full list of requirements, but is regularly adding functionality via extensions to the core system using Infor Mongoose. This rapid application development (RAD) tool has helped bring other existing systems into the fold by building extensions without the need for customisations to the core ERP.

Welfit Oddy’s primary differentiation from its low-cost competitors is in providing service-specific innovation – creating customer-specific products with varying barrel thickness, insulation materials, heating and cooling capabilities and many more. Welfit Oddy takes orders of 100 tanks or more in a single job, which can be delivered over an 18-month period, often with product variations requested by the customer during the production process.

These manufacturing complexities are addressed at its extensive 24 000-square-foot manufacturing plant, with production ranging from component manufacture through to one of three assembly lines with multiple stations, managed using advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) and control systems. Long lead times and high-value materials require careful advanced planning and management to ensure the right materials are available at the right time to prevent line stoppages.

On site, a large contingent of specialised permanent staff enforce the highest standards of design, component manufacture, assembly, and quality control to meet intensive regulatory requirements, as required for the transportation of food-grade materials and hazardous chemicals, and to support the complex engineer-to-order manufacturing environment.

Port Elizabeth, South Africa-based Welfit Oddy specialises in the design, manufacture and sale of tank containers, used for bulk liquid shipping and transportation for the international chemical and food-grade logistics markets.

Founded over 100 years ago as a manufacturer of transport-related equipment, in the mid-1980s Welfit Oddy entered the intermodal tank container market, growing to become a global leader for design and manufacture.

Welfit Oddy’s products help its customers transport various kinds of hazardous and non-hazardous liquids by road, rail and sea. Many of its containers are rented out all over the world.

Welfit Oddy produces large volumes of standardised tanks as well as highly customised solutions, delivering top-quality products, built for long-term continuous use and able to withstand challenging transport conditions.

Future
“We have not implemented the Factory Track Shopfloor Control just yet. We believe there is more work to be done getting the business ready in that area,” concludes Warren. “But overall, we see the future being in the cloud, which will provide additional security for us and our customers. We had avoided it to date, but cloud is a very exciting, very integrated product. This will be increasingly important as we start to find it harder to find the skills for on-premises IT and ERP work.”

“Cloud may be on the plan in the next few years. However, Africa does not have stable communications or power supplies, which is a current concern. Electricity supply issues with load shedding now affecting production but, thankfully, it is not closing our back-office systems. Of course, everything comes with a cost-benefit, and cloud unlocks many doors including artificial intelligence (AI). This could have big implications for us in the future. We certainly have our eye on it.”

As we usher in the second half of 2023, enterprise cloud solution providers are looking to expand their focus to business buyers, not just IT/development teams.

Interestingly, Gartner® notes in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023 presentation^[1], given by Gartner analysts at its 2022 IT Symposia globally, “senior IT and business leaders need to prepare to optimise, scale, or pioneer. To optimise resilience, operations or trust. To scale your vertical solutions, product delivery, or … everywhere. To pioneer customer engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.

In addition, Infor is seeing a growing need for combinations of technologies to address disruptions in any given industry or market. With these market dynamics as the backdrop, here are four of our technology predictions for the remainder of 2023:

The Composable Reality

For the last few years, many of the top market research and analyst firms have talked about the need and recommendation for purchasing best-of-breed applications and “composing” them together in a harmonious way, known as the “composable ERP.”

This challenges the notion of a monolithic ERP system itself as the center of gravity for an organisation. However, what hasn’t yet been formally addressed is the means by which to accomplish this composition. While many pure-play vendors in the market have their specific versions of iPaaS (infrastructure platform-as-a-service), no-code development frameworks, machine learning platforms, and more, no one has fully expanded their portfolio to cover the complete breadth for an end-to-end innovation use case. This is where GSIs (global system integrators) have traditionally played a large role, but the demand from buyers will likely be that this is an easier and faster process to procure, personalise, and deploy. Many larger software companies have procured more capabilities, but the vast majority are not natively integrated yet with their existing cloud services. This will be the year to make that the reality through a true digital transformation platform that becomes the standard glue for any given organisation.

Mainstream Hyperautomation

With the continuous pressure on cost efficiency and market influence, there is a conflicting need for new business models & differentiation while also being cost conscious. Organisations need to prove ROI faster while also focusing on the areas of their business where the largest cost and risk occurs. More often than not this tends to center around operations and people.

What we should expect is that simply automating one given task is not enough. That may simply begin the journey. Instead, this will be a journey of continuous improvement even if a sense of automation exists. Can I make this faster, more accurate, more proactive, more intelligent? Can this continue to automate across disparate systems? Can this reach into my legacy on-premise systems and knowledge? This will become the expectation that IT teams request, as they are pressured by the business.

Enterprise Simulations

Similar to the hyperautomation trend, businesses will want to explore if new paths can help them receive inventory faster, sell more product, reduce waste, move into new markets, or even assess how they can react to new market situations. Performing large-scale simulations like this can certainly be done in test environments but that comes with an excessively large overhead of data migrations or refreshes, process refinements, and eventual porting of changes to production. My expectation is that business users will want access to simulations in the context of their daily work. For instance, if a procurement specialist is working on an order and thinks this might be her opportunity to work with a new vendor of choice, then perhaps technology will enable her to simulate that decision based on the mass data profiles and machine learning and optimisation models running in the background. If the user likes the result, then they can gain more confidence in the path and ultimately make better decisions that affect the overall business significantly. It should no longer be the bottleneck for changing a business process for better decision making.

Enterprises becoming Creative Agencies

As an aggregator of the previous trends, the overarching movement is that, as the workforce evolves and the business becomes increasingly more pressured for ROI-based innovation, the C-suite will want technology solutions that empower their workers for be creative in safe yet measured ways. They will want to exploit the creativity of every member of every department without having to procure a myriad of tools and put stress on IT to provide project spaces. Instead, this should be engrained into the enterprise software experience to encourage such behavior. Employees will be better able to manage supply chains, resolve issues and escalations, optimise planning and inventory, and more. Companies will look for a trusted partner in an enterprise software vendor to empower and embrace the fact that lack of standardisation in innovation can actually make you differentiated in your market.

Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Issued by Perfect Word Consulting (Pty) Ltd

Written by: Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner

The past few years have lacked stability and clarity. As we move into the second half of 2023, businesses across the globe have largely accepted the new normal, preparing to weather new storms, and build resiliency. The pandemic, geopolitical dynamics, wars, and talent struggles have offered many lessons, and we’re bringing those learnings into the next semester. With that in mind, here are the top tech trends and decisions companies will contend with in 2023.

When it comes to supplementing talent, ongoing economic uncertainty means teams must get creative with the talent pool they have, expanding their typical practices by leaning on their partner ecosystems to supplement their talent strategy. Managed service offerings are set to control selling, general, and administrative expenses (SG&A) and provide up- or down-scaling flexibility, while simultaneously optimising workplace productivity. In addition, companies will ramp up robotic process automation (RPA) deployments to augment workforce efficiency and align focus to more strategic initiatives. Some will do this proactively to gain a competitive edge.

Companies have now faced several black swan events over the past few years. For the rest of 2023, the focus should be on investing in the resiliency of core infrastructure. At the top of this strategy is data. No one disputes that data and, more importantly, application of that data is king. Businesses will continue to lead with a digital-first strategy and move to integrated platforms, unifying their data to manage their full operations.

To support this, ERPs will continue to evolve into data-driven platforms that emphasise insights rather than just reporting. With most of the data that organisations need existing outside of their company, ERP vendors must assist companies in developing an actionable single-source-of-truth. Complementing this, we will see continued migration to cloud-native architecture with microservices and APIs, due to scalability, security and agility needs. Those companies that make ERP shifts will look to vendors that are fluent in business outcomes and have strong data platforms with even stronger ecosystem partners.

Looking forward, bridging technology is becoming essential. Economic uncertainty will mean that companies will first try to work with the systems they have before doing a large new implementation. The intent will be to control costs and limit operational disruption. In flourishing times, companies can stomach the initial inefficiencies that come with DIY-bridging, but for the rest of 2023, there will be anticipated pressure on time-to-value. Thus, partnership approaches are likely to dominate. With this method, companies must keep an eye on their future roadmap, select vendors with a composability mindset, and ensure out-of-the-box working APIs.

While this appears to be the ultimate scenario, companies must think deeply about the risks, which include: IT ownership and skill scarcity; increased end-of-life costs; mismatched workflows; costs of additional technology to close gaps; underachieving KPIs; and negative employee engagement.

A recent survey by the Harvard Business Review showed that workers are currently using six to eight apps to perform a single task. The cognitive tax, frustration, and mismatched processes hamper employee retention and, in turn, customer satisfaction. Not to mention, bridging often means companies must work against their ideal state, which is to have a single platform that handles all workflows with little manual intervention. If selecting this approach, heavy discipline and collaboration is required between IT, finance, operations, and even HR, to evaluate the performance vs cost risks.

Despite the points above, organisations inherently want to modernise, and in the current and upcoming business climate, often need to do so – with the help of intelligent overlays. Strategic use of add-ons are an inexpensive way to achieve this. In particular, hyper-automation and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) will continue to have strong adoption going forward. These technologies tend to provide a tremendous impact at very little cost, and while limiting deployment disruption to an organisation. Often integration of these overlays opens the door to other areas of improvement, like better OT/IT connectivity or migrating to a SaaS and cloud-enabled system.

While companies will continue to be cautious about spending (especially on big ticket items), they will stay opportunistic and curious about evolving technologies. Critical bets, during times when others are tightening their belts, can give companies the opportunity to stand out against competition. Adoption will be approached through the thick lenses of productivity, growth, profitability, and employee engagement.

With this in mind, expect to see an uptick in digital twins and process modeling. Companies can easily start with one model to prove the value of predictive capabilities, then expand into interconnected simulations to gain rich insights from complex relationships. And while many are still intimidated by the metaverse, connecting twins between warehouses, sites and operational functions creates a foundation to which extended reality (XR) technology can be applied and a powerful employee experience created.

Written by: Paul Bouchier is sales director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner.

Originally featured here

 

As the desire to move to the cloud continues to rise as a real priority for manufacturers, the last three years have driven a push towards adoption. After years of living off a diet of heavily modified, generic ERP systems and applications, manufacturers have realised that there are other options. Moving to a world with cloud services built exactly for the manufacturing organisation is very attractive.

The key is start with the business, its people and understanding its future vision. The technology should follow the vision. It shouldn’t be the other way around. From a cloud and digital perspective, there is an acceleration in the adoption of emerging technology within manufacturing; for cloud solutions in particular.

What Are the Main Barriers to Entry?

The big ones are knowledge, complexity, and a perceived lack of support. There is a myriad of digital capabilities to choose from so it’s very difficult to cut through that. From Infor’s perspective, there is an understanding of the customers and the technologies that are relevant in today’s world.

Running on a common technology platform, Infor applications are combined into a single solution, delivering a single user experience across all of those components delivered to customers; this is an industry specific cloud suite.

However, it’s also a platform that has integration, user experience, big data and a data fabric platform. It has built in artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning. So Infor customers have the benefit of knowing that those elements are already connected to each other and to the enterprise applications that they use.

What Are the Four Pillars of the Smart Factory?

• The first pillar of any digital project is how to harness data; understand it, access it, combine it, curate it and exploit it. Managing complex supply chains both ways; to customers and consumers.
• Pillar two is relevance of the cloud. When it comes to systems and applications, it’s important that they are kept constantly up to date, on the latest version, and accessible.
• The third pillar is understanding what should be used and ensuring a shortened time to value with a particular technology. Within this conversation between best-in-class digital capabilities or an all-encompassing digital platform, more and more people are going down the platform route because it covers more bases – so understanding the power of the platform versus niche digital capabilities is key.
• The final pillar is around people. Technology is one thing but being ready as an organisation is vital. Without a company culture and people who are okay with change, agility and flexibility, and have the ability to react to certain situations, digital projects can fail as quickly as they start. It is important to involve peopleand combine the business’ top-down vision with the bottom-up ideation from its people.

In summary, get control of the data; understand the importance of cloud; understand the power of the platform and the benefits that can bring; and make it all encompassing from a human perspective and get your people involved.

For more information about the best Cloud for your organisation, please contact Paul Bouchier at paul.bouchier@ioco.tech.

Written by: Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner

It’s time to demystify the different types of cloud currently available. Here’s why the future favours a multi-tenant model.  While it’s generally accepted that cloud is the future, clouds still come in many forms, and understanding the respective merits of each can be, well, cloudy, to say the least.  Industry analysts sometimes squabble over the pros and cons of single-tenant versus multi-tenant deployment.

Single-tenant deployment may have been a viable solution for some organisations in the recent past, multi-tenant deployment offers numerous benefits for organisations looking to modernise their operations. As a true cloud-based platform, multi-tenant deployment can offer vast amounts of storage, a speedy implementation, and advanced security capabilities.

The Difference Between Single-Tenant and Multi-Tenant

Single-Tenant Architecture

• Provides separate software and server resources for each customer, offering control but requiring more effort and a larger investment than with multi-tenant
• Lift and shift to a single-tenant deployment perpetuates outdated processes organisations are hoping to evolve away from
• Requires the same resource-intensive and expensive upgrade processes as on-premise solutions
• Rigid structures limit the extent of changes that can be implemented, impeding organisational growth

Multi-Tenant Environment

• Gives several customers the use of the application within the same operating environment, on the same shared hardware
• Provides all the benefits of cloud computing, such as greater agility and security
• Costs are shared across more business users enabling providers to offer lower prices
• Leverages more robust technology
• Requires the customer to adopt and adhere to proven, standardised processes, an approach which helps avoid a “modification mindset”, which can unnecessarily complicate upgrades
• Well-engineered cloud-based software enables personalisation by using extensibility and platform tools
• Offers flexibility, scalability, reliability, and value

Single-tenant vs. multi-tenant

	SINGLE-TENANT	MULTI-TENANT	WINNER
Routine maintenance and backups	In self-hosted, single-tenant solutions, you provide your own maintenance and backups. Some single-tenant providers may also require this. Infor®, though, provides backups, and addresses uptime via the service level agreement (SLA).	The multi-tenant provider takes care of routine maintenance and backups for you.	With multi-tenant platforms, the provider’s experts focus on maintenance for you, applying best practice standards for reliability.
Full redundancy and disaster recovery	With a single-tenant deployment, implementing full redundancy and disaster recovery could more than double your costs because you need duplicate systems. Infor achieves this by utilising various availability zones and elastic load balancers.	Multi-tenant solutions are built on auto-scaling technologies that provide full redundancy.	A multi-tenant deployment is more reliable and less expensive.
Security	Some single-tenant providers make their customers responsible for the security of their solutions. Infor provides security for its single-tenant customers that’s just as secure as our multi-tenant customers. Not all single-tenant providers can make that claim.	With multi-tenant, security is managed for you by experts who stay on top of new types of threats.	Unlike some single-tenant providers, multi-tenant providers won’t charge extra for security capabilities or require you to manage your solution’s own security.
Updating features and functionality	When working with some single-tenant providers, the responsibility for performing upgrades may rest with you, unless you pay extra for a service contract.	Multi-tenant providers perform regular updates (monthly for Infor), ensuring your solution is always up-to- date with modern technology.	With multi-tenant, monthly updates are more easily implemented and less disruptive. Business users can be trained on new features as they are rolled out.
Scaling for fluctuations of high traffic and workloads	With single-tenant, you need to invest in extra capacity to prepare for peak periods, whether you use it or not.	The elastic capacity of a multi- tenant deployment means your capacity automatically expands as needed, and you only pay for what you need.	Multi-tenant offers more flexibility and greater savings.

Why Deployment Matters

In their rush to the cloud, organisations often have to make a decision about whether to leverage single-tenant or multi-tenant deployment, without the full breadth and depth of information available. CIOs and IT directors planning a cloud strategy really need to be well-versed in the scope and limitations, and fully understand the long-term ramifications of each approach.

Some assume single-tenant deployment is safer and adopt that model, only to be surprised at the limitations. Others may want a highly customised single-tenant solution, and accept the huge upgrades every few years as an acceptable trade-off. However, particularly when it comes to complex manufacturing organisations, a multi-tenant model with extensive industry best practice built in, which can be implemented rapidly and is updated frequently, is the preferred option.

This is typically because if the single-tenant deployment falls short of expectations, it may eventually need to be re-implemented on a true multi-tenant cloud solution. Making the wrong decision can waste resources, capital, and time.

If the leadership team is seeking comprehensive, end-to-end transformation, multi-tenant is unequivocally the best option for the long term.

 

For more information about the best Cloud for your organisation, please contact Paul Bouchier at paul.bouchier@ioco.tech.

Written by: Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner

In an ever evolving, fast paced, and constantly innovating world, enterprise software solutions must deliver on one essential element. They must always offer a solution to a customer problem or meet a direct need. To achieve this, embracing the cloud is a must. In many environments, however, customers are still uncertain about cloud solutions – hesitant due to known and unknown challenges, confused in terms of cost structures and product options, and desperate for real business use cases that offer context and peace of mind.

Migrating to the cloud is not a decision that any business makes lightly. Nor is it one that should be enforced by a hard-and-fast deadline. When customers feel pressure to move to a new platform, they may very well shift away from a provider entirely. What customers need is proof that the move will solve the business’ pain points, and gentle guidance in the process. Ultimatums like “move or be shut out of maintenance” certainly do not offer customers peace of mind.

There are many reasons why users may simply not feel ready for the transition to the cloud. Whether this stems from common cloud myths, uncertainty around cost implications of moving to an in-memory database, costly and complicated processes, or doubt about whether current processes will be transferrable to the new platform, the answer is never pressure.

Software providers with decades of cloud experience concur that the best route to securing a cloud migration is information and support. Debunking the myths, dispelling the uncertainty, setting  customers’ minds at ease with relevant examples, and providing sound information that displays how the move will benefit the business are essential to migration success. This, along with a reliable track record of product development over time will allay fears and drive action.

With an outside-in approach, customers should be reassured that the platform will offer enhanced (and not decreased) functionality and more flexibility than their current solution. With any migration, the plans to move customers off legacy platforms and onto newer, more modern cloud-based systems should be a discussion, not a demand. The migration process could follow any one of multiple paths available, and companies should be given the information needed to find the journey that works best for them.

Essentially, this should be a wholly collaborative process focused on driving innovation and adding value, while solving the customer’s business problems. No approach should be one-size-fits-all. Every solution should offer focussed solutions to cover each industry’s (and each business’) unique needs – avoiding the need for compatibility packs that attempt to patch holes and provide only partial capabilities.

 

Written By Paul Bouchier, Sales Director at iOCO, within iOCO Software Distribution, an Infor Gold Partner

Originally featured here