Can the Cloud tackle competition pressures for an SMB?

In the hyper connected world of today, even small and medium businesses cannot insulate themselves from competition pressures.

To drive differentiated value and business growth, businesses are constantly honing their competitive advantage to tackle competition. This can range from optimizing production processes, optimizing supporting business processes to improving the quality of information available in real time about actual customer needs & perceptions with a high degree of agility.

Traditionally, some of the larger players did this through enterprise software applications as they created custom implementations of enterprise software frameworks to create differentiated value in their processes and practices from their competitors.

For this to happen, you needed time and money which typically suited the bigger players with deep pockets. SAP, Siebel would typically take a couple of years and millions of dollars to customize and create differentiated value in the business processes.

And then the cloud arrived and offered far more relevance for SMB’s as it provided comparable features & functionalities at a much lower cost structure and much lesser implementation time. Legacy enterprise applications no longer held that differentiated competitive value at attractive acquisition costs as the paradigm changed and now the situation is that even the larger players are moving to the cloud.

Cloud applications give business owners more control in making IT decisions and the key challenge is to integrate best of breed solutions in a way that differentiates them from the rest of the pack.

The Cloud has arrived and is making a mark

Cloud has closed the chasm between small businesses and the larger players in terms of competition. Now geography and a lack of resources cannot be sited as valid reasons not to leverage the capability of an ERP.

Technological and digital innovation especially the cloud has forever altered the way people conduct business and tackle competition.

You no longer require deep pockets but end up saving a lot of money that was earlier required in huge onsite infrastructure and real estate costs.

The cloud is especially relevant to small and mid-sized businesses as the decision times as well as implementation times are much faster showing faster ROI and effects on business operations.

The key benefits are:
• Security competence: The cloud provides an unmatched security competence for your data and transactions backed by billion-dollar security budgets of leaders like Amazon Web Services and the best minds in the world innovating continuously even as we speak.

• Cost-effective: Cloud computing solutions use reliable off-site data centers for running applications and storing data as well as highly tested & secure environments to host the application. You don’t need to purchase hardware for onsite servers or additional IT equipment or create extensive IT infrastructure support or manpower capability. All of this is the solution vendor’s hassle with performance guarantees.

• 24X7 access on to go: You can access your solution anytime even after office hours and via any smart device with internet connectivity.

• No maintenance and upgrade burden: There is minimal downtime for upgrades that happen in the background and maintenance of the application and the data storage is the solution vendor’s responsibility.
• Easy customization: Customization is easy with no requirement to be proficient in coding.

• Scaling: It is easy to upscale or downscale as the business need may be with affordable payment plans.

• Communication: Creating and maintaining communication is the key to customer satisfaction. With a cloud ERP, all process stakeholders can collaborate better from any location no matter how remote a location as well as on the go. There is also better quality of communication between the customer and the company with faster response times and more honored commitments that are indications of better customer service.

• Integration capability: To truly leverage business solutions best, they need to integrate well e.g. You should also be able to use your accounting data for better customer support or payment follow-up, inventory depletion data to lead to automatic reorders, inventory data should reflect in delivery estimates, etc.

The reality is cloud technology can support a business effectively at any level or scale.

Choose the solution with the least integration hassles and costs. Your chosen solution should be able to drive differentiated value by creating an advantage over your competition due to optimization of business processes, easier compliance, better reporting, better planning capabilities and faster response to contingencies. Agile integration capabilities that can have the options to change with dynamic business requirements could be the future of cloud solutions.

OUR VALUE PROPOSITION

We at Versa Cloud ERP have created a multi award winning, secure, comprehensive Cloud ERP solution that is e-commerce and mobility ready. The Versa Small Business Cloud ERP dba Versa system is accessible anytime, and on any smart mobile device. It provides support for e-Commerce and Multi-Channel Retail includes integration with 3rd party e-commerce platforms as well as POS systems.

In addition, the Versa Small Business Cloud ERP system includes the ability to remotely manage Master Data on multiple e-commerce and POS systems including product description, pricing, images, etc.

It is affordable and targeted towards small businesses and is backed by a promise of dedicated support. It is being used by clients in diverse verticals and could help you redefine the way you operate and grow your business.

Our solution is designed for fast growing small businesses, between $1-$50 M in annual revenue, looking to upgrade business management solutions like entry-level accounting products or mid-tier legacy on-premise ERP systems or even those looking at comprehensive and affordable ERP solutions.

Built from the ground up on the latest cloud and mobile technology, the Versa Cloud ERP system allows businesses to automate and optimize their operations across multiple companies, countries, and currencies with one integrated ERP system.

We will help you in a structured manner to migrate your data seamlessly from Epicor, Infor, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, MYOB, Sage, SAP Business One etc when you make the decision.

To know more, please visit www.versaclouderp.com or contact us directly.

We’d love to hear from you.

Reference:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/in-the-cloud-integration-is-the-competitive-advantage/