Accelerating Digital Transformation – The metasfresh Cloud Vision

Every organisation has a multitude of enterprise applications that keep the business operating smoothly. ERPs, CRMs, HRMs — traditionally, these applications were monolithic packages hosted on-premise and involving long and arduous implementation cycles. However, with the emergence of cloud, implementation has become shorter, more agile, and with low dependency on both software and hardware systems.

As such, unsurprisingly, enterprises are moving to the cloud to transform their applications, optimise their business processes and make themselves infrastructure independent. Even more importantly, applications in the cloud can accelerate digital transformation as they take advantage of scaling effects and cost efficiencies.

These, indeed, are key findings in a new report from Infosys — Behind the Scenes of an Intelligent Enterprise: Moving Enterprise Applications to the Cloud — which reveals that more than half of enterprises (54%) consider the cloud as the foundation for enabling digital transformation.

Respondents — 853 senior executives engaged in digital and cloud initiatives across twelve industries — also cited innovation and the advanced computing capabilities that the cloud enables as key objectives of a cloud app’s journey, as well as enhanced customer and stakeholder experiences, and enhanced mobility and collaboration across the enterprise.

However, moving key enterprise applications like ERP systems to the cloud can of course be challenging. Cloud environments can be complex and often require additional skills and resources to deploy and manage.

At metasfresh, we understand how these complexities can be daunting and may prevent organisations from adopting cloud-based enterprise solutions, despite the benefits they will bring. This is why we developed the metasfresh Cloud Vision for a simple-to-use yet powerful, reliable and secure ERP solution that enables your company to drive digitisation without having to think about infrastructures, hardware, or the computer skill levels of your employees or if they have worked with ERP software before.

A recent report from IBM — Accelerate Digital Transformation with Enterprise Apps on the Cloud — highlights how true digital transformation requires shifting both critical and non-critical workloads to the cloud. Many enterprises began their cloud journeys by migrating customer-facing applications and adopting cloud-native applications, the report says. However, these applications represent only a fraction of the total run by enterprises.

“Complete digital transformation,” says IBM, “requires organisations to enter the second phase of cloud adoption — enabling and integrating cloud-native front-office and back-office applications, such as enterprise resource planning systems, in hybrid multicloud environments. By bringing a hybrid cloud operating model to mission-critical applications, your enterprise can more effectively mine customer, supply chain, sales and marketing data to deliver new applications and services to customers, employees and partners.”

However, the 204 business and technology leaders interviewed for the report perceive a number of key challenges for running enterprise applications in a multicloud environment — and these concerns are inhibiting digital transformation. Chief among them is added complexity, cited by 42% of respondents. Business-critical applications like ERP systems integrate key functions across the business, so a seamless transition of these workloads to the cloud is essential to the success of an organisation. In addition, a lack of in-house skills and tools is perceived as a key challenge by 43% of organisations that are planning to use the cloud for enterprise applications.

Reducing complexity and overcoming skills-based challenges are precisely what we developed our metasfresh Cloud Vision to address. We believe that ERP software should not only be powerful, but enjoyable and easy to integrate and use.

The metasfresh cloud is a simple, reliable, secure and scalable ERP platform for small to large-sized enterprises across industries — from food and pharma to mechanical engineering and construction. The modern cloud architecture operates with React as a responsive web interface that is so intuitive that anybody can use it. In addition, metasfresh is open source, so does not contain any licencing fees, and provides the ability to change and individualise the entire behaviour and appearance of the platform through code-free customisation.

We believe that ERP software should be adapted to the user and not the other way around. Enterprises should not have to find themselves in a situation where they are spending more time dealing with how to implement and use a software tool than getting their job done — at both the organisational level and the individual employee level. Not only do we think organisations should be able to take full advantage of all the benefits of a cloud-based ERP application — as acknowledged by the Infosys survey respondents in the table below — but also that individual users should enjoy using the ERP software. Indeed, the metasfresh Cloud Vision is for ERP software that is enjoyable to use not only because it serves the company well, but supports individuals in fully focusing on their work, rather than dealing with the processes and functionalities of an overly-complex system.

With metasfresh, our aim is to free up valuable resources in your company to save you time and money for the implementation, maintenance, servicing and operation of your ERP system, allowing you to focus on the development of your core business. Our modern web interface is simple to use, has easy-to-understand controls, and can be accessed from and used on any device with a modern browser.

In addition, the open source licencing provides a platform that brings all the benefits of the cloud but not the usual drawbacks such as loss of control and vendor lock-in. This means you retain full control over your company’s most important business application. It is entirely up to you to decide on which server the system runs, how and where company data is stored, which interfaces you want to operate, who has access to the system, who you want to appoint to make changes, or whether you want to set up your own IT resources.

Talk to us here at metasfresh to find out more. Since 2006, we have been developing our metasfresh ERP software non-stop with open source components and under the open source licenses GPLv2 and GPLv3. Our mission is to enable each and every company to access a powerful ERP system that supports digital transformation and fuels corporate growth. Get in touch today for more information and insights.