Is Covid-19 a before and after Digital Transformation Moment for UK SME’s?
This recent Forbes article makes an interesting read. It considers how the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the need for businesses to digitally transform, migrating away from legacy software to the top of many business plans.
Companies need to break down internal silos to create a cohesive organization that embraces change.
Working in silos is not time effective requiring manual intervention to provide access to cohesive information against which decisions can be made. In some instances, information held in silos is rarely shared across a business thus much valuable information can become invisible or worse still leave your business due to staff turnover. With remote working remaining part of our lives for the foreseeable future working in silos will promote further risk to efficient and ‘joined up’ workflows to include:
- Purchasing decisions
- Manufacturing planning
- Sales opportunities, contact relationship management
- Timely and accurate invoicing
- Customer service and product returns
- End to end lifecycle from sales opportunity through to delivered goods.
Digital transformation can be powerful in improving the speed and reliability of the supply chain, from how fast products are manufactured to the speed and efficiency of order fulfillment and delivery.
- Better inventory control
- Excellent flexible reporting
- Planning against available resources
- Transport planning and delivery costs
Digital transformation requires a change in thinking about how an organization delivers its products and services, and even the products and services themselves. Successful companies push past what has always been done to find the most efficient and innovative solutions.
- Use real time data from a single database
- Move away from historic disparate systems commonly ‘owned’ by a department or individual
- Allow multiple users to collaborate on projects, documents, and schedules
- Gain clear visibility of profit margins
- Highlight operational inefficiencies and address them
Qi continues to work with businesses who need to digital transform, moving them from legacy separate accounting and MRP solutions to a single Microsoft SaaS ERP solution.
A Before and After Moment for Qi
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic Qi were already delivering 70% of required project services remotely. Since March 23rd 2020 we have successfully completed a number of migrations from Sage 50 Accounts and Manufacturing to Dynamics 365 Business Central using ONLY remote services. See this case study
Benefits
- No loss of data from either accounts or manufacturing (CRM data can also be migrated)
- Integrated CRM, Accounts, and manufacturing (either full MRP or assembly orders)
- Training is cost effectively delivered in bite sized sessions that accommodate the working day and our customers’ need for Business as Usual.
- Less disruption to the working day than hosting on site consultants.
- Training is delivered on a copy of your own data rather than ‘demonstration data’ prior to going live, which promotes the most effective learning experience possible.
- Qi includes Qi Extensions for 50 to provide the smoothest onboarding possible for Sage 5 users.
- A typical project timeline of 4 weeks from start to finish to move you from your legacy system to Dynamics 365 Business Central, including all the forms and reports with your logo, used as standard in Sage 50. Downtime is no more than a few hours, typically on a Friday afternoon.
- Staff can work from anywhere with an internet connection on real time, collaborative data.
- Following the initial migration which is the biggest step towards digital transformation, business are then able to optimise specific capabilities such as: bar code data collection, operation times and proactive use of CRM – as the digital transformation continues, in line with the changing needs of your business.
Thought for the day
Perhaps this is the silver lining for businesses in the age of COVID-19, forced change can be positive? And digital transformation for businesses using legacy solutions is inevitable.
Contact Qi to discuss how we can help your business digitally transform and support you and your staff all the way.