ERPx – ERP for the whole company

CIOs, CFOs, and CHROs are all under increasing pressure to ensure their business’s strategic success across finances, people, and technology. But for service-based companies, success increasingly depends on the ability to recognize the pressure your technology is under.

Although this might seem like a counter-intuitive statement, it’s true – your ability to perform in the marketplace depends on your ability to make sound strategic decisions more quickly. Doing this depends on cohesion across every part of your business. And this can only be achieved with the right technology.

With digital innovation accelerating, this is becoming easier to achieve when your firm makes the right investments. But these investments must be made across the firm, rather than department by department.

Organizations need technology that supports the kind of integrated ecosystem necessary to respond to a highly changeable market. Finance, HR & Project teams need the ability to seamlessly leverage the datapoints within their respective teams to make decisions, improve flexibility, and empower everyone in the organization to contribute effectively to success.

We’ve created ERPx as the answer to this challenge. In this article we’ll explore how it empowers the offices of the CIO, CHRO, and CFO to transform your overall effectiveness.

Click to read The true cost of doing nothing (ERP) 2023 (Gated)

ERPx for the Office of the CFO

The challenge: The CFO’s role is changing fast, and the modern day CFO is now tasked with managing success from multiple factors, alongside cash, resources, and headcount control, across the business – from planning to delivery. With a much wider remit, the systems that a CFO uses must provide more insight & more value.

Systems and processes capable of giving insight, providing oversight, and identifying where focus is needed are more important than ever – and as ever, managing the cost of those systems is equally as important. ERP costs need to be efficient and predicable.

How ERPx helps meet the challenge:

• Integration of HR, financial, and project data with financial data – CFOs gain the insight they need immediately across all aspects of organizational workflows.
• TCO. Employees can make changes easily in the system: ensuring that change is delivered at the lowest possible cost: no lost employee time & resources, no direct spend on Consultancy & no cost impact from delayed action.
• Integration with 3rd party applications and data sources through Industry Mesh – our app ecosystem integration solution – to allow for even more data points to flow into a single source of truth.

What does this look like in action?

Cost Calculation from Employee data. By providing the Finance team with real-time access & visibility of all employee costs – be that billable rates, absences, L&D, travel, expenses – and the organisational structure which underpins the resources being deployed, the CFO can ensure that the right skills and resourcing levels are available for projects while ensuring staffing levels remain optimal.

ERPx for the Office of the Chief HR Officer

The Challenge:

Managing remote working and the hiring, retention, and engagement of the talent the organization needs to succeed. It’s a complex task – and even more complex for project-based organizations with fluctuating work patterns. User experience is now key to retaining talent, and manual mundane tasks must be automated where possible to help boost productivity and wellbeing.

How ERPx helps meet the challenge:

• Unit4’s flexible foundation is built on a single data and workflow model that allows organizational structures to be changed and modified easily without disruption of financial data. Any changes can be made quickly, are error free, and mirrored immediately throughout the system. This foundation also makes automation much simpler to implement.
• Essential data from HR is available to the CFO so they can make informed decisions around recruitment and capacity and HR can make informed forecasts around skills gaps and have immediate data they can use for performance reviews.

What does this look like in action?

Empowering everyone in the organization to run performance reviews from a 360 degree viewpoint with output data from all systems (HR, Projects & Finance) such as employee engagement, employee peer to peer feedback, employee utilization on projects, billable hours, employee feedback / insights from projects they’ve worked on, customer satisfaction with their work, and more.  Projects & HR have real time access & visibility of all employee data – both within HR & other areas.

ERPx for the Office of the CIO

The Challenge:

The pressures on CIOs mean that as different departments work towards an integrated solution, there is still the need to maintain stability and governance: "Organizations are split on the importance of speed of making information available vs. stable data and business policies to govern decision making."(1)

Connections between separate Finance, HR and Projects involve thousands of datapoints to manage – making the system unmanageably complex.

When these connections are handled via integrations between disparate systems from multiple vendors – or even spread between similar technologies without native / natural dataflows – the resources, time & cost spent creating the integrations AND then maintaining them as each data source system is updated or changed is huge. It’s also unreliable and risky given these datapoints drive business critical processes like invoicing. When systems aren’t integrated, every one of those connections represents time, cost & risk.

How ERPx helps meet the challenge:

• Our flexible foundation ensures that when change is required – your users can make that change themselves, empowering your people to take ownership of the change & removing frustration & delays through change request processes which involve consultants, projects, or time away from your team completing more strategic work.
• Finance, HR & Projects interacting seamlessly within one ERP platform with a single data model means zero costs of integration – with no requirements for 3rd party integration tools, no future update to customised integrations and fast time to value of new ERP capabilities.
• Maintenance of third-party connectors can be managed by Unit4’s Industry Mesh – saving TCO and ensuring technology is always up-to-date.

ERPx for everyone

Our multi-tenant single data model provides inherent agility supported with highly configurable automated workflows to drive efficiencies. With Finance, HR & Projects all within Unit4 ERP on this shared data model, data management and  reporting & analysis are made simple and in real time. All with a single user experience, providing consistency in training, faster onboarding time & cross team understanding. All backed up with highly configurable workflows that give access to automated decision making between teams – and quicker time to action once you’ve identified challenges.

Ready to learn more?

ERPx is built for service organizations who are ready to embrace digitization and an integrated ecosystem. To learn more about what it can do, read this ERPx brochure.

(1) Source: Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey - Wave 1, IDC, January 2023