Migrating ERP to the cloud
The most common trend in enterprise resource planning as of late is migrating their solutions to the cloud. Dave Ives, Digital Advisory Executive at Altron Karabina, shared an article on IT Web Africa about how this migration is beneficial to organizations. With the arrival of mult-national data centers in the country, more organizations seen the benefits of the cloud and making it a standard business practice in South Africa. The business value in making the move sooner rather than later cannot be ignored. There are some challenges, however, that require a lot of obstacles to successfully run ERP in the cloud. Ives explains a couple and how to overcome it.
- Governance rules – Ives explains, “ERP operates in a highly governed environment. This means that any business must undergo several internal processes, including streamlining redundant and outdated processes, before committing to an upgrade or migration. With this decision comes the migration of legacy data and ensuring traceability of past transactions. Migrating from an on-prem to a cloud version requires a deeper assessment. Diagnostic tools are available from certain vendors to assess the impact of upgrading, while in some cases a refactoring of the solution, adaption of the interfaces and significant process changes may be required. The tools and assessments are typically run by a trusted partner who can align to a client’s organisational requirements. The resultant diagnostics also enables the partner to understand how the ERP application has been configured for an on-premise environment and what can be adapted for a cloud-based deployment. This enables the partner to either natively port the ERP processes or reconfigure them for a cloud solution.”
- Overcoming challenges – Says Ives in his article, “The cloud might provide the same features natively that companies had to tweak in their on-premise solutions, thereby foregoing the need to customize anything online. This is where an assessment forms an integral part of the migration plan. Tools and libraries that are available, such as the American Productivity and Quality Centre (APQC), provide standard process classification frameworks and assist in aligning to standard processes.”
