Why SaaS is the beating heart of your digital transformation

Digital transformation has risen on the agendas of forward-looking organisations over the past decade. In some sectors, where digitally native start-ups have been ‘Uberising’ legacy business models, transformation of customer service and delivery by traditional players has become a matter of survival.

The current troubled economic and operational times are now accentuating the difference between organisations well on the path to digital transformation and those just taking their first steps. According to Forrester analysis, “The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way we do business. It has forced firms and policymakers to do things that were previously considered impossible. As a result, business leaders are quickly embracing new, iterative ways to engage with customers, adapting to new ways of working, investing in technology innovation, and revisiting their business resiliency plans for long-term success.”

At the core of your business is your ERP solution. Unfortunately, if it is a legacy on-premise deployment, it will be more difficult to support continuous business innovation because it simply won’t have the flexibility to reduce operational costs, re-engineer outdated processes and enhance customer and employee experience in the digital era. Here are some of the key reasons why SaaS drives digital transformation.

When you transition from on premise to SaaS, you immediately free up the servers you were running your solution on. They can then be retired – which removes the costs of housing, powering, cooling, backing up and maintaining this hardware – or reconfigured for other applications, saving capital costs. A SaaS platform also shifts the focus of your team from ‘keeping the lights on’, allowing them to concentrate on new business technology initiatives.

Once your TechnologyOne ERP solution is on a SaaS platform, both the application and the platform are updated twice a year – so you are constantly being served the newest functionality on the latest technology. Traditionally, on-premise ERP solutions are only upgraded every five to ten years, which then makes it a mammoth task, sometimes requiring a whole new re-implementation. Having done it once, IT teams are reluctant to do it again too soon – so, most of the time, their businesses are unable to take up opportunities to improve their operational processes. One example of SaaS ERP innovation is the procure-to-pay process. Its adoption digitises tedious and time-consuming manual processes, removing paper trails and unnecessary data entry with its consequent introduction of errors. With digital automation, your accounts team become ‘knowledge workers’ – freeing up 80 per cent of their time usually spent on data entry and reporting. They can then spend that time analysing data and resolving exceptions instead.

Another very important benefit of SaaS is that your provider is better equipped and has more resources to manage security aspects of your ERP solution – keeping ahead of the curve and updating your ERP solution to meet all the latest regulatory and compliance requirements.