Agresso offers a uniquely integrated architecture designed specifically for Businesses Living IN Change
Agresso ERP systems are specifically designed for the needs of fast growing, dynamic, people-centric organisations. Spanning a range of industries, these types of business share a common characteristic – an ongoing requirement to respond to change The very nature of service-oriented companies is setting up and dismantling individual projects and teams, and constantly needing to readjust to improve quality of delivery.
Agresso has coined the term BLINC™ – or Businesses Living In Change to describe these service oriented organisations that have a continual need to execute projects and deliver new service offerings.
Being one of the few ERP providers that has integrated Payroll and HR together with fully integrated Financials and Project systems allows Agresso to specialise with companies that are people centric e.g Project Management, time billing, professional services, accountancy, Utilities .
These companies typically market services as their main product and need functionality like Project costing, timesheet, Expense Entry as well as all the Financial applications, some also need Field Force and Service managemnt.
In Australia the SKILLED Group, Australia's leading Staffing Services enterprise leverage the power of AGRESSO Business World (ABW) across their range of business in their Group portfolio, using Core Financials, Human Resources, Payroll, Project Costing and Billing and Project Management.
The transformation SKILLED GROUP have embarked upon leverages heavily AGRESSO's underpinning easy-change VITA ™ architecture as a Business Living in Change (BLINC ™).
SKILLED Group's comprehensive payroll solution allows for the full range of industries and accompanying industrial instruments, to be seamlessly accomodated as part of their business platform.
This scale ensures the Group can service all industries through more than 25,000 employees in Australia, New Zealand and other offshore locations using the AGRESSO Payroll.
Challenges Facing People and Service-Centric Businesses
Whether the pressure to change comes from within or externally, one thing is certain: change is inevitable.
80% of finance executives in a CFO Research Services survey reported that they had to moderately or extensively customise their ERP system to adapt to their specific business requirements.
Agresso is uniquely suited to support and facilitate the changes facing your business. Our business process automation software solution enables trained and authorised business users to modify the system directly from their graphical user interface (GUI) – no expensive re-programming or external IT intervention is needed. Technology Evaluation Centers compared how different ERP vendors’ architectures address change; their findings confirm that change management is faster and less expensive with Agresso.
Agresso has surveyed our customer base and can compare our results against the benchmark data of the CFO Research Services report on how companies are able to respond to change:
How are changes accomplished, | Agresso (GUI = Graphical User Interface) | Competitors |
Business Process Changes 48% less impact | GUI Only 32% of customers report expending ≥ moderate effort | Application Reprogramming 61% of surveyed finance executives report expending ≥ moderate effort |
Financial Management - Driven Change 55% less impact | Primarily GUI Only 22% of customer report expending ≥ moderate effort | Application Reprogramming 49% of surveyed finance executives report expending ≥ moderate effort |
Mergers and Acquisitions 71% less impact | Primarily GUI Only 11% of customers report expending ≥ moderate effort | Application Reprogramming 38% of surveyed finance executives report expending ≥ moderate effort |
New Regulatory Requirements 23% less impact | GUI 30% of customers report expending ≥ moderate effort | Application Reprogramming 38% of surveyed finance executives report expending ≥ moderate effort |
Re-organisation & Restructuring 23% less impact | GUI 30% of customers report expending ≥ moderate effort | Application Reprogramming 39% of surveyed finance executives report expending ≥ moderate effort |
The Benefits of Empowering Business Users to Respond to Change
In all these cases, changes made in the GUI by business users are:
- Considerably less expensive – ERP system changes made by trained operational users result in significant cost savings when compared to contracting external consultant to reconfigure the system
- Much faster – changes that take weeks in other systems can be done in hours in Agresso. Why spend all the time documenting requirements, engaging a 3rd party (or constrained internal IT resources), managing, testing and launching a new function, when it can easily be accomplished by your own operational users who best understands the business requirements .
- Lower risk – Scope creep, inadequate resources, operational disruption and project delays – the hallmarks of other ERP systems' implementations – are minimised when changes can be made right in the GUI.
With Agresso enterprise resource planning, when a user makes a change one part of the system, the change flows through to all associated areas. For example, reports do not need to be re-programmed, and dashboards and other analysis tools do not need to be re-configured. Thus complexity, risk, and effort are all significantly reduced and ultimately, money is saved.
Changing the Market Assumption: ERP Systems Do NOT Need Replacing Every 5-8 Years
Inexplicably, companies keep going back to the same old vendors, despite ample evidence that their systems are unable to manage change. For Businesses Living In Change, this is a poor long-term strategy: it locks them into an ongoing need-spend cycle and forces them into expensive new development when their requirements change, or re-implementations when forced to upgrade to a significantly new platform. Agresso offers an alternative – ERP with NO expiration date.
And how is this achieved? Post-implementation agility – the ability to make substantive changes to the system after implementation. Other vendors are flexible prior to implementation; but once the system is in place, making changes is only possible at great effort and risk.
Post implementation agility is unique to Agresso due to the our system architecture, Vita, described by Agresso on the other hand, has an architecture that was designed specifically to facilitate change.
We understand that dynamic businesses can’t predict what their needs will be in the future. So our solution can be implemented to meet all of a company’s currents needs – and if things change in a year, they can adjust their system themselves to meet their new requirements.
Taking Into Account The Total Cost of Change
When organisations consider “Total Cost of Ownership”, they typically include maintenance and upgrade costs… but rarely factor in the costs associated with making changes. Whether they simply can’t predict future change requirements, or optimistically do not foresee any, these organisations are failing to account for a significant expense.
A better metric to use when evaluating what an ERP system will cost in the long run is Total Cost of Change (TCC); it yields a more realistic picture, especially for businesses operating in a dynamic environment that know they will need to make changes.
“…the annual combined cost for internal and external resources needed to make changes to the ERP system can be nearly twice the amount of annual maintenance and support fees a company pays.”
CFO Research Services
