Manufacturing companies have been adopting cloud and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for their operations. This development has also become more visible over the last couple of months following the pandemic that has forced businesses to reinvent their operations to remain competitive.
The trend toward ERP and cloud computing is hard to ignore. The sentiment was echoed today by Media Analyst and Journalist Arthur Goldstuck in a roundtable discussion hosted by SYSPRO, a global organization that helps businesses integrate internal and external management information over a company via the assimilation of accounting, supply chain, manufacturing and sales, among others.
According to Goldstuck, the COVID-19 situation has proved the advantages of securing a robust enterprise solution for a business, backed by a reliable cloud product.
It has since emerged that the adoption of cloud services is on an upward trend, particularly in 2020.
A study conducted across 8 African states by World Wide Worx (with the support of Dell, Intel, F5 and Digicloud Africa) reveals this interesting pattern.
South Africa, for instance, recorded the highest adoption rate at 82%, followed by Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya and Namibia at 59%, 50%, 50%, 38%, and 33%, respectively.
Arthur argues that South Africa has recorded the highest adoption rate because some of the world’s most popular cloud services providers have stations in the country, including Microsoft and Liquid Telecom. The likes of Botswana and Zimbabwe have reported impressive numbers as well due to their close proximity to South Africa.
According to SYSPRO Head of Solutions Engineering Deirdre Fryer, the success of manufacturers may be measured by their ability to adopt modern business practices and react quickly to changes. A reaction entails a business’s ability to deliver customer-specific products with the lead-time of standard, off-shelf products.
Organizations such as MEDS and Synresins, whose CEOs Jane Masiga and Mira Shah were present at the meeting, use SYSPRO ERP solution to automate the majority of their operations, ranging from supply chain management to customer care.
The said companies sought the services of the ERP product to reduce their IT expenditure budget. According to CEO Masiga, MEDS has operations outside Kenya, and needed to service customers in a better and cost-effective manner.
The two organizations represent the real situation in forward-looking companies; they have a distributed workforce, hence being connected to the customer or employee has become an important business requirement.
Manufacturing and production companies serve customers in various regions. ERP and cloud services give all the benefits of integration, all time data access, and hassle-free set up and reduced cost. Small and medium sized manufacturing and production companies are opting the cloud-based ERP solutions, a development that has noticeably grown in 2020.
