ERP Today sat down with Spinnaker’s Martin Biggs, VP and managing director of EMEA and strategic initiatives, to try and understand why firms were hesitant to explore outside their platform providers.
Third-party support for ERP systems has evolved to a point where it could provide a business with options that may not have been possible from the platform service provider. Exploring alternatives outside a familiar system can seem risky, which is why third-party services like Spinnaker Support are trying to bust that myth. ERP Today sat down with Spinnaker’s Martin Biggs, VP and managing director of EMEA and strategic initiatives, to try and understand why firms were hesitant to explore outside their platform providers.
“The challenge is that they don’t realize there is an alternative. Time and time again, there are large organizations who are under the belief and are told […] that ‘this product is going end of life in a few years-time and you’ll have to go through this massive migration plan,’” Biggs explained.
He refers to the industry-wide transition over to cloud ERP solutions. While the future seems to be cemented within cloud-based software, sometimes a business isn’t ready to enact that change. Unique environmental or situational events might make the end-of-life deadline induce more anxiety than necessary.
What should you expect from a company-wide software upgrade to newer systems? It’s a massive, and potentially disruptive, digital overhaul of your entire firm that could take several months or years to fully implement.
“In the next few years, they’re [customers] facing an incredible amount of expense, an incredible amount of risk, when IT time and business time should be focused on addressing the current market dynamics and challenges rather than looking at your navel, changing your ERP,” Biggs said, touching on the potential risks of undergoing a business transformation.
Before jumping straight into the first option available through platform service providers, it might be worth considering whether or not your business is ready to undergo such an event. While your ERP platform provider will obviously push its own solutions above all else, it’s worth reaching out and considering the other options besides a top-to-bottom transformation.
Biggs expressed some frustration at the lack of awareness of the third-party support available. “Our point is, no, those aren’t the only options. You have a very real option of what we provide, you can stay exactly where you are for as long as you want, fully supported, to a level that’s compliant with regulation across the planet. You can use that either as the base of a composable ERP environment that becomes your hub, or you move to wherever you want to go, be it RISE or MS Dynamics, for example, at your pace and your time, at a time that’s right for the business.”
Maybe it’s not the right time for a cloud journey. Maybe a firm is already going through an internal shake-up that an end-of-life software deadline will only exacerbate. Third-party support services, like Spinnaker Support, offer alternatives that will allow clients to continue to work off software that’s no longer supported, and will also help maintain those outdated systems until the customer is ready to move on to the next step. A digital transformation should always be on the customer’s terms, not the provider’s.
