February 2021Issue 7

COVER STORY

There’s a fragile point in time during every business deal when the blood, sweat and tears are condensed into a single instance. The efforts made to secure the sale, the capital invested to deliver your product, and the time spent nurturing relationships are boiled down to a solitary moment when it all comes together or fails to meet expectations. This is the moment you either delight or disappoint. This is the moment of service...

EDITOR'S CHOICE

Vendor Review 2021 By Paul Esherwood

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Editor’s Words By Paul Esherwood

It’s 2021 and ERP buyers are getting serious about their tech choices. They have several decades of experience to inform their next big purchasing decisions and many are making brave choices...

Are you really ready for the future?By Anthony Byrne

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the pace of global change and the pressure on companies to respond. But, despite rapidly building their digital capabilities during the pandemic many organisations are yet to fully embrace transformation...

FEATURES

Retail software & tech trends By Richard Sanders

Ask any retailer what keeps them awake at night and the majority will probably answer Amazon. The combination of product range, price, availability and delivery infrastructure has caught many asleep at the wheel. Just when everyone thought ecommerce was king...

Creating resilient end-to-end agility in the New Digital Supply Chain By Adrian Bridgwater

COVID-19 has caused even the most robust supply chains to creak. What lessons can we learn and how should enterprises structure their supply chain so that digital technologies ensure goods and services flow?

Acumatica takes on Sage in the UK By Paul Esherwood

Acumatica is the US-based cloud-native ERP vendor that has set its sights on a big slice of the UK market that is currently occupied by Sage. Acumatica is from the same stable as IFS...

Going green with the Cloud By Christine Horton

We’re encouraged to choose more sustainable options every day – and this extends to the decisions organisations make when purchasing technology. For any number of reasons, sustainability is an increasingly important factor in the IT decision making process today...

Michiel Verhoeven: Can a new MD move the needle for UK customers?By Paul Esherwood

Back in July 2020, SAP appointed Michiel Verhoeven as managing director in the UK&I – until now we haven’t heard much from the new top man. In his first media interview since taking over the hot seat...

Chris Pope: Digital Workflows By Paul Esherwood

ServiceNow is the digital workflow organisation that has been around for 15 years but has recently seen a huge rise in uptake for its services and has been catapulted into the media headlines following the arrival...

Danny Attias: #1 Ranked CIO in the UK By Paul Esherwood

Anthony Nolan’s Danny Attias has been ranked the number one CIO in the UK. A mid-sized organisation that is dedicated to saving the lives of people with blood cancer, the...

Retail Reborn – How technology change has become a source of high street hope By Marc Ambasna-Jones

Technology can help reinvent the high street and deliver a new era of lean and mean retailers capable of capturing the imagination of a digital native generation. Given the carnage of...

Independent or Global SI – What makes a perfect match for transformation? By Christine Horton

COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation plans of many organisations, in some cases bringing about years of change in just a few months. Whether those companies turn...

Expert Opinions

Survival strategies in a hybrid and multi-cloud world By Holger Mueller

There is no question anymore that technology progress has overtaken the technology demands of business best practices, creating the current need for experimentation and exploration of how to operate a business in the 21st century...

The procurement problem – Unlocking innovation and supporting SMEs By Emma Sinclair MBE

I recently spotted a tweet from Chris Bakke, an entrepreneur with a number of significant exits under his belt, that got me thinking. Why is procurement still such a challenging beast?

Success should be measured by the ‘externalities’ of the business By Stephen Jamieson

In the past, to evaluate the health and success of an enterprise, you would look to its balance sheet where the profit, margins, and revenue columns would lay bare the performance and trajectory of the business. But that myopic way of measuring success is...

Working from home By Debbie Walton

In March 2017, a video of two young children interrupting their father’s BBC interview about South Korea went viral. Professor Robert Kelly was quoted as saying: “I thought I’d blown it in front of the whole world,” when his children...

Inflection 2021 – The Missing Piece of the Enterprise Jigsaw By Mark Sweeny

This year will see the continued evolution of SaaS cloud applications and once again we find ourselves at another inflection point. The next step brings into focus the final piece of the jigsaw and delivers on what ERP has been promising for decades - simply to make our lives easier at work.

Human to Human – How one vendor has humanised the software industry By Paul Esherwood

Advanced is a software company that you may not have heard of, yet their products and services touch the lives of millions of people. If you have called NHS 111, travelled on a smart motorway...

Using digital tech for a fair Future of work By Dr Zara Nanu

Throughout 2020 we have all had numerous conversations about how the pandemic has exposed rifts and inequalities in public health and the economy all over the world. Workplaces have not...

The economic benefits of Certainty By Wayne Lloyd

Certainty can be defined as the confidence that we have in our beliefs. It is a determining characteristic of how we perform as individuals, as a team and as a company. The more certain we are in our beliefs...

Intelligent Automation is the key to lasting business resilience By Prince Kohli

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most disruptive business events in history - requiring immediate technology shifts for recovery, resilience and competitiveness...

Guest Contributors

Breaking the Chain – Stress testing supply chains in 2021 By Andy Coussins

Over the last year, UK consumers have become increasingly aware of the impact of COVID-19 on retail supply chains. While the panic over empty supermarket shelves at the start of the first lockdown has subsided. In places concerns...

Under par and counting my blessings By Robin McBurnie

It is hard to believe that we are approaching a year since the first lockdown due to the pandemic. In many ways it has felt like forever and in other ways it has flown by – a year of working from home, looking out the window of my home office and still scratching my head and wondering if this is just a dream.

How to embrace organisational agility By Caroline Horne

COVID-19 forced businesses to make decisions about leadership, recruitment, finance and operations in a matter of hours. In the months following the initial shockwave...

Common Digital Transformation Myths Debunked By Bonnie Duncan Tinder

Using more than 1,000 enterprise cloud implementation reviews of SAP, UNIT4, Oracle HCM, Workday, UKG, ServiceNow and Cornerstone, Raven Intel debunks six common...