SAP BrandVoice: Intelligent ERP: What It Takes To Thrive In A World Of Big Data

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The phrase “data is the new currency of the digital age” has been coined for years as though data is an asset that every business should chase and capture. But for an asset so precious, data loses its value incredibly fast when it is not “spent” as soon as it is acquired.

The disparity between data hoarding, and data sharing, blocks potential intelligence that growing businesses need to support faster, more accurate decision-making and strategic action. And as the volume, variety, and velocity of information continue to grow exponentially, the traditional rules-based legacy ERP system increasingly becomes a risky liability as more data is left unused.

According to IDC, Intelligent ERP is the key to overcoming this technical deficit. This technology enables midsize businesses to balance time-tested rules with automation, self-learning, and real-time situational prediction by supporting use cases that combine Big Data with analytics and machine learning.

One of my favorite examples that thoroughly showcases the benefit of connecting and embedding data in real time is a use case adopted by Zalando Payments GmbH (ZPS). With a staff of 235, the payment services provider processes millions of consumer transactions across over 17 countries for fashion retailer Zalando SE. But what makes ZPS’s story particularly unique is its business model: a factoring service that provides consumers the flexibility of more than 20 payment options.

ZPS’s business model gives it a competitive advantage over companies that have more simplistic approaches to payment processes. However, it also requires the provider to comply with German financial regulations to protect merchants and consumers from bankrupt providers. One of those standards mandates an on-demand, accurate computation and monitoring of the total funds held in its bank accounts belonging to third parties – a task that its existing technology couldn’t accommodate.

While challenging, this requirement led to an innovation that helped the payment services provider optimize its financial operations and better understand and expand its business. ZPS collaborated with the University of Seville in Spain to build a customized cash-flow model to uncover valuable liquidity and financial planning insights.

Within this guarantee-monitoring model, ZPS uses Intelligent ERP to replicate data on contract accounts receivable in near-real time to a business warehousing solution and other reporting applications. An in-memory database then processes the data, calculates key figures such as customer cash-in and factoring cash-outs, and uses these figures to determine the amounts to be guaranteed each day. Furthermore, with a live connection to its business warehousing solution, ZPS uses a cloud-based analytics solution to let employees access calculated data and consume reports through intuitive dashboards and predictive stories.

By amplifying the value of its Big Data with Intelligent ERP and augmented analytics, ZPS allows a larger circle of business users to gain insights into financial KPIs, such as gross customer cash-ins or days from order. But this is not the end of the company’s transformation story: ZPS is now looking to develop a predictive model that forecasts amounts to be guaranteed in the future.

While picking the right technology strategy is a complex process made even more complicated by the evolving needs of a growing business, companies can never go wrong making choices that optimize their data. And one of those technologies – as demonstrated by ZPS’s recent transformation success – is Intelligent ERP. 

For midsize companies, adopting Intelligent ERP can kick off a digital transformation that goes beyond addressing a specific business need. It also provides the process efficiency, operational visibility, and actionable insights that the broader workstream needs to help grow the business.

If you are interested to know more about how Intelligent ERP can help growing companies rethink their approach to digital transformation, review a recent IDC article “Intelligent ERP: Delivering Critical Business Capabilities That Current Systems Lack”, and take a look at my recent blogs:

Why Intelligent ERP Systems Are The Secret To Growing A Company’s Competitive Edge