Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 24 | Page 46

FEATURE: ERP Planning your way to profitability Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions (ERPs) are more important for the management of workplaces than ever before. Powerful new capabilities are now available to enterprises for supporting operational excellence, improving visibility, and expanding revenue. In an increasingly competitive era in an ever- changing global business environment, enterprises are finding that additional functionality can support a growth in revenue and control costs. With an increase in customer demands, an erosion of margins for products and global uncertainty, companies can increase their business agility and enhance their strategic decision making through utilising the best ERPs on the market. Intelligent CIO spoke to three experts to find out more. 46 INTELLIGENTCIO KARIM TALHOUK, MBS DIRECTOR GULF Can you tell me about the ERP products Microsoft offers? Microsoft used to offer a range of ERP systems mainly for small and mid-sized companies and one for enterprise companies. With Dynamics 365, we reinvented the ERP in this one product, which is cloud-based but can be implemented on premise, for companies who don’t want to move straight away to the cloud. What’s unique about this product is that it combines both CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP in one single package. I think Microsoft is the first one to do this, which offers customers a lot of flexibility and cost savings. You can have one single point of contact so you can have better customer engagement, because this is ultimately the end goal for any company, and at the same time optimise your processes in the back office as an ERP to provide your employees with the best tool that will allow them to make their job better. Microsoft today is leading an initiative which is helping organisations to digitally transform. This means four things: Firstly, to provide them a better customer engagement tool; secondly to empower the employees of a certain www.intelligentcio.com