Resilience over Optimisation
When times were stable, your business was focused on optimising. Now you should be making a priority of resilience, including in your ERP.
Summary, for those who want just the takeaway
Sensible businesses spent the smooth times optimising what they do. Whatever your business does, but especially if it uses Epicor Kinetic ERP, you should now be putting resilience ahead of optimisation, which changes how a lot of things are planned and done.
How things are
As if there wasn’t enough uncertainty in the business world right now, let alone the wider world, users of Epicor systems have uncertainty of their own.
The pace of change for what was Epicor ERP, the flagship product, has been breakneck for some years now, and isn’t slowing down. On-premise systems have been slightly shielded by having direct control, and being able to wait out the more disruptive shifts, but with the announcement that those systems now have a time limit, that too will have to change.
Cloud is Epicor’s only future at this point, and cloud has been a bit of a rough ride. As the changes happen, users are hit by problems they didn’t expect and didn’t plan for. In some cases couldn’t plan for.
This, for any efficient organisation, is hard to deal with. Efficiency means making sure things are known and repeatable, in control. Psychology tells us that when there is a drive for certainty that can’t be attained, behaviour becomes pathological, and while psychology doesn’t apply in the same way to businesses, something similar can happen.
When external circumstances are stable, rational businesses tend to implicitly focus on optimisation, doing things the best way possible. When instability arrives, this can be hard to shift as an institutional instinct.
But what is needed is a refocus on resilience.
Resilience
Suppose you are now running an Epicor Kinetic system on-premise. It’s working well for what you do. But you now have a deadline by which it will no longer be developed, followed by support stopping.
You will have to decide what to do.
Obvious options are: stay on-premise in some form and manage an unsupported static system, plan a shift to Kinetic cloud, or a migration to another system entirely. An optimisation mindset says you need to decide which is best, using all available information, and commit to it.
But there is more. AI is arriving, and everybody says it will change everything. Some say it will do away with the need for systems like ERP entirely, others say it will usher in an era where every business creates its own bespoke systems on demand, or lead to a thousand targeted capabilities to stitch together. ERP companies say their new AI capabilities will lead to improvements in what you already know that are mind-blowing in ways you can’t yet identify.
And at the same time, supplies have become uncertain, prices gyrate, the business environment is hard to predict, and fresh surprises have almost stopped being a surprise.
A resilience mindset looks at all this, and prioritises making the best of it all, even the so-far unforeseen.
How to prepare for the unknown, though?
The key realisation is that you don’t necessarily have to decide everything now. What you do have to do is make sure that when decision points arrive, choices have to be made, you are prepared. You have your information, you know your priorities, the risks and goals, and have done groundwork that means you can commit cleanly.
So, looking at all these possibilities, what does groundwork look like?
The possible decisions may be different, but there are certain things in common that all will most likely need. Clean data, documented processes, clear accessible knowledge of everything currently used and how it fits together. Whether you choose the simplest upgrade course, or the most ambitious future-tech AI-driven replacement if it materialises, the data patterns will be crucial, and the workflows.
This is important. Even if you have no idea, now, what the best course of action is going to be, you know with high certainty what any likely course of action needs, now. And you can find out what it will take to get it in place.
As part of that, you will almost certainly need to do house-keeping. There will be old assumptions baked in that can be revisited. Simplifications and efficiencies possible. Almost no system that’s been running for a long time is as clean as it could be, and clean systems are easy systems – including easy to move to alternatives.
Look for the bottlenecks
A resilient mindset doesn’t settle only for a clean efficient system, though. Just as vital is hunting down anything that has no alternative.
What sort of thing? Anything, where if that element was to be missing or broken, the business can’t function. There are a surprising amount of those in most companies.
Some of them are people. Only they know how to do something that needs to be done. That’s a problem.
Some are parts of the tech, even the whole of it. Can things function, even limping along, with the internet out? What happens if an upgrade kills a custom process, or the integration with a crucial external system?
What about external systems more generally? Does having two connected systems make the pair half as fragile, or twice as fragile?
Do you have more than one way to do everything, even less efficiently?
Are your automations and customisations progressive, in the web development sense? That’s when you make sure the core process works with everything switched off, and each necessary function you switch on improves it, making it quicker and more efficient or easier without being necessary for it to work in the first place.
This is useful in itself, not only for the future
The great thing is that all this work tends to pay for itself in the short term as well. Simpler, cleaner systems, with better data, are more efficient to use, with fewer errors and time-wasting workarounds.
What’s more, resilience pays off while things are uncertain even before big decisions are made. When changes might happen any time, having diversity, fallbacks, diffusion of necessary knowledge, means things can keep running almost whatever happens, without panic spending when disaster strikes.
You get immediate benefit, in other words.
Without having to make the big decisions you can feel hanging over you, until you have to.