Tag: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

In the aftermath of the virus outbreak, 2020 has certainly been a challenging year for the manufacturing sector. The World Bank predicts the pandemic will push Sub-Saharan Africa into its first recession in 25 years with growth predicted to fall to -3.3% for 2020. Reduced demand has taken its toll on the balance sheet and cash flow of most producers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought on massive changes to the manufacturing industry, which has had to adapt to new operating models, an evolving consumer market, and disruptions in supply chain processes, all while keeping the workforce safe and healthy.

While IT continues to innovate and advance at a dizzying rate, the dark corner of technology licensing remains, for some, a haven of inertia. But even here there is activity and creativity as we see increasing demand to create a licensing model free of lock-in and representative of true value and transparency.

COVID-19 cannot take all the blame for the disruptions taking place in the global economy. The pandemic and resultant lockdown simply provided a conduit for highlighting the failings across industries in South Africa, whether that is healthcare, public transport, education, or others.

Business resilience remains one of the most important and relevant ways for organisations to bypass legacy challenges and to explore new opportunities. The recent months have likely been the biggest challenge for all organisations across the continent.

For many enterprises, their siloed, traditional Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems are proving to be their Achilles’ heel when trying to operate in unprecedented circumstances, preventing business continuity and resilience.

Manufacturers and distributors are operating in intensely pressured times. Stats SA reported that manufacturing output contracted for the ninth consecutive month in February of 2020 with the full extent of the damage caused by COVID-19 and the nationwide lockdown still unknown.

In the past, the typical profile of a successful Microsoft Dynamics reseller was an owner-managed company with one, two or maybe three handfuls of customers, no active marketing and no dedicated sales resources. Getting to that point was the hard part. Beyond that, life was fairly stable and comfortable.

With the cloud services market expected to grow at a rate of 28% over the next five years to top R23 billion by 2023, South African companies have finally woken up to its potential. Providing some of the impetus behind this is the local availability of Microsoft Azure data centres.

As we progress further into Industry 4.0, finance needs to further leverage new technologies to add real value to a business’s bottom-line, yet it remains in its infancy stages. Industry 4.0 has impacted a range of industries, and with the digitisation of industrial value chains, many forget about finance, which has only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging new technologies.