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Case Study – Healthcare – Skyway Behavioral Health
Start Up Requiring Robust Infrastructure – From Planning to Implementation
The 7 Irresistible Qualities of Cloud ERP
Learn why ERP tools are an critical component for many businesses.
Why a Business Continuity Plan is Essential
Learn why your company needs a business continuity plan.
Ransomware 101
If you’re looking for ways to stop ransomware dead in its tracks, the experts at CCS Technology are here to help.
How managed services make the difference
Learn more about the benefits of partnering with a managed services provider.
Cloud Services and the SMB Revolution
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Office 365 Migration Made Easy
Migrating over to Office 365 has never been easier with CCS Technology.
The Advantages of Working with I.T. Pros
Learn how working with a seasoned technology pro makes your work easier.
Closing Common Cybersecurity Holes
Learn several critical cybersecurity tips and tricks any SMB can use.
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What is the Total Economic Impact of Your ERP?
/in Blog, ERP Software /by Chris HigginsWhether you’re moving on from accounting software or addressing the challenges presented by legacy ERP products, the move to a new software often represents a significant investment. But like any investment, the decision is one that is meant to create value—no different than moving to a new facility, buying a fleet of vehicles that deliver better fuel economy, or introducing a new product line.
It Pays to Analyze the Big Picture of Your Investment
Understandably, an investment needs to be justified. A new facility in a higher-taxed jurisdiction could expose you to unnecessary damage to your margins. Higher insurance or maintenance costs could override any fuel savings. Your new product might not work for your customers, and your ERP implementation project could fail to deliver the benefits you need.
Balancing risks, costs, and potential benefits is a major part of any business decision, and to help companies in need of advice, leading analyst firm Forrester Research recently took a different look at measuring the value of ERP. From the report,
“To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four Acumatica customers with various before states. Some interviewed customers had legacy on-premises ERP solutions that had outlived their usefulness. Some organizations often ran numerous (or dozens in one case) of instances of various ERP solutions. Integration, management, and upgrades were labor-intensive and time-consuming. Other organizations had no ERP solution at all, relying on a mishmash of disparate solutions to run their businesses. Each of the interviewed customers recognized that they needed to overhaul their environment to drive growth and reduce costs.”
In turn, the firm used the interviews to look at the potential financial impact of Acumatica on their organizations
Total Economic Impact: A Broader Look at Return on Investment
While the concept of Return on Investment has long been part of an ERP analysis, and still delivers a direct understanding of the potential value of a project, better metrics and a broader understanding of ERP has led to a broader understanding of ROI.
What is the Total Economic Impact Framework?
This framework, called Total Economic Impact, seeks to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision, noting,
“The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.”
Four Pillars of TEI
This approach accounts for the following:
Combining customer interviews, analysis, and interviews with Acumatica stakeholders, Forrester was able to create a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations.
The Results: The Combined Experiences of Four Real-Life Customers
The composite organization is representative of the four organizations that Forrester interviewed, and it’s used to present the aggregate financial analysis used in the study.
So how did this composite organization fare? Though the report goes into much greater detail on the path to purchase, the outcomes, and the benefits, Forrester found the composite organization was able to:
Get the Entire Report and Get to Know TEI
If you’re looking to understand just how much of an impact Acumatica can have on your business, the entire report offers much more detail, exploring every single moving part that goes into the numbers. The Total Economic Impact™ Of Acumatica: Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Acumatica provides nearly 30 pages of insights and analysis, discussing how Acumatica Cloud ERP equips organizations with the tools they need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing atmosphere.
The Right Solution Starts with the Right Partner: CCS Technology
One of the hardest parts of an ERP decision is not just the solution, but the partner who gets you there. The wrong ERP partner can derail even the best ERP for you, so it pays to work with someone who has been there, done that, and can get you where you need to be.
With centuries of combined experience, the CCS team has led software projects of all sizes and has the skills to deliver for you. Get to know more about our process, our skills, and our team, and when you’re ready to get started, reach out.
Additional Resources
Getting More from ERP: New Gartner Report Predicts Push Toward Enterprise Business Capabilities
ERP Evaluation Checklist: 5 Important Things to Consider
Why Growing Companies Need ERP Software
Four Reasons Leading Analyst Mint Jutras Believes Acumatica is Primed for Unprecedented Growth
/in Blog, ERP Software /by Chris HigginsWhat makes an ERP solution better than the rest? It’s a question that many companies hope to answer but few realize. From personalization to pricing to partnership, so many things go into an ERP decision, and selecting the right one can be the line between easy growth and painful progression.
One of many ways to compare this is to look at how fast the company is growing to see if other businesses like yours have embraced the solution. But the term fastest-growing is a misnomer, with little backing from companies who know the solution best. But a recent report from leading Analyst Firm Mint Jutras has a few things to say about their beliefs about one such solution, Acumatica.
Customer Friendliness
One of the most important reasons that Acumatica has and will continue to grow is that the company is known as one who treats customers right. Something discussed in many other reports including the Emotional Footprint Buyer’s Guide from Info-Tech and the Nucleus Research Value Matrix, Acumatica is among the most highly rated when it comes to satisfaction.
This comes down to the company’s willingness to not only talk a big game, but walk the walk when they say that they are customer-first. How? Through the Acumatica Customer Bill of Rights—a no jargon, no malarkey way of telling customers exactly what they’re entitled to when they choose the software.
Acumatica customers have a right to:
Built on Innovation
Paired with the focus on the customers, Acumatica has been able to deliver innovation—not only through its own team but through its vast network of partners. Part of its 100% channel model, Acumatica’s staff is there for two reasons: to build a better product and support it. In this, nearly three quarters of its staff is focused on research and development, meaning the company can stay more agile than competitors and deliver innovation its customers need.
But Acumatica goes further. With no sales staff of their own, the goal of the company is to empower partners. This means that partners have more flexibility to create products to enhance the ERP.
Mint Jutras notes,
“While many software vendors, even those that have modernized development platforms, might pay lip service to encouraging partners to fill gaps in functionality and extend their solutions into new verticals, these kinds of fees often present an economic barrier to executing on that strategy.
Not only does Acumatica make its platform available to all, with no added fees, it also hosts an online Marketplace in which viable, certified extensions can be showcased and purchased.”
Priced for Growth
An ERP vendor can’t grow if it doesn’t deliver for customers, and the easiest way to grow is to help customers grow alongside them. Not only is Acumatica a scalable solution that makes life easier for companies who choose the solution, it facilitates growth as well. As noted:
“Most other ERP vendors price based on number of users. Per-user licensing is very common, both in the traditional on-premise and the SaaS worlds and anywhere in between. But it can also raise some barriers to growth. As you add more employees or you expand your implementation to a new department or function within your organization, the user count goes up, and so does the cost.
Acumatica is different. Its price is based on the computing resources you use, not on the number of users. Need a price? Just answer a few questions including, “What applications do you want to start using now?,” “What type of license are you considering: SaaS Subscription, Private Cloud Subscription, or Private Perpetual License?,” and “What is your projected level of consumption based on the volume of your business transactions and data storage?”
This unlimited user model means that everyone from the occasional report reader to the power user can have an account—all without scaling up costs.
Designed for Usability
Products need to be functional, well-supported, and usable. While the first two were discussed above, the last of these three concepts is often overlooked. Without usability, customers will be spending a lot of time talking with support to get the functionality. Especially in today’s world where more people need to use ERP, learning curves can’t be steep.
Acumatica has flattened the curve, delivering easy-to-use functionality that encourages growth and collaboration. Acumatica 2020 R1 strives to improve navigation, business intelligence, and import processing. This is a collection of seemingly “little things” that make a huge difference in the day-to-day use of Acumatica, plugging typical leaks in productivity.
From dashboards to easier uploads, usability continues to be a core focus of the provider, and they deliver with ease.
Get to Know More: Free Report Dives Deeper
As the growth of ERP continues and more cloud vendors get into the game, read this report to find out what separates the leaders from the also-rans. The Mint Jutras report, Innovation Fuels Acumatica’s Accelerated Growth, explores a variety of reasons that the analyst firm backs the product, including:
Download it here.
Acumatica and CCS: True Cloud Partners
If you’re looking for a flexible and powerful solution that doesn’t hinder your initiatives, it’s time to get rolling with Acumatica. Built in the cloud to deliver the adaptable, feature rich, and integrated enterprise resource planning software that streamlines your processes and facilitates your decisions, this solution is ready for the needs of distribution firms.
Get to know more about how this product has helped distributors like you by reading these case studies, reading 7 irresistible qualities of cloud ERP, and contacting leading Acumatica Partner CCS Technology for a consultation.
Additional Resources
Getting More from ERP: New Gartner Report Predicts Push Toward Enterprise Business Capabilities
ERP Evaluation Checklist: 5 Important Things to Consider
Compare the Top 14 Cloud ERP Solutions
Choosing the Right Offsite Location for Backups
/in Blog, Business Continuity /by Chris HigginsIt’s well-known that one of the best strategies for backups is to follow the 3-2-1 rule: have a least three copies of data, use two different storage media, and keep one copy offsite.
When it comes to deciding where to keep the offsite copy, cloud is an obvious choice today. However, cloud isn’t the only choice. The backup copy can be stored at your secondary data center, or at some storage facility.
How do you choose? The cost of the storage is one factor, but other factors should be considered as well. While the primary reason for keeping the copy offsite is to ensure you won’t lose it if your primary site it totally destroyed, there are other considerations as well.
The things to think about in addition to cost are the level of risk and the impact on recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
Offsite storage can impact your RTO depending on how long it takes to access the data. If you use cloud for offsite storage, this will be impacted by both data access times (backups stored on a less expensive storage tier will take longer to access) as well as the time to transfer the data. That data transfer process will in turn be affected by network bandwidth. If you choose to store data offsite at a storage facility your RTO will be impacted by the time to locate the backup as well as either the network bandwidth or the time to physically ship the media to your data center. If your offsite location is a secondary data center and you’re failing over there, you may be able to recover almost immediately; otherwise, transferring the data back to your primary site requires either network bandwidth or physical transport capability.
The time delay in delivering offsite media also affects RPO. You’ll lose any data between the last backup and the outage. If it takes a day for a tape to be delivered and processed, you won’t be able to recover yesterday’s data; you’ll be recovering the day before yesterday, while yesterday’s is still in transit.
The final consideration is risk. Offsite storage that’s nearby is conveniently accessible by your onsite staff, but it’s vulnerable to being damaged by the same natural disaster that’s taken out your primary site. A more remote storage site reduces that risk but can increase delays or errors in accessing the data you need to restore.
Many times, if you’re following the 3-2-1 rule, you’ll have a second copy in your data center and won’t have to worry about accessing the remote copy. But if that onsite backup turns out to be bad, getting access to the remote copy will be extremely important. CCS Technology Group helps businesses develop comprehensive business continuity solutions that ensure you’ll have access to your backups when you need them. Contact us to learn more about what you should consider when developing your backup strategy.
Additional Backup Resources
Don’t Let Ransomware Destroy the Backups You Need to Recover from Ransomware
Effective Backups Need to Address These Challenges
The Differences Between Backups, Disaster Recovery, and Archiving Matter