1. What is the number one sign that a business is ready for an ERP?
A key indicator that businesses are ready for an ERP is the need to improve operational effectiveness and simplify the ability to analyze data to improve financial insight, decision-making, productivity, and ultimately, improved profitability.
2. What are the top pain points you help businesses with?
We help people with their Business Transformation journey. This includes helping them understand and define new business processes, providing a means to pull Finance, Operations, and Customer data together in one place for full visibility, and moving away from a vast number of disparate and outdated solutions.
3. What do you think is the key benefit that businesses can gain from integrating a bespoke stack with a business like Flintech, rather than another SI?
Flintech employs seasoned and experienced resources with 15-20 years of experience in their area of expertise; It’s our people who make the difference. Our resources have not only subject matter knowledge but also industry experience and can relate to what the customer is needing to do, as many have performed those functions in prior roles.
When they’re working with a customer, they’re not looking at it from the perspective of ‘how do I configure the system?’, They’re thinking ‘how can we solve the customer’s problems?’
4. What is the number one challenge for businesses looking to undergo digital transformation?
At a practical level, the challenge of managing the current operations while implementing a new BT solution shouldn’t be underestimated. Customers are trying to run their day job at the same time as trying to implement a new system from design to testing – it can be a burden at times.
Another challenge is getting out of the mindset of ‘this is how we do it today. A lot of people want to take their existing processes, which they may have been using for 10-20 years and put them into a new system which will make things harder in the long run, it will make the stack harder to manage and keep up to date. We encourage people to be open to change – be open to doing things differently for long-term benefit.
We often need to take them on the journey, find out what they want to achieve, open the box to show the full suite of capabilities, then start to explore whether their processes can be adapted to get the full benefit of the solution.
When their needs do require customizations we can leverage the Microsoft stack, like Power Platform and Power Automate to customize in the right manner.
5. How can your customers benefit from the increased data provided by an ERP?
Microsoft Dynamics has built-in power BI capabilities which allow users to better see the data and be able to make real-time management decisions on operations.
Some reports in other systems show you what’s happened last week or last month but having it built-in, easy to access, and easy to read lets them see what’s happening now and be proactive in how they use that information.
During covid this was invaluable to our customers – sales and supply chains were highly volatile but our customers could see real-time inventory levels at a glance, along with how they were doing in sales, which was key to making sure they weren’t sitting on stock. We’re seeing this problem play out again now for some retailers. Supply disruption and lack of visibility have led to huge quantities of stock that need shifting, leading to heavy discounts and promotions and even paying people to keep unwanted items.
6. What’s one thing you wish every customer knew about systems integration and implementation?
It’s less about knowledge and more about mindset, especially at a leadership level. It helps a project from the start when you have a leadership team who is open to new ideas, and how they can do things differently to get a better result.
