Did you know cloud deployment brings the opportunity to redefine many of your legacy business processes and workflows in a way that leverages these more open, connected, instantaneous integration paths?

For example, employing inexpensive handheld technologies across the company can drive improved efficiency, enhanced insights, and increased accuracy to your decision-making processes. Moving to the cloud presents a number of easily quantifiable benefits, and many that can be difficult to assign a value to, despite their obvious business and/or technical appeal. Arguably, the one cost that is especially difficult to derive, but outweighs all others is the high cost of doing nothing—something we haven’t discussed in this paper as it’s a consideration unique to your operating environment, priorities, and objectives. How much does it cost you in efficiency, effectiveness, and lost opportunity to continue to build your future enterprise application strategy on a decades-old deployment model that has been proven to steal value from your organization?

Only you can answer that question.

Here’s 7 reasons to strongly consider moving your Epicor ERP to the cloud!

1. Cloud Economics: Early value propositions for cloud deployment tended to focus on economic and financial justification—for good reason. Despite the cloud having subsequently proven its value beyond just good financial sense, there is no doubt that for companies of all sizes the economics of cloud deployment are undeniably compelling, with Epicor Cloud ERP deployments often running as high as 40 percent less than their on-premises deployment parallel. Not being as capital intensive as an on-premises deployment (because of the subscription-based pricing model). Many capital-constrained companies pursue the cloud because it doesn’t place the same demands on their cash flow as the major up-front capital investment typical of legacy deployments.
2. Cloud Scalability: Better and more instant scalability, allowing clients to add users to their system on demand and saving them from having to invest in hardware and software at the “high water mark.” This is a significant benefit once your system has gone live—allowing you to grow your system without the need to scale corresponding hardware and infrastructure investments. Leveraged thoughtfully, most clients have also used this scalability to ensure they are subscribing to the right number of users for each stage of your deployment, and occasionally to support seasonal business fluctuations.
3. Server Savings: Think about all the costs of running the servers yourself. When you consider electricity, cooling systems, backup systems, and remote access technologies, the true costs of
   running an ERP system yourself aren’t always obvious. At the end of the day, you know those bills are being paid from someone’s budget, even if they don’t have a clear line tying them back to your on-premises ERP system expense.
4. Better IT Resource Utilization: Moving to the cloud does not mean that your IT department will go away. It does, however mean that your IT department will be able to deliver higher-value activities that are better aligned with your mission, and they will be able to spend less time patching the servers and keeping the lights blinking.
5. Easy Upgrades: It’s an open secret in the ERP industry that upgrades are generally viewed as a mixed blessing by many clients. Users with an active maintenance plan are entitled to upgrades as they are published, but few clients are enthusiastic about the administrative burden of managing these frequent upgrades. For most companies, the costs of outsourcing this work to professional services experts is impractical, leading to a situation where clients languish on old versions of their ERP system despite the new versions sitting on the shelf. Cloud deployment redefines the experience by designing upgrades—big and small—to be deployed by the ERP cloud operations staff as part of our standard support services, without imposing update installations on your staff. Minor updates are transparently deployed (generally bi-weekly) in a non-disruptive fashion, and major upgrades are announced well in advance, and include a sandbox training environment and end-user training.
6. Mobility! Mobility! Mobility! Opening up your ERP system by virtue of cloud deployment allows you to retire the poorly defined ad-hoc “integration by Excel file” workflows that have cropped up across your organization, where email is the backbone for critical business collaboration between people and systems. In their place, you can deploy real-time integration processes that link your employees, vendors, partners, and customers. From contract designers, to out-sourced manufacturers, to third-party logistics providers, to your own end customers who require real-time access to critical business data, deploying in the cloud makes it easier and more secure to collaborate and integrate across companies in real time—something that is just too difficult with legacy deployment models. Moving to the cloud brings instant (and likely long overdue) improvement to your supply chain and manufacturing processes.
7. Business Consistency and Global Process Alignment: Increasingly, companies have staff working across multiple locations and they aspire to provide the efficiency of a single unified ERP system across the enterprise to support them. For many organizations, moving to the cloud provides the immediate opportunity to shed multiple operating ERP systems across the company, achieve instant visibility across every location, and standardize a single set of operational and administrative processes. Deploying a single cloud ERP globally (where the only infrastructure requirement is Internet access) removes many operational obstacles in your organization, facilitates better global regulatory compliance, and gives you the confidence that your continued expansion efforts can be accommodated without a significant IT effort by simply enabling that new location in your existing cloud-based ERP system.

CompuData can leverage the cloud to deploy your Epicor ERP system. 

Ready to take your Epicor ERP to the cloud? Click here!