Tag: architecture

There is a lot of excitement about technology’s potential to automate tasks making our lives easier and freeing us up to do more fun things.

ChatGPT is the latest in a long line of excited debates – with the CEO of OpenAI now suggesting that his ambition for the technology is for it to become a ‘reasoning engine’, so therefore not just a fact database. But the problem is (and this has been highlighted through various tests and articles) that implementing automation, never mind autonomy, is really quite hard.

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AI is changing the world. You have an infusion of AI at every step in the process, whether you talk about the first mile or the last mile. Whether you talk about AI being used to intelligently and automatically capture paper-based invoices or to enrich, augment, and predict incomplete data. But you can’t get results from AI if you have data silos. In fact, AI initiatives might fire back if you trained your models with the wrong data.

In today’s episode, our guest, Claus Jepsen, discusses why AI and ML solutions are less effective if businesses still have data siloed. He also discusses Unit4 stories and their unique approach to the cloud. Finally, he discusses issues with the first and last mile of AI and how they each offer unique challenges.

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An ERP system often underpins the core operations of your business, invariably affecting mission-critical functions. Poorly managed, an implementation project can spiral out of control, leading to business disruption, cost escalation and even damage to your reputation. However, when executed correctly, a well-implemented ERP solution presents an opportunity to enable true business transformation, increasing revenue, enhancing customer and employee experiences, helping your company adapt to change and even positively impacting brand equity.

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In a year marked by uncertainty, organizations are looking for ways to reduce operating costs and streamline processes. Efficiency is on the mind of every business leader. Deploying automation to reduce manual work will continue to be a top consideration to achieve this. Company leaders will also consider new ways to build and maintain software and accelerate digital transformation. They’ll also contemplate continuing to move more workloads off-premise and into the cloud — including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) functions.

But this will also be a year when businesses get back to basics. They’ll rethink decisions they’ve made in the past and add new talent to manage the growing complexity in their fields. Here are five predictions to watch for in 2023 and what they mean for CIOs and CTOs.

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Cloud computing can offer businesses fast deployment, scalability and reduced costs, but it can also be a surprising tool for reducing your carbon footprint. Today’s customers, stakeholders and employees are ecologically aware, making sustainability a top priority for keeping up in a rapidly changing world.

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Organizations use a variety of applications to handle business tasks, and at the center of many point solutions is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In an ideal state, data from various solutions, such as the ecommerce system, CRM instance, collaboration tools, analytics solutions, payroll systems, etc., would flow seamlessly across the tech stack, with the ERP at the center.  In such an environment, Claus Jepsen, CTO at Unit4, discusses the value of having an integration-as-a-service approach.

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Modern people-centric organizations invest in critical integrations so they can use their ERP systems as a data hub but often lack the time or resources to work their way down the to-do list. Integration-as-a-service offers an opportunity to realize their ambitions of automation—and make time and cost savings as a result.

ERP systems have the potential to act as an organization’s data and transactional hub—but in my experience, this high level of integration is often just an ambition. As a result, I still see a lot of people exporting spreadsheets from one tool to another or using manual interfaces and rekeying data.

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As a technology organization, our company has been innovating for a long time—and we’ve learned from both our mistakes and our successes. Over eight years ago, we established a designated innovation team, but we soon learned that progress could not be led by one team: It is most effective when it is organization-wide. This led to Crazy Lab Days, one of the most significant events on the Unit4 calendar.

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Sustainability is a hot topic for modern businesses. But when you think about what you can change to reduce your environmental impact, your ERP software probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. However, there is a cross point between software architecture and sustainability, and it’s something you should consider when you design and deploy your system.

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I’ve been the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Unit4 for around three years, but I joined as Chief Architect in our innovation labs closer to eight years ago. When I arrived, many of the questions my team was seeking to answer revolved around the cloud. At the time, many were taking a ‘lift and shift’ approach, but we became obsessed with the idea of starting from scratch and building a cloud-native platform.

After many late-night eureka moments and plenty of trial and error, we were able to bring a unique, ultra-scalable solution to the market – and I’m now in the somewhat interesting but rewarding position of having to run what I have built!

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