Written by: Larry Hack
During May I had the privilege of attending another great SYSPRO USA conference, this time in Anaheim California from May 21 through May 26, 2016. In fact, this was the first time two conferences were held back to back bringing together key executives of the SYSPRO corporate world, SYSPRO Partners/Resellers from Canada, USA and UK and customers. The goal, to hear firsthand about SYSPRO’S corporate strategy and innovative development plans for the next 3 years and to learn. Also in attendance were SYSPRO’S authorised 3rd party solutions providers whom we have got to know well over the past years and also partnered successfully with to bring their products to our customers attention as needed. Their booths were manned throughout the conference and all had an opportunity to meet their staff to gain an understanding of what these advanced solutions had to offer.
Entitled “Simply Smarter | 2016″, the first two days were devoted to presentations to Channel Partners followed by 3 days of corporate presentations and the opportunity to attend 87 breakout topical education tracks centered around SYSPRO Financials, Distribution, Manufacturing, Administration and Enterprise tracks. It was hard to decide what to attend! Eventually I decided on a couple of hands on work and play sessions on SYSPRO 7 and some what’s new sessions as related to SYSPRO GL and the financial modules. “Intercompany control across the supply chain” was also of interest as was “Orders to Shipping and everything in between”. I felt these topics would help me to be able to help you, our customers gain a better understanding of what SYSPRO has to offer in these fronts.
SYSPRO corporate is striving for excellence as it moves forward with a strategy to improve market share. To address this over the next 3 years we have to be cognisant of changing and emerging technologies. The goal is to make SYSPRO part and parcel of everyone’s daily lives in a simply smarter fashion. The Cloud, which we all read and hear often these days, will become an integral reality in the SYSRO world. On the innovation front it was exciting to learn about SYSPRO’S plans centered on topics which in the past we thought were just science fiction. These included plans to use Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Predictive Analysis to help understand analytical trends within our businesses. Use of social media, the internet and mobility platforms will all be part of the SYSPO environment as we are driven by disruptive technologies today that challenge us to change our business processes to meet the demands of a new generation of “Millennial” users. This presents an interesting challenge for our more mature customers who are used to entering data into standard data entry screens and running standard reports that report standard facts. Moving forward under the mantra of “Simply Smarter”, we caught a glimpse of great changes to come within the software, be it in terms of specific module functionality or user experience around how data gets entered, displayed or reported on.
Exciting times await us indeed and I left the conference feeling very confident that SYSPRO will continue to deliver great value for money for the annual license fees our customers pay each year. The challenge for us now is how to re-act and adopt to the rapidly changing and emerging new technologies so as to take advantage of their benefits, or get left behind in their wake. In a previous blog I wrote about the need to establish an annual ERP budget. After attending the conference and seeing firsthand what awaits us on the SYSPRO front I am even more convinced that this is an area that needs close attention in the years to come.