ERPx receives yet more analyst praise

Since we announced ERPx at last October’s X4U virtual event, we’ve received more than a few positive mentions from industry analysts. We’re pleased with the reception our new approach to cloud based ERP has garnered, and we’re even more pleased to tell you that ERPx has recently been mentioned in three additional analyst publications.

IDC’s latest Market Note on Unit4 has praised both our improved performance against KPIs in 2020 despite the pandemic, and ERPx’s innovative approach to handling industry standards and our out-of-the-box industry specific user experiences across people centric verticals.

Nucleus Research’s dedicated Research Note on ERPx details the platform’s capability to deliver three major strategic benefits to our customers: increased user productivity, reduced operational costs, and improved organizational visibility.

And Mint Jutras, in their in-depth look at ERPx and its suitability to various different people-centric organizations, have stated that our “People First” strategy – which ERPx exemplifies – is more than just feel good messaging. It’s a commitment to delivering the right experience of ERP for a specific business – going beyond the old idea of a solution that’s an 80% fit – and helping to prepare it for the future.

IDC Market Note [1] – strategic alignment to grow in disruptive times

Along with an overview of our recent strategic realignment, in this piece IDC undertakes a closer look at some of ERPx’s core capabilities.

“With ERPx, Unit4 is looking to provide a more differentiated user experience: deep and capable for professionals, yet lightweight for general employees and casual users, and with relatively high degree of automation whenever possible. The deep user experience is meant to be highly personalized for professional users, while occasional users can be served in “10-second experiences” delivered in familiar platforms (such as Slack, Teams, or Outlook) and leveraging natural language processing and digital assistant interactions.”

The report also makes note of ERPx’s ability to integrate with a variety of other Unit4 products that help drive agility. These include our integration and extension capabilities - which allow organizations to immediately address business needs by shortening the time required to make customizations, create new business processes, and develop and integrate new services and applications. Moreover, they can be used by citizen developers without IT expertise.

(Our leveraging of AI and Machine Learning to drive automation in order to increase productivity also gets a mention.)

Nucleus Research – Unit4 shows its X-factor with ERPx

Nucleus’s coverage looks to the future, and to the potential effects and benefits our customers might expect to see as they adopt ERPx.

“Unit4 takes a vertical approach in the ERP market and gears its solutions towards mid-market organizations in the service-focused industry. We expect this specialization could make ERPx easier to implement and more intuitive when addressing industry-specific technology challenges, rather than a more general ERP product could. This specialization could potentially benefit ERPx customers with increases in user productivity and decreases in costs.”

The report also highlights ERPx’s next-generation capabilities in the arena of composable ERP features and AI/ML functionality.

“When deployed, the solution can give a full view of operations, finances, and HR and automatically gather relevant data with AI for data analysis and forecasting. As a modern ERP solution, ERPx comes equipped with machine learning functionality, which allows for the automation of repetitive and low-value tasks, prediction of risk factors, and prescriptive recommendations to further actions to users. ERPx also utilises machine learning with chatbot technology and Unit4’s proprietary digital assistant, Wanda, to allow users to streamline non-automated tasks more quickly. End-users also have access to low code capabilities to create customized functionality in house rather than outsourcing to costly third-party services. Integration extension toolkits further alleviate the time and resource burden on IT by streamlining the implementation of other solutions into existing systems.

The report further identifies three principle benefits that ERPx customers can hope to achieve from using the system.

Increased user productivity: Nucleus emphasises the fact that ERPx can effectively consolidate ERP, HCM, and FP&A functionalities in a single platform. This integration of such a wide range of functionality often allows users to standardize processes, use applications more easily, deploy more flexibly, and achieve data clarity. Eliminating the work associated with transferring data between systems. Further productivity gains associated with both manual process automation and reduced maintenance needs are also noted.

Reduced operational costs: the report highlights evidence that our vertical specialization will result in cost savings for customers, thanks to our specialist industry knowledge removing much of the burden and cost of customization generally needed with “one size fits all” products. As ERPx’s platform solutions are already natively integrated, and our industry model approach radically streamlines implementation.

Improved organizational visibility: the consolidation of multiple solutions streamlines and facilitates data flow, encouraging collaboration and making end-to-end visibility achievable. The report mentions that customers interviewed have commented on the benefits of making data available across our product ecosystem, and predicts that this unified user experience will support data analysis and decision making at the organizational level.

Mint Jutras: the Unit4 People Platform preps for the future

“If you are not currently a Unit4 customer and if you are running a legacy solution based on old, outdated technology, you have a problem that is not going away all by itself. The COVID-19 global pandemic has brought more change and uncertainty to (already) disruptive times and an added level of urgency to fix that problem. Fortunately, today, technology-enabled cloud ERP systems can provide the level of adaptability needed to navigate this rapidly changing landscape. If you are beginning a search for a replacement, start the planning process now. Unit4 ERPx, built on the People Platform is definitely worth a look.”

In their report on ERPx and the Unit4 People Platform, Mint Jutras express particular enthusiasm for the self-learning capability of our new solution as driven by machine learning. Particularly as it manifests through our voice assistant, Wanda, stating that “the more you use Wanda, the smarter she gets.”

They see the virtual assistant functionality of the platform as an excellent jumping off point for ever more sophisticated automation – using the example of automating expense reports for every transaction and highlighting that this is just one of the ways in which we’re making the automation of common tasks a core part of ERPx’s functionality.

The report also heralds ERPx and the next generation of verticalized ERP as the bringers of a degree of flexibility and – importantly – organizational fit unlike anything seen previously in the space.

“Fit and functionality are(still)important. In fact, an 80% fit should no longer be the goal. Look for that last mile of functionality to be delivered without costly and invasive customizations that build barriers to innovation and lead to stagnation. This is much more feasible with a purpose-built solution like Unit4’s than with a general-purpose solution that evolved either from manufacturing or a generic accounting solution.”

As always, we’re thrilled to receive such positive coverage, and we’re looking forward to more as ERPx shows our customers what it’s capable of throughout the coming year

[1] IDC Market Note, “Unit4 Strategic Realignment to Grow in Disruptive Times”, January 2021, IDC #EUR247275620