According to Syspro Africa’s Product Manager, Deirdre Fryer, IoT and ERP are a “powerful combination” for African SMEs.
As IT-Online reveals, Fryer stated that the joint implementation of IoT and ERP allows small-to-mid-sized African enterprises to “enter large supply chains and compete head-on with the big guys”.
By linking everyday devices with IoT capabilities (such as the office printer) to your ERP network, businesses can take advantage of “the possibilities of being able to feed information from an entire network of assets into the ERP.”
By using this “wealth of unstructured data” derived from “all of the smart devices in your business”, and integrating it with the “existing structured data” in the business’s ERP, “extremely valuable insights” could be gained which could have a positive knock-on effect in a variety of areas, including customer service, forecasting, inventory management and more.
This will help business owners to “make infinitely better business decisions” and “rapidly adapt to changing consumer and business requirements”, extending their business model accordingly and gaining enhanced flexibility.
With all these benefits to gain, the main obstacles still preventing some African SMEs from taking advantage of IoT and ERP are “the complexities involved in integrating all of their systems” and a concern “around security”, thanks to the prevalence of hacking. In order to protect your business against cyber-attacks, “protocols and security need to be a lot stronger”.
However, these challenges can be overcome by working out what insights you want to gain from using IoT and ERP and basing “your entire strategy” around them, ensuring the ERP system “has an integration layer and protocols that enable the sharing of information and communication between solutions and devices.”
By making the most of IoT, “companies can fast forward their business intelligence” and “punch high above their weight” as a result.