Is ERP still relevant?

Software is surely eating the world. SaaS startups are piece meal’ing one business problem at a time. This is certainly improving productivity of individuals and enabling small enterprises to become more efficient. But, are businesses setting themselves up to paying more in the long run?

Cloud based applications to run businesses is the way to go operating model and the trend continues with more and more organisations following this path.

Every day, there is a new startup in the market solving a problem in a different way. Software catalogues, marketplaces and digital marketing companies are abound and you can find a SaaS solution for pretty much anything you might do.

That begs a question. Is ERP still relevant?

Each business is an integrated entity that runs a core set of functions really well. Whether every function is fully or partly, internally specialised or externally sourced, the business needs to execute these functions well to succeed. Systems and people are what runs a business successfully. ERP is a business operating system that is built to ensure all relevant parts of a business are working according to design.

Although data integrations exist to connect the many SaaS solutions to each other, orchestrating an ERP across the many applications is a very costly and complicated endeavour. As businesses mature and scale, an ERP is a must have system.

ERP systems tend to lag in modernisation due to their sheer size. These days pretty much every ERP vendor has a cloud based SaaS offering and some are certainly better than others. It is wise to consider ERPs along with the shiny new SaaS offering in your system evaluations. No business stays the same and future planning is crucial.

How could a business using 21+ SaaS subscriptions to run many of its core functions, get itself setup to scale better?

It is important to review and consolidate the disparate parts of your business operating system at regular intervals. Technology is a moving landscape and there are always better options than last year.

Using SaaS solutions to build your business to a point cost effectively is a great strategy. Once you reach that point and start scaling, you will need to take a good look at your processes and build a better operating system for your business.

This could be a custom built database or custom built software or an entry level ERP with a small set of core modules. Best of breed SaaS can still be used to provide last mile extensions or unique value add.

The goal of building long term business value can only be achieved by systems that scale with you long term. This is where the right ERPs shine. Not all ERPs are equal.

Curious to learn more about this? We are keen to have a chat. Email us via erp@jeylabs.com

Do you email your personal information?

Believe it or not, there is a lot of personal information being sent via email, every hour.

This is the main reason behind the increasing number of fraud and cyber attacks we read about. There are plenty more ransomware attacks that nobody speaks about.

FACT: Internet is not secure. Email is not private.

This means when you send any sensitive information via email it is highly likely to be stolen.

FACT: Over 90% of all cyber attacks use sensitive information leaked from emails. 

Sending emails that contain address, date of birth, passport number, bank account details, etc is simply asking for trouble.

Email can be intercepted and read by attackers and will be used against people and businesses.

Everyone is busy and under pressure at work. In the heat of the moment, we may choose a short-cut and send over a document without thinking twice. However, ignorance is not bliss. It creates so much pain. We all must become very aware of the consequences of sending these harmless emails. They actually cause a lot of harm.

Typically an e-sign solution allows for documents to be uploaded and signatures to be placed on them.

You can add signers to a signing request and they get an email invite to sign. Once the signing is completed everyone gets a final copy.

Since these documents are usually sensitive and have people’s signatures on them, sending them as regular PDF attachments via emails, (means the whole world can see them) does not rest well with me.

This is very dangerous in today’s cyber world.

Providing a solution to capture signatures on documents can’t just be about getting the signatures.

We can and should do more. We have to make this more secure. We have to make it very convenient and we have to also make it more affordable.

jeylabs has filed for a patent to change this sorry situation. We have come up with what we call Personal document protection technology. This helps encourage the easy and automatic use of encryption to protect your most important documents.

Unlike other popular, careless and expensive solutions, GetSignature doesn’t send plain emails. 

When you receive documents from GetSignature they are encrypted with your own Document Protection Password.

Check out how GetSignature is helping you protect your important document and sensitive information at https://getsignature.today

Why would you ever send over documents with your personal information via email without strong encryption?

PowerToolz 5.5 is here

With the release of K2 Five 5.5, we have updated our PowerToolz suite of products to support the latest of K2 on-premise.

PowerToolz suite of products – Analyser, Converter, Tester, Administrator and Transformer – all now support K2 Five 5.5

You can download the 5.5 release of our tools and use them in your updated K2 environments.