What Is Next for the ERP Industry?

About this issue

Preparing for another year of change

How should businesses shape ERP investment when disruption has become a persistent operating condition? ERP News Magazine Issue 34, December 2022, looks ahead to 2023 through executive interviews, industry forecasts, customer experiences and product developments. Cloud platforms, connected data and automation recur across the issue, alongside a practical concern: organizations need capabilities that improve decisions and resilience without creating additional fragmentation or overwhelming their people.

Executive perspectives: responsive finance and contract intelligence

Aziz Benmalek, President of Sage North America, discusses the company's Major League Baseball partnership and connects its emphasis on insights with business decision-making. He argues that SMB agility depends on automated processes and timely information. His ERP outlook includes continuous analytics, anomaly detection and reduced manual work, with continuous accounting helping finance teams distribute closing activities throughout the month. These are strategic directions and proposed capabilities rather than quantified outcomes at a named Sage customer in the interview.

The SirionLabs interview brings together Laurent Lathieyre, Zendoc Co-founder and CEO who joins Sirion as Head of Post-Execution Applications, and Ajay Agrawal, Sirion's Founder and CEO. They explain how the Zendoc acquisition supports usability, contract automation and post-signature performance management. The engineering Center of Excellence in Nice is intended to strengthen research, talent access and European growth. Agrawal emphasizes accessible repositories, automation and actionable contract insights, while his savings and ROI figures remain attributed vendor claims rather than guarantees.

Platforms, people and manufacturing priorities

Natalie M. Gibson, Senior Director of Strategy and Go-to-Market at Infor, considers talent constraints, infrastructure resilience, bridging existing systems and focused intelligent overlays. She cautions that extra applications and mismatched workflows can undermine the intended value of modernization. Mike Guay, Vice President Customer Success at Infor, develops the platform theme through low-code extensibility, APIs, data fabrics, process intelligence and an evolving relationship between software and services.

Sanket Akerkar, Chief Revenue Officer at Acumatica, connects AI-assisted efficiency with employee training, real-time visibility and industry-specific cloud solutions. Allan Lessing, Director of Customer Solutions at OptiProERP, examines manufacturing applications for IoT, mobile access, digital twins, augmented reality and integrated analytics. Both contributions describe expected directions for 2023 rather than demonstrating that each technology has become universal.

Carter Lloyds, Chief Marketing Officer at QAD, identifies five EV battery priorities: supply chains, vertical integration, charging infrastructure, energy systems and competition between established manufacturers and new entrants. Christine Barnhart, Vice President of Product Marketing and Go-to-Market at Nulogy, adds a separate supply chain perspective on climate risk and more inclusive leadership. Thompson P. Gnanam, MD and Global CEO at 3i Infotech, broadens the outlook to edge security, zero trust, hybrid education, 5G, cloud operations and AI.

Customer stories: finance transformation and faster testing

Mission Health Communities replaces spreadsheet-heavy planning and reporting with Prophix. Following selection in 2019 and a two-month implementation, the organization uses a shared financial foundation to support budgeting, reporting and a rapidly built PPE tracking model. The account reports a 110% return on investment in 18 months, a nearly 15% faster monthly close, and a 66% reduction in budget-review time. Avoided personnel costs associated with PPE tracking form part of the benefit calculation; they are distinct from revenue growth or measured layoffs.

LambdaTest builds HyperExecute on Microsoft Azure to improve test orchestration, scalability and integration with development workflows. The platform brings test components into a coordinated environment and uses parallelization to reduce latency. The story describes execution up to 70% faster than traditional cloud grids, with Azure services and GitHub supporting deployment and development. This is a reported comparative testing claim, not a universal guarantee that every workload or software release becomes 70% faster.

Embedded customer examples and integration

Microsoft's product review combines platform arguments with several customer illustrations. MVP Health Care replaces a fragmented CRM environment with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform; its annual savings figure is an expectation. Westpac New Zealand reports process-automation time savings and improved data quality. Peet's Coffee uses Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to maintain a reported 98% fill rate in its expanding ecommerce business during pandemic disruption.

Gibson Brands connects cross-functional teams through Dynamics 365 and Teams to simplify processes and customer experiences. The City of Ottawa deploys a public-health chatbot using Power Virtual Agents, with estimated call-center time savings derived from recorded conversations. These named accounts should be distinguished from the composite organizations modeled in the same article's commissioned economic-impact studies.

Deltek's Unionpoint review examines integration as a platform capability for project-based businesses. The ProjectCon account covers prebuilt connections, custom workflows and the citizen integrator, emphasizing how business knowledge can inform application connections. It describes demonstrations and product direction rather than a measured customer implementation result.

Industry-specific ERP and business resilience

Olly Lukatski, Global Marketing Communications and Content Strategy Manager at Priority, examines sector-specific capabilities, customization, integration, mobility and AI. Nolan Business Solutions develops five related themes spanning cloud, mobile, vertical solutions, intelligence and IoT. Anirudh Bhardwaj's Oodles ERP contribution applies these developments to manufacturing and connected supply chains.

Rootstock focuses on visibility, productivity and production alignment under economic uncertainty. Thomas Saueressig, SAP Executive Board member responsible for SAP Product Engineering in the issue, examines eight cross-industry shifts, including services, mobility, health, sustainable energy, circular business models and resilient supply networks. Kerridge Commercial Systems adds two-tier ERP, security and API integration to its ten-trend outlook. Across these perspectives, flexibility concerns architecture, operating practices and commercial choices together.

Research, recognition and the wider outlook

Unit4's Business Future Index distinguishes some technology adoption from more substantial implementation, identifying continued gaps in forecasting and finance processes. SAP shares Futurum Research findings on enterprise software procurement and digital marketplaces. Ellucian reports Laura Ipsen's Female CEO of the Year award in a specific 2022 Globee category. Accenture Life Trends 2023 considers adaptation, community, workplace relationships, AI-assisted creativity and personal-data control.

These forecasts and reports capture a historical moment at the end of 2022. Their continuing editorial thread is deliberate investment: define the business problem, connect the required information and applications, and support the people expected to turn new capabilities into better outcomes.