A CIO’s Perspective: The 3 Business Challenges That Are Shaping our IT Strategy in 2022
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Our first priority as CIO’s is on reliability, stability, and consistency of our environments. If our application and infrastructure ‘just works’ then we can get on to other more important results for our companies. Conversely if our environments are not stable we exert too many resources getting back to reliable or stable and consistent. This distraction impacts our results and more importantly our credibility with our stakeholders.
Who wants to get a call from a peer executive complaining about access to systems, slowness of response, or just plain frustration of their team’s inability to be productive? No one ever!
When our environments are reliable, we then turn our attention to benefits of investment in technology. We recognized a few years ago that Pacific Coast Companies (PCCI) needed to upgrade our environment from legacy ECC 7.x to S/4 and BW/4. What drove this decision? A realization by the Presidents that our ability to scale was limited due to the years of customization in our ECC environment. The environment was reliable, so long as we didn’t make any changes. The project to migration to SAP S/4HANA has enabled us to remove customization, move to standard and improve our agility.
It was not an easy decision. The first time PCCI decided to move off a home-grown system, it was a start, stop, and restart over three years. The pain of that change was scared in many leaders’ minds as they were part of the original migration. Making the decision to move was based upon solid logic, compelling reasoning, and a realization that we would be impacting our company’s growth if we did not take the initiative.
Since moving to SAP S/4HANA we have doubled the number of customers, doc types, and total documents we share using EDI/CPI; completed the integration 7 new companies and greenfield startups and implementing Transportation Management. Stability yields opportunities to deliver results!
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