HFS Highlight: Unit4 shifts ERP from being an application your business runs to a platform for delivering business value

Suppose you are an executive in professional services, the public or nonprofit sectors, or higher education who has continually struggled with getting the data to run your organization or business. In this case, Unit4’s ERPx might just be the answer.

Released to General Availability in April the cloud-native platform supports the integration of business processes, including human capital management (HCM), planning and finance, with a differentiating focus on people-centricity. ERPx has value-added features, which include automation solutions, mobile accessibility, and industry flavors. Post-launch, Unit4 promises to add additional functionality, strengthening the ability to integrate with third-party solutions, offer low code development tools, and create a marketplace for partner and customer interaction. Their on-premise solution, ERP 7, is still available to customers, but ERPx provides a compelling option for customers on their OneOffice journey.

Don’t ignore the importance of people-centricity in ERP

For decades enterprise resource planning has focused on resource, material, supply chain, and financial planning. However, given the core heritage of ERP as a tool built for manufacturing and resource planning, it has often under-delivered in people-intensive organizations. Data and insights from these traditional systems often deliver underwhelming results out of the box and require significant customizations. As a result, management often chooses to run their business by spreadsheet and Gantt Charts – leaving a large investment to act as a glorified AP/AR solution.

In contrast, Unit4’s ERPx places a high value on human capital utilization, project planning, and service delivery profitability and has applied these values to designing a product to deliver these to organizations’ with people-centric operating models. They also focus on providing innovation at the edge as many of their customers value teams who can be entrepreneurial, like to manipulate data, and seek co-creation opportunities with others.

Unit4’s ERPx platform is a potential game-changer to enable sustainable business value

The mass migration to cloud-based services and applications is creating more access to technology and has led to a proliferation of data. However, data is only valuable if the right person can contextualize it to provide insights to get a job done more effectively. While these concepts aren’t new, and many other ERP vendors promote solutions offering something similar, Unit4’s ERPx solution stands out as it embraces modern application development and data architecture. With a fresh approach Unit4 eschews reliance on APIs, middleware, and resource-heavy customized development needed in past systems to deliver value. With ERPx, business users can team with, create, or co-develop mini-applications outside the core application and its data. This is important because it streamlines deployment, maintains access integrity, promotes security, and drives continuous innovation.

With ERPx, companies can deploy a modern, usable, scalable, and employee-centric system of record that scales based on business needs and brings low code application development to provide data analysis, embrace native automation features, and derive sustainable business value. This effort embraces Automation, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence, HFS’s Triple-A-Trifecta – infusing a company with a technology native DNA.

Delivering a solution for people-centric rather than manufacturing-centric needs

Unit4 has fine-tuned ERPx for professional services companies who value the ability to plan, execute, and deliver on tight deadlines and within set budgets. Meanwhile, the product’s people-centric nature may also appeal to public, nonprofit and education customers who care for staff utilization, scheduling, and optimization of human resources. By enabling the agility to access and customize data and insights at the user level, teams outside of finance and IT have a tool they can customize, tweak, and use to analyze data relevant to their role – without the need to submit tickets, change orders, or to engage in business requirements gathering exercises.

The private equity buyout by TA Associates in March 2021 brings an infusion of resources and funding for Unit4 to expand its partner ecosystem, accelerate its development on ERPx, and invest in a thriving community of co-development. These are important as other cloud-centric enterprise software vendors are likely to follow by releasing their solutions soon. However, Unit4’s customers can enjoy first mover advantage and boosts to both business and customer value.

Bottom Line: Unit4’s ERPx is a compelling platform with the potential to support long-term digital transformations for mid-size enterprises in people-centric industries.

With ERPx Unit4 promoses a solution less about being an monolithic ERP and more a workflow and data management platform in which its partners and customers can use solutions like low code to craft role and process specific dashboards, mini-apps, and data services to deliver only the “ERP” data their users need when they need it. Unit4’s plan is for ERP to thus be more usable as a system of record to all, rather than a few.