Imagine living in a world where we humans don’t age gradually: we do so in one leap every birthday. After being fed at your mother’s breast for a year, your first birthday brings a rapid doubling in size, the ability to move around on four (perhaps even two) legs, babbling a few words, wide open eyes that see everything clearly … all in a flash. The second birthday sees you suddenly walking and running unaided and making conversation. And so the process goes until a ripe old age. An ideal situation? I don’t think so.
If our world was like this, every birthday would bring with it the massive task of adapting to a new body and an enhanced intellectual capacity. Re-arranging the entire living environment to accommodate the latest upgraded version of you would be a physical and logistical nightmare. And for those around us, adapting to such a change would be even worse. How long would it be before such a big change were not interrupting normal life?
Humans are made to grow and develop gradually and continuously in order for the body and the mind to cope with the ongoing changes as they occur. That also applies to our adjustment to the society within which we find ourselves and, in turn, the way our family, friends and colleagues relate to us.
Why then does this not make sense to many producers of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and other IT software? Their once-a-year — sometimes even less frequent upgrades — often require users to incur substantial investments in their IT infrastructure to cope with the wide-ranging nature of the required changes.
It makes much more business and IT sense to do research and product development continuously on the entire ERP product offering and to issue the changes in easily digestible and implementable portions.
This not only makes the ongoing upgrading of the process seamless and relatively cheap, but it also allows users to take the minor changes in their stride. Smaller changes are less likely to disrupt business processes, giving management the strategic benefit of continuous access to valid and reliable information, even during the process of upgrading. This ability to access relevant information with complete peace of mind is what drives successful corporations towards the delivery of their brands.
To be able to do this effectively, knowledge of IT technology alone is not enough. SYSPRO has invested handsomely in the development of a thorough understanding of the business and management environment of its customers and their markets. This is achieved by forging relationships with authoritative analysts, consultants, industry specialists and research companies to gain meaningful external insights. But most importantly, we invite feedback from current and prospective customers and our distribution channels. All of this helps us shape our thinking and our development needs. These practices have determined the standards that are reflected in our 33-year track record of excellence in continuous innovation.
The result? At SYSPRO our customers’ Annual License Fee covers our continuous improvement and development process in full, including the issuing of anything up to a hundred upgrades in digestible chunks to our customers during the year. There are no nasty annual surprises; just an ongoing process of smooth and seamless improvements to service delivery — all at no additional cost to the customer.
It’s an approach that brings maturity — not confusion.
