Five questions with Ian Mowbray, Sage Product Specialist at Datel: “Automation frees up your employees’ time”

Sage Product Specialist Ian Mowbray answers five questions about the unique benefits of Sage Enterprise Management.

1) How can businesses benefit from Sage Enterprise Management?

There’s really any number of ways businesses can benefit from Sage Enterprise Management. But for most, efficiency, scalability, insight and cost-effectiveness tend to drive platform adoption.

Efficiency means more productivity with less resources. The real-world application of Sage Enterprise Management's automation frees up your employees’ time, which releases resources to be invested elsewhere. Where processes do require that human input, they simply don’t require as much time because they’re built around best practice.

Scalability might be of particular interest to businesses looking to grow in the future. They might not feel as though they require the platform just yet, but by investing now they’re preparing for that growth. Sage Enterprise Management is designed to grow with them in whatever they decide to do in the future.

Insight and cost-effectiveness drive platform adoption, too. Insight gives businesses that visibility whenever they need it - and cost-effectiveness could be described as a culmination of all those elements. You reduce your costs with more intelligent decision making, process optimisation and automation.

It becomes a cost-effective solution that ultimately pays for itself, and more.

2) What do you think Sage Enterprise Management offers that other ERP platforms don’t?

A Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester in 2016 highlighted that Sage Enterprise Management users can expect an ROI of 177%, with total benefits of £1.2 million from cost savings over 3 years.

That includes other benefits demonstrated in studies by IDG Global and Aberdeen Group, including a 16% reduction in admin costs and 73% increased productivity. The average time to see return on your initial investment in Sage Enterprise Management is 5 months, which is incredibly quick.

Sage Enterprise Management also gives its users the power to amend the platform themselves. Not every system change requires an expert consultant. It’s extendable and configurable and extensive support for integration with other applications. It all comes back to simplicity and flexibility.

3) What makes Sage Enterprise Management so well-suited to multi-national organisations?

One word: simplicity. Sage Enterprise Management is a single-folder system. It’s one solution and one database for every entity in your organisation - whether that’s multiple branches in one country or multiple companies spanning several continents.

And if it's the latter, Sage provides legislation packs and frameworks which include compliance for that territory - all written and maintained by Sage in that region. It’s really where Sage's strengths as an international solutions provider come into play, and it really shows in Sage Enterprise Management.

4) Can smaller businesses benefit from Sage Enterprise Management?

Absolutely, and it all goes back to efficiency to make gains in those four key areas. Those areas might vary subtly from business to business, but they’re fundamentally about wanting to do more with less.

Every business wants to expand its revenue streams and generate more revenue while doing it as efficiently as possible - more revenue, while minimising the number of people it takes to generate that revenue. They might want a 20% increase in revenue in the next 3 years, but not every business wants the associated increase in staff, either. Sage Enterprise Management can help businesses achieve that.

Scalability, as I mentioned earlier, is another key factor for smaller businesses. If you have plans to pursue growth and expand as a smaller business, having that bedrock in place before that can help streamline and accelerate that growth.

5) For organisations already using a business management solution, what would drive them to adopt Sage Enterprise Management?

Growth is often one of the key drivers for moving to Sage Enterprise Management. You’re employing more staff or opening more branches or trading entities, for example. Companies in this situation may have grown their IT systems over time, often bolting on additional systems to help manage their expansion.

A growing company can mean new departments, new people, new products and new processes - and all the corresponding information has to be managed and processed. But using multiple systems can cause its own set of problems if they’re not integrated or weren't implemented with connectivity in mind.

When information is changed within one system, it’s not automatically updated in another. That means you have to change that same information in other systems. People might forget or not have immediate access to those systems, so it just doesn’t happen. Things get out of sync.

Improved insight is another reason people might move to a platform like Sage Enterprise Management. With multiple systems, you have to pull all that information from different places. This is followed by the question: what do you do when that information doesn’t match up? A single solution means a single point of access and a single version of the truth.

Learn more about Sage Enterprise Management

Join our monthly online demos covering the core functionality of Sage Enterprise Management on August 16th. Led by Datel's Sage experts, discover the capabilities of the platform, ranging from manufacturing and distribution to finance and user customisation.

Ian Mowbray - Sage Product Specialist, Datel

Ian Mowbray is a business development expert with over 12 years’ experience in pre-sales and pre-sales management. As a Sage Product Specialist at Datel, Ian has extensive knowledge of Sage solutions and delivers tailored demonstrations to businesses operating across a range of industries throughout the UK.