Why is managed services a c-suite priority?

From the Great Resignation and war for talent, to skills gap and rising labor costs, businesses are struggling to find and retain the resources required to scale up. Companies are also struggling with high turnover of experienced, high skilled resources as tech personnel struggle to cope with the pressure of needing to balance day-to-day operational work with the push from C-suite to deliver on business outcomes. Another issue that adds to retention challenge is that employees often find themselves trapped in a cycle of mundane, repetitive work and feel under-challenged in their roles. Thus, leaders often find themselves spending a lot of time hiring, training and up-skilling tech employees to manage their business solutions. But as the organization looks to pivot to a growth-focus, business leaders will seek out ways to do more with less. Working with a ‘resource augmentation’ model can be prudent in this context as it allows you to complement your existing in-house tech team and resolve specific talent issues with a pool of certified and highly skilled experts, without additional overhead costs.

Developing and deploying digital technologies to support your growth strategy can be an arduous and resource-intensive process. Add to that the pressure of prospecting IT resources, conducting interviews and shortlisting candidates – the weeks spent hiring and training can significantly slow down your growth plan. Adopting a resource augmentation model, on the other hand, allows you to boost the capabilities of your team and leverage these temporary resources to speed up development timelines. While the augmented team works as an extension of the team, they can also support training efforts for in-house resources.

Typically, businesses tend to reach out to an application management services partner when they run into an issue or when they are on the brink of failure. The yesteryear reactive approach of fixing something when it broke is no longer acceptable. In 2023, the financial losses from operational software failure reached an estimated USD 1.56 trillion, and it doesn’t end there. Apart from the hit to the bottom line, application failure can also cause significant damage to the company’s reputation.

Business leaders must, therefore, ensure that the applications are not just up and running, but also look at how resilient the technology is. To do this, businesses must move away from the ‘one and done’ approach which mandates that applications can simply make do with routine support and maintenance. Instead, look at yourbusiness solution and technology as more of a continuously evolving piece of architecture. This way business leaders can avoid accumulating ‘tech debt’ and being forced to re-develop or throw out the application a few years down the line due to system failures.

Amid economic volatility, it may be tempting to focus on cutting costs, however, it is prudent to ensure that you are not cutting costs in areas that are critical to future growth. Balancing strategic and financial goals is key to ensure that the decisions you make today will influence positive outcomes in the next two or three years. Even amid the pandemic, technology has been the common denominator for organizations that thrived during the crisis. Doubling down digital investments—instead of cutting down—can help future-proof your business.

Beyond the obvious cost benefits, working with an Application Managed Services Partner can help business leaders deliver on priorities like growth, operational agility and resilience, key resource retention and stakeholder trust. An AMSP will proactively drive tech improvements, instead of focusing on treating the symptoms of larger technology problems through simple tickets and incident resolutions. An AMSP can offer business leaders greater stability in an uncertain market while helping them to build resilience. Working with a managed services partner means you also are able to access a wider pool of talent across broad range of solutions and technologies to help you approach problems creatively, as well as put into practice well-established methodologies and approaches that bring consistency and efficiency to the way your applications are managed.

Take the case of an Australian frozen food manufacturer who worked with Fortude’s Application Managed Services team to make the most of their newly implemented Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage solution. Fortude helped the manufacturer reduce admin and infrastructure costs and reduce YoY support tickets by 66%. Fortude’s Application Managed Services team not only helped stabilize and integrate finance processes across the manufacturer’s facilities in Australia and New Zealand, but also tracked and eliminated finance issues by correcting processes and actively providing recommendations. The Fortude team also built continuous enhancements for existing developments and introduced new controls and integrations to align with the manufacturer’s strategic direction. Implementation of Standard Operating Procedures also helped create a framework for the manufacturer’s finance functions.

Looking for a trusted Application Managed Services Partner to manage your Infor ERP applications? Talk to our Infor ERP Application Managed Services team to minimize application complexities so you can focus on what you do best: https://fortude.co/services/managed-services-for-infor/

You can also take our ERP health-check to understand if you are making the most of your current enterprise applications: https://fortude.co/erp-health-check-survey/