Scoring Big with Cloud ERP: Lessons From Fantasy Football

Fall ushers in a wave of classic American traditions: harvest festivals, pumpkin-spice everything, and fantasy football. Turns out, there’s a lot of overlap between creating an elite fantasy team and cultivating a winning ERP strategy. In fantasy football, bad roster management costs you points (and perhaps an embarrassing punishment). In manufacturing, suboptimal ERP performance wastes resources and undermines profitability.

With Legacy Systems, You’re at Risk of Losing the League

Are you holding onto your legacy ERP like an injured reserve player, hoping one day your slow, dysfunctional system will recover? Here’s four reasons legacy ERP holds organizations back:

Challenge #1: Constantly Splitting the Backfield

In football, running backs who “split the backfield” earn fewer fantasy football points because their touches are divided with another player.

Outdated legacy ERP works the same way. Disconnected systems split resources and duplicate effort across multiple platforms. Rekeying the same information across two systems, exporting data multiple times, or fixing formatting errors stifles productivity and efficiency.

Challenge #2: The Handcuffing Trap

Handcuffing is a common strategy in fantasy football where you draft a starter’s backup as insurance. While it offers peace of mind, it often limits your team’s upside since you’re investing a roster spot in a player who may never contribute.

On-premise ERP systems face a similar problem with hardware. To prepare for peak volumes, businesses often oversize capacity, meaning they overspend on capacity that they will not fully utilize.

Challenge #3: Disruptive Bye Weeks

Bye weeks happen when a team rests for a week, taking your star players out of the lineup. Legacy ERP upgrades and ongoing maintenance force your IT team into a similar “bye week,” pulling top talent away from strategic initiatives and critical business objectives.

Challenge #4: Perpetually Locked Lineup

Inflexible on-premise ERP is like being stuck with a continuously locked lineup. Every week, you’re forced to play the same static systems. regardless of performance or changing conditions.

Manual, time-consuming software updates create a slow upgrade cycle, keeping your business stuck on the sidelines while competitors advance with new capabilities.

Cloud ERP is Your MVP

Cloud-based ERP is the franchise player of an organization’s tech stack, serving as the backbone driving long-term success. Infor CloudSuite Industrial has numerous advantages that help businesses score big.

Advantage #1: One Unified System

Cloud ERP eliminates manual, redundant work by unifying disconnected systems and automating processes. The result: real-time companywide visibility, increased speed and efficiency, and more informed decision-making.

Advantage #2: Flexibility

ERP should scale with your success, not against it. Cloud ERP has baked-in flexibility to support your organization at all stages of growth.

Advantage #3: Resource Optimization

Save on infrastructure costs and let Infor and Amazon Web Services (AWS) do all the heavy lifting. With world-class security and automatic updates, your IT team is free to focus on the activities most valuable to your organization.

Advantage #4: Future-Readiness

Rather than dreading another agonizing upgrade, cloud users gain instant access to the most current and innovative ERP features with periodic automatic updates, all while maintaining control over which capabilities to deploy.

Drafting the Right Partner

Successful ERP implementations require partners who can go the distance. At Decision Resources, we’ve helped hundreds of clients execute a winning game plan with:

• A Proven Track Record: Tom Brady might have seven Super Bowl rings, and but Decision Resources has seven Infor CloudSuite Partner of the Year and Cloud Partner of the Year awards. We’ve been executing championship-caliber implementations since 1985.
• Seasoned Coaches: Our consultants are veteran coaches with extensive project management experience.
• Mock Drafts: We run targeted pilot scenarios based on real-life processes to ensure that your solution meets your day-to-day needs.
• Practice Huddles: We help smooth adoption and boost end users confidence ahead of go-live through training sessions and hands-on pilot participation.

Hear it straight from our clients:

“Decision Resources bench runs deep with knowledge, expertise, and experience. They worked well with our IT staff to deliver the conversion project on time and under budget. Our employees transitioned amazingly well to CloudSuite and we have no regrets.”– James Byer, Vice President and CFO at FPD Company

“Decision Resources brought team cohesion and expert-level knowledge and experience to our ERP project.” – John Hadley, CEO at Ever-Roll Specialties Co.

“The Decision Resources team is easy to work with, very knowledgeable, and always available to provide assistance.” – Tony Filipovic, ERP Administrator at Jergens

Contact Decision Resources today to score big with cloud ERP.

More About the Author: Sam Frumboli

With over 15 years’ experience partnering with businesses in the ERP and manufacturing sector, Sam has made it a passion of hers to help connect businesses with the right business partner, tools, and technology. As a demand generation leader, business coach, and freelance marketing consultant for start-ups and established brands, Sam focuses on dismantling complex ideas into actionable insights through creative marketing strategies and tactics. She has notably been featured in the Sociable, Women in Manufacturing, 40-Under-40, The Global Interview, and Forbes.