It really couldn’t be better. All your business’s activities and workflows are captured by your ERP platform and your company can easily and accurately examine, analyze and report the status of your revenues and expenses. You can access an up-to-the minute status of your assets, supply chain and manufacturing activities. Your HR systems are completely tied into your ERP as well. Employees have no issues working with the enterprise platforms you have invested in over the years.
Of course, we know this isn’t anywhere near reality. The ERP platform you purchased has never been operating at peak efficiency because, let’s be honest, your business workflows have been changing even as your ERP was being installed.
All enterprise software platforms – including the ERP – are hindered by their inability to handle business corner cases. And the problem is expanding exponentially with the pressure to customize services and products. It’s an unacknowledged epidemic in enterprise software that is negatively impacting productivity and employee morale.
As a result, departments are bogged down because they need to handle these cases with spreadsheets, side applications, customizations or even pen and paper. So in short, non-centralized, often non-reportable data is rattling around in the enterprise – often free of security protocols, good documentation and even knowledge that this information exists by IT departments.
Corner Cases and Their Outsized Impact
A business corner case, sometimes called an edge case, refers to a problem or situation that occurs outside of normal business operations. They are unusual in that the issues they stem from are fairly rare, difficult to anticipate, are usually complex and require employees to determine and implement time consuming workarounds to address them.
Our dynamic business environment is growing faster and more complex. It drives two uncompromising facts with corner cases: the number of corner cases continues to grow every day, and what were once corner cases often transition to become part of normal business operations.
Corner cases can be generated in both negative and positive scenarios. Unanticipated problems can arise from a spectrum of business operations – customer service, manufacturing, asset management, billing, supply chain management, and procurement, among many other areas. They can also arise from business opportunities that stem from entering new markets, customer wins, and business partnerships, to name a few.
The problem becomes worse as the corner cases move from being outside normal business operations to part of daily procedures. And this compounds quickly as the number of corner cases increase.
Corner cases have an outsized impact because the ERP platforms in use today – while great engines – are necessarily rigid. This is a feature – not a bug. However, it also means that they can’t address corner cases effectively. It also means that data is being lost or under reported. Accurately tracking operating efficiency is being hindered. Employees are spending an outsized amount of time trying to document, or failing to document, their activities when dealing with these unexpected issues.
Leveraging an AI Augmentation Transformation to Tame Corner Cases in Your ERP
As we said, ERPs are not inherently flexible. They require considerable amounts of time to be transformed. By the time a single corner case has been addressed, many more have developed. This means addressing corner cases has been time consuming and expensive, and in fact is never-ending.
When done correctly, by AI systems that augment new or legacy ERPs, these revitalized assets can effectively address the growing number of corner cases a business generates or encounters. Additionally, the AI system can ensure that the new data can be connected to legacy data, documentation is maintained, and all of it follows business and security rules. The power of quickly addressing ERP corner cases rests in delivering a single, flexible interface. The cost of and speed of adding that flexible interface to the ERP is much easier to rationalize compared to individual customizations for individual corner cases.
AI systems can be configured and updated to augment legacy ERP implementations that will make it easier for end users to operate, while assimilating new data sets into a central data store – while keeping faithful to all business rules, security rules and the business governance policies of the underlying enterprise software systems.
AI-augmentation of an ERP allows workflows to be more flexible than with legacy or recently purchased ERP platforms because all workflows must be carefully tested and planned for ahead of time. The AI networks become the user interface and are flexible enough to be quickly reconfigured as needed. AI can allow workflows to proceed based on logical business rules which can be easily updated.
When done correctly, AI augmentations also integrate easily with other enterprise platforms and point solutions that “bolt on” to an ERP system. They are seamless because, for the first time, they can interact directly as well as through the ERP platform. Leveraging AI networks as the user interface allows better data collection and management while rapidly adapting and adding new workflows which are promptly tailored to address new corner cases.
Corner cases will only continue to grow exponentially. If not addressed, they will hinder the accurate tracking, analysis, reporting and operations of business activities. By leveraging an AI augmentation transformation of their ERP platforms, businesses and organizations can effectively tame corner cases – increasing operational efficiency, tracking and reporting and employee morale.
Ken Fischer
Ken Fischer is the CEO of Atigro, the proven ERP transformation firm that pairs its modular augmentation capabilities with AI-native frameworks. Atigro’s experience and capabilities generate the rapid development and provisioning of new ERP functionality that meets dynamically changing business processes.
