Lockdowns aren’t going away, and employees are getting more and more used to working from home. But as we discussed in the past couple months, many companies took a temporary approach to setting employees up for remote work. Processes were likely disjointed and people likely are looking for something bigger and better. To get there, however, you need to look for ways to empower them, rather than simply provide access.
Positioning yourself for success in the new normal requires a solution positioned to help you follow through. After discussing the challenges businesses will face connecting their workforce in the coming years, we would today like to dig a bit deeper into how the cloud makes this happen.
Top Goals for Distributed Workforce Leaders
Empowering a distributed workforce comes down to positioning and facilitation. Whether it’s spread across offices, warehouses, or hundreds of employees working from home, managers need to expect their distributed workforce to have the same or better experience than they did before.
Getting there, however, requires you to set goals and take steps to achieve them. Today, we would like to explore three top goals for managers and discuss how a move to the cloud can make this happen.
1) Security
Naturally, one of the most critical components of empowering your workforce to work from home is to ensure that the team isn’t exposing mission critical data to prying eyes.
In the workplace, IT teams get to monitor traffic and retain a semblance of control over who can access data. For example, an internet-enabled printer at the office is identified as a weakness and is likely able to be protected or separated from access.
In the wild, however, it’s not as easy. With employees working from home, anything from a smart speaker to a router to a home printer can leave your network open for attack. Pair home networks with personal devices and you have a perfect storm for issues.
While already a problem when employees are working from home, a post-lockdown distributed workforce is going to be even more risk prone. Coffee shop or airport Wi-Fi are easily some of the least trustworthy networks, and this leaves your data even more likely exposed.
For those using hosted products, this means that even with a VPN that allows for secure tunneling, a hacker can find this weak point and access the ‘tunnel’ to your internal network.
How the Cloud Delivers
Rather than putting the security burden on the shoulders of the organization using a product, cloud providers like Acumatica live and die by their security promises. That’s why they will put an incredible amount of work into ensuring user and company data is protected from internal and external threats.
Here are just a few ways Acumatica promises to secure your in-office and distributed workforce:
Organizational Separation: Providing a better multi-tenant experience, Acumatica keeps every subscriber’s data stored in a separate database. This way, every Acumatica subscription enjoys better data security and can be on their own versions of Acumatica.
Data Management: Data is never stored on the user’s computer. As users complete forms only small bits of data are transferred to the web browser. Once forms are completed, no data remains in the browser. All transmission is secure and encrypted using SSL technologies.
Intrusion Detection: Acumatica’s intrusion detection system (IDS) detects any attempt to compromise the confidentiality, integrity or availability of your data, or to circumvent security controls.
IP Restrictions: Acumatica constantly monitors risky and unfamiliar IP addresses to prevent logins from unauthorized devices.
User Level Security: Preventing a user from gaining too much access to a system starts with limiting access to data. With Acumatica, each user can be assigned unique security credentials, and in order to provide unlimited users, they also will track each individual login. Learn more in the video below:
2) Productivity
Even if you can rest easy knowing that data is secured, you still might be concerned on whether users are staying as productive as they were at the office. Though many companies find that employees are more productive at home, many have risked burnout over the past year. Ensuring productivity is part of any good management team, and this comes down to a few factors.
How the Cloud Delivers
Cloud solutions are deeply intertwined with productivity. From making the job easier through automation and a friendly user interface to providing email-free collaboration, the right cloud solution can make everyone more productive. For example, cloud ERP will put the right information in the right hands, allow for employees to do the work more easily, and automate processes that once took hours.
Facilitating Work: Each task takes a specific amount of data entry, calculation, and action. More often than not, data is spread across departments, calculation requires a different tool, and action requires additional input. The cloud connects data across departments and tools, handles calculations that would otherwise need manual entry, and provides outputs users need.
Delivering User Friendly Interfaces: User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) can make or break the acceptance of a software. If learning a product is hard, people won’t adopt it. If it doesn’t provide the right flow, people will feel gypped. Cloud solutions like Acumatica overcome this with logical workflows and easy to use interfaces.
Providing Up to the Minute Information: Email is death to productivity. Often, without a connected product, companies are left waiting for someone else to act. Cloud ERP gives the right information when it’s available and offers the most up to the minute data. Users are provided with a single source of truth and are freed from email.
Learn more about creating and configuring easy-to-use dashboards in Acumatica in the video below:
3) Alignment
Productivity is great. Many accounting solutions can make an accounting department more productive. CRM solutions can make marketing and sales more productive. Inventory management can make warehouses more productive. But think of how many processes exist that span beyond one solution or beyond one department.
While productivity can be traced to the individual or the department, alignment can be considered productivity across organizations. For example, the three above mentioned departments need to work together to complete a sale. Salespeople will need to see if there’s inventory in stock and they’ll need to see if a customer has the credit. Warehouse staff will need to receive the sales order, fill and ship. The company will need to invoice the customer, collect the payment, recognize the revenue, and pass it onto the sales manager for commissions or tracking.
How the Cloud Delivers
Processes need to align, and in a distributed landscape, each of these processes not only see barriers between departments, but barriers within departments. Maybe it’s in the form of multiple warehouses. Maybe it’s a salesperson making a call from at home or on the road.
Alignment is critical, and this requires multi-department processes to connect. Especially in a distributed workforce, hiccups can’t occur. As we discussed in a blog this October,
“Cloud ERP is built on integration and access. Rather than mandating users download, manipulate, and re-upload spreadsheets to make changes to a different system, those in the cloud are treated to real time access and automatic information transfer between applications.
ERP software that integrates with CRM and other applications enables data to be transferred between systems. Without this functionality, more manual work is necessary, which can lead to errors and decreased efficiency. If each department is using a different software application, implementing the latest system can improve collaboration across your organization.”
The Road to a Distributed Workforce Starts in the Cloud
Security, productivity, and alignment are the bedrock for success in a distributed workforce. But building a resilient business requires you to push this a lot further. Distributed businesses need a culture of collaboration and a technology stack that can facilitate improvement. Much like a digital transformation initiative, this is an ongoing evolution that will get easier as you start to get the ball rolling.
But this all starts with the right framework and the right advice. Cloud ERP can put businesses in the right position to take further steps to empower workers in the future.
Knowing this, even the first steps can feel like a challenge for many leaders. Without the right help, even those with the best intentions can falter on their journey. That’s where we can help. As a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner, we know Acumatica and believe in its transformative effects on businesses. In fact, we believe so strongly in the product that in recent years, we have opted to work exclusively with this enterprise resource planning solution.
When you work with Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, we can promise you that our team is focused solely on Acumatica. We aren’t a Jack of All Trades VAR, our team is trained on Acumatica alone, creating knowledgeable, focused, and credible experts. It also means you will get honest answers. When you work with Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, we aren’t going to beat around the bush—if we feel that Acumatica isn’t the right product fit for your business, we’ll tell you.
To learn more about our work as a Gold Certified Acumatica Partner, contact us for a free consultation or watch our Acumatica Demo Videos.
Additional Resources
Business Desiloed: Are the Risks of Manual Entry and Re-Entry Putting You Behind?
Value-Adding Benefits to Look for in Cloud ERP
Collaboration in a Socially Distanced World: Benefits of the Cloud
