They say all roads lead to Rome. Well, this was certainly true for all NAV lovers last week; everyone went to Rome. The only sad thing was we had to leave again! Not only did we get to experience Rome and it’s tremendous history, great weather, and delicious food and wine – but we also managed to squeeze in a few action packed days on the EMEA Directions conference!
What I found most compelling about the conference is in the sentence, “A business solution from Microsoft,” which all of the presenters from Microsoft kept on coming back to. It is not just ERP – it is all in (just like the cloud message).
What does that mean for ERP implementations? That the days of “this is an IT project” are over – well, hopefully. ERP needs to be considered in the overall strategic thinking of the company; it can’t be an afterthought. Structured business data has to be blended in with unstructured data presented in a way so no one really knows ( or cares for that matter ) from which data source it is presented. But the data does allow the decision maker to make the right decision. NAV 2013 has the capability to enable that, and the irony is that as this product becomes better and better, it becomes way less visible in the organization – because it is like a well greased machine running in the background, doing everything it is asked to do – and no one really has to worry about it. Extend it, integrate it, drill up and down and across to get your numbers – NAV 2013 is right there, available and reliable.
So in a city that has so much history, we all got a big dose of what the future will look like. And if you don’t want your home base to look like Colosseum, all partners better buckle up and do better, faster and adjust to the changes. With that great challenge in the back of our mind, we ordered another bottle of red wine, forgot it for a while and took in the scenery a last time. But make no mistake about it: As soon as we landed back in Vancouver, it was back to reality. This is what the industry need and we are excited about it.
