For many businesses the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a critical part of their infrastructure.

ERP can provide complete visibility of the business’s core processes across all departments. This leads to improved productivity and operational efficiency.

Due to the pervasiveness of ERP across an organization, this can cause challenges for global companies. You might have your head office in London, and a manufacturing plant in the Philippines. Both departments have to use the same ERP system. This means that one of them will access it using a high latency network connection. They will likely be asking ‘Why is our ERP system running so slow?!!’

This type of scenario can cause a bottleneck in processing. For example, the manufacturing facility may need to consult the ERP system to work out what they need to manufacture that day. If this takes ten minutes to produce, that’s ten minutes unnecessary uncertainty.

More globalization increases this type of problem. Outsourcing of manufacturing, opening sales offices in new locations etc can all increase the reach of the ERP system. This just exacerbates the problem I outlined above.

Implementing an ERP system is a costly time-consuming process requiring a lot of planning, remodeling of business processes and employee training. Swapping out your ERP system for a speedier one isn’t a task that can be undertaken lightly. It will cost a lot of money and will cause a lot of disruption.

It’s ironic that the system you’ve put in place to improve operational efficiency itself becomes a bottleneck that is making your business less efficient!

Replify WAN Optimization

Deploying Replify WAN optimization can solve these issues. Replify Accelerator uses various techniques to improve the throughput of network connections which ultimately speeds up access to your ERP system.

All of this can be done without having to change any organizational processes or re-train any users.

At Replify, we pride ourselves on the flexibility of our software and its ease of deployment. Since we are completely software based, we can be deployed remotely across a global organization. Also we don’t interfere with your network infrastructure, nor introduce any downtime.

We normally measure Replify Accelerator performance in terms of WAN offload. This is simply a measure of the reduction in traffic across the network. For example if downloading a file uses 10MB of data, and with Replify Accelerator installed, you use 2MB of data instead, we would say there was an offload of 80%.

Our experience of ERP systems is that there can be well above 90% offload for typical use cases. To translate this to a real world scenario, one of our customers had an issue where a report typically took fifteen minutes to download. When using Replify Accelerator, this time was reduced to twenty seconds.

We’ve seen good results across a wide range of ERP systems including Infor M3, Epicore ERP and Dynamics 365. However all ERP systems are processing the same types of data, so we would expect to see this level of performance with most other systems too.

To get accelerating, all you need to do is place a Replify Virtual Appliance close to your ERP server, and a corresponding VA or Replify Accelerator Client at the branch side.

ERP in the Cloud

As is the case in many industries, ERP solutions are typically moving to the cloud. Obviously there are lots of advantages to this. However unlike the location of your physical servers, you may have less choice over the cloud location for your SaaS ERP system. This could increase the number of users who experience performance issues.

Thankfully Replify is on hand to help again. You can deploy the Replify Virtual Appliance software as easily (if not more easily) in the cloud as you can in a data centre. Simply spin up an instance of the Replify Appliance on a Virtual Machine or Container in the cloud and a corresponding instance in your branch office and away you go. You can also use the Replify Accelerator Client on the end-user devices, rather than a local appliance.

To learn more about how Replify Accelerator can help speed up your ERP system, please get in touch at sales@replify.com.