“Whatever ERP product you ’ re using has to fundamentally behave in a way that your business does ”

— Mark Hughes , Regional VP for UK & Ireland , Epicor virtual business model . “ Manufacturing tends to have a shop floor with tools and machinery ,” notes Hughes . “ It ’ s why these customers are more comfortable with physical servers and are less driven to move to the cloud . Hence the need to offer choice with hybrid solutions that can start on premise and move to the cloud where required .”

Hughes sees the hybrid-type model offering flexible solutions for manufacturers . “ You can do real-time data capture physically on the shop floor , analyse it and at the same time that data can be passed up into the Azure cloud . Combin-

NOVEMBER 2019