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For years, businesses have followed the same five priorities to fuel growth: driving revenue, increasing efficiency, reducing costs, fending off competitors and seeking new markets. But even these tried-and-true rules are quickly becoming too broad and undifferentiating to use at face value.

Cloud ERP enables innovation mindset

While “business innovation” is primarily associated with new products and services, fast-growing companies, such as unicorns and digital natives, extend that term further to include the creation of new business models and customer experiences. They achieve success by building business agility through discipline and standardization. As a result, each new innovation and transition becomes more purposeful and faster, as they are built on top of each other and scaled in ways that to keep competitors guessing and customers engaged.

SAP Insights research data confirms this inherent force behind high-growth companies. When ranking their top three organizational priorities, respondents focused on enhancing product and service sustainability, introducing new offerings, and improving the customer experience.

Supporting all three revenue urgencies at the same time may seem like a tall order. However, a cloud-based ERP system can integrate them together and with business processes to create a continuous, responsive framework that meets the needs of current and new market segments and sustain revenue maintenance and growth.

Elevating operations efficiency

The one theme of operational efficiency that has never gone out of date is the desire for control over costs and spending. But what has changed is the opportunity to achieve it faster by going beyond eliminating underperforming labor resources and process bottlenecks.

Surveyed companies indicated that traditional drivers for operational efficiency are being combined with new strategic ones, particularly strengthening processes with automation and building more reliable supply chains with cloud ERP.

They are increasing the depth of their integrations and the speed of insights across suppliers, customers, logistics, assets – bringing to life a global, virtual network that uses collaboration as a competitive advantage. Sustainability is also increasingly considered a critical factor as businesses feel increasing pressure to limit their impact on the environment and demonstrate ethical labor practices and social responsibility in surrounding communities.

The good news about incorporating these additional efficiency drivers is their potential for bringing greater differentiation. Among these advantages is detecting changes accurately and adapting quickly by enhancing process flexibility and internal and external collaboration. At the same time, lines of business can align and interconnect their objectives with the rest of the company to further improve sustainability performance.