Unforeseen changes have brought unforeseen opportunities over the last few years, but positive change has been dependent on successful digital transformation at the core of businesses in the Asia Pacific region.

As the world transformed, many organizations struggled to adjust quickly enough, and the limits of legacy IT systems became painfully apparent in many areas, from finance and operations, through to the customer experience and employee engagement, marketing communications, and most visibly in supply chain management.

But if there has been one takeaway for businesses throughout the pandemic, it’s that future resilience and equipping for change are imperatives for success. The cloud has always offered companies scalability and security, but it’s the ability to pivot quickly and continue to adapt that has placed many cloud-first companies significantly ahead of their competitors.

Part of the issue many businesses grapple with is legacy IT, particularly older, on-premise ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. In many cases, older systems place operational and financial data in different areas (so-called silos), thus making it very difficult for decision-makers in any part of the enterprise to get the complete picture. Additionally, bringing together the information from different functions in the company often took time — collating marketing data alongside sales analysis, next to real-time supply chain metrics, for example. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, business insights that take weeks or even months to compile are effectively out of date. It’s real-time (or near real-time) information that holds the key to success.

For businesses to successfully undergo digital transformation, there needs to be a new class of enterprise management solutions to help them close the acceleration gap. This is the gap between the speed of change and the ability to keep pace with it. It is not just porting outdated ERP software to the cloud, it’s about using a solution native to the cloud that works with the business rather than for it.

Today’s enterprise management platforms bring to the table all the advantages of a cloud-based solution: extensibility, a unified data core, up-to-the-millisecond information, and a host of powerful digital functions that can be fine-tuned to a business’s specific requirements. Agile cloud infrastructure means companies can adapt fast to sudden changes in working conditions, as well as more specific market-led challenges, like the emergence of a disruptive competitor.

With an architecture designed from the ground up to evolve, companies can cost-effectively transform from the heart of their business operations and always be on the front foot for challenges today and into the future. With people, finances, and operational information tightly bound together, platforms like Workday grant the enterprise shorter plan-execute-analyze cycles for agile decision-making, faster to-production timetables, real-time seamless operations, and closing of the digital acceleration gap.

In practical, everyday ways, companies can now leverage technologies that, just a few years ago, were used only in academic research institutions. Today, machine learning algorithms powered by cloud computing, automate key business processes right across different IT systems, working with data from connected on-premise and cloud stores. Machine learning is at the core of automation and forms the foundation for analysis-based intelligent predictions and modeling. Insights gathered in this way can change how a company approaches finances, talent management, and operations. The smart algorithms present live data in accessible, easy-to-understand formats or “stories”, meaning organizations’ investments in their IT systems pay off in every business function.

Workday’s single system as a prime example means that companies can continue to recalibrate and adapt, embedding an evolutionary approach to business processes. In short, as the landscape changes, so too will the enterprise’s approach and operations.

Workday gives decision-makers the ability to think faster and make smarter decisions based on real-world, empirical data from a highly resilient and secure platform that’s fully cloud-native. Whether companies need to re-affirm their employees’ engagement with the business or offer a new generation of customer experience to the market, Workday is the platform on which companies can build and create. It delivers a new class of enterprise management cloud which provides the flexibility for its users to evolve their business, drive growth, and thrive through disruption. Workday knows that applications should adapt to the business’ evolving needs both today and in an uncertain tomorrow.

To learn more about Workday’s enterprise cloud management platform, reach out to a local representative who speaks your language today.