Unit4 aims to improve the ERP experience with a new customer success model

For the CIOs of millions of professional services, not-for-profit, and local public sector organizations, deploying ERP can take years of effort before achieving value creation. The nuance of people-centric business often means that implementing ERP applications requires customizations, increases costs, and prolongs the delivery of software-enabled services while adding rigidity to business processes. Far too frequently, CIOs find themselves redefining workflows around software limitations rather than empowering employees with tools to enhance how they work.

Recently, Unit4 briefed HFS on how they seek to redefine the customer experience in their target markets by implementing ERP. Unit 4 challenges itself to build on the technological advances they’ve made in ERPs and to make customer success a seamless part of how its partners do business. The company aims to radically accelerate how long it takes clients to achieve measurable business results.

ERPx continues to evolve as a SaaS platform that delivers new features and improved customer experiences

For nearly a decade, Unit4 has been on a journey to help CIOs of midsized, people-centric firms rethink how ERP solutions can impact their businesses more quickly and efficiently. As HFS covered in 2021, Unit4 manifested its vision for ERP to become a platform with the launch of ERPx. HFS viewed this as a significant innovation, as it went further than many ERPs that were evolving their products from on-premises to cloud-based SaaS offerings.

HFS saw a key opportunity in ERPx for Unit4 to deliver composable, role- and industry-centric business software to project-centric and people-centric firms. A year later, Unit4 introduced into its platform Industry Mesh, an out-of-the-box, bidirectional integration suite with pre-built integrations. Unit4 followed quickly with its App Studio, a low-code-centric toolset for IT and business users to create dynamic workflows across business processes, containers, and data sources. These improvements make ERPx scalable and adaptable without extensive customizations.

While these technology changes enable Unit4 and its partners to differentiate this ERP solution for mid-market, people-centric industries, success is only realized once quantifiable role-based business outcomes are measurable. Achieving client outcomes requires addressing support and training impediments.

To improve adoption and align with customer value creation, Unit4 is reorganizing its professional services, training, and customer support teams into the Success4U team. HFS views this as a positive initiative for clients. The combined customer success team offers business-centric capabilities and accelerates value realization through best practices and standardized approaches to applying these to business-critical software.

With a simplified engagement model, Unit4 makes it easier to get the pre-and post-implementation support

The Success4U model is designed to simplify and accelerate the adoption of complex ERP solutions. The goal of Success4U is to enable Unit4’s customers to realize the benefits of activating software-augmented capabilities to give their teams the ability to realize outcomes that drive revenue, client outcomes, and a better customer experience.

To support Success4U, Unit4 is investing in a customer 360 platform, which will enable it to understand how customers are adopting Unit4 technology, professional services, training, and support services. This unified view provides customer success teams with new insights, enabling them to address client needs uniformly. These insights include input from the customer and the client’s partners, who also capture insights and project plans.

Success4U seeks to enable customers to go live in less than 100 days

Clients can leverage Unit4’s customer success management as a partner-delivered service or directly from Unit4 as a free or enhanced model. HFS likes how Unit4 delivers out-of-the-box frameworks to provide its partners and clients with tools to accelerate their implementation, training, and self-service capabilities. Given the complexity of some projects, Unit4 also provides a professional option that offers more advanced training and education, as well as its Success Points, which offer fixed budgeting and preferred pricing for packaged services.

The vendor says customers that use Success4U as part of their ERP modernization to its ERPx should be able to see results in 90 days. Unit4 has already improved the go-live timeframe with clients using Success4U, and these clients currently average 120-150 days. Unit4 says it will achieve an average of 90 days as it rolls out Success4U to more partners and clients and implements their feedback to improve how its success teams operate.

While implementation, user training, and post-implementation support services are nothing new regarding ERP, HFS likes how Unit4 makes this a single offering from clients. Moreover, as we’ve seen with their approach to ERP as more a platform than a software suite, we expect that Success4U will give its customers much more flexibility than other professional services offerings by enabling clients to get support where and when needed without requiring additional budget or resources.

The Bottom Line: With Success4U, Unit4 promises CIOs an improved project and customer experience, making its service and support offerings seamless while implementing a new ERP for their business.

Unit4’s Success4U offers a transformative approach to ERP adoption, emphasizing user-centric, outcome-based solutions that significantly reduce implementation time and enhance user experience. Enterprise leaders should consider integrating Success4U to achieve rapid value realization, streamline organizational change, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and user satisfaction.