Introducing

The Unit4 People Platform. Designed for people, built for change.Delivering on the Digital Revolution.

White Paper

In business for people.

2 The Unit4 People Platform

Delivering the next generation of people-focused solutionsThe Digital RevolutionWe are all participants in a revolution – the Digital Revolution. We feel it in our everyday lives as we consume movies from the cloud, spend hours every day on social channels, and live and breathe with our mobile devices. We see it around us as homes become intelligent and cars drive themselves.

This same revolution has unleashed a tremendous wave of innovation in the business world. Companies like AirBnB have disrupted long-established business models. Instead of large companies controlling the market, we have individuals offering services and other individuals consuming them – all orchestrated by smart technology used by lean companies.

Businesses are rethinking how this revolution will transform the way they operate and serve clients. New service-based business models are being created. A Digital Economy is emerging – fast.

This phenomenon is happening in every industry and in organizations of every size. Manufacturers; private and public service industries; everybody.

In service and government organizations, where people are the core asset, this transformation drives unique challenges. In these industries people must be empowered to succeed. They need a new kind of business software that enables innovation, strong decision-making, and rapid responses to changing business realities.

The Digital Revolution in actionHere are some ways people-centric sectors are being transformed by the Digital Revolution:

1. Universities & online learning For centuries, education relied on a traditional model of bringing students and teachers into a campus. Today, students around the world have incredible choice. They can take courses in classrooms or online or a combination. They can study long distance, learn through online libraries and tutorials and collaborate with peers through social technology. The campus has become the cloud, and to compete, universities are becoming global digital institutions that can reach students anytime, anywhere.

2. Not-for-Profit fundraising Not-for-profit organizations are the backbone of any society – and in times of global crisis they need to become faster and more transparent when raising donations and delivering help. In the past, donors would send in annual checks and not think much about it. But, today it’s all about matching the needs of the projects with the preferences of the donors. Crowd funding or digital fund raising have become familiar channels for donors to support their favorite causes – but they also expect to be able to follow where the donations go and see what impact they have. Not-for-profit organizations need to tap into this new way of linking projects and donations.

It’s time for a change of focusERP was originally designed for manufacturing and product-led organizations, with material and parts in mind. All the processes, all the interactions are centered on products.

But a very large and growing part of the world’s GDP – services businesses – are driven by people. They need to help their people work smarter by removing repetitive and low-value tasks and enabling them to focus on what really matters.

In people-centric environments, applications must be based on four key elements:

#1 Service focused – providing applications that address the challenges and priorities of industries such as professional services, government, education and not-for-profit.

#2 Built for people – delivering a great user experience that combines the best of consumer application design with smart business focus. Users need the right information, insights to be a step ahead, a simple and elegant user interface, and the time to focus on what truly matters.

#3 Designed for agility – an architecture that allows users to adapt applications easily at the pace of business change – without consultants or IT experts

#4 Cloud without compromise – customer-defined application delivery, whether on-premises, private cloud or public cloud. It’s what we call: “Cloud Your Way”.

It’s time for a new focus on empowering people and people-centric industries.

Personal Experience– how people experience enterprise applications

Business Capabilities– response to user business requirements

Smart Context– relevant information delivery by applying social, mobile and analytics technologies

Elastic Foundation– Extend-and-Relate™ architecture, delivering maximum flexibility

Introducing the Unit4 People Platform – powering business applications for peopleThe new Unit4 People Platform is enabling our applications to meet the needs of people-focused organizations. The Platform delivers powerful and simple experiences that help people work smarter, faster and more collaboratively than ever before. The People Platform is designed to close the gap between the need for simplicity in user experience and the growing complexity of business reality.

The People Platform consists of 4 interconnecting layers:

4 The Unit4 People Platform

A closer look at the People PlatformPersonal Experience – how people experience applicationsProvides a simple, relevant and complete user experience. It gives users what they expect from the highly intuitive consumer applications they use every day. The Personal Experience layer draws upon other layers of the People Platform to feed users just the information they need to help them make smart decisions.

Business Capabilities – response to user business requirements Offers business functionality designed for people-centric industries with high flexibility to adapt to the needs of horizontal (e.g. financials, payroll, HR), function-specific (e.g. cash flow planning or travel & expenses) and vertical (e.g. student management in education) business processes.

Smart Context – relevant information delivery through use of disruptive technologies Acts as the core of Unit4’s strategy to reimagine enterprise applications for services and public sector organizations. It works in concert with the foundational level below. Plugging disruptive social, mobile, and analytics physically into the foundation makes the consuming applications more intelligent and enriches information with data that has never been available before.

This results in applications that can drive themselves. Timesheets and expense reports are fully pre-populated using pattern recognition and machine learning. The time to plan a project is reduced from days to minutes using predictive analytics.

Elastic Foundation – Extend-and-Relate™ architecture delivers maximum flexibilityEnables business users to model and remodel their applications as business realities change, with no need for consultants or IT experts. With this, the Elastic Foundation reflects everything that is going on for a business in the “real world” in the structure and design of their applications.

This agility eliminates business disruption, adds speed of execution and results in instant value and low TCO. It also ensures the completeness of information, because all a user needs can be stored in one place. It eliminates the need for shadow applications and/or

data sources and, as a result, empowers reaction and decision-making for every service organization

The secret ingredient of the Elastic Foundation is the Unit4 Extend-and-Relate™ technology.

• Extend: Allows end users to enrich the standard information model inside Unit4 solutions with the dimensions required for specific and evolving business requirements.

• Relate: Accomplishes the difficult task of making extensions work as if they had always been part of the core functionality. Business and data extensions immediately become part of all modules, all reports, and all workflows in the solution. They do not behave differently compared to the components that are part of the pre-defined model inherent in the application.

The unique design of the foundation, combined with the smart context and business capability layers, is what ultimately gives the end-user a simple, relevant and complete experience.

The Elastic Foundation also provides an open integration layer that enables third parties to augment Unit4’s portfolio with specific, targeted capabilities.

The People Platform in the Cloud The People Platform delivers five unique cloud capabilities:

• Enhanced security: The Elastic Foundation design principles combine multi-tenancy with the capability for every customer to have their own data schema. It offers security and control in multi-tenant deployment scenarios.

• Portability: The customer-specific data-schema provides the ability to take the entire application from on-premise to the cloud – or from one cloud to a different cloud.

• Upgrade Elasticity: Customers have the option to run upgrades according to their own schedule.

• Completeness: The same applications can run on-premises, in the private cloud and in the public cloud (multi-tenant) without compromising the functionality of the Business Capability layer.

• Data Disaster Recovery: In the case of errors made inside your organization, recovery is comparable to an on-premises situation.

The People Platform – delivering real business value in practice

In the Professional Services industry, it is very time-consuming for management and project teams to do resource utilization, billing, project forecasting, time-sheet reporting, travel expenses, and more. The People Platform reduces these low-value tasks to a bare minimum. The result is readily-available information that eliminates latency and ensures better decision-making.

Here are a few scenarios where the People Platform increases productivity and delivers value:

1. The consultant Consultants who regularly travel for business carry their cell phones at all times. Using smart Travel & Expense applications, they automatically track their daily activities and client visits, fill out expense reports and time sheets, and cross-check them against their calendars and past expense patterns. This eliminates hours of manual drudgery on non-client-related tasks, and enables the consultant to focus on important activities.

2. The business manager Leaders of project-driven organizations must always know the status of their team and their projects. They need the right data at the right time in order to make effective decisions. It is unacceptable that critical information is only available several days after a month closes.

Here is why the People Platform is indispensable to the business manager:

• It provides total and immediate access to time, expense, and status reports with its easy-to-use mobile solutions. It combines this data with important personal input from team members through its unique social collaboration tools. Business managers stay informed when it’s most important – in real time.

• By connecting all this empirical data with its predictive analysis and social collaboration input, managers get a more balanced view of project status, utilization and profitability than ever before.

• The result is a better view of the overall effort, the details when necessary, and the exceptions that need attention. And that means continually making improvements that affect your people, your clients, and your top and bottom lines.

3. The project manager Predictive analytics offer great advantages to the project manager when creating new project estimates. When a company runs regular projects, data such as budgets, forecasts, re-forecasts, timesheets, expenses, invoices and other actual costs is captured. Unit4 applications can predict the time and cost of the next project, based on former ones. It is all about leveraging the data, defining patterns, clustering similar types of projects and using machines for what they do best – processing vast amounts of data. We are entering the next phase of innovation for the services industries where applications are driving the creation of optimal project plans, including defining the optimal project teams.

About Unit4Unit4 is a leading provider of enterprise applications empowering people in service organizations. With annual revenue north of 500M Euro and more than 4000 employees world-wide, Unit4 delivers ERP, industry-focused and best-in-class applications. Thousands of organizations from sectors including professional services, education, public services, not-for-profit, real estate, wholesale, and financial services benefit from Unit4 solutions. Unit4 is in business for people.

ConclusionThe Unit4 People Platform creates the next generation of intelligent ERP and enterprise applications for service organizations and their people.

Evolving ERP to meet the needs of these people-centric industries takes more than a cosmetic makeover to the look and feel of an application. It needs to deliver a fundamentally different approach driven by how the users actually work:

• Freeing people from administrative tasks, so that they can focus the maximum time on delivering great customer service.

• Enabling people to work smarter. The People Platform provides simple, relevant, and complete access to the right information, in order to make decisions and react quickly – ultimately resulting in better customer experiences.

The good news is that this is not just a rosy vision of the future. These advances are already being delivered by Unit4.

Please visit www.unit4.com to learn more about how Unit4 supports people in services and government organizations.

Unit4 – In business for people.

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In business for people.