2. 2 The Unit4 People Platform
Delivering the next generation of
people-focused solutions
The Digital Revolution
We 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 action
Here 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.
3. It’s time for a change of focus
ERP 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 people
The 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. 4 The Unit4 People Platform
A closer look at the People Platform
Personal Experience – how people experience
applications
Provides 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 flexibility
Enables 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.
5. 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.
