2021: A Year in Review
20 January 2022
Chris Stock, Managing Director, Inforlogic, reflects upon the last 12 months and explains why he feels eminently more positive as 2022 gets underway.
2021 was undoubtedly, another challenging year for us all. In a similar vein to 2020, our best laid plans were often side-lined as we continued to react and adapt to new ways of thinking about what we do. However, many positives shone through, and the year certainly wasn’t without reward.
Our manufacturing customers have without doubt experienced unprecedented volatility. Compounded by the fallout of Brexit, supply chain disruption; rising labour costs; increased administration; and fluctuations in demand, have all conspired to create a bit of a perfect storm.
Digital transformation continues to be heralded as a key lever in managing and mitigating these variables, and 2021 definitely saw a shift in the way the industry views the cloud.
While manufacturing has arguably been one of the slower industries to move away from on-premise systems, cloud adoption accelerated throughout the pandemic as organisations fully embraced the low-risk, low TCO high availability and scale that it brings.
The Inforlogic team has brought a record number of cloud customers on board, and this continues to build as 2022 gets underway.
Another trend we’ve seen is the need for trusted advisors to support manufacturers through the changes and uncertainty being experienced. Our ethos is grounded in flexibility and dedication to meeting the specific needs of the individual customer, and this ethos has truly come into its own over this last 12 months.
As well as project deployments, we have witnessed increased demand for flexible support frameworks. This model helps our customers to extend their IT team without the need to increase headcount, and provides access to skills as and when they are needed. The low risk nature of this model has proved incredibly valuable and it’s a trend which I anticipate is set to increase further in the next 12 months.
In order to fulfil this demand, we have continued to grow the Inforlogic team, and we’re incredibly proud of the people we have at the helm. Securing talent in this space can sometimes be a challenge, but we’ve been fortunate enough to have added some brilliant skillsets over the last year.
It was fantastic to be able to celebrate this at our (real life) Christmas party in December which I feel we all appreciated and enjoyed so much more for having not had the opportunity for some time. Getting to know so many new members of the team properly was brilliant – and the event was such a positive and fitting end to 2021.
With the best people in place to achieve our goals, I’m very much looking forward to all that this year will bring. We have a number of new projects, upgrades and are excited to leverage the capabilities of Infor SyteLine to transform the way in which our customers work and perform.
With agility and resilience high up on the wish list for manufacturers as they continue to face volatility and new challenges, we’re really pleased to be able to help equip them with the digital foundations necessary to pursue their future growth.