What will 2021 bring us
The beginning of a new year is always a good time to reflect upon the year past and contemplated the expectations for the year ahead. We have created a series of three blogs to discuss 2020 and 2021 trends.
2020
Last year was a year we will never forget. The pandemic drastically changed our way of working and it remains uncertain how the pandemic will evolve in 2021. Quistor had a very positive year in 2020.
Our offices closed in the height of the first lockdown and as a company, we have continued to work remotely ever since. This saw a drastic drop in office coffee demands and an equally significant increase in our Microsoft Teams usage. Our existing IT infrastructure made the switch to remote working seamless for both our current operations and customer projects. A big compliment to our internal IT team.
Alongside keeping normal operations running smoothly, we as Quistorians achieved many positive milestones. New customers grew by 8% with a 32% growth in new OCI customers. We onboarded 30 new employees (completely virtually and saw more than a 25% increase in revenue - not bad in the midst of a pandemic!
Operationally the teams kept working hard resulting in over 300 database migrations, 8 JD Edwards upgrades, and over 30 successful Go-Lives. Furthermore, we refreshed our Exahotel with two brand new X8M Exadata machines and onboarded 2 new customers on this platform…
But enough looking back let’s look forward to 2021 and what to expect in the coming year.
2021
But that is enough reflection, let’s look forward to 2021 and explore the trends we can expect to see in the coming year.
Remote Working
The COVID-19 pandemic forced us into a new normal both in our personal and professional lives. As with most companies, we quickly adopted remote working, closed our physical offices, and switch to 100% virtual working for all our processes. We sped up the implementation of Microsoft Teams and further improved our security systems to support internal employees and external contractors.
Together with our customers we successfully delivered a number of projects and in terms of managed services, it was business as usual due to our existing remote working environment.
In 2021 we expect a trend of realization in our customers, acknowledging that tight working relationships can still be maintained remotely, with a physical premise not always necessary. Many systems can facilitate and improve remote collaborations. This new virtual approach will in turn lower the barrier for companies to start outsourcing more and more processes.
Furthermore, we expect customers to improve processes by implementing different (new) technologies such as Engagement- and Commercial Portals, Mobile solutions, Process Automation, and Chatbots to shift manually intensive tasks to Self Service or Automated tasks.
We expect customers to start automating recurring processes and structuring support processes to make it easier to outsource them and become more flexible as an organization.
Specific processes currently relying on physical office equipment will transform to digital processes too. Think signing documents, data stores, approval , and /or delivery processes. All processes with manual forms are candidates to optimize through automation.
Quistor has offered all JD Edwards and Managed Service activities on a remote bases for years so we understand your challenges and will likely have dealt with most issues you will be facing at current.
Interesting in the other trends watch out for the coming parts of the blog.