In the rapidly evolving digital world, organizations are consistently challenged by the need to efficiently manage their resources while adapting to the ever-changing demands of their industries. One fundamental issue is the administrative burden on employees, which hinders them from focusing on more meaningful, mission-driven work. This is the problem enterprise resource planning solutions provider Unit4 aims to address. Designed to serve the unique requirements of mid-market organizations, Unit4's offerings aim to transform how organizations work, placing a premium on people and their experience within the enterprise.
Their suite, encompassing financials, procurement, project management, human resources, and financial planning and analysis, aims to revolutionize how mid-market organizations share real-time information, derive insights and enhance their customer service. With the flagship ERPx software at its core, the suite leverages over four decades of experience, combined with the latest cloud technology, to integrate critical business functions into an adaptive platform.
CEO Mike Ettling talked to Accounting Today about recent initiatives like the launch of a new app studio, as well as future plans, like Unit4's upcoming global virtual event X4U.
How would you describe what your company does?
Ettling: Unit4's next-generation enterprise resource planning solutions power many of the world's mid-market organizations, bringing together the capabilities of financials, procurement, project management, HR and FP&A to share real-time information and deliver insights to help organizations become more effective at servicing the customer. Our solutions allow employees to focus on more meaningful work and projects instead of being weighed down by administrative tasks. By combining our mid-market expertise with a relentless focus on people, we've built flexible solutions to meet customers' unique and changing needs.
What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product?
Ettling: Unit4's suite of applications features financial planning & analysis (
Unit4 solutions provide customers with global, as well as region-specific, solutions to help organizations transform their people's work into a more meaningful and inspiring experience.
What product of yours do you think should be better known among accountants?
Ettling: Our ERPx and FP&A solutions are designed to help free accountants and other professionals of their administrative burdens to do more of what matters, like attracting, supporting and retaining clients. Our software empowers accountants and their firms to build a more agile and resilient business strategy, plan profitable engagements easily and accurately, execute and bill with precision, monitor and optimize project resources and ensure these projects are delivered on-time and within budget.
Diving deeper, Unit4's solutions can also:
- Initiate new projects with work break down structure, milestones, deliverables and billing conditions;
- Determine budgets including time, procurement, travel, and both internal and external contractors;
- Manage the billing of complex projects with the ability to create invoices from multiple legal entities;
- Ensure effective billing and timely payment with an end-to-end, project-based invoice and credit control capability;
- Utilize real-time reporting data to enable better revenue recognition and billing; and
- Manage change throughout the project lifecycle and run post-mortem evaluations and team pulses.
Replacing legacy systems and upgrading to a SaaS ERP system with integrated FP&A solutions will enhance antiquated back-office functions and technology. Accountants and their firms will then have access to smart automation, specific industry functionality and data integrity. The cost of holding back on switching to the cloud and streamlining back-office functions is damaging to the people experience, productivity and, ultimately, profitability.
What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?
Ettling: Recently we launched
What is the most exciting new thing you're working on?
Ettling: On November 8, we are hosting X4U, a global virtual event that will explore the power of our innovative solutions and services, industry trends and best practices. This year, we'll be discussing what it means to "Power Up." In an ever-evolving world, it has never been more important to equip your organization with the right technology to boost performance. At Unit4, we're all about enabling our customers to focus more time and resources on their mission-driven work. We'll dive into how our solutions can help companies drive strategy, boost performance, handle complexity and support change.
What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different? Unique, even?
Ettling: Most enterprise software grew out of industrial manufacturing, with a bias toward mechanical processes and treating humans as capital instead of focusing on the people experience. However, each module and set of software at Unit4 was conceived, engineered and developed by forward-thinking innovators to solve for the needs of project-based, people-centered organizations. Primarily and uniquely, we're focused on how these types of businesses work best.
Unit4 defines People Experience as a discipline applied to software development that prioritizes human experience and how to improve it across the organization. The most successful people-oriented businesses use technology in transformative ways to offer not just a better place to work, but a better way to work. Our People Experience Suite helps organizations automate and transform the way work is done across the organization, so people can focus on the important work that can help them to change people's lives. Our applications are also self-driving, adaptive and intuitive, intelligently automating administrative tasks and allowing non-IT specialists to change, grow and configure services through localizations and best-practice models.
What is the biggest challenge facing companies like yours right now? How do you work to address it?
Ettling: With external factors such as evolving global markets and economic issues facing both employees and their employers right now, building organizational resilience remains the biggest challenge for companies around the world. A company's ability to adapt and overcome adversity in the face of macroeconomic challenges and the rise of AI is no longer a competitive advantage, but a requirement for survival.
Instead of taking a negative approach to new AI and automation tech, companies should look to embrace it if they want to more effectively streamline processes, enhance productivity and unlock new growth opportunities. AI and automation are not a wholesale threat to companies — they will enable them to become more resilient. In a world where the speed of response is essential, the organizations which use AI to analyze more information in real time or automate processes to increase its efficiency will be able to adapt more quickly and thrive.
In addition, a critical pillar of building organizational resilience is company culture. And the key to creating the right culture to transition into an era of resilience is strong leadership. Leaders have the ability to set the tone, provide a clear sense of direction and empower employees to take positive action.
If your company has been experimenting with generative AI, how have you incorporated it into your business?
Ettling: Unit4's people and project-centric enterprise software solutions are already leveraging powerful AI and ML based processes and features that can simplify every aspect of finance workflows. From virtual assistants capable of retrieving, analyzing and cross-referencing teams' financial data, through to planning and forecasting tools capable of spotting emerging trends rapidly. Such technologies allow organizations to both mitigate and manage risk, as well as capitalize on opportunities with greater flexibility and agility.
ERP cloud platforms can also use AI tech to "train" against incoming data to automate data segmenting, tagging, storage and recall for a host of different tasks. This further eliminates the need for manual tagging and the time-intensive "cleaning" of datasets before use.
Furthermore, AI tech can mitigate the time spent on non-value add activities to help ensure data quality and deliver the analysis needed to increase strategic agility. This translates to a risk-management approach that can truly consider all variables and still be both practical and timely. This can happen all while making the job more streamlined without changing core functions and skill sets.
Unit 4 at a glance:
Founded: 1980, in the Netherlands
Customers: 5,100+ in more than 100 countries
Employees: 2,700+
Countries with Unit4 presence: 59
Web site and social media:
Partner ecosystem website:
