Let’s face it, no matter what size manufacturer or distributor you are, every business needs a method of organization in order for it to be profitable and effective. But, even knowing this, many small and medium-size businesses aren’t quite sure what they need or even where to start looking. At a recent event, I was surprised at how many mid-market manufacturers and distributors didn’t know ERP even existed, or that there was a more efficient method available to them beyond Excel Spreadsheets.
So, What Is ERP?
ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning Software, is business software that integrates and runs all aspects of your business; everything from traceability of raw materials, management and optimization of inventory, production planning and scheduling, to financial controls and even customer relationship management. An ERP system enables businesses to identify waste, eliminate inefficiencies, improve customer relations and facilitate real-time collaboration.
How Does an ERP System Work?
The main purpose of an ERP system is to increase organizational efficiency of an organization by managing and improving how company resources are utilized. Improving and/ or reducing the number of resources necessary without sacrificing quality and performance are keys to effectively improving business growth and profitability.
ERP systems typically cover all aspects of business operations and commonly provide:
- An integrated system
- Common database
- Real-time operation
- Support for all applications/ components
- Common user interface across application/ components
- On-premise, cloud hosted, or SaaS deployment
ERP software has the ability to collect and compare metrics across departments and provide a number of different reports based on roles or specific user preferences. The data collected makes finding and reporting on data faster and gives a complete view of business performance with complete insights on how resources are being spent.
ERP synchronizes reporting and automation by reducing the need to maintain separate databases and spreadsheets that would have to be manually merged to generate reports. This combined data collection and reporting offers valuable insight, such as where to cut costs and streamline processes, providing the information to make real-time business decisions.
When Does Your Business Need ERP?
Business development often focuses on goals that coincide with a company’s short-term and long-term growth, as well as analyzing potential business challenges. Conducting a regular analysis of systems and processes helps identify when a business may need to integrate an ERP system.
An ERP solution should be taken into consideration when existing business systems and processes are:
- No longer function or function inefficiently (throttling/ bottlenecking)
- No longer support the growth of the company
- Lack current security requirements to mitigate risk
Identifying broken processes is important for growth and finding areas of improvement. Here are a few examples of opportunities that may signal a process is no longer supporting company growth:
- Use/ Relying heavily on separate databases/ spreadsheets/ programs that require manual processes for data management and fall out of sync regularly
- Information and analytics are difficult to access and/ or out of date
- Day-to-day processes are difficult or overly time consuming, such as paper-based accounting, financial reporting, etc.
- Sales and customer experience are suffering due to inaccurate or incomplete data and cause poor reputation for reliability and services
- Inefficient/ complex/ complicated IT processes. Current systems have bad scalability, fragmented systems legacy solutions.
- IT time is spent fixing/ patching legacy systems to try and keep up with growth
- Does not support new and advanced technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence, etc.
Once broken processes are identified, businesses can take the next steps to overcome these business challenges and support business growth.
How Can ERP Help Improve and Grow a Business?
ERP systems are used to help businesses of all sizes overcome challenges—from small businesses to massive enterprises. Early business practices may no longer keep up with growing demand and require more efficient business tools, like ERP, to effectively manage a business’ systems and resources.
ERP software systems provide many benefits to the health and growth of a business.
The Benefits and Business Value of ERP
- Cost savings and improved ROI efficiency. Increased productivity and efficiency as a result from the integration and automation that ERP software provides
- Improve business insight. Improve decision making with a single aggregated source of truth and real-time data
- Manage Regulatory Compliance. Manage and monitor compliance with regulatory standards, and even set up alerts for non-compliance
- Mitigate and reduce risk. Automate core business operations, manual tasks, and reporting. Reduce human errors, and free up employee time and resources
- Enhance collaboration. Break down communication barriers for efficient collaboration and coordination to improve job efficiency.
- Improve supply chain and distribution network reliability. Use demand-driven MRP to forecast supply and demand and prepare for fluxes in orders and supply chain
- Scalability. Consistent infrastructure for streamlined operations can grow as your business grows
- Optimize customer and partner management. service, customer relationship management, as well as partner and supplier management with insight from seamless shared information
How to get an ERP system developed for your business?
We at EchonLabs have been helping our clients to provide better services to their customers since 2017. ERP Systems developed at EchonLabs will make operations at your business much more easier.
Need a quotation for your ERP System? Contact EchonLabs (Private) Limited today.
