An enterprise resource planning (ERP) software acts as a bird’s eye view of your entire company’s activities to form a very elaborate overview of things like your company’s purchases, inventory, and many other company endeavors. This software allows you to unify your data to provide a much more detailed analysis to reduce the risk of new decisions across the board. As a company grows, the amount of data that the company has to keep track of increases significantly. Without an elaborate ERP system in place, it becomes really easy for a company to unknowingly neglect data that can lead to a massive improvement in different parts of the company.
1- Creates a More Efficient Environment
Planning resources used in a project with an ERP system include the time spent doing the specific tasks during valuable company time. Collecting that data over time will lead to finding the average amount of time spent performing these tasks and if that number is much more than necessary, a company can start to find solutions to decrease it. The same strategy can be implemented with the number of resources allocated towards a task as a company can find the sweet spot between cutting out excess spending and improving equipment to create an efficient environment. Without an ERP system in place to track all of this data, a company can easily lose this valuable information in a vast sea of paperwork and excel sheets.
2- Quickens Response Times
The market is moving very quickly these days, which means that other companies expect very smooth interactions with any department they communicate with. Having a specific department disconnected from a primary information system that allows them to access the data they require to execute a deal with another business or a customer prolongs the process unnecessarily. An ERP system helps every department access the data they need swiftly, which in turn helps your response times and your customer satisfaction levels. It’s also a very big quality-of-life improvement in the management and the employees working at a certain company as it makes their job a lot faster.
3- Standardizing Software Brings Simplicity
Without an ERP system, a company would have to transfer specific data over to the employees and management very frequently. In a big company, hundreds of data transactions would occur every single day. If every one of these transactions takes approximately 3 minutes, a company would lose 300 minutes every day because the system isn’t standardized across all departments. Having one system that everyone uses comfortably will make the process a lot simpler and easier to handle.
4- Reduces Costs
Having direct access to every detail of the company’s transactions can help you figure out the optimum ways in decreasing costs while gradually increasing profits. Most companies lack the IT skills required to put together a comprehensive ERP system and training them would require far too much time and resources. An alternative method is to choose an ERP implementation partner to put it together, however, picking the right partner requires a very good amount of research to determine whether or not they’re going to give you the system that your company needs. With a user-friendly ERP system tailored specifically to your company, you can find many ways to reduce costs in the short-term and the long-term easily.
5- Improves Management
Many statistics get lost with the overwhelming amount of numbers that a company has but having an ERP helps managers of specific departments closely follow their employees’ numbers easily. This way, managers can reward good work to improve morale or find deficiencies and work towards improving them over time. It’s much easier to keep track of everyone under a department when you can access their statistics on a singular system that collects everyone’s work simultaneously.
6- Improves Security
Different industries have different regulations that must be followed to stay on the right side of the law. These regulations are prone to change with time and having a system that’s constantly up-to-date can help you track whether or not your company meets these requirements. This helps you stay updated with the tasks you should do and your company’s legal security. This system is also protected with a strong firewall that protects your data from any breaches that can occur. Using an ERP system for any tasks a company has can help the system administrators safeguard your information while notifying you of any irregularities that may have occurred.
An ERP system is a necessity for any small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as it helps them with a large variety of aspects that can bring exponential growth over time. Picking the right ERP partner is half the battle, though picking the wrong one can be extremely annoying to deal with so make sure you do a good amount of research before you decide on which one you want to go with.
