For small and medium-sized businesses that have grown quickly, it can be difficult to scale your systems with the rest of your business. This often leads to departments working in silos and slow, manual ways of working hurting further growth potential.
As handy as spreadsheets are, they just aren’t the best for multimillion-pound companies!
So how can enterprise resource planning (ERP) improve a company’s business performance? There are several ways but, in this article, we will cover the following three:
- Automate Repetitive Work
- Make Faster & Smarter Decisions
- A New Level of Integration
While each part is important on their own, the trifecta makes for massive improvement opportunities in your company’s business performance.
1. Automate Repetitive Work
A key feature of ERP systems is the ability to utilise automation for a variety of tasks. Time consuming tasks can be reduced or even eliminated by programming automated workflows that are unique to your business needs.
For example, a manufacturing company can set their ERP to instantly reorder materials when stock reaches a predetermined threshold. This helps alleviate the issue of running out of material or engaging in costly overstocking.
You can even use workflows for the finance side of your operations. This can be used to ensure invoices are sent out at the correct time and any that are overdue for payment are flagged for your team to investigate.
2. Make Faster & Smarter Decisions
When it comes to making smart business decisions you need access to information. ERP is great for this as data is consolidated in one location, allowing for detailed reports and analytics on demand.
This is perfect for things such as end of year reporting, as revenue and tax can be calculated by the ERP system and ensure no account errors occur.
Not only are you able to access this information, but many systems have the added benefit of featuring business intelligence (BI). This great piece of software can analyse your operations and create forecasts based on it. It can inform you of growth potential as well as consider seasonality when ordering stock. This helps companies in the food & drink industry manage varying stock levels throughout the year by using historical data to more accurately predict demand.
3. A New Level of Integration
ERP offers a level of flexibility that is unrivalled in business systems. It can integrate with a range of other services, allowing you to expand its capabilities to the important areas of your business.
For example, you’re able to integrate your ERP with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, allowing you to track sales figures in real time. This allows for the most accurate predictions for things like shipping dates, helping you keep customers updated on their orders.
ERP systems are great for being able to adapt to the changing needs of a modern business and help ensure that the decisions being made are right for the future growth of your business. If you would like to know more about how ERP can improve your company’s business performance, then get in touch with us.