It’s late at night. You’re still in the office reconciling the day-to-day work processes. You’re having a hard time on keeping up the order volume and customer satisfaction is dropping, your sales forecast is based on guesswork rather than a piece of specific evidence, you have no clue on how many stocks left in your warehouse.
If your business is experiencing more than a few of these signs, maybe it’s time to invest an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in your business.
We understand that every company is unique, and no one knows your business than you do – built up over time in the pursuit of making your business stand out in the crowd of your competitors. However, we have observed that company who face similar struggles and frustrations would often benefit most from the ERP. There’s nothing as a perfect set of rules which defines your company is ready for the implementation of ERP system but easy to identify if you are facing the issues below.
Here are five reasons why your business needs an ERP:
(1) You have lots of systems that don’t integrate well with each other
Technology is intended to improve our life. For businesses which managing more than one system comes the potential of increased complexity and inaccuracies.
Take a second to think how long it takes for your employee to track, record and download the report every day. Is the system of accounting team using is different than what is the sales team using? Based on a finding by the McKinsey Global Institute, workers spend approximately 28% of the workweek managing email. Besides, they lose 20% of their time on looking out for internal information and seeking out the help from their colleagues with other tasks.
When there are multiple systems run separately, it can be detrimental to your company, requiring a huge effort on tracking and update the data in the required field. Keying in data in different systems sometimes will cause more than just financial loses for your business. With an ERP system, these types of costly mistakes would simply be avoided with its integration of all the systems. Under one centralized system, ‘data silos’ will be removed straightway, providing your business a real-time and accurate data.
(2) You’re spending more time to find the right information
One of the red flags that would bring the company to the brink of the danger zone is when there is an uncertainty of up-to-date information and validity data. Business leaders often unable to answer some relatively trivial though important questions like, “how many orders do you have for this gadget per day?” If this happens it certainly means that business can’t use the data to come out with an effective decision.
Good strategic planning is followed by a comprehensive information analysis before coming out with an informed decision. If a business is not able to gather the data at the first place, it runs a risk of identifying relevant dynamic trends in the industry hence falling behind your competitor as the pace at which the disruptive technologies is accelerating.
Accurate, fast and reliable data exchange between departments is required to reduce the time of duplicate processes and information consolidation. Having an ERP solution that contains accurate and real-time data, it enables a seamless flow of information across the department. Besides making the forecast become a simpler process, also helps staff have a better insight into relevant processes.
(3) You’re having trouble on keeping your customer in the loop
Keeping the pace with the digital age, accuracy and immediacy have been shown as the critical component. Customer only seek businesses that can give them the information fast and accurate and they expect to get their hands on their purchase’s straightaway. If there’s an inquiry about a particular stock’s availability and the customer support not able to resolve the issues right away and on occasion, the sales are slipped through fingers.
As the business grows, it’s utter importance to improvise the warehouse management process. If it’s not handled in a proper way, there will be a potential risk of overselling that leads to customer dissatisfaction or a negative review that could directly affect your business.
Just imagine that if your sales and warehouse team are using two different systems to organize things, it really takes time for your sales team to log in to another system and to track the stock availability. However, by using an ERP System, it streamlines all those complicated business operations and increases productivity. Staff in every department have the same access to all real-time data. With this robust system, questions about orders details, shipping status, stock availability, product details can be simply answered by any one of the customer support.
(4) You’re getting hard time on organizing financial reports
Accounting plays a fundamental role as an essential component for every business operation. It provides the insights of financial position to help business leaders to make better decisions. For smaller businesses or start-ups, using spreadsheets to record sales orders and invoice is an easy way to begin with.
However, as the business becomes bigger, you will hit a pricey ceiling eventually. The lack of reliability and flexibility of this strategy will prevent the business future growth as the demands of your business is increasing along with the quantity of the stock made, ordered and sold. If your employees spend hours on entering data into different accounting and sales system – are you letting your employees run down the clock? Today many businesses have accounting software but with the lack of integration of application would overcomplicate the process of financial information reconciliation.
By investing in an ERP solution in your company, it will allow the business leaders to manage the entire business by providing a holistic view of all financials in a single database. When a team is well equipped with the right technology, more high-quality work will happen to lead to greater growth and yielding the most returns.
(5) Your IT is too complicated and costly
Having multiple systems at the same time would burn a hole in your pocket in the long term. It’s a pain for businesses to customize, integrate and keep those systems up-to-date with the latest version. More integration and maintenance need to be performed after the latest versions been purchased. With a number of applications, the valuable time of IT will be wasted while ERP software can handle it in instant. By adopting the system, the operating costs for multiples systems and IT resources will be simply eliminated.
With the advent of ERP, it enables all the systems can be accessed through one application with one interface and provides a seamless and transparent transition for your business. Every individual, team, and company want to be more productive. The term ‘KISS’ principle always applies. Keeping things simple will deliver a quality of work. Stepping the digital transformation trail, it is crucial for businesses to keep up with the technology in order to meet the changing demands of their customers.
Join us on our Facebook official page to get the latest information on digital trends.
