Posts

Scalability and flexibility with ERP solutions

/in /by

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a miracle of the modern workplace. In essence, it unites your company’s accounting, human resources, product development, manufacturing, marketing and other departments. It lets those divisions instantly share, store, organize and utilize a common repository of corporate and customer information via a standard or customizable user interface.

Today’s ERP software makes it easy to make data-based decisions. With its flexible tools and powerful features, you can track employee performance, make cost projections, craft budgets, plan schedules, calculate ideal price points and figure out how many products to ship to stores, among many other crucial operational tasks.

In addition, this software can automatically generate reports and fill out paperwork, ensuring that you follow all compliance rules and requirements.

With this software, everyone can work more efficiently and accurately to deliver and share timely documentation and analysis.

Whether you prefer on-premise or cloud-based ERP, if you choose the right vendor, you’ll have excellent onsite support whenever you need it.

If you’re in the market for ERP software, you’ll probably want a platform with these features.

1. Learning capabilities

When your ERP software has machine learning capabilities, it will figure out over time how to make itself more useful to everyone.

For instance, if your ERP program realizes that your accountants often seek a certain data point, it might display that number as soon as it’s updated without being asked. It can also identify and recommend best next actions based on expert user activity and recurring processes.

2. Complete mobility

No matter where your staff members are, they should be able to safely access your ERP interface. And it ought to be user-friendly for all smartphones and tablets.

With secure mobile access to your corporate systems, your sales reps and other employees can enter pertinent updates and statistics from customer meetings, conferences, hotel rooms, flights and remote offices.

3. Customization

It should be simple for you and your team to customize your ERP solutions. As soon as you log in, you should see the charts and tools you need in your user portal. Meanwhile, items you rarely or never use can remain hidden, along with data restricted to other users or departments.

Simply put, if your ERP can adjust to accommodate the needs of each role and department, your team will perform their unique duties more effectively.

4. Social media integration

Just about every company relies on social media platforms for marketing and even customer interaction and feedback. As such, it’s helpful if your ERP software automates and streamlines your social media programs and activity to ensure consistency, compliance, and collaboration.

With the right process in place, each department can even use the interface to submit photos, videos and messages for sharing approved content.

Furthermore, your ERP analytics can tell you which posts get the most response and even evaluate the responses for more insightful decision-making. That way, you can keep posting the best kind of content for your audience and your company.

5. Scalability

Whenever you see an influx of new customers, you want to know the cause and the effect. It might happen because your business appears on the news or a major website, or because you introduce a hot new product. Whatever the reason, it’s vital to have ERP software that not only adjusts to meet changes in demand but also helps you make the appropriate adjustments in the relevant areas of your business.

That is, your ERP program should be capable of processing as much new data as your company feeds it. And you must be able to add as many new users and mobile devices as necessary. If your ERP can’t handle a sudden flood of info, you’ll have to buy and implement new software, an expensive and time-wasting prospect.

With the right enterprise resource planning solution, your operations will remain flexible as you grow. Similarly, you’ll always be responsive to market changes and trends, since your ERP will help you make choices based on customer preferences. With adaptability so often comes prosperity

The key to growing your business you might be missing

/in /by

If you’re a small business owner focused on growth, you’re already invested in marketing and scaling up your ability to deliver goods and services. One thing you might be overlooking, though, is a software-based tool that can support your company’s growth through data collection, sharing and workflow automation. This tool is known as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and it’s so important to modern businesses that the market share for ERP software is expected to grow to $49 billion by the year 2024. Here’s what you need to know about modern ERP solutions and how they can help your business grow.

What is enterprise resource planning?

Put simply, ERP systems are software solutions that bring processes from many different parts of a business operation together under a single roof. ERP solutions can be used to manage everything from finance and accounting to customer relations and product distribution. Tying these different departments together through a unified software solution allows for easier data collection and sharing between departments. All this leads to making your business more efficient and productive.

Keep your business growing

One of the most important advantages of implementing a modern ERP software in your business comes in the form of improved workflow. ERPs provide for automated workflows that will take your employees through tasks in a step-by-step manner, making it less-likely for oversights to occur. In this way, your SMB can exert higher levels of quality control on its processes and spend less time correcting human errors.

A modern ERP solution can also support your company’s growth by providing you with valuable marketing insights. Thanks to their ability to collect and share data, modern ERP platforms can be used to measure the effectiveness of growth strategies such as expanding into new markets or penetrating further into existing ones.

Using operational insights produced by an ERP solution, your business can refine its marketing, adjust pricing and even develop a more complete customer profile for future targeting.

Improve customer service

Of course, the benefits of a modern ERP solution aren’t limited to the back end of your business. ERP software can support the customer-facing side of your SMB by providing improved systems for inventory control, sales and even customer relations. When your team can communicate and collaborate easily through a unified ERP platform, your customers are likely to have a much better experience and encounter fewer difficulties.  

Cloud-based ERP solutions offer strong security protections that can be managed by a third-party vendor without draining your limited resources away from more critical tasks. If you want to keep your SMB on track for sustained growth by implementing good data security and cybersecurity practices, a cloud-based ERP solution can be a useful tool.

Conclusion

From improving efficiency and use of resources on the back end to supporting your marketing efforts and customer relations on the front end, ERP software solutions can provide incredibly useful tools for driving business growth. By making it easy to collect and share data between different departments, a modern ERP system can help your company make the best use of its resources and improve the customer experience it provides.

If you want to maximize the growth of your SMB, consider having your IT staff or managed services provider implement an ERP solution that will meet the needs of your company.