Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) helps organizations automate and streamline their business processes. It enhances collaboration within an organization and improves customer satisfaction. What this means for you and your business, is an opportunity for accelerated growth and productivity. ERP systems are rich in modules, features, and functionality. For starters, ERP analytics help companies easily track, monitor, and measure key performance indicators (KPIs), while built-in compliance support makes it easy for businesses to meet industry or regulatory standards and regulations.
If you’re contemplating ERP implementation in your organization, or you’re scouting around for a new system to replace those perhaps outdated Excel spreadsheets, here are what we like to call our “Grateful Eight” – the 8 key benefits of ERP:
- Streamline business operations. ERP implementation allows businesses to streamline their operations across departments, resulting in enhanced productivity, improved customer service, and sustained business growth. This is because ERP brings together different business and financial operations all on a single platform, all with a shared data source. ERP identifies workflow bottlenecks, and in turn, security vulnerabilities become easier across the board.
- Gain a competitive edge. Although ERP is popular among larger companies, it’s equally beneficial to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Research shows that automation helps small businesses to grow quickly by eliminating time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. This means that businesses can override competition, and stay ahead of rivals in the market. As many SMBs are yet to implement ERP, those small businesses that do will be a step ahead of their competition.
- Ensure regulatory compliance. ERP helps businesses to comply with regulations and security requirements by identifying factors that could lead to non-compliance. Built-in compliance features help businesses to automate regulatory protocols and generate compliance reports for industry and government authorities. Some of the prominent regulatory statutes are the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Energy Policy Act (EPAct).
- Improve collaboration and communication between departments. Businesses often lag behind their projects and find it difficult to scale due to lack of coordination between departments. ERP brings different departments of an organization under a unified interface and enhances communication between teams and departments. For example, sales and marketing teams can communicate with each other better, and share their data with customer service teams who can identify potential prospects, to ultimately, enhance sales.
- Rich insights and analytics. Relying on inaccurate data to make forecasts results in predictions that are erroneous, leading to failed business strategies. As ERP unifies all datasets and eliminates inaccurate datasets, it generates reliable reports and statistically valid insights. These insights help businesses to make meaningful forecasts and predict business outcomes. Accurate predictions and forecasts are necessary to develop business strategies that deliver success.
- Enhanced customer relationship management. ERP systems help businesses to automate their marketing and share data with their customer relationship management teams. ERP also collates data from customers’ social media accounts, previous call records, service requests, and browsing behavior. As a result, customer service agents can rely on accurate buyer personas and engage with customers more meaningfully. This greatly enhances customer satisfaction and helps products and services to quickly move through the sales pipeline.
- Keep data accurate and consistent. As businesses grow in size and stature, they tend to subscribe to multiple software programs for different operations. This results in haphazard, redundant, and duplicate data sets. What’s more, when employees enter data manually, there’s ample scope for human errors and redundancies. ERP eliminates both these problems and creates a unified and up-to-date set of data. As a result, market research, forecasting, and business analytics will be reliable and valid. Accuracy and consistency of data are of significant predictors of business success.
- Manage employees on-site or remotely. The latest ERP solutions are cognizant of prevailing attitudes towards work-from-home arrangements, and they also support field management protocols with robust and reliable mobile ERP applications. Businesses can easily monitor and manage their employees remotely from an ERP’s project management module. Completing projects, tracking time, collaborating with staff, and holding meetings on video conferencing applications, are today, efficiently powered and streamlined by ERP.
Businesses of all sizes benefit from ERP implementation
Businesses of all sizes benefit from deploying ERP, and with an open, flexible, and scalable ERP, the system can grow as your business grows. ERP improves productivity, ensures enhanced inter-departmental communication, and enables regulatory compliance. More important, businesses will have less to worry about when it comes to their day-to-day operations and find more time and resources to improve their business strategies.
If you’d like to learn more about how our ERP solutions can benefit your unique situation, contact us today.
