7 Signs That You Need An ERP System
The approach you have while processing company transaction, managing its finances, and running its daily operations can impact your business positively or negatively. You might have installed software to perform partial or all the work, but how can you be sure that your legacy software or your manual work is impeding your progress?
Some times your existing software may not be sufficient to manage and record your business transactions efficiently. In this article we are listing out 7 signs that your business needs an ERP system.
Briefly, What is ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP software refers to a type of software that helps businesses to manage their operational and financial processes more efficiently and effectively. It’s a system that integrates different process of business in one software system. Without ERP systems, it can be difficult to keep track of large amounts of data across departments in an organization. That’s where ERP systems come in. Each business will have different needs, but the core functions are likely to include inventory management, order processing, billing and payments, procurement, and customer relationship management (CRM). This is a brief description on what ERP software is and why companies should use it.
Here are seven signs that you need to look at to know whether it’s time to install ERP software.
Inadequate Business Data
In case you have not installed an ERP software, or if your legacy software is not well integrated, then your employees will have to take care of a huge amount of work manually.
Extracting and cross-checking data from different spreadsheets or consolidating data from multiple databases can be a tiring task. Additionally, when they need to take printouts of those reports or email internally, the whole process can become time-consuming and error-prone.
An ERP software will integrate effectively with your existing and new systems. ERP can automatically extract data from the business tools and can also push updates to them.
You can have access to all the figures and reports in real-time. So you employees no longer have to spend hours or days configuring a report.
Systems That Don’t Work Well Together
When you have implemented different systems in your company, it becomes hard to make them work in collaboration to give integrated results. Some software also fails to extract data from the new field in your CRM.
If you are ready to go a step ahead and want to streamline your data flow and business operations, and your focus is to patch things together, then you better replace them all.
Growing Customer Issues
Customer satisfaction often gets hampered due to inadequate software and processes, which leads to a decline in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Customer loyalty matters, especially when you are dealing in a product-based industry.
For product selling companies this factor is very important. You need to make accurate forecasts about product stock availability, or else you will end up losing customers. In case your business is holding separate data for every activity, this can cause many drawbacks in your operation.
When you use ERP software, it maintains a central database that enables staff from across all departments and branches to access related crucial data in real-time.
Financial Accounts Reporting is too slow
Whatever your company does or performs is based on its finances. If your finance and accounting department is spending hours and days to manually enter all the data, including purchase orders, invoices, or complete the monthly reconciliations, then it’s time for you to install an ERP. ERP will automate these tasks, and they can be finished with in few seconds.
Plus, ERP will store all your financial data in a centralized database, so your employees do not need to re-input all the information and update or manually reconcile the accounts. Your finance department can work with utmost productivity and cost-effectiveness.
Adaptation to Fit Your Current Systems
If you have to adopt new business processes and approaches to match your business software, you are clearly not using the right software. This has to be another way around; however, some companies keep playing the game of adaptation to save expenses. This is least likely to make such companies any far.
You must rather use software that matches your needs and streamlines and improves the business process by adopting your business values and culture. ERP is a perfect solution here.
Growth
Suppose your business is growing and you are adding new products and services and attracting a large number of customers. In that case, you need a system that can cope with your changing and growing needs and help you streamline your business operations, no matter how complex they are.
E-commerce Requirements
Pandemic has severely damaged mobility across the world. Businesses with retail outlets had to adapt to the changing world to survive. Adopting an eCommerce approach was one of the ways.
Ecommerce lets you offer your services and products online, and you will need ERP software that can easily integrate with an eCommerce website.
If you witness any of the above-given signs in your business, it’s time for you to consider an ERP software for your business.
