We've got some good experience in speaking to organisations that need to change their ERP or business applications. It's fair to say that nine times out of ten, those organisations start with the same question: 'Do I need to implement a new ERP solution?'. To answer that question, we always start by looking for these reoccurring signals.
In this article we'll run through some of the telltale signs that you need to change implement a new ERP solution.
1. Reporting
You either can't access the information you need to run your business profitably, or it can take hours to extract it, manipulate it, then interpret it to take the necessary actions. Reporting is always the number one bug bear for every client we talk to and is the biggest factor in deciding to implement a new ERP solution. The root cause is usually because businesses are running multiple applications for separate functions. Finance and accounting runs on a siloed solution, budgeting and planning on another, orders and sales run on a separate CRM, projects, time and expenses run on spreadsheets, nothing is integrated - you get the picture. Running reports means talking to IT and waiting days or weeks.
Modern ERP solutions provide dashboarding in system with real time business KPI's, allowing you to identify issues and business risks at your hearts content.
2. Increasing IT Costs
Most ERP solutions are built for specific purposes and struggle to acommodate your needs as your business changes and grows. Perhaps when you implemented your ERP, you were much smaller, operated in only one country, served only a handful of customers or had a completely different business model. As your needs change, many of our clients try to modify and develop on top of their applications. What can start as some custom code becomes an expensive asset which needs constant and costly maintenance. In the short term, this can be neccesary to give you business agility, but in the long run it hampers profitability.
Selecting the right ERP solution for your industry and needs means you can accomodate all of your business needs in one application suite, reducing your overall TCO. If you need help finding the right solution for your needs, speak to one of our advisors.
3. Compliance
Compliance risks can put your entire business in the balance. If you're running an outdated or disparate solutions to run your business then the compliance risks can be numerous. Sensitive customer or business data may be insecure and open to hackers. If you're in regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals or financial services, then you may risk losing your ability to trade. In one example, a pharmaceutical company we were working with lost the ability to do business because it could not pass it's computer systems validation checks.
Today, ERP solutions ship out of the box with tight information security standards, specific industry functionality to meet compliance checks and make staying compliant easy.
4. Spreadsheets
The spreadsheet will never die, that's for sure. But as you approach the limits of your current ERP or business solutions, spreadsheets start to take over and get out of control. When your business starts to abandon your business systems for the humble spreadsheets, reporting becomes inaccurate and multiple versions of the same data proliferate across your organisation. Human error becomes more frequent and it's hard to standardise and scale your operations.
Most ERP solutions still enable you to leverage excel with plugins to keep your data fresh, accurate, up to date and controlled.
5. Productivity
When productivity is under scrutiny, poor IT infrastructure is often to blame. Arming your employees with the right tools is the perfect antidote. Many of our clients are unable to provide remote or mobile access into their business critical systems due to inability or security risks. In real life, this can slow down your ability to take business critical actions and ultimately, if your employees can't enter data into your systems, you can't see it either. Automation is also often non-existent with older systems and you can spend hours replicating data from one system into another.
The Cloud ERP solutions of today enable you and your employees to work remotely, action items on the go and do business faster and more efficiently. New innovations mean that repetitive manual tasks can be automated with intelligent algorithms, allowing you to maintain headcount whilst scaling your business.
Sound familiar?
If your business is suffering from some of these problems and you'd like to kickstart your ERP project, shortlist vendors or just ask us a question, speak to one of our team today.
