Your day-to-day workflows directly influence your operations. If they aren’t flowing like they should be, your employees, stakeholders, and customers can tell.
Fortunately, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can help you automate and simplify these critical processes.
Are you unclear about the purpose of ERP? Wondering if it’s right for your company? Today, we’re sharing ten reasons why these platforms exist and the benefits they can provide.
The Purpose of ERP Software
1. To Increase Organizational Efficiency
An efficient organization is a profitable one. If your processes are riddled with operational siloes, crossed wires, and bottlenecks, productivity will wane. When this happens, customer satisfaction drops along with revenue.
An ERP system can streamline your processes by automating time-consuming workflows, reducing duplicate work, and ensuring everyone’s working from the same set of data.
Ensuring a thorough ERP selection process is critical to selecting a system with functionality that can optimize your highest priority workflows.
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2. To Automate Manual Workflows
Are you still inputting all your accounting data into an Excel spreadsheet? Still creating your forecasts and reports in Word?
Relying on your employees to manually input data not only takes longer but it increases the risk of human error.
Employees are not machines, so there’s potential for even the best team member to slip up. There are certain documents, such as financial reports, where transposing just one number could have significant consequences.
When you allow an ERP system to take the reins, you can mitigate or even eliminate these risks altogether.
3. To Free Up Critical Employees
Are your best workers spending hours each day on manual tasks? Automation frees up your employees to focus on value-driving, mission-critical work. This helps them make more efficient use of their time, which can also improve morale.
4. To Strengthen Business Reporting
Business leaders need real-time, accurate data to fuel smart decision-making.
Many ERP systems include built-in reporting tools that gather data from across the enterprise. This way, you always know you’re working with the most recent and relevant information.
Some systems even leverage business intelligence (BI) to perform advanced analytics, making predictions and forecasts based on past patterns and real-time data.
Pro Tip: Be sure to focus on data management through ERP selection and implementation to ensure all your necessary legacy data is cleansed and properly migrated.
5. To Improve Customer Service
An ERP system enables team members to work across departments with ease. This means that if a customer calls with a question or complaint, the customer sales rep can easily access their sales account to understand more about their purchase history.
This allows them to deliver targeted, personalized support that goes far beyond boilerplate templates. Quick data access also means faster response times, improved order accuracy, and smoother deliveries.
6. To Lower Operational Costs
By streamlining your business processes and best practices, you’ll naturally lower the costs required to perform your daily operations. Employees will become more efficient, and your resource utilization ratio will improve.
You can also lower costs associated with downtime. This is especially the case if you invest in customized ERP training to make sure all team members know how to use the tools at their fingertips.
7. To Create a Consistent Business Infrastructure
When your back-office teams are using the same tools as your front-office workers, everything becomes cohesive and consistent. All your business activities have the same look and feel, which helps strengthen your brand image and improve recognition.
8. To Enhance Communication and Collaboration
How many times have your employees had to stop what they were doing to track down a file halfway across the office? This process might have been the norm years ago, but it isn’t necessary with ERP.
Once all your data is migrated to an ERP platform, authorized users can access it just by logging into their dashboard. This means less time searching and sorting through tomes of data you don’t need just to find the one report that you do.
This also makes it easier for departments to communicate and collaborate with one another, even if they’re separated by geography and time zones.
9. To Lower Inventory Costs
An ERP system, such as one of the top ERP systems for manufacturing, allows users to obtain deep insight into inventory management operations. With this data, you can easily see the exact amount of product you have on hand. You also have access to past purchase histories, and you can create accurate forecasts about what buyer behavior might look like in the future.
You can leverage this information to keep your inventory levels optimized to avoid common issues associated with over-stocks and under-stocks.
10. To Reduce Cybersecurity Risks
When all your data is scattered across disparate locations, it can weaken your data security and make your systems more vulnerable to attack. Stored into an ERP system, it’s better safeguarded against those risks.
For one, ERP systems have integrated data security measures to ensure only authorized users with valid login credentials can access the information stored within them. This helps protect your most sensitive data, including employee records and financial documents.
Are Operational Inefficiencies Holding You Back From Optimized Productivity and Performance?
An ERP solution can address your pain points and help you unlock new potential.
We’ve only listed ten of the reasons that ERP technology exists. The full purpose of ERP is much more nuanced. The ways that ERP transforms your organization may differ from the way it transforms your competitors.
To learn more about how these systems work and determine if your company could benefit from one, request an ERP consultation below.
