While your business product or service may be well-defined and streamlined, how are you managing all of the processes on the backend? From marketing and customer relationships to human resources, accounting, inventory management, and maintenance, there is an almost endless list of things to coordinate and track. Most businesses establish systems as they grow, which often ends up involving paper forms, spreadsheets, and manual data entry. If they do implement software, the result is often a different software for every need. This creates an inefficient process, as information is siloed in various spreadsheets and software. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solves this problem by streamlining all the information and processes in a single software.
ERP software integrates daily business processes and provides real-time data in one central hub. This allows businesses to gather accurate insights, detect problems, and take action to grow and improve. It is effective and useful for companies of all sizes, not just “enterprises”.
How Can it Help You?
One of the greatest benefits of ERP software is that all employees and management have convenient access to the same data. So, when they’re making business decisions, everyone is on the same page. For example, you may have separate software or processes for invoicing, work orders, and customer relationship management (CRM). The accounting department may have a billing backlog due to the required data entry to transfer work orders to invoices. Invoices may be sent with missing line items because they aren’t integrated with work orders. And, your sales team may be underquoting projects because they can’t see that the work orders ended up with more hours or other issues that decreased the profit margin on a project. With ERP software, employees in all three departments would be working with the same reliable information.
Enterprise Resource Planning software enables you to better manage your daily operations, as well as scaling and growing your business of any size. Also, moving these processes to software provides the benefits of digital processes. This includes eliminating double data entry, automating notifications and certain systems, and access to auto-populated, real-time reporting. You can analyze your business as a whole instead of pulling insights from several separate reports. ERP software gives you visibility ranging from the big picture down to a granular level that is almost impossible without software.
What Does Enterprise Resource Planning Software Cover?
Every system will be different and many can be configured to your business’s unique needs. Depending on your business and the software you choose, it can help you oversee, track, and analyze data for:
- Managing finances including accounting and invoicing
- Supply chain and inventory management
- Customer relationship management
- Human resources
- Project management
- General asset management and maintenance
- Sales and marketing
ERP software will streamline all of your processes and integrate them into a single system. So, many businesses turn to ERP software more for the benefits of time savings, accurate data, real-time information, and easy reporting. Additionally, consolidating to an ERP software will eliminate the several different subscriptions to separate software for each of the processes.
Streamline Your Business with ERP Software
The business impact of streamlining your processes can be monumental. One Redlist user experienced a 40% growth in their company, as well as identifying and closing a $450,000 accounts receivable gap, after transitioning to a single software. To remain agile and competitive in business today, you need to be operating efficiently and be able to make quick decisions. Without access to accurate business data, those quick decisions can lead you in the wrong direction. ERP software ensures that you have your business data at your fingertips, and you don’t have to log in to several different systems to get it. This is essential for growing your business and increasing profitability.
