A widely-quoted Forrester Research statistic from a few years ago showed that half of all ERP customers at the time were using old software releases; some as many as four years old or more. The reason? Most small business leaders will say they don’t have the time, personnel, or budget to take on an update to the ERP system-there’s never a perfect time to implement.
Your Data is Unmanageable
Each one of your departments – sales, financing, marketing, fulfillment, etc. – generates a flood of data. Often this data is difficult to share, access, and update between departments, making it time and labor-intensive to handle routine tasks like onboarding a new client or customer. With an ERP, all of this data is shared and automatically updated across the board when any change is made. That eliminates a tremendous number of administrative hassles and avoidable mistakes.
Your Insights Are Ineffective
When your business runs on disparate IT solutions, it’s especially difficult to glean meaningful, impactful insights from the data you have at your disposal. Strategic decision making will always be imperfect when it’s based on only part of the picture. Since an ERP integrates all your data under one easy-to-access umbrella, you can more clearly see the advantages/disadvantages that will affect you moving forward.
Business Needs Are Outgrowing ERP Capability
You know why you bought your first ERP system-to help manage a growing company. But if incrementally increasing maintenance fees and limited-user license fees are adding up as the team’s headcount grows, you may be dealing with an ERP system that doesn’t scale well. ERP should support and streamline your team’s growth, not hinder it or generate more work.
Not Addressing Customer Requirements
In any enterprise scenario customers, suppliers, and stakeholders always want straightforward reach to business data corresponding to billing, shipping, and inventory. Customers particularly don’t like to bear the trouble of making calls to access some information. This is where older systems seem to be fully unequipped to allow access to business data without compromising on security. Now modern cloud-based ERP solutions can deliver quick and instant data access from anywhere and anytime. This is a key reason for enterprises to consider taking onboard new ERP systems.
The ERP Can’t Meet The Latest Regulatory Requirements
When an older ERP system is unable to meet the regulatory requirements like the taxation rules and other compliance regulations for the respective industries, it can be a necessity to opt for a new ERP system. Since these regulations change very frequently and almost every year, the ERP system should be able to accommodate new guidelines and regulations to make the process smooth and frictionless. Often the traditional legacy ERP solutions are unable to meet the evolving regulatory requirements and this is another reason for businesses to prefer the latest cloud-based solutions.
Expensive IT Infrastructure With No Big Performance Gain
In many companies, it has been observed that a lot of resources and expenses are simply wasted because of creating separate IT infrastructure for different departments leading to large cost overhead and unexpected performance-drop in terms of output. This is where an integrated ERP solution powered by cloud service can do wonders. With a single integrated system, you can deal with the IT Consulting Services Company in USA.
Enhanced Inventory Management
The maintenance and management of inventory involving the right kind of manpower are crucial for improving the business bottom line. But this is not possible with disconnected departments working and managing their inventories separately. With such disconnected inventory management involving several departments, calculating the inventory precisely and timely becomes really difficult. In contrast, a comprehensive and integrated ERP solution can help a business manage the entire inventory efficiently with a single software.
Safeguarding Sensitive Data
There is no dearth of cybersecurity threats now. Keeping pace with the cutting edge technologies and innovations, hackers and security threats are also becoming more equipped to carry out data thefts and data breaches. This is why robust data security is something that no business now can compromise with. An ERP solution equipped with cutting edge security tools can just reduce the security vulnerabilities and risks to a great extent.
Hike In Maintenance Cost
Reducing the maintenance cost is essential for improving the business bottom line and by the same measure to boost the competitiveness of your business. In case your company pays a hefty sum of managing an on-premise hosting service, you should consider cloud-based hosting alternatives including services that charge on a pay per usage basis. Apart from opting for cloud hosting look for an integrated cloud ERP solution provider to get the benefits of the most efficient service at a lesser cost compared to your on-premise hosting.
Get Rid of Server Downtime
For every business-customer relationship is of paramount importance to maintain the reputation and consistent business growth. Since waiting to get their problems addressed is the most detested thing for most customers, businesses need to ensure a faster pace, performance, and complete absence of downtime from their digital interactions. Server downtime and performance glitches are the two major blots with most traditional enterprise IT systems. Cloud ERP systems in this respect can give your company’s digital footprint a complete makeover in respect of performance.
Conclusion
You don’t need to suffer from all these pain points to make an ERP solution worthwhile. Correcting just two or three of them can radically transform the way that you do business. Take a hard look at your recent performance, and decide if your next quarter would be better with an ERP in place.
