By now, you should be aware of the benefits you can reap from your ERP system. Last week you would have delved into Phase 1, which investigated how you can enhance and leverage higher level benefits from your ERP system. Your ERP system can do everything your accounting system can do plus more. It is recommended that you read last week’s blog, Phase 1: Enhancement and Leveraging Higher Level Benefits, to revise these benefits. Now everything is bedded down in terms of ERP system operations and efficiency, it’s time to gain some useful insights from your ERP system that allows you to maximise your business growth. These systems and processes can automate business, which takes the onus off the owner and minimises manual data entry errors. Let’s have a look at how we can achieve this.
Your ERP system is a powerful, fully customisable solution that can help your business grow by forecasting future trends to help you identify and manage your business risk to ensure you have the competitive edge to outcompete your competitors.
Workflows
ERP systems automate your business processes to provide insights into your accounting, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, marketing, and human resources. Automate workflows to reduce the risk of human error and ensure your tasks aren’t overlooked. It allows your organisation’s processes to become efficient and streamlined. Automated workflows can grow with your business and ensure it meets your business’ needs in a dynamic and adaptive way.
Workflows allow you to complete tasks more efficiency. They allow your business to save time by allowing your staff to focus on more important, innovative tasks that can grow your business rather than having your employees complete repetitive and mindless tasks. Automating your workflows increase employee effectiveness and reduce labour costs. Additionally, errors are reduced since the workflows are automatic and therefore input errors are minimised, since your staff don’t have to input this key information. This also saves your business money!
Automated workflows ensure you never miss a payment, you could approve sales, orders, invoices, discounts, and purchase requisitions automatically, which reduce any penalty fees added for late payments. This also allows you to avoid accidental duplicate payments and make sure that you never confuse which invoices you have already paid.
This increased visibility and enhanced communications allow you to optimise decisions support and effectiveness.
Automated workflows allow you to deploy solutions quickly and make changes to this when your business requirements change, or new opportunities arise. You can also automatically tack information with reporting functionality that allow you to observe your processes, savings and performance metrics and make better business decisions to lead to grow your business. This allows you to increase the efficiency of your processes with automated workflows that notify employees when they need to complete a process and ensure that no action or process is overlooked.
Deeper Level Understanding of the Trends and Drivers of the Business
ERP systems provide you with an immense amount of information that gives you the ability and power to grow your business. These systems collect and organise key business information and streamline your processes to increase efficiently and expand your operations beyond what you thought would be possible. These systems allow you to discover ways to improve your processes and increase your efficiency by using the customisable reports provided to you by your ERP system. This places all the important information you need in an easy to access format that allows you to spend less time searching for this data across multiple systems.
Your ERP system can highlight your efficient and inefficient processes with visibility that allows you to capture better and richer data and improve your business. This gives you an immense power to trump your competitors by applying strategic thought to these identified trends.
Competitive Analysis
What sets you apart from your competitors? Why would a potential customer choose your business over another similar business? Your ERP system is a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that enables you to review and capture information about customer and supplier trends to ensure your business is meeting their needs effectively.
ERP systems provide you with complete visibility of your business, which allows you to determine where a problem is arising quickly to ensure it can be sorted out before it becomes an issue. Real-time data allows you to monitor and manage the projects you have on the go. This allows you to schedule your time more efficiently and give more accurate measures of how long particular jobs are going to take. This subsequently enables an accurate timeline to be established for your customers, which leads to a higher satisfaction rate.
Real-time data also allows you to fully understand your customers and provides your business with insights that enables you to meet your customer’s need. These insights also put you in front of your competitors by safeguarding the future of your business by evaluating your existing processes and redesigning your processes to become more tailored to your customer’s demands. ERP systems also provide you with advanced monitoring and protection measures for your business and your customer’s data.
But why stop here?
Next week we’ll delve into Stage 4c (Phase 3) where we will discuss how we can use competitive advantage gained in Phase 2 to leverage and maximise your profit by reducing your company’s risk. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us!