Apart from the overall benefit of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) supporting daily activities that make up your business operations, do you also know ERP drives innovations? It is more like this popular idiom, “using one stone to kill two birds”.
By the very nature of ERP systems, it causes your business to innovate. When innovation is in your business, you get to operate faster, efficiently, and also achieve more.
With over 25 years of deploying business management software, we have seen companies appreciating the usage of the software. They were able to discover some loopholes and came up with innovative ways to address them. That being said, let’s dive into the topic.
Powerful Ways ERP Drives Innovations.
1. Marrying Stand Alone Systems as One
It is very common to see businesses using different stand-alone software for different aspects of the business. Accounts have their own software, the human resources department has theirs, so also the inventory/store manager. All this software requires maintenance, which translates costs.
This also beget questions like, how are all these systems connected? What is the cost of maintaining these systems? And other associated problems like consolidation errors from different sources.
But with ERP systems, you get to bring all the stand-alone systems under a single software and dashboard. This reduces redundancy, increases operational efficiency, and also make you have a 360-degree view of your business in a single dashboard. You get to discover areas you can develop on.
2. Business Process Re-Engineering
One of the ways ERP drives innovation is by giving you the chance to re-evaluate your entire business process. The ERP software is developed such that you discover processes that are impeding efficiency and improvement. Your software vendor/partner will also give you valuable inputs.
It is not strange seeing businesses sticking to what they are used to doing. As a software vendor, we advise such businesses on the broken processes that were discovered. We also tell them how it is affecting their business and encourage them not to just transfer their old processes to the ERP software.
When reviewing the business processes in the pre-implementation stage, we also give them a fresh perspective. Some business processes aren’t even the current best practices in their industry.
3. Accessing Real-Time Information
Another benefit of the innovations ERP systems brings is, it gives your business and employees to make decisions on the go. Having access to real-time data about your business gives your personnel the initiative to come up with innovative strategies to serve your customers better.
Access to immediate data about sales lets you respond to sales patterns, making sure you stock the right products at right time and the right quatities.
Management also needs real-time information to make strategic decisions for growth. This is where the ERP system comes in. Information from ERP drives innovation to make your business function optimally.
4. Harmonization
With the ERP system integrating different units and also providing real-time information, managers and units are able to work together thereby increasing operational collaborations. Employees across your business can access information to perform their tasks.
For instance, information from a department is the data for another department. With collaboration on a single dashboard, it reduces errors that are associated with transferring information.
When employees collaborate, they can come up with innovative suggestions that are beneficial to the business.
Conclusively, with the ERP system managing the overall business processes, it is expected that ERP drives innovations that will minimize inputs and maximize outputs, without jeopardizing your customers’ and employees’ satisfaction.
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