Business Growing Pains: Is It Time for ERP?
Accounting solutions like QuickBooks are a great choice when first setting up a company, but once your business becomes more complex and grows to $3 million or more, employees need additional functionality that just isn’t available in an accounting solution. The decision to step up to ERP is a hard one to make. How do you know it’s time?
Familiar Business Growing Pains
Growth experienced by most organizations typically includes adding more employees, warehouses and other locations, customers, and many more product SKUs. Your business structure, accounting and tax rules become more complicated. You may have numerous systems, including CRM, web stores, POS systems and other business applications, and employees are likely re-entering data into these multiple systems. Most organizations at this point are experiencing business growing pains, and you may find that the issues below highlight your chief concerns.
Business Growing Pains:
Inventory Problems are Creating Disgruntled Customers
Without software to help effectively track your inventory, serious issues are impacting customer satisfaction and company profits. Employees are having problems managing inventory for multiple locations and warehouses. Customers are dissatisfied that you are understocked on popular items, and your profit margins are impacted due to overstock that hasn’t moved from your shelves.
What to Consider:
Lost Opportunities in Inventory Control
Waiting to migrate to ERP means you are delaying improvements in inventory control that would significantly improve customer relations and lower your overhead. You can achieve 97% inventory accuracy, improve inventory turns by 62% and reduce your inventory by 17%1 with a cloud SaaS ERP solution like Trek Cloud ERP. Tighter inventory control ensures your material costs are well-contained while at the same time improving inventory accuracy and stock availability.
Business Growing Pains:
Inaccuracy Due to Double Data Entry
Double data entry into disparate systems is taking up a significant amount of your employees’ time and leading to mistakes. Employees spend a portion of their day dealing with the outcomes of data entry errors, and those errors result in unhappy customers.
What to Consider:
Lost Opportunities in Overhead Reduction
Research shows that mid-market companies are able to reduce their administrative overhead by 12% and operational overhead by 13% following an ERP implementation.2 Efficiencies and reductions in staff time spent on manual processes such as double data entry are associated with a significant part of this savings.
Business Growing Pains:
Communication Breakdown
A quickening pace of activity in your business is leading to communication problems. Collaboration is difficult between your different departments. Communication frequently breaks down and important customer, order, shipment or schedule information is not being shared or gets overlooked. Paper forms and emailed requests get lost or are not distributed to everyone who needs them. You suspect that business cycles are taking far longer than they should due to the way your staff communicates and collaborates.
What to Consider:
Lost Opportunities in Operational Efficiency
There are real operational improvements and savings to be achieved when implementing ERP. Studies show that midmarket organizations implementing SaaS ERP see a 24% decrease in cycle times of key business processes over their first two years, and a 20% improvement in complete, on-time shipments.3 When you are able to improve your business cycle times and accuracy, you will in turn create more loyal customers and a positive reputation in your industry.
Business Growing Pains:
Lack of Visibility and Support for Business Complexity
Without more complete and robust capabilities provided by an ERP, you’re not able to effectively manage the supply chain and your multiple organizations and warehouses. Your team also doesn’t have visibility to all the data they need for effective and timely decision-making. You’re not able to solve some of your business problems or even learn that a problem exists until it becomes a major issue.
What to Consider:
Lost Opportunities in Visibility and Decision-Making
Consider this: midsize companies that implement cloud SaaS ERP see a 46% decrease in time-to-decision during their first year, in comparison to an 18% decrease for those that implement on-premise ERP. Having immediate access to all your data from your phone or tablet makes a huge difference in how quickly your team can respond to issues. Integrating cloud ERP with your other business applications gives you immediate visibility to all your data, providing you with reporting and dashboards for real-time insight to the status of your business. Your ERP will pick up where your accounting software left off, filling in the software functionality that has been missing in your business.
Ready to Move to Cloud ERP?
If these issues are impacting your business, consider moving to cloud SaaS ERP. Cloud SaaS ERP is a proven and affordable step up from accounting software for growing businesses. Give us a call at 1-888-575-8445 or email us at [email protected]. We would be glad to assist you in exploring ERP options and best-fit solutions for your organization.
Sources cited
1Aberdeen Group. SaaS ERP in Wholesale and Distribution: Enabling Communication Across a Wide Network.
2Aberdeen Group. ERP in the Midmarket: Enabling Functionality and Simplicity to Combat Complexity.
3Aberdeen Group. SaaS and Cloud ERP Observations: Enabling Collaboration in the Midmarket.