What are the Primary Business Benefits of an ERP System?
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems provide many business benefits to organizations. The simplest of answers to the question, What are the primary business benefits of an ERP system, is that ERP creates order out of chaos. With ERP, organizations can more effectively manage their business processes and gain insight to their data across departments and locations. Also when exploring, What are the primary business benefits of an ERP system, automating your back office functions and integrating all the divisions of an operation are key factors to achieving a Return on Investment. If you are involved in an ERP selection process, the following list will help you and your project team.
Answers to the Question: What are the Primary Business Benefits of an ERP System?
This list provides the top 7 primary business benefits of an ERP system, and is based on feedback we’ve heard from our customers. The list gives project teams the foundational information they need to begin talking about an ERP Selection and Implementation Process.
1. Achieving Traceability and Compliance
In a growing number of industries, there is a need to be able to accurately track a product from its point of origin through all the changes made to it in the supply chain until it reaches the consumer. Features you may need include being able to track lot and batch numbers, expiration dates, ingredients, quality control test results and other data, in case of product recalls or other issues. Enterprise software like Trek Cloud ERP provides the solutions necessary to help you effectively comply with your traceability and compliance regulations.
2. Eliminating Manual Processes
By automating many of your current manual processes with system-driven capabilities in your ERP, your employees will have more time to focus on the core of your business. With automation in place, your employees will have more time to help grow your business such as by providing better assistance to customers and expanding your reach. You will have more capacity to add new products and services and will be able to deliver an even better service.
3. Reducing Key Business Cycle Times
Using a suite of ERP solutions that are tightly integrated together will help you to break down operational silos and improve processes and communication across your entire organization. This, in turn, helps you to improve efficiency and reduce the cycle times of your key business processes. Here are some of the efficiency gains you can expect by adopting Trek Cloud ERP:
- Customer Order Cycle Times cut in half
- Expedited Orders cut in half
- 20% improvement in complete, on-time shipments
Additionally, if you select a cloud ERP solution like Trek Cloud ERP, you can take advantage of well-built web APIs that allow you to integrate the ERP with other software. You can integrate your ERP with your webstores, Point of Sale systems, CRM and other software to improve operational performance.
4. Streamlining Communications
Without an ERP system, employees are trying to communicate in other ways and are dealing with miscommunication: lost sticky notes, forgotten conversations, overlooked emails, and overwhelming numbers of paper forms. For your employees, this benefit alone answers the question for them as to What are the Primary Business Benefits of an ERP System? You can greatly improve collaboration with ERP. An ERP system can be configured to address your organization’s unique approval rules and established process steps. The system then replaces manual communication with consistent work flows that prompt employees when it’s time to do the next step in a process.
5. Enforcing Accountability
Your ERP system is set up so that entries, approvals and other actions are tied to Users based on their login. Users are given one or more Roles in the system that allows them to access the necessary features and data relevant to them. This setup allows you to more easily determine where issues occurred and make adjustments to prevent problems from recurring in the future. Finally, you’ll have a tool in place that automatically enforces accountability based on users, and their roles and actions.
6. Gaining Control of Your Spend
Many tools in an ERP system help you gain control of your spend. For example, you can fully automate your Procurement process. You’ll be able to utilize thresholds, set approval steps and gain control over spending. Having business-wide insight to the organization’s requirements for materials and products means purchasing can negotiate quantity-based terms. Multiple requisitions can be consolidated into a single purchase order. You can set min-max levels, make better use of price lists, and order the right amounts on time. Cost savings that are commonly achieved with a Cloud ERP include
- 17% decrease in inventory
- 62% improvement in inventory turns
- 28% decrease in stock-to-sale ratio
7. Increasing Customer Satisfaction
It all really comes down to this. When you are considering, What are the Primary Business Benefits of an ERP System, it’s all about creating more satisfied customers. When you improve your organization’s speed and accuracy, customers are happier. When you reduce your overhead, you have the ability to pass some savings on to customers.
The way that a business operates has a profound impact on customer satisfaction. By improving and streamlining your business, you deliver a better service. Positive customer experiences lead to long-term business relationships and referrals.
When considering what are the primary business benefits of an ERP system, these three capabilities result in more satisfied customers:
- Having access to timely & accurate information
- Having tight control of inventory
- Providing fast order fulfillment
Ready to Consider ERP? Gain Freedom in the Cloud with Trek Cloud ERP
ERP is available in both on-premise and cloud-hosted environments. When you select Trek Cloud ERP, you gain a secure business system that provides for even greater productivity gains. That’s because the system is more accessible. You can access the system any time, from anywhere and any device with a web browser. This helps your employees keep business moving along efficiently from wherever they are, without delays or interruptions. For example, your sales teams and off-site managers can access real-time data on their dashboards and complete transactions remotely.
You’ll also see a quicker ROI thanks to Trek Cloud ERP being offered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. No special hardware or software installations are required. This reduces your ERP cost dramatically. You can use the equipment you already have. System infrastructure and system security are taken care of for you in the cloud. By choosing cloud ERP over on-premise ERP, businesses typically see
- 46% improvement in time-to-decision
- Half as much data loss and down time as on-premise ERP
Learn more about cloud ERP to further address the question, What are the primary business benefits of an ERP system, with our article, What is Cloud ERP?
Have questions? Feel free to contact us, we love talking about ERP and would be glad to address your questions!