Corporations that refuse to move with the times, or do so too slowly, are bound to lose precious market share to more agile competitors.
Becoming a more engaged organisation is a significant undertaking. Large companies built on decades of iterative process refinement often find it difficult to respond to new trends. It may be easy to turn a speedboat on command, but altering the course of an ocean liner requires forward planning and teamwork.
This is where Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) steps in.
ERP, by definition, is the process by which a company manages and integrates the most important parts of its business. This is often directed by an Enterprise Resource Planning system that automates and takes stock of critical areas, such as planning, purchasing, inventory, sales, marketing, finance, and human resources.
Although many corporations already have these elements in place, they often exist in isolation. Inventory planning will operate independently from sales or purchasing. Human resources may function without the automated input of finance. As antiquated as it may seem, this represents the traditional enterprise management model.
Any modern corporate manager or employee should be able to identify the inherent weaknesses associated with a lack of integration immediately. A company that is unable to unify itself internally will have a tough time of swiftly reacting to external demand.
The upside for ERP planning is business intelligence.
A manufacturing business focused on the food industry could use ERP software to link the purchase of raw materials and basic production to remove unnecessary inventory while giving managers a real-time view of sales, ordering, product packaging and shipping.
This level of traceability allows for swift response in the event of a faulty product. Using ERP software it is possible for chain store managers immediately to trace the default to a batch to determine if similar offerings, no matter where they were sold, were also defective.
The common misperception is that ERP is a focus area for production- or manufacturing-based businesses. It can also be applied to service-type organisations with considerable success.
A company that offers training as a service could, for example, use ERP to gain an immediate view of what courses students have enrolled in, payments over 24 months, courses completed, additional expenses against each student and total profitability per head. The benefits here, from a human resources and planning perspective, are tremendous.
Enterprise Resource Planning is, without doubt, the future for modern business and will act as a cornerstone for business intelligence and big data analytics as these frameworks are developed.
Can your organisation afford to be left behind? If not then might be time to take the next step.
