Companies put a lot of time, effort, and money into evaluating, purchasing, implementing, and maintaining ERP systems. They are worth the effort, but if managed incorrectly, you can slip backward and revert to being the company you set out to correct when you initially purchased your ERP.
There is no shortage of three-letter acronyms in the software industry. Sometimes it can be confusing to try to figure out what they mean, much less what the solutions do. Let’s take a closer look at both.
The upside to buying enterprise resource planning (ERP) that is not custom-written exclusively for one company is the economy of scale. Since it is written for the masses, the cost per user plummets. Microsoft Office certainly costs much more to develop than the few hundred dollars it costs to license. One of the other upsides is thousands or tens of thousands of users create a robust community that quickly flushes out weaknesses in functionality, helping the software become stronger.
It’s not as simple as one may think for companies to execute an ERP and CRM integration. In many cases, there is no strategy as internal departments do their own thing. For example, accounting may adopt QuickBooks and production may use a non-integrated system or supplement QuickBooks with a plethora of spreadsheets. This scenario is one we commonly see.
The roots of today’s ERP systems were pretty humble. They were originally designed to take and ship orders, figure out what had to be made and bought, track who owed who money, and produce financial statements. Today, an ERP modules list covers all of that and so much more.
You may have been asked to find ERP software for your company but are still wondering, “What is an ERP system?” An internet search of the term “ERP” will yield quite a bit of information, and not all of it is helpful. So let’s start with an ERP definition: ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, which refers to the management of business processes in an organization. These processes typically include:
If you are a small- to medium-sized manufacturing company that is growing, you are likely experiencing growing pains. Those pains can come from a lot of different directions, but in our business, we hear about growing pains as they relate to software. As a business grows it becomes more sophisticated and complex, and in turn, the software tools used to manage processes need to match that level of sophistication.
