Although the term mrp was coined by Joe Orlicky back in the 1940s and ERP came along in the late 80s there are still many organizations that don’t truly understand the value of ERP.
While streamlining and automating your financial processes is a huge benefit, that is only one piece to a much larger puzzle.
Successful ERP solutions enable businesses to capture, manage and translate data into business insight from a wide range of activities.
An erp system is not just a typewriter- it makes the right data available in the right context for informed contextual decision making at all levels of the operation.
Both for key business tactical operational decisions, the Sales and Operation plan, the budgets, forecasts and strategies, the short and the long term, erp is the glue that aligns your business processes, plans delegates work, monitors and reports and notifies progress and helps to evaluate changes, threats and opportunities and to manage constraints and priorities
Erp can help create new levels of efficiency and reduce manual tasks through streamlining, and directed process automation, a and exception reporting and dashboards.. It can reduce errors with profiles, policies and templates, and provide more control with workflow processes, and analysis tools.
ERP provides a platform to re-engineer your business processes to fit with best practices, and adapt to changing technology and market demands and opportunities. Understand your real across and how you make profits-which customers and products. What if different scenarios.
Ultimately, ERP is a platform on which to design a better business. Organizations who don’t share this vision for ERP will struggle to reach a solid ROI.
ERP used to be reserved for large organizations, who could afford to take on such an expensive transformation. However, thanks to advances both in technology and infrastructure, and changes in licensing modules, and the emergence of cloud technology ERP solutions are accessible and affordable to businesses of any size through the cloud.
Organizations no longer have to invest half their earnings into hardware and IT staff, and can get up and running much quicker than ever before.
Be open to change
ERP is not about fitting your existing practices to a technology system. While that may apply in some aspects, the goal is really to improve your processes with a system that can enhance their accuracy, automate them, and integrate with your partners and suppliers.
While a budget usually can put a cap on ERP projects, don’t settle for less than what’s possible. There are many ways to utilize ERP when you understand what others have done and what is possible. Don’t buy a Ferrari and drive it in first gear and skimp on servicing and driver training. Don’t spend money on endless reports and customisations to suit every employee’s whim. Be prepared withy our report design, business processes and data – use self elearning resources, get involved early so you can do your own testing, and use consultants for where they can most add value without wasting their time.
Key factors
An ERP implementation can literally transform your business, but also carries a certain level of risk. Projects can fail to reach positive ROI if the following factors aren’t met:
◾Support from senior management
◾Planning: time, roles, scope, budget and process analysis
◾Consultation and support, both functional and technical
◾Go-live process: phased vs. big bang
◾Training, available resources, and user willingness to adopt. ◾Test! Test every aspect of the system with each of your users as much as possible before going live.
Find out why every Synergy project goes live on time to budget- in 23+ years no Synergy project has ever failed to go live and none has ever needed reimplementation.
Ask our customers. Find out why we were awarded highest customer satisfaction by Microsoft.