“Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning.” – Narayan Murthy
I would give more than half credit to the customers for the success of your business, as without buyers your business is stagnant. However, a considerable percentile of the success also depends on your team of manforce especially if you are in the service or hand skilled industry. Without your workers your business means nothing. It is never possible to grow single handedly. It is certainly the result of good leadership and harmonious teamwork that a company reaches its goals.
As an entrepreneur, it is your prime focus to nurture and train a whole crew of skilled, honest, loyal and efficient workers, who in return will bring to you productivity and growth. To drive optimal efficiency and productivity, your workers need to be freed from the burden of daily operational activities. The intelligent use of Technology plays a vital role in the process.A robust, consolidated, conducive ERP software which fits best to the needs of your business uniquely, will act as a catalyst to success and growth.
An organization big or small is divided into several departments based on functions. Administration, finance, marketing, sales, customer service, public relations, inventory, logistics, production, HR, exports are some of the departments. In the conventional business process, each department functioned as watertight compartments with inadequate interaction between them on a real time basis. Each information or data had to be fetched from the relevant department either through phone, email or messaging. Apart from being time consuming and cumbersome, it will also lead to duplication of data. With the introduction of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), business processes became easier enabling integration of various functions within the organization and availability of data on real-time basis helping in quick decision making.
Features of ERP that help a company improve the productivity of the workers:
- Centralised systems: In government administration and planning, decentralization may be good in certain situations where there should be intelligence about the needs and requirements at the local panchayat level. In business, if information flow is decentralized, the decision makers will have no idea of the whole picture at any point of time. There will be a time lag –fetching information by email, letters or phone. In a competitive industry, it can impact the firm’s growth prospects as they can’t respond fast to changing market conditions and consumer demand. With the use of an ERP the reports and analysis of the company can be viewed with a single unified system.
- Share a central database: In an organization there are several types of data, consumer data, employee data, production data, inventory data, financial data. All companies use databases to create, store and manage data. Advanced ERP systems can work any database, any platform and with any operating system. Some databases are inter-related- for eg. employee data is shared by HR, Finance and administration but in ERP systems each division doesn’t maintain a list of employees but fetches it from the HR Department. Therefore, duplication of data is avoided. Central database enables economizing on database maintenance costs.
- It is user-friendly: Enterprise Resource Planning is not a sophisticated system that is only for programmers, managers, decision makers or techies in an organization. The system recognizes the importance of the most junior employee and they have a role as end users. They are the people who input data- for eg. in the sales department, the sales clerk inputs customer data such as name, email id, age, address, mobile number and purchase details to create sales order and subsequently the invoice. The company also needs the help of functional consultants who understands the various business processes with an organization – such as Finance, HR, Accounting, Inventory and help in the development of modules. They define the requirements, parameters and what all types of data, type of permissions required.
- Customizable and adaptable: ERP system is not a software solution that makes the organization adapt its business processes to conform to its system but can be customized to the requirements of the company irrespective of the operating systems, database systems being used. ERP solutions are not for large organizations alone. It is now available for small and medium businesses too. Morever, ERP systems can be implemented in a modular fashion which means huge upfront costs need not be incurred by an organization if it has financial constraints. Implementation is at the core of ERP solutions and the success lies in understanding of the business processes that is usually done by functional consultants either available in-house or outsourced. When the requirements of the firm, software, servers integration doesn’t match, it is said that there are gaps in implementation which are addressed by the technical consultants.
- Advantage of the cloud and mobility: Many companies find implementation of ERP on site to be expensive, taking more space and integration within the organization. Luckily, there are cloud service providers who enable full or partial storage of data, software and the platform to run it. This enables companies who have critical data that needs to be secure to be held in their own servers while getting more generic work done in the cloud platform. ERP systems are also deployable on the mobile, so that salesmen, marketing executives can update information in real time enabling quicker response from the decision makers in the corporate headquarters. With cloud has emerged Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as–a–service (PaaS) and several pay-per-use packages which has drastically reduced implementation time required in the traditional on-site models and drastically cut costs of ERP implementation.
- All stakeholders feel the difference with ERP: The use of ERP systems not only benefits the employees and the organization but also the consumers. These days, organisations value customer loyalty and most often they just need to tell their mobile number to get loyalty bonus, get billed quicker at the retail store and stay informed about discounts and offers of the company. It is a win-win situation for both the customer and the company. Those not requiring a printed bill are delivered an e-bill in real time thanks to ERP systems. A bank customer gets money any time of the day or is able to deposit money at cash deposit machines 24/7 because of a third party payment gateway integrated with your ERP. In an ERP led hospital, you need not carry your previous records with you every time as they are all saved in the patient database.It is impossible to function orderly without ERP software in today’s times.
- Improves efficiency across departments: As ERP integrates each department into a central database, finance, marketing, manufacturing and inventory control improves. Data comes from sales, finance, and various business units with different sets of numbers, ERP integrates them giving a snapshot for the CEO to assess. Reporting formats and procedures can be custom made for each organization enabling collaboration and discussion between departments. Manufacturing processes can be streamlined using automation features of ERP, inventory control is better through the centralized system and the customer is taken care of in the entire life-cycle of the product – whether it is five years or seven years.
- ERP is known to give positive ROI in a year: The implementation of ERP may take one to three years in a conventional scenario but with Cloud computing the time frame has come down. According to surveys, companies which were focussed on return on investment (ROI) at the beginning of the ERP implementation could see significant results happening after a year. It could be in the form of cost reductions, quality improvements, customer satisfaction, reduced employee count, redeployment, and improved market share.
