Improve business productivity and agility with modern ERP
EXECUTIVE BRIEF
You don't know what you don't know
How do you run your business? Are you doing weekly planning on a whiteboard? Do you keep track of inventory in spreadsheets? Can you measure performance against key performance indicators (KPIs)? If you rely on a legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, can key stakeholders even utilize it, or do they need to roll up their needs to a few select “super users?” Does your business have lots of data, but it exists in silos and requires time-consuming and error-prone manual processes before it can be shared across business units?
Even if you answer “yes” to these questions you might think, “but what we have works—it’s good enough.” In today’s fast-moving, quickly changing, increasingly competitive business environment, good enough is no longer good enough. Today’s organizations need complete enterprise-wide visibility and the ability to collaborate across the business. They need the agility and flexibility to quickly respond to a changing market while growing the business to take advantage of new opportunities—ideally, before the competition. Today’s way of doing business is data driven and you need the right tools to access, share, and leverage this data in order to make business decisions to not just survive, but thrive.
Modern ERP requires an organization-wide cultural change
The goal of a modern ERP system is to bring your people together with shared goals. This requires a major cultural shift in thinking across the enterprise. It requires a data-driven mindset across the business. While much of that change is typically driven by management, enlisting change agents from all levels of the company can give employees a sense of ownership toward the changes they’re about to undertake.
From digital operations platforms to composable ERP
The modern ERP system’s origin dates back more than 100 years, when it began as economic order quantity (EOQ)— a decision tool for optimizing inventory costs. Over time, additional functionality was added, like finance and CRM, and the individual components were integrated into a single overarching, albeit difficult to use, system.
A simplified definition of ERP is a system or solution that businesses use to manage day-to-day business activities, such as procurement, project management, operations, and sales. ERP systems can also introduce automation that replaces manual tasks. The goal of an ERP system is to improve business productivity and agility.
As these business systems evolved, they met the needs of their times, but their functionality was directly limited by the available technology. Today's most modern, flexible ERP systems are built on enterprise application platforms (EAPs) and support a fully connected ecosystem with open architecture and democratized access to critical data. Some key features modern ERP systems bring include:
Benefits of a modern ERP system
Implementing or upgrading to a modern ERP can cause significant business disruption, causing an organization to lose focus, or even “break” business processes that the company looked upon as core to their success. As scary as this may seem, the productivity gains and business improvements that your business will miss out on far outweigh the costs and risks.
Modernization has a strategic impact on your business. Without access to a modern ERP system, it can be difficult or even impossible to support new business models and benefit from the improvements in KPIs that come with a successful ERP implementation.
Some of the major benefits of a modern ERP system include:
Embrace a data-driven mindset
Saying that ERP systems help organizations manage day-to-day business activities is not only an oversimplification, but it doesn’t address the breadth and reach of modern ERP systems. Not only do modern ERP systems touch and connect virtually every operational corner of a business, they also help foster a data-driven mindset across the business. In doing so, they empower key stakeholders to leverage this information for critical decision-making that can grow the business and increase the bottom line.
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