No matter what size of business you own or run. ERP software is beneficial for all sizes of businesses provided you purchase an ideal enterprise resource planning software.
But the question is how companies use these systems to realize benefits, and what role each piece of the ERP software plays to help businesses succeed.
In this article, you will learn about the five common use cases of an ERP software and how this type of software can impact and help the different aspects of your business.
First, please answer the following:
Is your organization struggling with communication disconnects among the respective departments, disparate data and systems, operational inefficiencies, and time lags?
Are you looking for a potential remedy that can get your organization rid of these problems?
If yes, then you need to consider implementing an ERP software.
ERP software definition
An ERP software is a unified database and set of applications that brings together financials, supply chain, human resources, customer service and other data and business processes. An ERP implementation often delivers a fast return on investment (ROI via insights and efficiency gains that save the company money right away.
An ERP software doesn’t only help you through the above problems your organization is facing, but it also increases its business efficiency.
Being varied, ERP software offers deep levels of customization and allows your business to have enormous flexibility in its ERP options.
But it never means that the flexibility will help ease your buying decision.
Rather the existence of many different types of ERP systems makes it difficult for you to buy an ideal ERP system for your company.
Hence, before finalizing an ideal ERP system for your company, you should also familiarize yourself with your organization’s specific product, IT, operational infrastructure as well as business goals.
This way, you will not only be able to make an informed decision in buying an ideal ERP software for your organization but also save yourself from the unnecessary hassles and financial losses as faced by many.
Following are the five common ERP use cases that will help you make an informed decision in purchasing an ERP software for your company.
Top 5 ERP software use cases
1. Inventory Management
Before inventory management, a retailer’s operations team used to rely on physical counts, that is, it would track in a spreadsheet, for the existing inventory levels.
But warehouse workers found it very hard to confide in this information, as a result items regularly went out of stock because the company ordered more items only when the shelves were almost empty.
Besides, fulfillment was not as efficient as it was expected and worked slowly and warehouse employees had to struggle with a lot of problems when it came to finding the required products or items.
After the inventory management module,
The retailer now has implemented an inventory management module, which not only helps in showing real-time inventory levels but also updates on the available stock that’s on the go to the warehouse.
Every morning, an operation manager is able to compare the available inventory to sales data to ensure if the business needs to place any purchase orders (POs). Besides, the warehouse team helps in fulfilling more orders each day as the inventory management software shows the precise locations of all available products.
2. Purchasing
A manufacturing firm invests a lot of time searching for suppliers and creating quotes for the raw materials it needs for products-making.
An employee in the same manufacturing is assigned to physically send out quotes, liken them, choose a winner and, at the end, give a PO. Staffers generally forget to update the list of approved vendors and their contact information, further reducing the process
After the investigation of a purchasing module, the manufacturer helps in automating requests for quotes, storing all responses in one place, and sending out POs with a few clicks, thus saving much time.
The purchasing module has a current list of all suppliers and helps the manufacturer to keep track of the status of each outstanding PO.
3. Sales and Marketing
At a midsize distributor, an experienced sales team has become immensely frustrated with the work needed to bring about sales and quotes orders.
The reps find it difficult to track where prospects are kept in the sales pipeline and which customers need to be prepared to reorder.
The business also tries to access a larger audience of prospective buyers but is left with no option to organize marketing emails, contacts, and digital ads.
Thankfully, with the integration of an ERP system for sales and marketing, representatives can convert quotes into sales orders within a few minutes and then send system-based invoices to customers.
The marketing and sales teams can now figure out where any customer is standing in the sales cycle to ascertain the further steps.
Marketing tools help the distributor in importing lists as well as targeting the prospective clients with ads as well as emails across multiple channels, which gives rise to a 10% bump in annual revenue.
4. Manufacturing
A small-size manufacturing company, for its first few years, used to make use of spreadsheets and paper to keep track of existing raw materials and regular production numbers.
But as their business began to grow, those manual methods not only became time-consuming but also turned into a major roadblock.
As a result, a lot of valuable production time was lost and wasted when the materials ran out of stock, and really had to go through a tough time when calculating for the existing manufacturing capacity.
After investigation and implementation of a manufacturing ERP module, the company not only successfully carried out planned production for the following few months but also succeeded in comparing that against on-order and available supplies. They are also to keep track of output against that plan and, if demand goes high, increase by ordering more materials and creating additional employees.
5. Financial Management
Before the financial management module
A direct-to-consumer (D2C) company, which is single-mindedly focussed on outstanding customer service, though has a customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform, they are still making use of online banking tools and many different types of spreadsheets for the management of their finances.
Plus, they manually monitor all of their customer orders (accounts receivable) and purchase orders (accounts payable). All these processes not only consume much of their time but the lack of insight has led them to perilous financial spots many times.
After the financial management module
The company has now purchased and implemented a financial management module.
The module cannot only automatically record all AP & AR transactions but also manage the general ledger.
As a result, the company is now able to better control cash flow as well as spending.
The module eases the staff accountant’s job by creating major financial documents such as cash flow statements, balance sheets, and payment receipts.
The system even takes advantage of artificial intelligence (AI), expressly machine learning to detect possible fraudulent orders or errors by doing evaluation of the transactions to 1000s of likewise entries.
After reading the article about 15 Use Cases for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), we hope that you would like to know more about the ERP consultant who can best guide you in selecting an ideal ERP software for your business and help it work efficiently.
If you have any questions about which ERP software you should purchase and use or can help you get more benefits from your business, we would be happy to answer them in the comment section below.
