Why Businesses Need an ERP System: Three Reasons

Before we jump into the reasons why businesses need an ERP, let me ask you a quick question. Imagine there are two competing businesses of similar size, product focus and industry.

Business one is chugging along at a very successful pace. Its future looks bright as customers sing its praises and it almost always meets or exceeds its milestones.

Business two struggles to keep pace with customer demands and stay competitive. Overworked employees sometimes make costly mistakes as they rush to finish their work on time. Understanding that they can’t continue like this, the leadership team is actively striving to address the company’s operational inefficiencies.

Which one of these businesses would you say needs an ERP? The answer, which may surprise you, is both. Now that you’ve seen that ERPs can do much more than shore up struggling businesses, let’s look at three key reasons businesses need an ERP.

Reason One: Uncover and Seize New Opportunities

To be successful, companies must quickly adapt to customer needs, anticipate market shifts, and jump on new opportunities before their competition. When you have standalone systems running each department, combining data and turning it into useful information for decision-makers is a manual and time-consuming process. So, keeping up with your competitors is difficult, let alone getting a leg up on them. Legacy systems, even if they offer the reports a business needs, suffer from much the same problem. They stifle innovation because they chain workers to their desks and overburden them with mundane tasks, which monopolize their time and drain their creativity.

A modern ERP platform puts up-to-the-minute, comprehensive information at the fingertips of decision-makers. So, whether they are working in the office, or a thousand miles away, they can spot trends and act on them before the competition ever sees anything coming.

Reason Two: Improve Customer Satisfaction and Retention

The faster your business grows, the harder it is to keep customers happy. Yet failing to do so can twist your dream into a nightmare. If you use different systems to manage your front and back-office operations, as your order volume grows, the more difficult it is to keep things from slipping through the cracks. Worse, when you use disconnected systems, your employees can’t easily get a single view of a customer’s every interaction with your company, which leads to confusion and frustration.

An ERP solves this by giving you (and your customers) a single unified view of every interaction. So, support specialists are much better prepared to help customers solve issues the first time, and customers feel empowered with self-service access to the information that matters most.

Reason Three: Stop Wasteful Spending on Temporary IT Fixes

It’s no secret that if companies do not change with the times, they will become obsolete. And while it may seem tempting to update your technology one application at a time, because it’s easier on your short-term budget, this is a more expensive way to modernize. Why? The answer is simple. When you do this, you are saddling your business with applications that can’t efficiently work together. So, you’re back to the problem of not having a clear view of your business’s performance and relying on error-prone and inefficient duplicate data entry to move information from one system to another. As a result, billing mistakes increase, support response times lag, you miss lucrative sales opportunities and encourage walls to be built between departments.

However, with a modern ERP that controls your business from financial management through inventory and everything in between, you sidestep these issues. In addition, making all your technology, not just your software, work together becomes much easier. Newer ERP’s make it easy to connect the system to credit card terminals, barcode label printers, laser printers, cash registers, point-of-sale systems and much more. And when you buy new hardware or software, an ERP with open architecture allows you to connect these systems with low code or no code tools. Thus, relieving your IT staff of much of the setup burden and allowing your business to keep humming without interruption.

Next Steps

These are just a few of the many reasons why businesses need to ERP. To explore a few more, download the e-book, “Seven Reasons Why Businesses Need an ERP Solution.”

Once you’ve looked at that, if you’re ready to explore your ERP options in greater detail, visit our website. We have over 30 years’ experience helping businesses of all shapes and sizes take technology from something that is holding them back to something that empowers them to work smarter and embrace the future. Want to learn more? Let’s chat!

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