How to achieve business growth with ERP

How to achieve business growth with ERP

Maintaining operations and improving processes is one thing, but what how to achieve business growth with ERP? How do you grow your business, attract new customers and increase profit?

This is where ERP can help. By streamlining your processes and becoming more efficient, you can focus attention on new business rather than worrying about maintaining operations and reducing costs.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) helps you manage all aspects of your business, from inventory management to production and even sales.

The ability to automate, report and generate new insights to optimize your operations is almost endless.

With that in mind, here are 5 key areas where you can achieve business growth with ERP.

Improve Supply Chain Visibility

With Brexit and COVID-19, supply chains are under immense pressure with the very real threat of breakdown if you don’t have a grip on things.

ERP can assist with certain forms of supply chain management that are central to most businesses, such as shipping.

A good ERP system will help grow your business by generating data every day on arrival and departure times, who collects your goods and when, what areas need improvement and what areas are hitting targets.

With this level of insight you can begin to make some informed decisions and tweak your processes accordingly.

Ask any business expert and they will say a collection of small gains can make an enormous difference to your bottom line.

Such a system also allows you to change parameters that supply chains require to function normally.

By identifying and fixing problems within your supply chains you can make some pretty big strides ahead of your competition, reduce waste and maximise growth.

 

Optimise productivity

It is not only possible to achieve business growth with ERP by focusing on the immensely complex.

One of the key benefits is the improvement in productivity that your staff will experience.

By reducing the need for manual inputs of data and eliminating duplications, you can make surprisingly large gains.

Similarly, by accessing and inputting data remotely with mobile tools, big strides forward can be made and your staff can get to grips with more strategic problems.

Time is money and it is hard to underestimate the ability of ERP systems to improve your business in this sense.

The same goes for business that are still stuck using Excel for their finances or other forms of documentation. By departing from Excel spreadsheets and embracing the capability of ERP, you can diverge from manual data entry and rely instead on automation.

Of course, the more you grow, the more important this becomes. With multiple sites, multiple departments and multiple systems running parallel, there are enormous opportunities for growth to be found in improving productivity with ERP.

 

Benefit from real-time data

If you want to grow business in the 21^st century, the importance of data cannot be understated.

Whether this is on site or on the go, the ability access data real time can transform your business understanding and position you to maximise growth.

This is a big win for business executives who are busy attending meetings and conferences and are unable to control operations from a desk.

By placing your multiple databases in a single central location your can access your most business-critical information from a centralised entry point.

A great advantage of ERP is its ability to scale to your growth if needed, supporting you every step of the way.

 

Reduce Costs

Want to cut costs? With ERP software, you have the ability to cut costs without cutting corners.

How to do this? The first step is with automation. Through automation of processes that were previously manual, you can achieve business growth with ERP. This is because it reduces the number of delays across production and supply chains. Rather than waiting for manual approval or processes being held back by staff absence, the system can be optimised to move forward when certain conditions have been met.

You can also consider the time saved on administration. Rather than manually logging, you can automate and remove the need for in-person oversight.

All of this time saved equates to lower costs and more efficient processes that will position you for growth.

And once you have the data at your fingertips, you can begin to make further cost-saving measures when needed.

 

Perfect Customer Service

Any competent business leader understands the importance of customer service.

No matter how good the product, if you can’t get the customer service right, you’re almost certain to lose customers and gain a poor reputation.

In the age of social media and instant communication, bad reviews and bad feeling can spread like wildfire.

With ERP, it’s relatively simple to achieve high quality customer service to your customer base.

Through software, your customer service reps can access customer insights such as their purchase history, past decisions and past investments to anticipate their needs. Tailoring your approach is a key component of growing your operation, and the data from ERP facilitates that. Being able to access this information centrally is just one more benefit.

With streamlined shipping operations, customers also receive their product much faster and the possibility of errors is significantly decreased. As a result, this increases customer retention and leads to more potential business opportunities.

Want to put your business on the pathway to growth? Get in touch with an expert here.