One of the most important criteria for choosing the right partner to help facilitate your company’s ERP implementation is to find one that understands your business processes. However, before you can expect your ERP implementation partner to understand them, you have to first determine what they are, how they work and how the effect your business. These processes are usually unique to your industry or even your individual company.
Once you have your processes listed out in detail, you need to start to look at how the implementation of an ERP solution will affect these processes.
Understanding what business processes really are
Before we go any further, let’s make sure that we are on the same page when talking about business processes. We can define them as a series of related activities and tasks performed together, or in sequence, to produce a defined result. For example, lets say a customer purchases something from your company. Your marketing and sales department likely has a process that generates the order. Accounting and finance has processes that handle payment and/or financing. Finally, your supply chain management processes handle the customer receiving the item. With the right people handling its implementation, your ERP solution has the ability to help with each of these processes.
The role of the ERP solution
The most general purpose of an ERP solution is to share data between the functional areas of your business. Providing the right people with accurate, up-to-date information allows them to make the best decisions for your company and helps improve the efficiency of the businesses processes. Let’s take a look at how the departments mentioned above can benefit:
Sales and marketing– By knowing what customers order allows your marketing team to better promote your products. They can improve this process by understanding what others in a specific customer’s industry are purchasing and make suggestions from that, they may remind customers to reorder after a specific amount of time or they may promote complimentary products. On the sales side, having the right data on hand helps with forecasting, making this process much more accurate.
Accounting and finance– Relying on data that helps predict sales forecasts, the process of budgeting for staffing and production can be completed. Other processes that stand to benefit are the procurement of raw materials and supplies as well as determining a customer’s eligibility for credit.
Supply chain management– Probably the ones that stand to benefit the most from that data available through an ERP solution are the ones responsible for procuring necessary production supplies to keep the lines moving, having enough packaging materials on hand for shipping and keeping inventory levels at the right level.
A qualified implementation partner will understand exactly how your ERP solution will benefit each of these business processes, along with any others that you may bring to them. Having experience in helping other businesses the right partner will identify the right inputs so that the right people in your organization will have the information they need to keep your processes working efficiently and effectively.
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