If you’re running a small to mid-sized business, it can seem like a never-ending stream of interruptions and fires. These distractions keep you and your team from the work you know you need to be doing to gain critical leverage. The simple reality is that growth can cause efficiency and precision to suffer initially.
Adapting requires updating and expanding systems to accommodate the new demands. Thriving requires finding new efficiencies and opportunities.
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system can shorten the distance. ERPs manage business processes while integrating departmental data to provide total visibility, insights, and workflow automation. Since they’re scalable and customisable, you can make updates with the click of button that pass through the entire company.
ERP and the benefits of workflow automation:
- Organise and automate workflows
- Increase efficiency
- Communicate and collaborate more effectively
- Improve client experience
- Deliver projects on time and on budget
Organise and Automate Workflow
What is workflow? It’s the repeatable sequencing of connected activities where the output of one step serves as the input of another. By diagramming how different activities and departments fit together you can formalise these processes in an ERP.
What is workflow automation? It’s the streamlining of your business processes by using software to manage and conduct certain work functions without requiring employee labour. Based on your instructions, an ERP both organises workflow and reduces workload. It does this by performing routine tasks directly and providing employees with a prioritised queue of next actions to minimise administrative work. Inputs, outputs, and other data is captured in real-time to coordinate and modify plans, while also providing insights and recommendations via data analysis.
Increase Efficiency
One the biggest benefits ERPs delivers is reducing wasted time caused by indecision or miscommunications. ERPs improve efficiency in three key ways:
- Performing routine tasks and decisions and taking them off your employees' to-do lists.
- Eliminating lag time between tasks by creating optimised next action lists in real-time that coordinate between all involved parties.
- Providing complete company-wide information and analysis to improve decision-making and minimise interruptions/delays.
Communicate and Collaborate More Effectively
As employees start to see and experience the benefits of a fully functioning ERP, it doesn’t just increase compliance. It can improve internal communications and shift culture.
As company-wide activity is digested into actionable information, everyone experiences the exhilaration of having everything they need at their fingertips and discovering new opportunities. They become eager participants in the process and improve internal communications.
With a robust knowledge-base, on demand status updates, and new channels of communication (e.g. contextual messages), email inbox volume and other interruptions go down.
Improve Customer Experience
The difference between an acceptable and an amazing client experience can come from small things like attention to detail or big things like accommodating challenging requests.
Improving the experience means being responsive to client needs. Did they get that update when they needed it, so they could more focus on other critical tasks? Could they change the parameters on a fast-moving project when market conditions changed overnight? Did everything turn out as expected with results exceed expectations?
ERPs help improve client experiences in the following ways:
- Includes clients on key updates and provides 24/7 access to see the status of projects in real-time.
- Creates a protocol for requests/changes.
- Manages projects and processes tightly to reduce errors and meet project criteria.
Deliver Projects on Time and Budget
As noted above, ERPs tightly manage and automate processes to make sure everything stays on track and no detail gets overlooked. They can anticipate cost and schedule overruns before they actually happen to prompt course corrections before it’s too late. For instance, notification of incomplete tasks prompts employees to complete them before they become a bottle neck.
Is an ERP Right for Your Company?
Knowing whether or not it’s time for an ERP comes down to inventorying your operational issues and opportunities that would be addressed by an implementation to think through a cost-benefit. Typically, the benefits outweigh costs significantly when you’re experiencing growth or increasing complexity where a system can help tame that chaos.
If you’re new to ERPs, knowing exactly how a system would work for and benefit your business can be hard to fully see. We’d be happy to provide the necessary information to help your process. We can provide both general information about how ERPs would work for your particular situation and comparisons between different systems. Feel free to contact us today.
