Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is a hot topic that has become even hotter in our post-COVID world. What is it? And how can it help your business thrive?
What is ERP Software?
ERP software helps businesses manage their processes.
You: Jeez Ann, that’s really vague. It could mean anything!
Me: Exactly!
Some business areas that are commonly managed using ERP include:
- Finance and accounting
- Human resources
- Manufacturing
- Order processing
- Supply chain management
- Project management
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Supplier relationship management (SRM)
That’s a long list that encompasses just about everything businesses do. Plus, think of all the specialized stuff that happens! Associations have member management. Educational institutions have student management. Etc.
Keep in mind:
- A single ERP application may support one or many of these areas (but usually more than one).
- It comes in vanilla, strawberry and rocky road, which is to say it may be general enough to be useful to most businesses, or it might be targeted to a specific industry, or even one organization.
- It may be off the shelf, customized, or completely custom.
- And it can live in the cloud or on your local machine (although, these days, most of us live in the cloud).
The bottom line is: you’re probably already using some form of ERP, even if you didn’t know it until now.
Where did ERP come from?
Using software to manage business activities is not a new idea. The term ERP was coined by the Gartner Group in the 1990s. ERP is the great grandbaby of material requirements planning (MRP), manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) and computer integrated manufacturing.
Business school faculty rejoice! It really is about widgets!
Early manufacturing software answered questions like:
- What parts do I need?
- When will I need them?
- Who can I order them from?
- How and where can I store them?
- How do I use them to assemble my brilliant, irreplicable, first-of-its-kind widget?
Across town, Wall Street had figured out that they could use mainframe computers for more than decoding Axis communiques or sending people to the moon. Computers could also do all the boring stuff that humans don’t want to do, like process checks and do reconciliations, and they didn’t even complain about it.
The Perfect Storm
Like most modern epics, the story of ERP eventually lands squarely at the doorstep of Y2K. Remember that? Your bank’s mainframe and your toaster and everything in between would cease to function at midnight on January 1, 2000 because most computer systems were coded with two digit years and 99 is greater than 00 and stock up on milk and toilet paper now. Oh the humanity.
Kids, that really happened. I mean, people thought it was going to happen. But it didn’t. History will have to sort out whether that was because of 10,000 BASIC programmers madly punching keyboards in a smoky basement or because it wasn’t really a problem after all.
Anyway, a lot of companies took Y2K as an opportunity to upgrade to ERP software.
Since then, ERP software has evolved to provide real-time data, sourced from a single database, and, not only managing different parts of the business, but connecting them to each other. Sometimes on your phone.
What a time to be alive.
How can ERP software help my business thrive?
There are many benefits to implementing ERP software in your business:
- Do more faster. The right ERP software can automate repetitive tasks, which means you need fewer people to do the same job.
- Generate ROI. Remember all those people who aren’t needed to perform repetitive tasks anymore? They can now do things that make you money.
- Improve Collaboration. This cannot be overstated. If you have a hybrid workforce, you want your employees to be able to share the right information at the right time in a way that’s recorded and repeatable.
- Gain clarity. We’re big on this. Having better vision into the state of your business gives you the power to make better decisions of all kinds.
- Access anywhere. Cloud-based ERP software can be made available on any device in the form of mobile apps and mobile-optimized websites.
- ERP made for the way you do business. Another thing we’re big on is creating software that matches the way you do business, or better yet, the way you want to do business. Custom ERP software is an investment, but it pays off in so many ways. (Just ask our client who took a vacation for the first time in years because so many of his processes were automated.)
Interested in using ERP to help your business thrive. Send us a note and let’s talk!
