What is an ERP system? And why should businesses use it?
If you are already convinced you need an all-in-one enterprise solutions system for your organization, you can skip this page.
Today, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) also face some of the problems that large enterprises do. One of them is planning and managing their resources. SMEs face similar complexities but have limited resources to deal with them.
Small businesses (like their bigger counterparts) have to:
- Do accounts to track their sales/purchases.
- Do their taxes.
- Pay their employees.
- Manage deliveries within promised timelines.
- Deliver quality goods and services.
- Communicate with customers, and answer their queries.
Large enterprises invest millions of dollars in highly sophisticated systems like SAP. SAP and similar systems can handle requirements from these large enterprises to bring their multi-country, multi-company, multi-currency, global businesses into a single platform. This has helped them consolidate data/records in the fundamental processes such as accounting, taxation, payroll, reporting, and supply chain, to name a few.
In contrast to large enterprises, SMEs have been left out of the 1st wave of digital revolution (1995-2015). The main reason for being left out is because they need the financial resources to license, hire programmers and customize such software to match their needs. Systems like SAP have been a no-go for most SMEs. Such systems need a minimum CAPEX or OPEX layout of $100k (Yes, One Hundred Thousand Dollars) and upwards. Even with cloud offerings (Software as a Service, SAAS) from such vendors, there is no easy Do It Yourself (DIY) people can feel confident about.
So even today, small businesses continue to need help to keep things organized. They often use a mix of applications and tools such as spreadsheets, accounting software, and web-based CRMs to manage their day-to-day record keeping. As a consequence, they have to access different systems to understand customers’ master data, sales, cash flows, or profitability. The information exists in seperate silos. It becomes hard to combine the data to get valuable insights or alerts. This leads to SMEs being reactive instead of being proactive in their day-to-day operations. With such a constrained way of working, there’s limited scope for growth.