Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Standardizing processes across every function can enhance communication, efficiency and innovation.
Processes are the mechanisms by which businesses run. That’s why inefficient processes can have such a detrimental impact on organizations of all sizes. Late payments affect your working capital; back- ordered inventory delays production; and out-of- date numbers skew your sales forecasting.
Because your margin of error is low, midsize businesses need to stay in control at all times and can’t afford surprises that slow the business down or create blind spots. Nevertheless, managing all aspects of the value chain can be difficult.
For example, without the IT budgets and the sophisticated tools of your larger competitors, it can be a major challenge to get visibility into the supply chain, which means less insight into bottlenecks and potential disruption. Even when technical functionality is more mature, midsize businesses often require external IT to generate reports. This leads to outdated insights and inhibits diverse critical thinking as much as fast decision making. Many midsize businesses still rely on cumbersome manual processes in areas such as finance, relying on mountainous spreadsheets and reports. Not only does this eat into skilled workers’ valuable time, but it invites the possibility of human error and duplicated data. No wonder 67% of midsize businesses consider freeing employees from mundane financial tasks to be a top goal.
Best practice areas:
Investigate
You need to understand which processes frustrate customers and staff most, where delays are happening, and what can be remedied easily by existing tools – for example, can you replace paper-based forms with secure digital ones?
Improve communication
Empower people to share ideas and knowledge safely and compliantly. By adopting collaboration tools and platforms, this can be done across the business and with internal and external stakeholders alike.
Automate
Ideally, you should reduce time spent on administration and free-up employees for meaningful tasks. This can be facilitated by automating work-flows and deploying solutions that integrate with other systems in your business.
How we can help?
- Standardizing processes across every function – from supply chain and expenses to marketing and billing – can enhance communication, boost efficiency, and promote innovation in midsize businesses.
- An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can connect every aspect of your value chain and act as the source of proactive insights and visibility that decision makers need to navigate the market.
- You can optimize interactions on e-commerce sites, in-store, and in the field with real-time, integrated insight based on intelligence from across the business – including customer profiles, operational expense, and supply chain capacity.
- SAP offers ERP solutions to meet your specific needs and help you automate everyday financial tasks. Integrate your financial operation with other business processes such as marketing and after-sales.
- Using integrated ERP applications, midsize businesses can simplify their IT and gain ready access to real-time data.