5 Benefits Of Reviewing Your ERP System
As with all aspects of a business, regular reviews or health checks are critical to ensuring long term success. Reviewing your existing Enterprise Resource Planning Software is as essential as reviewing your sales and marketing functions. In most instances, senior stakeholders will begin to notice that their existing ERP solution is no longer capable of meeting the growing needs of the business. If left unattended, this could lead to unplanned disruptions which will certainly affect productivity and efficiency and could negatively impact the organization’s bottom line.
As solutions experts, we encourage our clients and greater audience to systematically review their ERP system on an annual basis. This review can be done internally or through an independent solutions expert. It is advised that this review be completed as part of your organization’s annual strategic planning session, ensuring that your ERP system offers the functionality and features which support your outlined goals.
1. Understanding the Health of Your System
The first and most important benefit of reviewing your system. A review would allow you to develop a high-level overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the system, in relation to your business needs. This would enable you to drill down further and identify any advantages and disadvantages to your overall operational capacity.
A systems review will also allow you to highlight any bottlenecks, redundant workflows, duplication of processes and inaccuracies in your data and reports. An overall understanding of your systems health would be a good indicator of the overall health of your business and would allow you to identify areas of improvement moving forward.
Understanding the overall health of your system would prove to be advantageous when planning and forecasting business operations, as it would allow you to set realistic and achievable goals which match your existing operational capacity.
2. Managing Data Integrity And Accuracy
One of the key benefits of any ERP system is data management. The best systems actively enable the centralized collection, processing, storage and communication of data. A systems review would enable your organization to easily assess the quality of data being collected, processed and reported. It would also allow stakeholders to identify any gaps in the data collected and reported.
This would allow you to measure the effectiveness of your overall reporting structures and feedback systems and implement remedial action where required. A systems review would also allow stakeholders to measure the speed at which they are able to make decisions and the quality of those decisions.
The effects and benefits of being able to effectively manage your business’s data integrity and accuracy cannot be understated. If your system is no longer able to offer your enterprise-wide visibility at the speed at which you require the information, remedial action should be considered.
3. Increased Operational Performance
One of the most understated benefits of an ERP system review is gaining a better understanding of the system itself. Most businesses do not focus on ensuring their teams have adequate skill levels to maximize the features and capabilities of the ERP system being used. This lack of focus on upskilling staff and ensuring they can maximize the features of your ERP system can be extremely detrimental to the long-term success of your business.
A systems review would highlight the bottlenecks and challenges being faced by your team but can also highlight key features and aspects of your ERP system which are not being used effectively. If this is the case, your operational and strategic performance may be improved through a few staff training sessions.
An ERP system review also allows decision-makers and users a chance to improve the business in a meaningful way. It enables stakeholders at all levels of the business to identify and address the challenges they face in the existing system, creating a sense of cohesion when moving forward.
4. Highlighting Your Competitive Advantage In The Market
Once your ERP systems review has been completed, there should be a clearly defined list of advantageous and disadvantageous features. This review will ultimately provide you with an overall view of your existing operations, success and failures. Understanding your existing strengths and weaknesses is critical to your ability to improve.
An ERP systems review would enable you to determine the measurable progress of your business based on the historical data collected by your existing ERP. It would also enable you to measure the ROI received from the existing system against new solutions available.
Assessing your ERP system would also provide you with adequate information to determine how your system is performing in relation to other systems in your specific industry. If your system performance is gradually declining, that would be the first indication that you need to consider a new ERP system.
5. Increased Strategic And Operational Focus
Lastly, the main aim of performing an ERP systems check is to ensure your business has the correct tools and resources in place to drive growth. Performing this check allows you to measure your existing capabilities against your overall business aims.
It also provides your team with the required insight into the limitations of the system, allowing you greater understanding when setting your strategic and operational goals.
This would allow you to decide if you should maintain the existing system as in, integrate or update the system with additional add-on systems or consider the implementation of a totally new and more suitable software solution.
Once this is decided, the decision should be communicated throughout the organization. This would assist in creating a clear and concise focus on the overall aims of the organization, the strategic plan to achieve these goals and the planned operational activities to be implemented moving forward.
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