7 signs your business is ready to upgrade to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software

 Still relying on complicated spreadsheets and QuickBooks to run your critical operations?

Spreadsheets are a powerful tool for quickly and easily tracking enterprise data across the organization, but fail to provide the level of reporting, automation, data integrity, and security needed across a stable enterprise.  By making an investment in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools, organizations are able to build in the efficiencies and automation needed to help them scale their operations.

Below are 7 critical signs that your organization is ready to mature beyond spreadsheets and embrace an enterprise-level solution to stay in-step with your competitors and a changing marketplace.

Does your business constantly struggle to quickly adapt to the changing needs of the business and the marketplace? To be a high performing business, executives need real-time visibility into business operations and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across business units. Without an ERP system in place, any data that is available to executives is often inconsistent and outdated by the time it reaches the executive’s desk.

Takeaway: By centrally managing the data and operations of the business, ERP systems provide executive level, real-time dashboard views of critical business data, across business units. 

Is your business constantly reacting to critical issues and putting out fires? Responsive business operations are able to see potential problems coming, and adapt to them before they become get out of hand. Without the proper alerts in place to notify key staff when problems arise, the business is left reacting to problems as they come, often crippling operations.

Takeaway: By monitoring critical business processes with defined alert thresholds, ERP systems give your staff the time and resources they need to proactively respond to problems before they become critical.

Does your business still rely on paper data collection and manual entry into spreadsheets? The time spent on data entry and manual input means your data is often outdated and error prone.  Spreadsheets also lack the complexity needed to manage a true business process workflow, where data validation and complex formulas drive the process from start to finish.

Takeaway: ERP systems allow your business to automate its electronic recordkeeping and data storage, bringing efficiency in your data collection and centralizing your data.

Is your current enterprise solution a veritable house of cards, prone to breaking and critical failure with even the slightest change? Time spent troubleshooting and resolving critical problems with your in-house solution translates to a loss of real dollars and productivity. It is important that organizations don’t overlook the cost-savings potential when considering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of purchasing and implementing an ERP solution. 

Takeaway: ERP systems are built for enterprises and offer a stable codebase for your day-to-day operations. ERP vendors provide the highest level of support for their products, including Help Desk support, ticketing, and bug tracking.

Does your organization enter new customers, products, and vendors in two or three different systems, constantly plagued with incorrect and redundant data? Without a centralized ERP system to store and mange data, organizations are forced to duplicate data across multiple systems. This often leads to outdated and inconsistent records that take resources to true-up and sort out for duplication.

Takeaway: ERP systems allow organization to maintain a single source of record for their enterprise data, reducing redundancies and saving time in data entry. By using a relational database model, critical data only needs to be entered and stored once, accessible across the organization.

Do your critical business applications interact and share data across platforms or do they live in isolation? ERP systems eliminate the need for running siloed enterprise applications by centralizing the applications into one integrated platform. ERP systems also provide key integration gateways for major enterprise applications like financial systems (Sage, QuickBooks) where it is critical for the business to remain on the platform.

Takeaway: By providing integration across the entire enterprise, ERP systems help organizations efficiently manages their people, processes, and data without the need for constant data exports and imports via CSV files.

Are you completely confident about who has access to what enterprise data in the organization? Different roles in the organization require different levels of access, but without the ability to proper secure data and assign user access, organizations are left vulnerable. ERP systems allow full control over who views what data in the system, often down to the record-level detail. 

Takeaway: By providing enterprise security across the entire organization, ERP systems allow organizations to control access to critical business data. By creating and assigning custom roles to team members, organizations are able to control not only who has access to what data, but to what degree.