With the right ERP strategy, applications like SAP Business One enable your business to achieve visibility across your organization and improve your operational efficiencies and overcome business challenges. While there are many alternatives to choose from, most lack the scalability to meet the needs of growing businesses or the flexibility to support specific processes across a broad selection of industries.
Having previously determined the availability of IT resources in your company and having previously defined your Business process needs, you are ready to move to the next step. To ensure that your business is ERP ready, it is important to establish the right criteria to evaluate your options before achieving ERP readiness. Narrowing the number of choices on the market can be a difficult task however, this crucial process can become more manageable if you keep in mind the following points:
Understand your business process
Businesses must first define their business processes and the corresponding functionality needed to support their operation. The easiest way to determine business requirements is to map out your operations and understand your own business processes. While your business may have a large list, what is important is to focus on high level processes following these steps:
- Create a detailed map of your organizations workflows and daily operations
- Speak with your employees to determine essential processes
- Identify areas that need improvement
Business requirements can be used as criteria to narrow the number of alternatives; solutions that do not have support for high level processes can be eliminated from the decision making. A great ERP solution will offer support for the essential functionality to support businesses throughout a broad range of industries.
Decide on essential features
Having previously identified functional areas where added ERP efficiencies can translate into costs savings for your organization or provide support for much needed processes, deciding on an ideal ERP solution should be an intuitive decision. By focusing the point of comparison between solutions on the presence of high level functionality, your business can avoid becoming overwhelmed by a large list of ‘nice to have’ but unessential features. This is the best way to ensure that your business’ selected ERP solution is based on criteria that has the ability to achieve measurable business value.
Decide on the type of ERP that fits your business needs
Decide on the type of business management solution that best suits your operations. There are many preconfigured solutions on the market, however many of these out of box solutions do not provide the breadth of features or the high level of customizability to meet your industry specific needs. Choosing an industry vertical ERP solution provides the benefit of supporting specific requirements or meeting industry standards or regulations out of the box. Alternatively, other businesses can benefit from a more highly customized solution with the help of an implementation partner. In either case, ERP solutions should be evaluated on their ability to offer core functionality out of the box that can be further tailored to suit your business with the help of an ERP partner.
The next article in the series will look at another equally important consideration; selecting the right ERP implementation partner. Selecting the right partner will ensure that the previous preparation will be followed up with execution to ensure that adopting an ERP solution will be a success.
