Have you read Good to Great by Jim Collins? It’s essential reading for any growing small to midsized enterprise (SME) that plans to achieve continued business growth and success. In the book, Collins identifies key factors attributed to great businesses – mainly that they focus on what they do well, better than their competition. The advice for any company caught up in the day-to-day operation of their business is to take a moment to reflect on what is working well, and what could be improved. Evaluating your overall business performance is the first step to investigate how you can better align your business for continued growth and success.
Collins’ book also discusses the importance of businesses to focus on their core competencies and strengths. Collins discovered seven common characteristics of companies that went from good to great. Technology accelerators were one of the seven factors that enabled these companies to excel. If a business focuses on putting out fires and responding to daily operational inefficiencies due to a lack of adequate technology, it’s almost impossible to give customers the level of service they expect.
At Vision33, we know technology. We are one of the largest global partner for SAP Business One, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. We use SAP Business One ourselves and recommend it as a technology accelerator for growing SMEs running on QuickBooks.
It's important to know the difference between QuickBooks vs SAP Business One enables you to leverage information inherent to your business to make accurate, sound decisions about where to focus your efforts. Is there a product that’s selling particularly well in a market? How can you better manage your inventory so that you have enough on hand for production? How can you deliver better service to your customers by preempting their needs? These are the types of questions that you can answer with technology like SAP Business One, but you can’t address with small business accounting software like QuickBooks.
SAP Business One also provides you with the standardization needed to free up resources and focus on delivering your product or service, without having to connect the dots from customer orders to your backend accounting system. It does this by integrating all of your business functions into a single solution. Running on a single system with a single database allows greater visibility into your operations at a moment’s notice.
Our customers often tell us that the lack of real-time information is one of the roadblocks preventing them from taking their business to the next level. We have developed an eBook called Graduating from QuickBooks: Enter a New Program with SAP Business One, which contains customer stories about the growth challenges they faced with QuickBooks and how they were able to overcome those challenges by implementing SAP Business One as their technology accelerator. Our eBook is a great read if your business is thinking about upgrading your accounting system and needs some help deciding on your next solution.