[Editor’s Note: The following is a guest article provided by Finances Online]

Although every business organization operates under unique parameters, one common challenge that they face is staying ahead in today’s fiercely competitive business environment. This calls for an efficient way of storing and accessing all business-related information so management has an overall picture of the performance of the business. This is where an Enterprise Resource Planning software or ERP system can play an important role.

An ERP system can integrate the flow of information from, to, and within your enterprise into a comprehensive information system that’s accessible to every stakeholder across your organization.

How ERP Software Can Help

To succeed in the complex and highly competitive modern business environment, companies need to put in place a system that allows them to easily streamline, automate, and scale their operations. This calls for real-time reporting, informed decision-making, cost savings efficiency and more.

According to a successful ERP case study, ERP helped global giant LG Electronics to centrally manage its 114 subsidiaries and more than 82,000 employees across 40 countries. Business performance is a conglomeration of key performance indicators. With that, getting all these indicators in one place is the job of an ERP software. Indeed, an ERP system can improve your structure and business practices in a number of ways. Here are some examples:

1. Automate and Streamline Back Office Jobs

Whatever business you are in, you have quite a few back-office jobs like accounting, sales, CRM, and HR, among others. An effective ERP system can help business leaders automate and streamline back-office jobs by allowing employees to use accurately maintained shared data without being inhibited by the inconsistencies of manual records. While it can help your employees become more successful in their respective roles in the organization, it can also offer you real-time visibility into the operations of your business.

2. Better Information Management Through Business Automation

Performance metrics are vital for evaluating the progress of your business. They not only help with current insights, but also assist in setting up goals for your future endeavors. Nevertheless, measurement becomes a tough job as your business continues to grow.

Manual calculation of profit ratio, sales margin, and various other indicators are simply not possible on a regular basis. However, these are vital parameters for the evaluation of business performance. An innovative business software in the form of an effective ERP solution can automate this suite of jobs.

With the help of an ERP system, your employees across different departments of the organization can access shared data. There is no need to maintain and correlate manual records about every transaction. The system can also generate synchronized reports about key performance indicators.

3. Effective Workflow Leads To Enhanced Productivity

ERP software can streamline the workflow across all departments of your organization and simplify access to all data through user-friendly interfaces. Employees can acquire relevant information and apply it to their respective jobs. They can extract customized and standard reports, formulate reports for presentations, and more.

4. Centralize Data Ensures Greater Efficiency

An effective ERP system can integrate all the data relevant to your business in a centralized storage system. This helps in streamlining access to data and adding data to the existing bank. In fact, ERP helps businesses to achieve greater efficiency in marketing by centralizing all data about sales in one central location.

5. Simplify Business Accounting

As your business continues to grow, keeping track of your accounting process becomes increasingly difficult when employees are doing it manually. Business accounting entails complex figures across a range of departments like sales, finance, accounting, and HR. An ERP can easily streamline the accounting process further by integrating accounting and CRM. With this, your business can do away with the time and effort needed to update business accounts manually, thereby enhancing your employee productivity and efficiency.

6. Elimination of Redundancies

If each department of your business keeps its relevant data relevant in a secluded environment, redundancy or repetition of data is very likely to occur. This can lead to confusion and inconsistencies in data management. Multiple data storage locations without any synchronization between them can lead to data inaccuracy. An ERP system can eliminate instances of task repetition, errors in inventory, and loss of data. It provides centralized visibility of data across departments with an accurate and real-time picture.

7. Better Customer Satisfaction

You need to keep customers satisfied while managing sales, inventory, and accounting process efficiently. If you are keeping your inventory data and customer data in different locations, you may not get updated product-related information without updated inventory data.

Data inconsistency can be disastrous for customer relations as well as product-related decisions. With the help of ERP software, you can ensure the maintenance of up-to-date data about products and also get data updated in real-time.

ERP Implementation Is a Must For Your Business 

Browsing through various solutions on the market to find which one suits your business best can be a daunting task. Still, it’s about time that you replace traditional legacy software with an enhanced ERP solution that can help you grow and manage your business efficiently. If you’re hesitant to implement the solution at one go, you can start with an introduction to ERP in your organization and then subsequently include all the departments in a phased manner.