Five Signs That It’s Time for a New ERP

It’s difficult to find out what’s really happening across the business in real time.

Most systems are designed for an era when companies could wait until the end of the month to get the data they need. That’s not the case today— consolidated views and up-to-the-minute reporting can make the difference between thriving and barely surviving.
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Small teams at a single location can sometimes get by without a fully automated system because they are close enough to the action. But as a company continues to grow, opens new locations or allows employees to work remotely, the information that has to be exchanged increases exponentially.
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Additionally, the data needed for timely and accurate business decisions is buried within multiple systems.
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Here are several ways to tell that your reporting capabilities aren’t meeting the organization’s needs:
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• Team members waste time playing “Hunt for the Spreadsheet”. Growing businesses inevitably reach a stage where employees rely on spreadsheets to fill the information gap since data lives in so many separate systems. Employees end up spending more time searching for data than actually analyzing it and making decisions.

• Reports are error-prone and out-of-date. Businesses using manual processes may need to rekey sales orders into their financial system, reconcile customer information manually or manage SKUs across multiple applications. Reporting errors are inevitable and decisions are often made based on out-of-date, incomplete or inaccurate information.

• Reports take too long to run. With disparate systems, it’s easy to hit performance bottlenecks but solving them is more difficult. When reports take too long to run, it’s a sign that the amount of data the business has amassed has grown too large for its systems to report on it.

• It is impossible to get a comprehensive view across all business units. As businesses grow, they usually have one set of financials in a standalone ledger system, with financial data for newer locations divisions or subsidiaries ending up in other systems. Moving data among them is usually manual and can result in errors. Additionally, management teams lack insight into how the business is performing.

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Want to learn more? Check out the Five Signs That It’s Time for a New ERP white paper!