How to know if you need an ERP system?
February 10, 2020You’re a wholesale business owner who took the plunge and started your own company and you’ve made it through your first season, or maybe even your 5th, but you are struggling with keeping track of the moving parts of the day-to-day operations. Tasks seem to take longer than they should, and you are dependant on multiple systems, spreadsheets and non-connected business processes.
You know that there must be a better way, an easier more efficient and cost-effective way that helps to eliminate errors, saves you time and headaches, but what is it?
In addition, you may want to take your business to the next level, but you are unsure how to go about it. You need an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to position yourself to take advantage of future growth opportunities and realize your full sales potential.
What are the key indicators that an ERP system could be essential to streamlining and growing your business? They are easy to identify:
1 – Your data is not centralized, and you have multiple systems that don’t communicate.
An ERP ties in product management, sourcing, demand, inventory, financials which ensures that all your critical data lives in one place in the ERP. Having your data centralized helps to manage all aspects of your business from procedures, to reporting. When data is not centralized, your process is likely manual, time consuming or slow, prone to error and costly to the business. When you feel like you may be losing control of certain aspects of your business, that data is difficult to access, you could most likely benefit from an ERP, which will give you precious time back to focus on the bigger picture.
2- Timely Access to Data is Challenging
Are you using Excel for sourcing and inventory, handwritten order forms and Illustrator for your product line sheets? Is your Accounting team managing receivables with Excel? Chances are it’s challenging to stay abreast of everything your company does using this manual process. To make matters worse, if you have multiple systems for tracking information, it can be difficult to identify which system is correct. An ERP system avoids human error and ensures that there is only one version of the truth as systems are synchronized and communicating constantly. The confidence of knowing that the data on hand is correct will empower you and your staff to make educated decisions based on facts.
3- Your Sales and Customer experience is poor.
The lack of integrated sourcing and demand solution makes it time-consuming and tedious to react to problems and can impede decision making when issues arise. When your demand is on order forms, and sourcing in is excel, manual reconciliation is the only way to keep track of your valuable inventory. You certainly don’t want to miss out on orders, or have the shipping of those orders delayed, and most importantly, your inventory needs to be accurate for you to succeed. If any of these issues are a reality for your business, an ERP can help enable your teams to manage inventory and turn your business into one that functions seamlessly, and never misses out on an order, as the ERP provides near real-time access to information on product, inventory and orders.
4- ERP connectivity for maximum results in an Omni-Channel world
An ERP system not only provides your company with access to centralized data, reporting and procedures, but it also enables the connection to other state of the art software. This positions you to take advantage of Omni-Channel opportunities in an ever-evolving business environment by facilitating the connection to eCommerce B2C and B2B platforms, Third Party Logistics systems, Retail Systems, API(s), EDI, and more.
Having a proper ERP system in place with established connectors will ultimately leads to a variety of business opportunities which will help you to realize increased revenue and reduced operational costs.
5- The accounting process takes long and is complex
Without communicating systems, your accounting process is likely a manual one which can be quite time-consuming, can result in duplication and end up being very costly for the business. An ERP system provides the essential reporting structure to support your financial query requirements, helps with reporting and identifying any gaps in this process, an ultimately will save you and your teams time, and money.
6- Re-engineering the company procedures
An ERP solution, by definition, will allow you to review and re-engineer the company’s operational procedures. The process will address the current pain points and establish operational controls to allow for a scalable environment. Improvements in visibility to data, operational costs, data quality and accountability are some of the returns on an investment in an ERP. Providing sales and customer service teams with modern tools and real-time access to information will increase productivity and maximize sales through every channel.
Development of standard procedures will reduce onboarding costs of new employees and increase the power of the company to react to business opportunities.
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Momentis has over 30 years of experience in providing ERP solutions to wholesalers and retailers in the fashion apparel, accessory and footwear industries, and has recently expanded their offering to manufacturers of home goods and textiles.