The Importance of ERP to Your Business

Can Your Company Survive Without it?

In closing out our five part series on “What is ERP Really”, we learned that the true purpose of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions is to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs. That is a tall order, building a single software program that serves the needs of people in finance as well as it does the people in human resources and in the warehouse. Each of those departments typically has its own computer system optimized for the particular ways that the department does its work. But ERP combines them all together into a single, integrated software program that runs off a single database so that the various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.

That integrated approach can have a tremendous payback if companies install the software correctly. ERP vanquishes the old standalone computer systems in finance, HR, manufacturing and the warehouse, and replaces them with a single unified software program divided into software modules that roughly approximate the old standalone systems. Finance, manufacturing and the warehouse all still get their own software, except now the software is linked together so that someone in finance can look into the warehouse software to see if an order has been shipped. Most vendors’ ERP software is flexible enough that you can install some modules without buying the whole package. Many companies, for example, will just install an ERP finance or HR module and leave the rest of the functions for another day.

Just how important have ERP systems become? A survey of nearly 400 IT executives who had an ERP system installed found that more than 85 percent of them agreed or strongly agreed that their ERP systems were essential to the core of their businesses, and that they “could not live without them.” When asked if their company would be able to live without its ERP systems within the next five years, more than 80 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. For better or worse, ERP systems are here to stay.

Are you tapping into the full potential of your ERP system? Are you ready to implement an ERP system? Do you need more information? Contact Axis Global Partners for more information.