Your Business is Disjointed, Reactive & Complex.

If this article makes you squirm in your leather wingback chair just a little, you may want to read on.

If your business data resides in separate systems, you depend on people to manually create the necessary bridges between those systems in order to manage your business. Sales managers, plant managers, VPs of operations and finance, and supply chain executives are forced to trade spreadsheets and manually manipulate data to forecast sales, respond to proposals, manage inventory and production schedules, and determine product pricing.

While these manual processes may seem to serve your business well today, in reality, there are multiple issues that are likely impacting your margins, your profitability, and your ability to handle change and respond to competitive pressures.

Reduced productivity for your most valuable knowledge workers —Manually collecting, entering, and analyzing data adds time to your business processes, expanding instead of contracting cycle times. Manual processes result in longer times to respond to requests for proposals, forecast sales, and ultimately deliver product, affecting everything from margins to cash flow.

Do you unknowingly promote Information Silos? (a condition that exists when data are isolated in separated information systems)

Effects of the data silos:
-Work group information systems procedures are understood within each work group, rather than being formalized.
-Information silos arise as a consequence of an organization’s growth and increasing use of information.
-Information silos are problematic until they begin to share data about the same entities.
-When departmental information systems or applications are isolated, business processes are disjointed.
-Information silos usually result in increased costs for the organization.

The primary purpose of an ERP system is integration. Industry-specific solutions contain program and database configuration files as well as process blueprints that apply to ERP implementations in specific industries. A flexible ERP system can fortify your operations to best handle change by letting you provide any business division and any employee with the data required to improve decision-making and respond rapidly to virtually any changing condition— regardless of whether data is needed from one or multiple systems. With the right ERP system, you can overlay your business processes onto your business systems to provide the timeliness and consistency to manage variability, eliminating the need and high cost of integrating your existing systems. Instead, you simply define the processes and where the data resides to execute those processes. The result is a cost- effective yet unmatched ability to streamline your operations—and best manage change.

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