As a new year dawns in Sri Lanka it is also a time of re-evaluating progress and future potential. Is your ERP system on track helping you achieve everything you planned for this year? Here are 8 ERP new year resolutions we believe every business should be targeting.
1. Develop your digital vision
Digitization is happening whether you like it or not. You may be faced with mobility, vendor portals, cloud infrastructure, or even automating your production line. The abundance of information and tools out there means you have to be extra careful in what you select and how you adopt it into your environment. This is why you need a vision of where you will go as far as digitizing is concerned. What technologies have the greatest impact on your business going forward? How can you leverage these tools for a competitive advantage? You’re not alone in this so don’t forget to call us at ERP Services if you need help!
2. Align ERP with your corporate strategy
The topic of ERP in the Sri Lankan context often falls by the wayside of archaic IT systems and seldom gets the strategic significance & attention it needs. At the heart of it, ERP can infact help deliver corporate goals and measure whether you are achieving them or not! Ensure that your system is delivering what you need to reach your growth objectives by aligning your system outputs with your corporate goals.
3. Mobilize your team
Businesses in Sri Lanka are yet to capitalize on the mobile revolution. So make it a point to make your team more mobile this year. Mobility allows work to happen wherever and in critical cases right where the customer is. Imagine a sales-rep checking inventory and placing a client’s order at the customer site all by himself without placing any calls. Ensuring mobile applications linked to ERP are designed well for ease of use and practicality is vital for success. Starting with simple tools is the way to take your business wireless!
4. Go for a multi-device approach
Your business will by now have set up plenty of mobile devices be it smartphones, tablets, sensors, field equipment, and perhaps even wearables, etc. It is vital that your ERP platform supports such extensive device options and is scalable into the future. Chart out a strategy that captures how your business can be impacted by mobility and then plan for the ERP system that can best fit that vision. This might mean you need to change your current ERP solution!
5. Clean up your data!
Housekeeping or cleaning is everyone’s new year’s resolution and it’s no different when it comes to the data on your ERP system. As you accumulate more and more data system performance eventually does degrade. It is therefore critical to ensure that you keep your data neat and tidy by eliminating dead accounts and ensuring existing accounts have the right data contained within to enable effective transacting and reporting.
6. Update your security measures
At the forefront of data-heavy internet connected technology is the security of that data. There is a never ending appetite to secure data on systems and ERP systems are by far some of the strongest advocates of both enabling digitization whilst helping to preserve the integrity of that effort. Ensure the right roles and access permissions are in place to secure your system data and further to this develop processes on how sensitive client data should be handled.
7. Go paperless with DMS
Printed paper is an annoying process that is not only bad for the environment but also requiring endless storage and painstaking time and energy for retrieval. Going paperless will not only lessen your environmental footprint, but there are definite economies and efficiencies that result from reduced printing costs as well as doing away with the logistics of the manual printing process. There are fully ERP integrated document management systems (DMS) that can save you this headache and help streamline and organize your business. Take advantage of this!
8. Get the ERP selection support you need!
The objective of ERP is to get work done efficiently and make informed decisions to grow your company. Knowing what the ERP can deliver is important as is knowing what it can not – you typically learn this in the deal stages and also during deployment. Keeping your system increasing in value also requires continuous improvement of your processes and having a vendor agreement that enables you to cost effectively update your system – ERP is not a ‘set and forget’ setup. Hiring in-house ERP resources is the realm of large corporates, however for smaller and mid-size firms this is not cost effective and usually whoever it is will move on with your trade secrets in a short while. For your knowledge needs regarding these complex systems refer to experts who do this business on a daily basis and have years of experience on how to handle it.
Call ERP Services at 0770415387 or email us at info@erpservices.lk and we will help you navigate the complex processes of selecting and implementing your ERP system!
We wish you a happy and prosperous new year!