Evaluating ERP solutions for Distributors and Manufacturers

When was the last time you thought about improving your business processes? Automating warehouse management or workflow? Doing away with manual data entry to save time and reduce the risk of human error?

If you’re planning to scale or grow your business and thinking about an ERP solution, this podcast is for you!

As you grow your distribution or manufacturing business, an enterprise resource planning or ERP System becomes a critical part of your business. Which system you choose is a very important decision that will affect your company for many years, especially in today’s environment with rapidly changing business challenges.

This week, we explore enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions with an eye specifically to distribution and manufacturing companies. Murray and Samantha discuss six essential components of any structured software evaluation to ensure you’re getting exactly what you need now and into the future.

These 6 key areas are:

• Productivity: What can this product do to make you and your staff more productive? Any new piece of technology or a new set of business processes should make your life easier. And help your company make more money and reduce costs.
• Functionality: This is obviously core to running your business. You can’t select a business solution until you know a tool is going to meet your needs. And does this solution support your business requirements – now and into the future?
• Technology: Is this responsive to changes and updates? With technological advances happening almost daily, will your solution grow and adapt as you and technology change? What is “true cloud” technology and why is it such an advantage to many businesses?
• Value: Eliminating the need for several programs to run different processes, investing in the right ERP solution can optimize your business and provide incredible value. By reducing manual data entry, automating time-consuming processes, or booting up an e-commerce site seamlessly, you exponentially improve your ability to scale and grow.
• Risk: What’s the risk of not doing anything? Or more specifically what’s the risk of continuing to run your business on spreadsheets? There’s data risk, there’s consistency risk and there’s risk of data loss. So that’s a lot of risk of reliance on any one person or on manual or ad hoc processes.
• Next steps: Make sure you understand and document your business requirements before reaching out to a vendor. They need this essential information to recommend what functionality you need in an ERP solution.

Listen now to get more details and great advice on optimizing your business processes with an ERP solution.

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