Change in business is inevitable. Big and small changes happen all the time from change in personnel and products to new taxes and regulations. Perhaps your company is growing with new customers, more products, new countries and increased production. The question is not whether change will happen, but how well you respond to it. In many industries today, if you do not keep up with change, your business may be left behind.

Technology and market conditions are changing faster than ever.

The transition from an industrial marketplace to an information-intensive one has brought dramatic changes. Decisions have become more complex with the growth in technology, increased regulations regarding safety and sustainability, the blurring of industry boundaries, and the globalization of businesses.

In order to remain competitive in this changing marketplace, many businesses have reacted with flatter organizations that are more decentralized, enabling them to be more flexible and agile. Functions within businesses have been blurred with more collaboration and decentralization on processes and decisions.

Your ERP should help you manage change.

An ERP should help you manage change rather than impede change. A big part of that response is whether your business management software can easily adapt to change and even help you adjust easily. Technology should provide you with the flexibility and adaptability you need to respond to rapid change in global trade and competition. An ERP allows you to do business without geographic or functional constraints while being more efficient and reducing costs.

6 key qualities that your ERP should have to support change:

1. Flexible implementation:

Businesses need to be far more flexible in responding to changing environments. Fast response to customer needs and changing market demand are both essential to effective operations and business success. Autonomous production and operations units might be scattered geographically, but working within one common system.

Your ERP needs to support changes in strategies, regulations and market dynamics. A flexible ERP is one that can be easily configured with modules and provide regular updates. It should offer multiple deployment options including mobility. Implementing new capabilities needs to be rapid in order to meet the fast-paced changes in the marketplace.

2. Efficient and automated processes:

Businesses need to streamline operations for growth. Configured correctly, an ERP can lower administrative, operating, and inventory costs. You ERP needs to accommodate new technology geared toward process efficiency. It needs to support end-to-end business processes from order to billing. An ERP will help you maintain control even as you distribute processes and decision-making and eliminate overhead.

3. Real-time analysis of information:

Businesses need real-time access to information that enables decision-making. An ERP should allow you to respond quickly to unexpected situations whether those are internal or external. With an ERP, you can process data in a timelier manner to control operations, make decisions and communicate. With data in the right hands, the business can be flatter and more agile.

The problem that arises in an information-rich marketplace, is that managers are bombarded with data continually. Instead of being burdened with too much of the wrong kind of information, they need data that is specific to the tasks they perform and the decisions they make. With a business intelligence system integrated with your ERP, senior managers can easily access a wealth of data and make more informed decisions without the need for someone else to compile and analyze it.

4. Collaborative processes:

Business need to implement collaborative processes across departments, suppliers and customers. In order to effectively and rapidly react to change, functional silos need to be eliminated.  Success and failure in one function affects activities in other functions. Your ERP should enable cross-functional collaboration using common data and processes. To facilitate communication, your ERP should be easy to use and accessible anywhere, anytime.

5. Coordinated global operations:

Even small businesses need to support global operations whether it is international sales or outsourced productions.  Your ERP should enhance communication, promote collaboration, distribute information, and facilitate e-commerce supporting multiple geographies, languages, and currencies. With the right technology, you can reduce the costs and complexity of doing business globally.

6. Strong customer relationship management:

Businesses need to become customer-centric. Your business isn’t the only one changing rapidly, your customers’ businesses are changing as well. You can’t assume that what works today will work tomorrow. Instead you need to put a system in place to be responsive the changes in customer needs. Your ERP should provide tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) to help you manage your customer interactions.

In addition to technology, you need the right vendor to support change.

Not only do you need the right technology, but you need the right vendor to support change. Your vendor should offer products and services that will help you continuously innovate and improve in order to compete in a rapidly changing marketplace.

We believe that we are that type of vendor. PositiveVision provides business software, such as Sage 300, and tools, including business intelligence, CRM, warehouse management and human resource management, that will help you be successful. Not only do we provide ERP systems that support change, but we also offer services that will improve the performance of your business to be more productive, competitive and profitable. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you manage change.