Best practices to select an ERP for business productivity
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a great investment towards your business success. It pumps up much needed productivity and operational efficiency that makes your business more competitive. ERP implementation automates back office tasks and delivers much needed actionable insights to decision makers that often get overlooked due to disparate data and disjointed systems. Although the benefits of ERP implementation are countless, they can only be realized if you bring in the right ERP solution for your business. With too many options available, finding the right ERP solution for your business is a daunting task. In this article, we’ll provide you some of the tips that will help in making your ERP selection a bit easier.
Business requirements:
As ERP is critical for your business success, it is recommended that you should always have clarity about bottlenecks and what actually you want to achieve by implementing an ERP solution. For example, some organizations use disparate systems of different departments like HR, finances, customer support, etc. When you use disparate systems it eventually increases the technical debt. By bringing a true SaaS ERP solution like NetSuite, you don’t need to use separate systems for different departments. Since NetSuite is an all-in-one cloud ERP solution, it reduces the technical debt.
Define Selection Criteria:
As ERP is a big investment, while selecting it you need to consider scalability. Out of complexity, cost, and effort required, it is recommended that you shouldn’t implement everything in one go. Rather, bring in a modular ERP solution like NetSuite in which critical modules for your business should be implemented first and you scale up the things as your business grows. Another scaling criteria is integration capabilities. Suppose you’re currently using an ecommerce solution like Shopify or Magento. Now, you need to bring in an ERP. It is recommended you should look for an ERP solution that can be integrated seamlessly with your existing ecommerce system.
Read our blog: NetSuite Shopify Integration
Budget:
This is the most important ERP evaluation criteria. You need to understand the total cost of ownership. For example, on-premise ERP solutions require very high upfront costs as you need to spend on hardware, infrastructure, maintenance, & IT support along with the licensing cost. Cloud ERP solutions like NetSuite require less upfront cost since they’re available as SaaS.
Implementation partner access:
The success with an ERP solution depends on its implementation. A successful ERP implementation requires knowledge of business processes along with technology. Combining both i.e. technical and functional parts, you can achieve success. Always opt for ERP solutions whose partners can be accessed easily and fairly. For example, in the case of NetSuite, there is a complete list of NetSuite implementation partners.
Financial evaluation:
As compliance/ tax requirements are changing at a fast pace, always opt for an ERP solution that supports multiple tax regimes, multi-currency, and multi-company structure. Opt for an ERP solution in which vendors keep on rolling out critical patches and updates to support new taxes or changing compliance.
Conclusion
ERP selection is a daunting task as it can have a lifelong impact on your business. Always opt for an ERP solution in which updates are rolled out at a faster pace to accommodate the ever changing requirements of customers. You may call us biased but we’ll still recommend NetSuite for fast emerging enterprises due to its low cost of ownership, support for global compliance requirements, multiple tax and multiple currency systems and numerous other features. As Oracle NetSuite consulting partner, we’ll help you in licensing, implementation, integration, customization and support. You should feel free to contact us.
