Introduction
Starting your business is not a piece of cake, you need passion, guts and motivation. Once you forge your own path and launch the business you have dreamed for years, the next step is focusing on growing the business and maximizing efficiency and productivity, so it is essential to seek out any and all tools to give your business a competitive edge. For many companies, this is achieved through the use of ERP software. Now a days many frim are turning to ERP solutions to improve their business flow, increase efficiency and saving both time and money.

According to a recent report published by Allied Market Research, titled, “ERP Software Market”, ERP software market expected to reach $78.40 billion by 2026. ERP is scalable and flexible system, especially for small to medium enterprises ERP is the perfect solution. ERP implementation for SMEs has a great impact of cost savings and operational improvements. This helps companies survive and thrive in these difficult economic times.

So, in this article I’m going to tell you what ERP is, how it can help your business, how to choose right ERP for your business. So let’s dive into it.

What is ERP?

ERP is an acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning, which are commonly used by the organizations to manage their business processes with in a centralized and integrated system. ERP is a modular software which includes various modules like sales, purchase, inventory, manufacturing, accounting & human resources etc. All these modules are integrated with each other which help you to streamline your business operations.

How ERP can help your business?

The very basic question is why Enterprise Resource Planning is required? And how ERP can help your business?

ERP is an umbrella term for a complicated type of software setup. It can be very simple once you understand its purpose and the depth involved, so let’s look at that now:

When you roll out an ERP System you open up access to task management, human resources, fleet management, bills, expense management, purchase orders, project management, invoicing, stock management, quotes, asset management, API access, payment gateways, shop implementation, dashboard, detailed reports

Now let’s say you have a warehouse this warehouse stocks all of your products, when the product is order, ERP will be involved in every part of the cycle it will automatically schedule delivery and arrange who should prepare a product then provide monitoring and transit through fleet management and even replenish that products automatically.

 

Benefit of ERP

Why ERP so Essential for SME’s? here are some most important advantages of ERP software:

·         Integrated Information

Allows data sharing between multiple department of your organization. It helps to reduce manual entering of information by providing automatic workflow and quicker completion of processes. This also ensures that all the activities are properly tracked and none is missing.

·         Streamlined Processes

ERP is a perfect solution if you want to have a complete visibility into all the processes across the whole organization. ERP provides a unified platform to analyze statistics in real time, across all functions. This is very important, especially for the senior management - information on all activities in the organization and its departments is gathered in one place, to help you get a better insight on your business.

·         Customer Service

The software can assist you in sales orders processing, customer relationship management, physical distribution of goods, billing and invoicing. It enables you to keep any kind of information you need on your customers.

·         Cost Savings

ERP can show companies how to increase their productivity by better managing the supplies. Operations related to inventory, products/supplies and customer service are interconnected. ERP is the solution that provides visibility on how one problem is affecting the rest of the processes, a real-time financial data, which gives managers the power to analyze, have better insights and make productive decisions. This offers a competitive edge, helps to increase efficiency and can quite reduce the costs.

·         Reporting

ERP provides better reporting and better business intelligence. It has different types of reports: standard and custom. These reports make managers and employees jobs easier, which increases productivity and reduces delays - especially useful for financial reporting and everyday accounting.

 Conclusion

Although the costs of an ERP software could be more expensive than other smaller software or maintaining data over spreadsheets. ERP software system makes it a beneficial tool for small business. It helps to manage data more effectively, maintain confidentiality, carry out adjustments in a flexible manner, enhance labors productivity, increase sales and take effective decisions at the right time.