How to Get the Most from Your Organisation's ERP Software
To help ensure your business is maximising its return on investment, today’s article discusses how you can get the most from your enterprise resource planning software (ERP).
)
For organisations striving for growth, efficiency and competitive edge, optimising financial processes by using the business’ ERP system to its full potential is crucial. After all, these are some of the main goals a business hopes to achieve when implementing an ERP solution, so why not go the extra mile to ensure your company is doing all it can to maximise the system's potential. Below we explore some of the steps your business can take to ensure it’s getting the most from its ERP.
Invest in People
Investing in your staff is an important aspect of ERP integration. It’s worth spending time and resources to train and upskill your team so they are competent and confident using the software. Training sessions or technology workshops are a good way to achieve this. It may also be a good idea for managers to stay informed and follow announcements or updates about the technology to potentially give periodic feature update talks, so users know what to expect from future system updates and have plenty of time to prepare. This will help maximise user adoption, which will in turn continue to maximise the business' return on its ERP investment.
Consider Process Automation
Although some ERPs like Business Central have automation capabilities for processes like reporting, additional automation tools can be used to further streamline finance processes and workflows. For example, low-code automation tool, Power Automate, could be integrated with Business Central to automate a vast range of processes such as:
Notifying the necessary team member when documents like invoices and purchase orders require approval.
Monitoring inventory levels in Business Central and sending a notification if stock falls below a certain level.
Adding customer details to the business’ customer relationship management (CRM) system when they have been newly added to Business Central.
Routing reports to management for approval.
Automating these kinds of processes will help your business reduce its reliance on manual tasks so its finance team can focus on more valuable work and drive productivity.
Integrate with other Business Systems
Integrating ERP with your other business technology can be a game-changer when it comes to enhancing business performance as it will help you unlock an entire 360-degree view of business operations, as well as facilitating process automation. Integrating your organisation’s ERP and CRM enables the seamless flow of data across systems. For example, sales orders that have been added to the CRM can be automatically transferred to the ERP for processing, eliminating manual data entry, reducing the risk of discrepancies and enhancing operational efficiency. Not only that, but by combining data stored in ERP and CRM, businesses can gain a comprehensive view of customer activity, unlocking deeper insight into customer behavior, preferences and purchasing patterns so they can learn how to better tailor their interactions and experiences.
Augment your ERP with Solution Add-ons
You can further streamline processes and enhance the functionality of your organisations ERP by implementing solution add-ons. By integrating low-code data visualisation tool, Power BI, you can create interactive data dashboards and reports that help you visualise and better understand your financial data so you can make data-driven decisions. Or, leverage Continia solutions to enhance expense management and data entry processes. Continia Expense Management allows staff to upload expense receipts and mileage claims directly from the app to Business Central for processing, reducing manual data entry and accelerating expense approvals. Continia Document Capture automatically scans documents like invoices received via email and inputs the data to Business Central, eliminating the risk of input errors and reducing the manual workload on the finance team so they can regain valuable time to spend on more complex tasks.
Update Software Regularly
To get the most from your solution, ensure you are always operating on the latest version of your ERP so you can benefit from the latest features and security advancements. However, with some ERP systems such as D365 Business Central, this won’t be necessary as the system automatically updates at least twice a year, with smaller feature updates released every few months.
If you would like to learn more about ERP, get in touch with one of our solution specialists today.
)
)
)