To scale and streamline your business you'll need some sort of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution.
What are ERP's?
The most well known version of and ERP would be for say a retailer so that they can manage their product range, stock, warehouse, customers, suppliers and finance elements of their business on one system the whole company can use. They are powerful and critical to the business success.
ERP's are not just for product businesses. Service companies also have them to make their businesses manageable and scalable.
Limitations of off-the-shelf ERP's
There are off-the-shelf ERP's and in fact nearly all ERP providers will have a standard ERP system that you could use quickly for your business. The off-the-shelf version will almost certainly do to start with. You can put in place work arounds etc. But in most cases the standard version of the ERP is unlikely to provide you with the full and ideal solution. There will be extra elements and features you need to really provide the best solution for your business.
In some cases the ERP solution supplier will have to develop the custom elements for you, as this involves changing some of their cores codes but in most cases where you need bolt on modules to the ERP you can ask a third party to do this.
Customising your ERP is the secret to getting the most out of it
We have experience of doing just this. One of our most successful clients needed a custom business critical online order processing modules to take orders from around the world. The solution they needed you could buy of the shelf. It was unique to their business. We research and built this and integrated it with their ordering system.
Not only that, they also had an installations team that had been managing a network of UK engineers using email and phone. This was proving crazily complex and error prone. By putting together an installation web module where the jobs could be set up, engineers view their jobs and update the status and finance could bill the clients and pay the engineers the whole system was streamlined and scalable, and pain free! This was all integrated seamlessly with their ERP system!
All this work proved to be a key element in the clients success. They ended up in a short period of time in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 and selling to a multinational for £20m+.
More than ever there are smarter and faster ways of rapidly building custom web applications.
If you need help finding the best ERP system for your business or you think your business processes could be streamlined please get in touch info@yourtechnologydirector.co.uk.