6 Tips to Improve Your ERP Performance
A core part of Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, regardless of the industry, is to have integrated business processes. Synchronized reporting over different departments has many benefits.
Make sure your choice of ERP reflects your business
Many people decide on the best ERP from what they have been told, but it’s important to consider how it impacts your business. Choosing the wrong ERP can cost a company investment opportunities, time, and much more. Requirement gathering and assessment is a vital prerequisite to selecting an ERP, with both technical and functional requirement analysis being considered.
Run SAP on Azure
Why not run your vast SAP workloads on SAP-certified Azure? This way, transactions, and analytics can be handled in memory on each data copy to speed up your business processes. Simplifying your IT environment is always a core goal, and Azure SAP integration is an effective way of achieving this. There is a lot of options post-migration, from office apps and security to streaming and analytics. SAP and PowerBI are a common collaboration, with the benefits of in-memory analytics in real-time being a fast way to access data.
Other integrations are of course important too. There are many legacy apps, SaaS applications, and databases that it needs to interact with, as well as other aspects of the IT infrastructure. It’s important to consider the APIs that are possible with the ERP, and make as many integrations as possible.
ERP software training
An important way to improve your ERP performance is to improve the personnel’s skills who are using it. It’s rare that a business ever fully extracts 100% of the ERP’s capabilities, so this is where the training of an implemented ERP becomes very important. On-boarding is an important first step, but regular training sessions will help reduce the skill gap and allow the employees to use the ERP to higher performance.
One module at a time
When implementing an ERP, it’s tempting to go all-in on everything you need (or will need, down the line). However, incremental development can be more simple and effective, like what Odoo promotes. Once one module has been implemented and tested for quality and bugs, the next module can be implemented. This makes it easier to train for, too, as the building blocks will become apparent at the time.
Focus on business requirements
It’s important to focus on core business requirements when tweaking your ERP. It’s important to get the vendor selection process right and take into consideration all of the business requirements – and not to come up with too many. Vendors often fail to satisfy all of them if there are too many (despite what they say), so it’s important to reduce critical business requirements down to just a few.
Planning for the future
It’s important when implementing an ERP system that the data analytics can take into account what will happen tomorrow, not just today. For example, can it anticipate shortages? ERP performance can go through the roof when it transfers from a procurement tool to a strategic one.
