Posts Tagged ‘small business erp’

Small business ERP – the business case (overview)

Friday, November 27th, 2009

ERP for small business

Small business ERP can help you manage a better business

Every minute of the day in your Company, you and your team are busy managing different activities like interacting with prospects and customers, following up opportunties, handling the sales paper trail, booking time to projects and tracking stock. Every thing you do in your business has some financial impact so you’ve got to keep your accounts up to date, keep a vigilant eye on what money is being generated and used….and forecast your sales and cash flow. Every sale, every item you buy and every job or project you work on creates a pile of documents.

And from the time you follow up an enquiry to the moment your business gets paid, you have to be able to record and view detailed information about every action in these processes. You and your team need real time access to all of this information from anywhere. And you, your managers and team leaders have to have an accurate and concise view of every key task and the opportunity to quickly drill down on any balance or activity to see, understand and track what is happening where, when and why it’s happening and if these activities are being managed efficiently.

Small business ERP – how it can make a difference

What gets measured gets improved so it’s essential the activities in every critical process in your business can be viewed and measured as they occur so you and your employees can take advantage of opportunities, highlight and get to grips with issues before they become tragedies and manage your business processes effectively.

To do all of this and always have a complete picture you don’t need an accounting system, you don’t need a CRM system, you don’t need a time capture system, an employee expenses tracking system or a stock control system. You need a single system that has all of this in a single environment and lets you give access to all of the key workers in your business where ever they they want to work. An integrated system  that gives a concise view of your business, so you always can see what’s happening and lets you manage your organisation in the way that works best for you and your managers.

You need small business ERP

Wisdom from a small business owner – Why small business ERP is key to your survival

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

small business erp

Companies need efficient process, the focus of leadership and structure that can stretch to enable the company to grow safely as a massive 55% of businesses don’t survive the first five years. The commentators offer useless ‘insight’ as to why this happens. I continuosly observe three key reasons why this tragedy occurs so often and to so many people with different experience, education and knowledge.

The primary reason is insufficient market understanding.

Refusal to look at the water ahead. For example People dream up the idea, build the product and then sit back and wait for the market to flock and buy. In networked age there is no excuse for lack of research prior to spending any time and cash on creating a product until you have firm evidence there is a market.

The number two reason is lack of understanding of the basics of business.

The majority of folks starting a business know their trade, how to offer a service or manufacture a product, but not how to run a business.  Being able to understand and track the numbers in the Income statement or the balance sheet is an essential skill. The basic knowledge of accounting is rarely imparted coherently by the business manuals, online resources and those with the knowledge such as CPAs and bookkeepers. IT Giants such as Sage software and Intuit aggressively fool business managers with their marketing that their packages are the holy grail.

Sage software and other vendors as usual are underserving small businesses.

Large enterprises way back worked out that all of their Information systems should be joined together to give them a total view of the business and then along came ERP software solutions and packages. One software developer NetSuite had the vision to see the opening in the market and started offering its small business ERP software. NetSuite pricing has become prohibitive as their product has increased in complexity.

The final reason businesses fail is because of lack of process and procedures that put in place the essential behaviours and consistency a business must have to perform efficiently.