What Components make up an ERP?

Searching, selecting and deploying ERP is a daunting task for an organization and its stakeholders. The entire project demands due diligence as it must account for all of the current requirements and those of the future. This coupled with the premium pricing, means that the entire exercise for complete ERP implementation can easily a year.

In such a scenario, having an overview of the functional components of ERPs, in general, can help you screen software as per your requirements more efficiently. As a part of our ongoing endeavor to help businesses implement ERPs/business software smartly, here are the 6 broad components that encompass an ERP system.

1. Financial Management
2. Inventory Management
3. Customer Relationship Management
4. Business Intelligence
5. Supply Chain Management
6. Human Resource Management

Financial Management

Business, by definition, means money will change hands. Financial transactions within your company as well as the transactions made to outside parties are all recorded in the ERP system.  

As a part of financial management, an ERP system will maintain records under Accounts receivables, Accounts payable, costing/budgeting along with costs associated with inventory. The allied reporting mechanism helps you forecast and gives you an overview of your company’s financials. This helps in proper identification of costs and revenue centers enabling you to affect actions to positively affect your bottom line.

Inventory Management

By now you are aware that inventory management is one of the more critical aspects of your business process. Inventory management, by its sheer nature, talks to multiple modules within the ERP.

An inventory management module, worth its salt, will handle multi-location, costing of the inventory in all of the multi-location, track inventory via serial/batch numbers and handle multiple SKUs. Lean manufacturing is something that deeply benefits from an inventory management system that is deeply integrated with Supply chain management

Customer Relationship Management

In this social media-driven age, prospects and customers want to connect with you on multiple channels over multiple time-zones. Having centralized data of your customers is absolutely paramount for the maintenance of the healthy lead funnel. A robust CRM integration will help you give the best services to your customers and prospective customers.

CRM’s historical information on your customers helps you to get a deeper understanding of the buying patterns, get personalized with a complete view of customer conversation history and use the insight to further improve your internal processes. Information provided by CRM is of strategic importance and can help you increase customer satisfaction and provide more opportunities for up/cross-selling.

Business Intelligence

BI modules are today one of the more critical components of an ERP. BI modules make sense of the data that is collected and generated by the ERP system to enable data-backed decisions in real time.

Reports are the most common medium of extracting reports, market-leading BI modules also pack potent feature of data visualization. This helps in getting maximum value in one eyeball. BI most effective in analyzing the big data for patterns that can help in achieving tighter efficiency with more optimized operations and protocols.

A proper BI tool is a must for getting the most juice from an ERP system.      

Supply Chain Management

Global suppliers and extensive distribution networks provide for a delicate situation for manufacturers and cargo operators. Here, delays in delivery and under optimized inventory translate to a domino effect of disruption. In such a scenario real-time data is worth its value in gold.

An SCM module optimizes the process of manufacturing and distribution. With real-time overwatch of your operation, you can anticipate issues/bottlenecks and remedy them with time at hand. SCM will also help you fully embrace lean manufacturing by enabling you to plan demands and optimized production plans to minimize waste and maximize time efficiency.

Human Resource Management

The stars of the show, without the employees there is no company. As a 21st-century employer having high employee retention is pretty high on your agenda. A transparent, and hassle-free HRMS will take care of, on boarding, payroll, and general administration will go a long way to make sure that employee satisfaction in this regard is high.   

Payroll is pretty much the king of the HRMS as it saves you loads of time and costs. A robust HRMS system will help you to automate payments, handle taxation seamlessly and with transparency.

End notes

Every business is unique and what it seeks from the ERP will be different too. We advise you to do your homework properly before you settle on a solution for your business.

Evomatiq Business Solutions LLC is a professional, lithe and boutique enterprise software services providing company based in Dubai, UAE. EBS specializes in helping businesses identify and deploy effective and efficient solutions that give them a solid edge.

For any queries, reach us.