Perhaps when you started your business, you had just a few employees with each responsible for his own piece of the work pie. You may not even have questioned how things were getting done as long as you were moving forward and realizing a profit. However, as your business grows, and you add more personnel, you need a way to organize your processes, assure accuracy, keep on top of regulations, and automate whatever can be automated to keep your business working like a well-oiled machine. You may have reached the point where you are tasked with selecting and implementing ERP and CRM systems that integrate with one another necessitating common processes that will leverage both systems.
A first step is documenting your existing processes from sales, marketing, and management. But because your organization has grown organically, their processes, while working fine so far on their own, may not mesh with each other when gathered as a whole.
Interviewing your VPs of sales and marketing as well as some leaders such as the contracts manager and the person who calculates commissions, you might realize that their processes were not even documented; they existed only in their minds.
Individual sales and marketing teams may have developed processes that made sense (at the time they were put into place) and worked (for the few who actually used them), and individual employees may have disregarded nearly everything but the shortest processes that involved the least amount of administrative work—they needed to devote their time to selling.
Rather than viewing this as a setback, you can view it as an opportunity to create, document, and instigate processes that will be sustainable and repeatable, and will have buy-in from management and team members alike. You can have efficient, sustainable processes throughout the entire company, and an ERP solution such as can help.
Next, it’s time to identify processes that could be automated so the system will actually save time and money as well as ensuring accuracy. You’ll also want to pay attention to placing controls to prevent duplication of effort. For example, you don’t want your inside sales people calling each other’s clients for different marketing campaigns. Finally, you’ll want to develop metrics that illuminate valuable intelligence via dashboards and reports to enable management to track everyone’s status, keep everyone on your goal-focused trajectory, and ensure forward movement.
This development, unification, and vast improvement of processes can happen when you implement your new . Acumatica alone will not ensure the growth of your company, but with improved processes in place and your team’s dedication to success, it will be a valuable tool toward that end.
Implementing an ERP for the first time or switching ERPs gives you a tremendous opportunity to create, analyze, or modify central processes within your organization. Acumatica’s Cloud ERP and CRM in a single platform offers options for tailoring the system to your workflow and you find necessary. Use your ERP to improve your business and increase your bottom line.
To see how Acumatica Cloud ERP can be used to improve your business processes, .
By NexVue Information Systems,
