The right ERP platform creates a unified foundation for business transformation, expansion, and greater visibility and control.
Businesses now face constant disruption and growing complexities. The effects of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in today’s environment are more challenging than ever, with pressure to continuously innovate, maintain regulatory compliance and grow while optimizing efficiency and controlling costs. As your business faces these VUCA times, it’s important to be ready by having a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in place.
A modern ERP system helps you organize, automate and transform the way you do business, be agile and keep pace with your evolving business needs. It streamlines key business processes and functions like finance, personnel management, manufacturing and procurement. The right ERP platform creates a unified foundation for business transformation, expansion, and greater visibility and control. It allows cross department data visibility with a single source of truth and enables you to take advantage of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to evolve your business.
A new ERP platform can deliver enormous value: greater flexibility, adaptability, efficiency, control, compliance and other benefits. That said, implementing a new ERP solution is no trivial undertaking, and you’ll need to gain buy-in and commitment from other executives and business leaders.
Preparing a compelling business strategy can help you provide key decision makers and stakeholders with the information they need to understand the strategic importance of a new ERP. Here are some ideas and best practices to help you build your ERP strategy:
Define the vision: Where is the business headed and what’s your vision of how the ERP solution will help enable company strategy? A new ERP platform should become the foundational technology for supporting your business as it grows and evolves.
Describe outcomes: What are you solving for? What sustainable impacts on areas such as productivity, agility and profitability do you want to achieve? Based on top-down discussions with stakeholders and executives, describe what success will look like and use these goals to drive the decision-making and priorities for the project.
Assess internal readiness: Consider staff skills and available resources for supporting an ERP implementation. Do you have an internal champion for the initiative? You’ll need someone with a cross-departmental, cross-company purview, who can understand the issues involved and work to resolve them.
Determine requirements: Understand and create a map of current business processes to identify jams in efficiency and opportunities for improvement and standardization. Articulate the capabilities you will need to support your current and future-state production processes.
Form the business case: While every business case will be unique, consider the areas of greatest value to the business, such as: increased agility, better inventory control, greater efficiencies, ability to adopt new business models, greater alignment of processes to the business and improved visibility into business performance.
Threekit, a 3-D visual effects company, is the go-to software to create, edit, optimize and display product visuals. The company quickly realized that their financial solutions, which included QuickBooks, were limited and would hinder their goal of expanding in the U.S. and beyond. Threekit’s most evident issue was currency conversion between U.S. and Canadian dollars. They conducted transactions in both USD and CAD, but they did all their reporting in CAD.
“ Since we are a SaaS company, deferred revenue is a huge part of our accounting processes. Performing all the deferred revenue processes in Excel was manageable at first, but we recognized quickly that we were going to be limited as we grew.”
Nancy Rizkallah
VP of Finance, Threekit
As you look to modernize your technology stack, you’ll want to make sure the solution you choose is built to support the unique needs of your company. For example, does your new ERP platform need to support multiple companies, currencies and languages; intercompany buy/sell relationships; global supply chains; and complex production processes, among other requirements?
By choosing an integrated, cloud-based ERP platform, your company can flexibly take advantage of new capabilities and applications, without the need for disruptive upgrades. A cloud-based platform also gives you the scalability you need as your company grows.
Traditional Medicinals has more than 60 varieties of wellness teas sold in more than 70,000 stores. As it began expanding its line of wellness products beyond tea bags, the company realized that its 17-year-old ERP system could not keep up with the growth. Working with Armanino, Traditional Medicinals deployed a modern ERP solution to improve efficiency, scale operations, automate manual processes and electronically connect with co manufacturers.
“ First and foremost, we wanted to make sure that the ERP system we implemented could grow with us and handle our needs well into the future without requiring any customizations.”
Scott Kenney
IT Director, Traditional Medicinals
A-dec, a leading manufacturer of dental equipment, was faced with a fast-changing marketplace and stuck on a legacy ERP system. The company needed to streamline their systems and improve their ordering process. They wanted an ERP with industry-specific capabilities to deliver a superior ordering experience for customers.
“ Armanino will continue to be our support. They’ve been a very, very important part of the success of this project. They were all very invested; they became part of our family, frankly.”
Marv Nelson
Chief Operating Officer, A-dec
Choosing the right partner for your ERP platform is just as important as selecting the ERP solution itself to enable your team. The right partner will help you with the various technology services you need to ensure you get the most out of your investment.
Your partner should understand your specific needs for your business technology ecosystem and have experience in your industry to help you achieve your overall short- and long-term operational strategies. Look for a partner that offers:
Implementing a robust ERP for your company is not a do-it-yourself project, but it’s also not something you can hand off to a third party with little to no involvement on your part. Instead, plan to work hand in hand with an experienced implementation partner to achieve optimal outcomes, in the shortest amount of time, at the lowest risk.
