How up to date is your ERP?

Up to date ERP Systems – essential for managing business today and critical to digital ambitions

The current economic climate and cost of living crisis has put increasing financial pressures on businesses. It means it is more important than ever for businesses to get the most they can out of their systems and data. And this starts with having end-to-end processes run as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Critical role for ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have increasingly become the essential core application platform at the heart of businesses across many industries.?Usually spanning financial management, purchasing, sales, manufacturing, and supply chain functions, and sometimes extending out to HR and engineering/plant maintenance, ERP systems support the everyday, smooth running of business operations?by helping the flow of data between business processes. The promise of ERP was to remove manual transaction processing, provide a single source of data, and enable cross-functional collaboration.

ERP help or hindrance?

Well, in theory, they should but the stark reality is that they often have not achieve their intended promise. Processes are still inefficient, disjointed and require a combination of manual interventions and offline processing, and “best of breed” applications are often required to complete the picture and provide enhanced business capability.

Increasingly, (legacy) ERP systems, that may have been in place for anything from 7-25 plus years, are seen as an expensive inhibitor to change and limiting the speed at which enterprises can embrace digitalisation, exploit data and capitalise on the potential of intelligent technologies.?These problems are compounded when systems are not kept up to date.

Perhaps now more than ever, the pressure is on to sweat existing investments in ERP, while at the same time preparing for modernising the business applications landscape to drive efficiencies and enable digital aspirations.?When ERP systems are not kept up to date, the ability to add new capabilities; the effort required to change and the costs of maintenance and support, become critical considerations.

ERP action plan

Here are some of the main steps you should take when looking to maximise the value of your existing ERP platform:

1. Review your processes, costs and budgets to prioritise improvement opportunities
2. Look for every opportunity to integrate, remove manual activities and automate
3. Review the options for making improvements with your current systems and/or by introducing additional application/technology components
4. Fully understand your upgrade and ERP migration options, and most importantly the associated timelines
5. Quickly evaluate the business case at an individual opportunity and collective levels for “do nothing”, “optimise existing”, “add to existing” or “upgrade/migrate/replace”
6. If you are going to stay on your current platform for a number of years, then bite the bullet and apply any required patches, to bring systems up to the latest supported version
7. If you need to move quickly into major upgrade, migration or re-implementation planning, take a critical look at the scope of your current ERP and associated systems, and consider adopting a more composable approach to business, data and applications architecture, which you can read more about Composable Architecture here in?our article on composability.

Benefits of an up to date ERP landscape

A well running, integrated ERP delivers:

• Process efficiency and effectiveness
• Ability to harness data for control and insights
• A platform for digitalisation and exploitation of intelligent technology

Call to action

So, whether you want to “sweat” existing investments or prepare for an ERP upgrade/cloud migration, need assistance or unsure where to start, get in touch!