How an ERP system helps develop your business

An ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, is considered a key tool that comes in to help look after and manage a business efficiently, helping work become more systematic.

But many business owners may still wonder how an ERP helps manage the organisation, since every organisation already has staff responsible for and looking after the work of each department.

In reality, however, when a company begins to expand it often runs into problems from the increasing workload.

This article will explain how an ERP can help develop your business.

The author therefore summarises all the ways as follows

1. Helps manage all resources within the organisation
2. Helps increase the organisation’s operational efficiency
3. Helps improve the organisation’s internal structure
4. Helps reduce costs
5. Helps executives decide more easily with real-time data
6. Helps the business keep up with competitors through fast data sets
7. Helps protect confidential business information by setting access rights

The details of each topic are as follows:

1. Helps manage all resources within the organisation

An ERP enables the organisation to manage all its resources within a single system.

That is, each organisation has the responsibilities of each department — for example, the accounting department, the store department, the purchasing department, and the sales department.

The ERP links the data of every department together, so that executives as well as staff can manage internal information efficiently.

2. Helps increase the organisation’s operational efficiency

Of course, every organisation has a different way of working, but old ways of working make it hard for a business to move forward, because anything still done manually slows the work down and creates duplication, since documents have to wait for approval from many parties before they are approved across all departments.

This takes a long time, and if a mistake occurs, time is lost checking which part it came from in order to fix it at the right point.

Conversely, if the organisation has an ERP, it helps reduce mistakes and duplication in the work, making the organisation more efficient.

3. Helps improve the organisation’s internal structure

An ERP makes the organisation’s internal structure stronger through the analysis of business data, analysing the workflow that is shown in the system.

For example, the system shows the work data of each department, and executives can come in and check which department makes the most mistakes,

which department works most correctly, and can also check for damage that might unnecessarily arise from the organisation’s internal work processes.

This means an organisation using an ERP makes fraud difficult, and lets executives see the business’s blind spots and develop the organisation to grow efficiently.

4. Helps reduce costs

Many people may wonder how an ERP helps reduce costs for their business. In short, the ERP is a tool that helps analyse costs

arising from buying materials or goods for sale, from the production process, from damage caused by late delivery,

or from work errors. For example, a purchase order of 200 pieces comes in, but staff key it in wrongly as 2,000 pieces, resulting in excess stock that raises costs and lowers profit.

If the organisation uses an ERP, it leads to greater care, and executives can recognise the source of rising costs.

As a result they can analyse costs and increase profit for the business.

5. Helps executives decide more easily with real-time data

An ERP can call up real-time reports with highly accurate data, which results from a way of working that links everything together.

This means executives or staff who need to see data to analyse the business can pull out reports quickly, as real-time data,

because the system updates data all the time. If it were still a manual system using documents to analyse data the old way,

the data would become inaccurate and out of date, making decisions about your business hard.

6. Helps the business adapt to market changes

Because an ERP is fast at calling up real-time data, executives can adapt to market changes efficiently.

For competition in this digital era is not the era of the big fish eating the small fish, but the era of the fast fish eating the slow fish.

So if you want the business to stay ahead of competitors in the market, it is essential to have an ERP to manage the organisation.

7. Helps protect business information by setting access rights

An ERP has what is called access-rights control. For example, if the accounting department does not want other departments

to know its information, it can grant rights only to those with a duty to access it; or if an executive does not want everyone to see the organisation’s revenue data,

they can grant rights so that only specific people see it. And if anyone wants to enter the system to access data, user access rights must be set.

This makes the data in the system highly secure, and allows tracing of who came in and did what in the organisation’s system.

From the article above, you can see that an ERP can help develop the business through these 7 factors:

1. Helps manage all resources within the organisation
2. Helps increase the organisation’s operational efficiency
3. Helps improve the organisation’s internal structure
4. Helps reduce costs
5. Helps executives decide more easily with real-time data
6. Helps the business adapt to market changes
7. Helps protect business information by setting access rights

These 7 factors are a strength for a growing business, or a guide for an organisation that is about to change to an ERP.

If you want a system with all 7 of these factors, the author recommends PlanetOne ERP — it is highly flexible and can be adapted to fit your organisation’s way of working, and reports or various data can be called up in real time, supporting every type of Thai tax system.