The Right Time to Upgrade/Replace your ERP System

The Manufacturing business operations are more complex and competitive in nature. The ERP that any organization uses, creates a centralized database that integrates all the departments together thus establishing a standard workflow. This clearly states that the companies are completely relying on its ERP Software and obviously an ERP upgrade is unavoidable to prevent any errors.

Investing in an ERP system would definitely help you see growth in the business but in the long run. Hence ERP upgrade/choosing a new ERP is not an easy task since it requires additional time, cost, the right planning of the implementation process, training your employees and creating a new workflow with change management. Executing all these without affecting the ongoing production will really be a challenging task.

Signs which indicate the right time for ERP Upgrade :

Lack of Real-Time visibility :

The manufacturing industries require many real time information that is happening within the organization, like order management, inventory management, materials procurement, product shipping and even the movement of vehicles in and out of the company. All this information is to be fetched by an ERP software for a smooth running of the business and timely delivery of products to the customer. Hence when a legacy ERP fails to give such details on time or any data mismatch occurs then it will raise a major problem causing project delay leading to a rise in operational cost.

No Mobile Functionality :

The Mobile functionality helps the workers or team leaders work on the go, easing the operations carried out on time. For example, there is an immediate requirement of a material to be purchased and you raise a purchase request which is to be approved by your Manager who is on leave or out of town. At situations like this, he may not always need to carry a laptop with him, instead make use of the mobile app. It is not necessary for the mobile app to have all the features exactly as a software but a few like this would really help to save time.

Non Compatible with latest technologies :

There are many basic and common features like payment gateway, barcode/QR scanner, printers, visitors pass, employee attendance, etc. that would be required to integrate with your ERP. But when these functions are not supported then you will have to make use of a third party integration which again increases your operations cost. Also when your employees start to feel difficult to complete certain tasks in ERP, they will be looking for any third party software like Excel and this consumes additional time causing delay in any process.

No Vendor Support :

All Software vendors will be keen only on upgrading their software to new technologies. So the level of support you can get when using an older version is difficult in the long run. Hence it is always better to keep yourself updated to recent versions and explore more features that would even more simplify our work process. It is also advisable that you don’t leave a big gap in upgrading to the latest version as the vendor support team may feel difficult in helping with new technologies to your employees who were long used to older versions.

Losing out to competitors :

Manufacturing is all about delivering the products on time, with good quality and meeting out customer demands. For this, you have to be working spontaneously without any limitations or delay. Customer satisfaction does not come easily as you have to be very conscious about knowing their changing requirements and keep upgrading yourself. An ERP system should help you in terms of timely follow-up, preparing quotation, analyzing the efficiency, quality standards of products and finally, the on time delivery. If any of the features is lagging you from customer satisfaction then you lose out to your competitors.