What Should Manufacturers and Distributors Look for in a New ERP Solution?

Whether you’ve outgrown your current system, need new functionality, or are looking to facilitate collaboration, what are some of the most common things product-based firms like yours should expect when they’re in the market for Next Generation ERP?

What Can You Gain from Next Generation ERP?

Following our last blogs on the ongoing challenges that firms like yours will need to face in order to remain competitive for the next decade and the opportunities for growth you should be embracing, we would today like to explore some of the ways a modern, connected solution can help you overcome the status quo and position yourself for success in this competitive landscape.

Take Control of Your Back Office

Often, the first department to recognize the challenges presented by outdated or underperforming software is finance. Running a finance department takes a lot of time and effort just to keep the lights on, and as a company grows, the workload increases.

Unfortunately, with more work comes more risk—each manual task or entry adds a tiny amount of risk to a department that can’t tolerate any. A miskeyed decimal, a slip of the finger, or another typo could leave you scrambling to find and fix whatever error took place. Add to this the sheer amount of work that goes into keying in all this data, and you’re paying a lot of money for little value.

However, a next generation ERP solution can connect your business and reduce the workload for your staff.  By automating manual processes and setting up workflows to reduce the likelihood of error, your staff can

• Focus on high-value tasks that help grow the business.
• Rest easier knowing that they won’t be sifting through thousands of cells in a spreadsheet to find where something went wrong.
• See how data connects and use this data for greater impact.

Understand More about the Business

Added to the reduced risk that goes into running the business, a Next Generation ERP solution can give you more visibility into the results, drivers behind the results, and more. Better yet, this information is available to decision makers when they want to see it—not after hours or days spent keying data into a spreadsheet.

A modern ERP platform provides employees across finance, sales, administration, procurement, and production with a “single source of truth” that connects workflows, creates greater visibility across the business, and empowers more intelligent decision-making.

An Opportunity to Better Your Business

As mentioned above, a Next Generation ERP can free up your staff to focus on higher-value activities. Rather than simply working on day-to-day tasks needed to keep the lights on, your staff can instead look at ways to improve the business and find new opportunities they might have never seen while buried in spreadsheets.

For example, if your pick, pack, and ship processes are inefficient because warehouse workers are spending too much time on low-value activities, you’re leaving profits on the table.

However, to achieve this, you need a solution built to handle the unique needs of the business, delivered by a partner who knows how to put this solution into action.

Kissinger and Sage 100cloud: Your ERP Partners for Better Business

Software vendors with direct experience in manufacturing and distribution are likely to have a set of best practices from deployments across their customer base, and are even more likely to have a base of partners with the expertise to make it happen.

For growing businesses in the manufacturing and distribution industry looking to leverage Next Generation ERP, look no further than Sage 100cloud and Kissinger Associates. With over three decades of experience in the ERP industry, the Kissinger team has worked with mid-market distributors and manufacturers to implement and support products that fuel growth and make life easier for end users.

How can you tell if you’re ready for ERP? Download this free guide from analyst firm IDG on how to make smarter choices in ERP.