The larger and more complex your company becomes, the more moving parts you need to keep track of. The key to continued growth often comes from finding synergies across all these moving parts. For example, how do your inventory practices affect sales? Where can you apply CRM insights when it comes to budgeting? Are there supply chain opportunities that stem from project management? Answering these questions starts with implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution.

ERP implementation is invaluable for any growing company, largely because it connects significant data inputs across different business lines. Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Human Resources, Accounting, and other segments may not interact directly with each other. Still, they all depend on each other to facilitate business operations. ERP connects the dots to provide insights across all activities.

Let’s take a look at some real-world examples of ERP implementations and the benefits that stem from the insights ERP offers.

Three basic examples of ERP implementation

For many businesses thinking about ERP implementation, seeing is believing. Understanding how ERP connects data across the business is instrumental in understanding how you can benefit from it. Here’s a look at three simple examples to show how ERP improves business synergy:

1) Inventory

Are your inventorying practices the best they could be? ERP software can tell you how your inventorying affects cash flow based on sales—while also factoring in supply chain lead times and your customers’ net payment terms—to help you determine the best way to stock products. More than that, real-time insights can even account for seasonal or cyclical inventorying habits for ongoing, real-time optimization.

2) Sales Pipelines

Every business wants a sales to funnel that’s chock-full of prospects and potential sales. That means building effective sales pipelines. ERP software ties together data from sales and marketing, customer service, product development, and finance to help businesses make more informed decisions about how they target audiences, structure pipelines, deliver value, and budget resources. It’s a cohesive effort that relies on more than just MQL data.

3) Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)

Consider the investment that comes with designing, building, and deploying a new B2B website. For enterprise businesses, the costs can creep into the tens of thousands of dollars, and there’s no shortage of implementation considerations. ERP software connects the dots between project management, budgeting, IT, tech stack integrations, customer web portals, and more. Every aspect of the project informs every other to ensure a seamless design-build-rollout process that’s on time and under budget.

These three simple examples are just the beginning of what ERP implementation can offer growing businesses. Because ERP facilitates data sharing across the business, limitless optimization opportunities exist! Anywhere you can connect one business action to another through data, there’s potential for insight-driven improvement.

The core benefits of ERP implementation

What business challenges are you trying to overcome? What growth goals are you trying to achieve? ERP implementation is helpful for businesses trying to create solutions across a wide area of focus. Some of the core benefits of successful ERP implementation include:

• Cost Savings: Investigating data synergies makes identifying and eliminating waste within connected business operations easier.
• Productivity: Understanding the connections between business activities and outcomes makes it easier to automate production.
• Business Synergies: Identifying relationships across the business improves decision-making in a broadly beneficial way.
• Data Visibility: Beyond generating data, ERP makes it easier to clean, store and apply data with confidence to improve understanding.
• Compliance: In compliance-based industries, broad oversight equates to better adherence to strict rules, standards, and practices.
• Resource Management: ERP helps businesses understand how to maximize resources from cash-on-hand to the company’s many assets.

All these benefits add up to a major one: a better-run business. Knowing how different business functions affect broad company operations can make smarter decisions across the board. Knowledge is power, and ERP implementation opens the door to incredible knowledge about your business.

AI is making ERP even more powerful

Today’s ERP platforms aren’t just capable of bringing data together to power business insights they can also use AI to automate decision-making.

Imagine an AI-powered CRM that’s smart enough to quantify the value of an SQL. Consider the potential of AI-powered accounting software that makes recommendations to improve your cash flow. These features of an ERP platform are helping companies big and small overcome growth hurdles and solve everyday challenges that might otherwise hold them back.

Modern ERP implementation happens in the cloud. That means it’s broadly accessible, highly integrated, and uniquely customizable. As companies expand their tech stacks and become increasingly digitized, AI-driven ERP implementation is becoming essential.

Who benefits most from ERP implementation?

According to 2022 data, Manufacturing, Distribution, and Technology companies are the most dependent on ERP software. When surveyed about their reasons for investing in ERP software, finance and accounting (23%) and IT department employees (23%) were the most significant factors driving implementation.

The larger and more complex your business becomes, the more valuable ERP implementation becomes. A staggering 95% of businesses see measurable improvements in their business processes after implementing ERP software. ERP makes it easy to not only manage an exponential number of data sources but also connect them to glean applicable insights. It’s the best way to keep your business organized and optimized.

The reality of ERP is that any business can benefit from it at scale. While startups and small businesses may not use all the functionality of ERP software right away, they’ll grow into it quickly as they add more and more facts about the business. There’s a reason upwards of 90% of all Fortune 500 companies rely on ERP to run their businesses!

Author Bio

Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services​​

From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan Gould brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. As the Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing, he skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs. He strongly believes in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.