The challenges of scaling up an enterprise don’t stop when you establish a global presence. On the contrary, managing international operations can become incredibly difficult if you don’t have the technology in place to streamline everyday tasks and ensure supply chains are unencumbered. Here’s how an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can help you transition to enterprise status and stabilise your global operations.

Scaling your competencies as you grow

Far too many businesses with an appetite for international dominance fail to scale up successfully because of how they manage their resources. Consider a small retail operation that is achieving remarkable profits in Australia. Their transformation journey from SME to global enterprise requires a complete overhaul of their central systems, but their current accounting package only allows them to manage stock in one location, with no services to deal with foreign currencies.

What ERP provides is a way for the business to integrate all its operations into a ‘single source of truth’ – from human resources to stock management and everything in between. In addition to having a holistic view of the daily operations of the enterprise, all through a user-friendly app on your phone or desktop, users can access real-time insights and manage their data however they like. Compared to their original legacy solution, the retail business can now immediately find information such as their average sales per unit per week, individualised by each location around the world.

Managing global supply chains in real-time

Without ERP, critical reporting can take weeks – or even months – leaving an enterprise’s decision-makers dealing with bad financial news at a time when they can’t make any effective response. For example, speaking on the Beyond Business Borders podcast, Emma & Tom’s co-founder Tom Griffiths said: “Back in the old days, we would have our accountant tell us in September that we lost $40,000 worth of stock in May – bad luck, it’s gone. [With ERP], we are now reporting 10 days after month’s end, so the transformation is fundamental.”

Beyond the reporting applications, enterprises can also monitor their supply chains in real-time to ensure any minor problems don’t balloon into profit-draining disasters. If you have delivery drivers in multiple countries or active pickers in various warehouses around the world, the information they upload through their company PDA is sent straight to the cloud and made instantly accessible through the ERP solution. With instantaneous insights at your fingertips, you can make smarter and faster decisions 24/7.

3 benefits of ERP for enterprises

Aside from providing the functionality to support your global ambitions and help you streamline your enterprise’s critical business processes, ERP also delivers:

• Built-in BI: Make the most of business intelligence with real-time insights into your KPIs. This provides decision-makers with a bird’s-eye view of the entire organisation and a single source of truth to refer back to.
• Productivity solutions: Ignoring repetitive, time-consuming tasks is the fastest way to lose money as a global enterprise. ERP solutions are designed to eliminate or automate these manual and tedious tasks in order to provide you with organisation-wide efficiency gains.
• Customisation: Build the ERP solution that matches your enterprise’s specific needs. With the right technology, you can add and remove functionality as your organisation scales and evolves.

Especially in the current climate where many businesses are experiencing flat sales and slow growth, ERP can provide much-needed insights. Having the ability to easily manage your balance sheet, view live inventory across locations, and ultimately see what is happening inside your organisation in a timely and transparent manner is key to breaking through the challenging times and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise.