NGR's Blog

For a business person, accounting is a backwards-looking activity. Looking forward, out the ‘front windscreen’ of your business, you see the next customers to win, to next orders to fulfill, the next payments to collect. By comparison, accounting is what you see in the rear-view mirror: a mundane recording of what has already gone by.

Depressing as it may be for the more sales-oriented types, accounting is still a critical ingredient for business success. Businesses who ignore it or screw it up don’t last very long.

So, getting accounting right is critical for a business, and this means that getting the accounting software right is critical too. And here is where things are now becoming tricky.

The manufacturing industries are constantly looking for ways to cut costs, increase revenue, efficiency, speed, and so on, and advancements in technology are key to furthering this cause. Today, there are several emerging technologies that are having a significant impact on how companies operate. And one that is being embraced with increasingly open arms is cloud manufacturing software.

Cloud, or software as a service (SaaS), based solutions offer many benefits to end users that are making it attractive to manufacturers. There are of course still the ever-present security concerns and the question of data ownership, as well as the more cut-and-dried issue of network connectivity. And it should be noted that one of the keys to making a cloud-based manufacturing operations solution viable is to ensure that that architecturally there is enough redundancy that production will not be affected if access to the cloud is interrupted.

Nonetheless, the rise in adoption rates shows that many manufacturers are seeing enough advancements in cloud technology and the associated quick ROI for implementing cloud-based software solutions today, along with an anticipation for even larger considerations for tomorrow.

Just because it’s in fashion and a young trend, does not mean you should jump and get that cool scar. Unless of course…….

ERP on Cloud! That could have sounded as outrageous as torn jeans or wrinkled shirts or tangerine hair streaks. Such uber-stylish stuff is better left for experimentation of teens, is what you would have thought, and rightly so.

But is some bottom-up adoption of SaaS variants crawling into your office? Is it poking and hinting that indeed a big young lot of developers, sales/marketing or IT folks in your organization have since long started using cloud with full frenzy and oblivion to what you prefer?

So are you already too late? Should you follow something just because it is in fashion?

To continue to achieve a return on investment in the years following ERP implementation, manufacturers and distributors should be sure to take advantage of future software enhancements and upgrades to their ERP application. All too often, the organization becomes bogged down in the company’s daily operations and puts software upgrades on the backburner. When this occurs year after year, the software that serves as the information and transactional backbone of the enterprise becomes outdated and puts the organization at a competitive disadvantage, as technology and the mechanisms in which businesses interact with customers is constantly evolving.

This article will explore the relative advantages of acquiring and implementing a fully-integrated ERP software system rather than buying application software based on a best-of-breed solution approach.

A typical manufacturing or distribution enterprise will need the following types of functionality:

• Financial management and reporting;
• Inventory management, purchasing, and order management;
• E-commerce;
• Customer relationship management;
• Manufacturing planning and execution;
• Warehouse management;
• Forecasting and planning; and
• Decision support and business intelligence.