To what degree does your business run by convention? What sort of value does this cost your business and what level of risk does it expose you to?
Data entry and management, document generation, report generation – these are the bread-and-butter functions of ERP systems.
But industry leading ERP solutions today can go further, much further. Modern software packages should be powerful and flexible enough that they can encode and automate the bespoke processes on which your business relies.
As an example, this could mean:
- Automatically sending out emails and notifications to marketing staff when a new customer has made their first purchase;
- Automatically sending a text message to salespeople when a stock item in their portfolio has had a price change;
- Automatically notifying finance and sales team when a customer has exceeded comfortable credit limits;
- Automatically putting sales orders on hold and requiring approval when they exceed a maximum value or don’t meet a minimum margin;
- Sending updates to sales/customers when supplier order delivery dates have changed;
- Build the onboarding process for new customers/suppliers so that it is always followed and appropriate documentation and approvals are completed and attached to the ERP records;
- Build a process for employee approvals for annual leave or sick leave;
- Build a process for project onboarding that everyone can follow and play their part;
One of the early steps in any good deployment of an ERP is sitting down with members from all business units to identify their processes and map them to an automation (Business Process Manager) in the system.
The obvious benefit of such automation to employees is that it significantly increases their throughput and productivity. It frees them up to spend more time on higher-level decision making, which enables the sort of innovation and strategic thinking that allows businesses to thrive.
But the other, deeper benefit is more subtle – bringing the processes and workflows of members from all business units to light as part of an ERP implementation makes them explicit.
In doing so, it not only subjects them to a scrutiny which they may never have received as simply the conventions within each department, this might make some people uncomfortable. But when you weigh in the benefits of easier communications across the business and protecting all team members by knowledge sharing, then everyone begins to see the real benefits. Solid practical Business Processes which can be automated into your ERP system enables better working relationships with all teams in your business. Processes and workflows which are automated, are processes and workflow that you can see – and it is far easier to optimize, manage and communicate what you can see than what you can’t.
This is the promise of modern-grade ERP solutions as seen in MYOB Greentree. MYOB Greentree with the right implementation strategy wraps around your business and becomes central to how it runs, making your operations as scalable as the software. MYOB Greentree enables automation of your business processes, so that all staff can follow a set process for pre-defined tasks. Greentree tracks who commenced the process, updates along the way and attaches documentation as required if this is part of the business process.
Tune in next post for a specific application of these concepts to the Food and Beverage Industry.
Contact us at Endeavour Solutions to find out how we can help you get the best out of MYOB Greentree or MYOB Advanced.
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