Achieve Operational & Financial Excellence by Letting Go of Your Spreadsheets
If you want to accelerate your growth, it’s time to end your reliance on spreadsheets to run your business and switch to the right ERP system and partner to implement it
When you’re trying to grow a manufacturing or service business, the complications have a way of stacking up like shipping containers in a pandemic. Managing everything in spreadsheets is more of an inhibitor of growth than an accelerator.
We know Excel is comfortable and you’ve probably got a long-tenured crew that keeps it all straight. And when you’re as busy as ever, who has time for the disruption of switching everything over to some massively complicated ERP that you’ve heard so many horror stories about?
Still, it’s probably hard not to notice the inefficiencies creeping into your processes as your business grows. No one can really track inventory on a spreadsheet even if they have the most recent version – and who catches the mistakes? And those team members who keep material costs for 1,000 different parts in their head – what happens when they leave?
That nagging sense that you’ve outgrown your spreadsheets? Here’s what to do about it.
Spreadsheet Inventory Management & Other Growth Obstacles
In the ramp-up to becoming a bigger business, you outgrow old, manual processes. That’s a good thing, but inefficiencies have a way of multiplying too.
Unlike Excel, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system puts everyone in your business on the same page by making it easy to do everything right and hard to do it wrong. The right ERP system, implemented by the right partner, will help ensure:
- Your inventory, across all locations, is aligned with your production schedule
- You have the financial information needed to recognize unprofitable lines of business and unprofitable customers
- You take advantage of opportunities to optimize your supply chain
- You utilize your workforce effectively
- Your pricing keeps up with your costs
- You understand how much of your growth is due to price increases vs. additional sales
- You close your monthly financials in days instead of weeks, avoiding the dreaded state of “perma-close”
The right ERP is, first and foremost, a source of answers – answers you can use to drive innovation, efficiency and identify things that are holding you back. Can your spreadsheets do that?
ERP vs. Excel: Can Your Spreadsheets Do This?
A good ERP has so many advantages over Excel, it’s not even close to a fair fight. Six months after implementation, you’ll wonder how you ever ran your business without it. Here are a few examples of what the right ERP can do to boost efficiency and productivity across all aspects of your business:
- Manage the full customer life cycle
- Monitor real-time production and quality control
- Speed decision-making
- Optimize resources across your supply network
- Improve warehouse operations and inventory management
- Accelerate innovation
- Control costs and increase profitability
- Configure, price and quote complex orders
- Profitably manage equipment rental
Isn’t ERP Implementation a Nightmare?
How can we be so sure that your ERP will do what you need it to do? We design it that way. The right ERP is customizable and configured to work the way you work, not the other way around as with Oracle, SAP and other “industry-leading” ERP systems.
At Bridging Business Technology Solutions (BBTS), we have deep expertise in helping manufacturers and service providers grow and thrive with the power of Infor SyteLine/CSI, an incredibly flexible and powerful mid-market ERP. We don’t just implement SyteLine, we customize it to the unique demands of your business.
We also make ERP implementation easy for you – in fact we guarantee your success. With over 165 successful implementations behind us, BBTS team members bring over a decade of experience to the job. Our success is built on a proven process of review, demonstration, testing, and support.
Get started by speaking with one of our ERP implementation experts as part of a process review.