How effective is your customer service?

Despite the fact that, when thinking of ERP solutions, most people immediately think of enterprises and organizations, small and medium businesses are actually the ones that can benefit from ERP solutions the most, as their size is limited and the search even for the smallest or distinct business advantage is a stressful, daily process that can get them half a step ahead of the competition.

An ERP system can help a small or medium-sized business improve their intelligence, reduce their expenses, enhance extroversion and consequently increase sales, and of course ensure a high degree of customer satisfaction. In order to make this happen, you need to have precise knowledge of your products and services availability and stock. If there is no stock available, it is impossible to reach out to customers and drive sales. This is where ERP modules can be really helpful, as they provide a link between the sales and marketing departments and logistics, ensuring that all product shipments will take place the soonest possible.

The importance of preparation and the advantage of having multiple modules!

In their effort to provide the best possible support, ERP solution providers are especially receptive to their clients’ demands and requirements. Therefore, they tend to develop a great number of modules with a huge amount of features and functions that, in most cases, are never used. In some cases, their owners are not even aware of their existence! On the other side, small and medium businesses that don’t have organized IT departments or a big budget, need to ensure the continuous and smooth execution of their daily operations through the ERP system, so every available module and every issue that is solved before it even comes up, is an added benefit!

However, before even starting their market research, any business that needs to have a successful ERP system must first make a detailed list of its operations and specific needs, document their operational methods and so on. Having all this in mind, they then need to find out if the available solutions meet their requirements and, if not, they need to find a solution that comes closer to their needs and work with the provider in order to develop the missing functionalities. This is usually achieved with simple customizations and not by developing new applications, since the era of fully-customized systems seems to be part of history.

Finally, there are quite a few ERP modules that provide solutions for different platforms and applications. As a result, it is not considered necessary anymore to replace the systems and software applications already used by the client. As a matter of fact, ERP system developers are now taking steps well in advance to incorporate specialized tools to various programming interfaces, thus making it possible to actually enhance the functionality of the software solutions used by their clients, eliminating the need to transfer the existing data or spending valuable time getting familiar with the new applications…