TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION

Designing the backbone of a system for a company, the usual limiters come to mind, can I afford it, and how do I navigate the technology?

​

You may have heard you need an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, but is this correct for my company? After all, they promise integration throughout my organization and will solve all my problems.

​

These types of systems do allow integration of all the functions in your business, have a reporting suite to allow you to manage, report and analyse your company. Some common ones in the market place you might have heard of are SAP, Sage and Netsuite. From experience, these are not suited to SME’s as they tend to be expensive to purchase, take a long time to implement take up a lot of resources to manage on an ongoing basis. You should also consider; how is your business structured and can you make your business work with these ERP packages?

​

They do however provide the backbone of your company and as such one of the most important things, you can invest in, so if not a recognized ERP solution, what alternatives do we have?

​

At Bridging Strategy we prefer to map out your customer journey and see the processes that are vital to this making this journey the best possible experience for your customer.  This also gives a futuristic view or roadmap of where you need to go over the next 1-3 years and so a very worthwhile exercise. 

​

A decision then needs to be made what needs to be tackled first and gives you the most bang for your buck and then look for the best solution in the market place. This means you drive this from the customer side and not the process side which will improve your customer service, and by default increase your sales.

​

With the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service), this removes the barrier to entry to as they are often free (or cheap) and as you scale up (or down) the software can cope with that. Other functionality can be upgraded and allows the scalability for your technology to grow as your company does. This model also allows you to interface one software service to another gives you the connectedness, automation, common source data and collaboration of staff to allow more efficient working.

​

Another possibility due to the idiosyncrasies companies have, especially around the collection of sales data (and your most important data), then a bespoke system may be a better option, more capital outlay but no monthly/annual subscription charges (and can be amortized). This can also be interfaced with other SaaS options to provide a seamless backbone of technology that more expensive ERP systems provide.