The economy and financial market s have been acting like a roller coaster lately and companies are feeling tremendous pressure to lower cost.  No department is feeling the pressure more that information technology departments as that is one of the first places companies look to trim some fat, particularly enterprise systems and related support costs.  Here are seven key areas to reduce costs in your ERP, enterprise resource planning, systems with an emphasis on “big” enterprise systems such as SAP.

The economy and financial market s have been acting like a roller coaster lately and companies are feeling tremendous pressure to lower cost.  No department is feeling the pressure more that information technology departments as that is one of the first places companies look to trim some fat, particularly enterprise systems and related support costs.  Here are seven key areas to reduce costs in your ERP, enterprise resource planning, systems with an emphasis on “big” enterprise systems such as SAP.

Automating your data entry is a good place to start.  Using a Microsoft  Excel interface, usually a standard front end face, can really save time and increase efficiency.  Most employees know how to use excel, and if they don’t that can learn to basics pretty easily.  In many organizations these list are originally in excel format which make it all the more easier and expedient.  Excel is also an easy program to sort, categorize and customize data and customize data entry forms.

Data entry as a whole is a key area to cut costs.  Look to automating the data entry process in these key areas:

Sales operations,-which include customer data, sales orders, pricing conditions, order changes, and contracts.

 Finance and accounting data entry- journal entries, invoices, accounts reconciliation, payments, and fixed assets.

Human Resources- employee life cycle information, training, job changes, records, and contracts

Procurement- inventory, forecasts, purchase orders, vendor tracking, bill of materials

The same process holds for data maintenance too. This maintenance is a routine occurrence and the data entry is very time consuming as it involves global changes to the master data records in the enterprise system.  Data entry should be made first on records exported on an excel interface and then exported back to the enterprise system.  The loading time will be reduced dramatically.

Integrating information from various departments is another support cost that can be reduced.  Given the popularity of open source, software on demand (SOD) and SaaS (software as a service) applications used in parallel by companies such as CRM applications like Salesforce.com and popular Human Resource applications, critical information had to be integrated amongst the various departments and integrated in the company’s core enterprise system.  User friendly, inexpensive data loading software can be used to dramatically reduce the integration of this data automatically versus manually.

In this economic slump, it will no doubt be well received for IT managers to implement these data maintenance and data entry automation solutions proactively rather than by mandates from above.  There are considerable resources and costs that can be saved by working smarter and more efficiently with your technology tools and make them work harder for you.

Written by :

rich