With escalating material costs and the global recession, cutting costs is a priority for mid-sized companies when sourcing ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions and ERP software. However, companies cannot sacrifice customer service or satisfaction to cut costs. It’s easy to be influenced by the pressures from the challenged economy, management and financial pressures to gain short term profitability at the expense of long term drivers key to long term market share and customer retention.

ERP Software in The Mid Market- What is Expected From Enterprise Systems in Today Businesses

With escalating material costs and the global recession, cutting costs is a priority for mid-sized companies when sourcing ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions and ERP software. However, companies cannot sacrifice customer service or satisfaction to cut costs. It’s easy to be influenced by the pressures from the challenged economy, management and financial pressures to gain short term profitability at the expense of long term drivers key to long term market share and customer retention. Data from mid-sized companies surveyed show that ERP software solutions are essential to achieve the best performance results in reducing costs, while increasing accuracy, delivery performance and inventory management. Here are the summary of finding for companies using enterprise systems and enterprise software solutions to increase company performance and cut costs. The Top Performing Companies Show That in 2008: • Costs were reduced by over 20% by companies using ERP software compared to under 10% by the industry average • Delivery accuracy increased by 17% for companies using enterprise software • Administration costs were reduced by 20% with ERP systems versus industry standard reductions of 8% • 14% more ERP functionality were used by the top companies • Top performing companies were more likely, about 20% more, to be using the current version of their enterprise software Overall, in reducing costs the 3 main areas that companies were able to cut costs were by; 1) providing transparency and visibility to business processes across the company, 2) streamlining sales, customer service and back office functions such as accounting, finance, and administration, and 3) optimizing current capacity which includes labor, plants and equipment, warehouse space, fleet utilization, and scheduling of staff. One out of seven companies did not have and ERP system implemented and surprisingly they were not all small companies. One fourth of the companies were medium sized companies and more than 10 percent were large companies. In summary, to achieve the best of breed in their respective industry, companies should not only implement an ERP solution, they must continue to increase their use of features in their ERP system and deploy the solution across the entire company, not just for a few key departments or employees. In order to get company –wide buy in and deployment, or in other words, get employees to use the ERP system to its fullest potential, companies need to assign key department mangers and operations manager as sponsors to ensure the enterprise systems are utilized.