Competitive Advantage with ERP

Epicor Software’s Basil Daniels explains the business benefits, implementation challenges and future applications of ERP.

BM. Companies implement Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems for a variety of reasons. Can you outline the main business benefits of an ERP system?
BD. Enterprise Resource Planning systems are essential to any modern business looking to gain competitive advantage. Organisations benefit from ERP in a variety of ways including: enhanced productivity, flexibility and customer responsiveness; eliminate inefficiencies and streamline business processes; real-time visibility of operations that leads to better decision making; and ultimately new growth opportunity. According to AMR Research in their January 30, 2008 report, European SMB IT Spending, 2007-2008, “Improved efficiencies and lower costs across the enterprise lead among business initiatives that drive IT investments, with IT governance surging in importance.”

BM. What is the most effective way to control the soaring costs of ERP implementation?
BD. This has been the subject of much discussion in recent years as mid-size companies have seen the potential benefits of ERP systems outstripped by the costs of implementing expensive and inflexible systems that were not designed for them. At Epicor we fundamentally believe that the key to managing ERP costs is to have a flexible system designed for industry-specific requirements that can easily be tailored to each company’s unique way of working. As a result, Epicor had the lowest total costs per user of all ERP systems according to industry analyst reports.

BM. Let’s talk about the convergence of ERP and CRM in end-to-end business processes. What impact is this having on the industry and on organisations in general?
BD. It is inevitable that ERP and CRM have merged into single integrated systems in recent years. Every company needs to focus all efforts on looking after the customer and responding rapidly to changing requirements. Therefore, it is vital that customer requirements are immediately synchronised with manufacturing or distribution facilities to make sure you can keep the customer happy. This also applies to after-sales service, and making sure that capacity (people and parts) are aligned to service demands.

BM. Companies frequently use their ERP systems for 10 to 20 years. What are the best ways to protect that investment over such a long period of time?
BD. In this global marketplace who knows what new markets you will be entering or acquisitions you will be making over the next 10 to 20 years. What’s important therefore is that your ERP system has the ability to adapt as your company changes. This means not only having the right dynamic functionality, such as multi-site planning or adaptable financial reporting, but also that the technology it is built on will easily allow changes to business processes. To this end, at Epicor we have invested in building our next generation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the technology foundation for all our business applications. This flexible new technology provides a truly collaborative and dynamic enterprise application experience, offering new levels of flexibility, usability and agility in support of application-to-application and business-to-business integration.

BM. Where do you see the market heading in the next 18-24 months? Are there any trends you are currently getting excited about?
BD. The most exciting trend will be to use new technologies to help change the way users work with ERP systems; to unlock the power of enterprise systems and make it easier for everyone to use, so making the whole company and supply chain more productive, not just the select few trained on how to use the system. Epicor is enabling this through solutions like Information Worker that enable users of desktop tools like Microsoft Office to access ERP directly data from these familiar productivity tools. For example, with Epicor Information Worker, users are able to synchronise Microsoft Office Outlook contacts, appointments and tasks with an Epicor application along with other items such as customer information, sales history, inventory levels and production schedules. This all part of a trend called Enterprise 2.0, using new web-based technologies to make users more productive, open up ERP systems and enable real collaboration.