Time and money
As a small to mid-sized manufacturer or distributor, chances are if you have to ask your teams where their time and money go, they’re spending too much of both on manual processes.
Comprehensive visibility is the only way to genuinely track where your time and money are invested — and to determine if they are delivering the best possible return on investment.
There’s no question that COVID-19 has created obstacles for SMEs — from working capital to supply chain challenges. But there is a silver lining — it’s a great time to examine your business practices across departments and find areas where you can be more competitive, and profitable.
It’s the perfect time to study up on accelerating trends in the direction of e-commerce, and automation, scalability, and other cost-saving measures. The pandemic disruption has taught us that a small business’s ability to pivot is just as important as other forms of innovation.
Demystifying ERP
Enterprise resource planning software — sometimes called business management solutions — is a platform that supports production, inventory management, CRM, financials, and demand management.
It’s not rocket science — when properly executed, ERP is a simple, comprehensive platform that delivers support and grows your business. Think about it like this — xTuple ERP helps you manage the downstairs components of your business, like supply chain and production, and go-to-market strategies:
- Purchasing
- Inventory
- Sales
- Customer service
- BOM
- Project management
- Shop floor
- Q/A
- Q/C
For the upstairs teams, xTuple helps you plan and control your bottom line. It delivers real-time, end-to-end visibility into your entire business. It’s a competitive advantage, particularly in times of disruption, new product launch, and first-to-market positioning:
- Shareholder accountability
- Budgeting and accounting
- Fixed assets
- Financial reporting
- Analyze and measure through KPIs
The business benefit — the true value of ERP — is to deliver seamless integration across functions and process standardization throughout your entire business.
A side-by-side comparison of ERP for small businesses clearly shows why xTuple is the top ERP solution. We focus on your priorities, price, and functionality — annual costs include onboarding and the most crucial and preferred features.
How you can avoid ERP implementation failure
Most small businesses lack a full-time IT team, or a project manager with time to spare. That’s why xTuple delivers a dedicated engineer to onboard our customers in 90-days. We drill down to the value of ERP for your specific business.
- Dedicated onboarding engineer
- Personal customer success experts
Mid-sized companies that operate under Waterfall methodology — linear, sequential approaches, can delay value realizations of ERP and can drag on for months without providing a positive impact. xTuple onboarding engineers are well-versed in Waterfall and can help speed the return on investment for these organizations.
In addition to the engineering component, xTuple provides a dedicated customer success specialist to ensure that your onboarding questions are answered in real-time. Mid-onboarding questions, like taxation and validation, which require collaboration with upstream and downstream teams have the potential to slow things down, but xTuple customer success experts cut through the red tape to accommodate the unique needs of your business.
xTuple onboarding is faster-paced, more transparent, and delivers end-to-end visibility so stakeholders can prioritize high-value, core ERP functionality.
Inflection point
COVID-19 is an international health issue and an economic challenge; the pandemic has created an inflection point for many businesses. Significant changes in the way consumers do business while sheltering in place, as well as supply chain disruptions, materials shortages — and for many, an unstable economy, require a reset — a deeper understanding of your business and the marketplace.
The inflection point is here and now — the question is, what does it take to accelerate through it?
The answer is innovation.
Companies — especially smaller organizations with razor-thin margins, can’t afford to stay the course. To create and maintain a healthy, profitable bottom line, SMEs must pivot to a seamless business solution that gives them accounting, e-commerce, inventory, sales, and production visibility, and control.
Check out our self-guided and custom demos, and see how xTuple can help you integrate, automate, and grow.
