Welcome to 2022! Are you thinking about the New Year’s resolutions you are planning to make? If so, don’t just consider the usual personal ones like losing weight or sorting out your finances. Make sure you have a good think about business goals as well, like how best to improve your business in 2022. Here are six reasons why a new year should equal a new ERP for your business.
1. Now is the time to move to a cloud ERP
According to recent predictions from Gartner, global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $313 billion in 2020. As a result of the pandemic, many organisations are bringing forward their timescales on their digital business initiatives and moving more rapidly toward the cloud.
Has your business been trying to move towards a hybrid working model, but are you finding that your on-premise ERP is struggling to support the increased need for mobile access? Moving to a native cloud-based ERP such as Business Central will allow your employees to perform both back-end and front-end tasks from anywhere and at any time. Also, up to date business data can be accessed on the go which means that important business decisions can be made without any unnecessary delays.
2. Your software is out of date
Are you currently using legacy ERP software that is either coming towards, or has already reached, the end of its product lifecycle? There are numerous risks attached to using an ERP that is out of support. There could be security issues, problems with bugs that cannot be and are not being fixed, as well as difficulties with software compatibility. If this is the case, now is the time to start thinking about a replacement solution which will be both well-supported and provide you with added functionality and flexibility to help your business grow.
3. Your hardware is out of date
All the while that your out-of-date hardware is working, it doesn’t seem to be a problem. However, once problems start, the hardware can become expensive to maintain. Out-of-date hardware doesn’t include new capabilities and functionalities such as integration with mobile technologies such as handheld scanners. Using a cloud-based ERP such as Business Central means that software updates are deployed from cloud servers and therefore the burden of updating hardware is removed.
4. Your systems are siloed …
Many legacy ERP systems are siloed. All the data about the different parts of the business is there but it is usually in separate and discrete operational systems. What this means is that there is regularly a duplication of effort as data needs to be manually inputted into various systems and there is lack of clarity on which version of the data is the one that should be used to make specific decisions.
Business Central will give you a single source of truth, with a consolidated view of all your business data. This can be financial data such as cash flow, bank reconciliations, fixed assets and budget forecasts, or general data such as vendor and customer records. This single view ensures that you and everyone in the business has the same data to hand and, as a result, are able to make crucial business decisions based on it.
5. … and have limited functionality
As your business has grown and your processes and business requirements have changed, you may have found that your legacy ERP has not grown with you. It no longer has all the functionality that you need in order for you to do everything you want to in your business. For example, you may have a warehouse where you want to use mobile data scanners. Or you may want to introduce RPA (robotic processing automation) into your business to automate mundane, rules-based business processes that are often tedious and time-consuming. Modern cloud-based ERPs, such as Business Central, make use of the most up-to-date, cloud-enabled functionalities to meet its users’ evolving business management needs. They are also regularly updated so you can be sure that you will always have the most modern functionality available to business users.
6. It takes far too long to get reports out of your system
With your current ERP, do you have to wait days for someone to pull the latest business report? And when you get it, is it a struggle to get it to tell you exactly what you want to know about your sales or customers or creditors?
A key selling point of modern ERPs, such as Business Central, is that it offers real-time business insights at every level of your business. This can be from a high-level overview of your entire business to practical detailed analyses using so called “Dimensions” of individual customers, products, departments, sales teams, etc.
New Year’s Resolution: New year = New ERP. This Year we will move to Business Central!
If reading this article has made you realise that you have outgrown your current ERP and you feel you need a more robust and modern business management solution, TVision Technology can help you make the next step.
We are the largest and most experienced providers of Business Central (formerly known as Dynamics NAV) in the UK. Our team take real pleasure in working with our clients to develop, implement and support the best possible ERP implementation for their needs, and it’s this enthusiasm for our work which sees us keep our relationships with clients long after the initial implementation is complete.
If you want to know more about Microsoft Business Central and how TVision could help you, please feel free to contact us to arrange a demo to see how moving to Business Central could be the right business move for you.
