What’s Next for ERPs? Future Trends to Look Forward to

‘ERP implementation improved business processes for 95% of businesses’, found the 2018 ERP Report by Panorama Consulting Solutions.

This testifies the pivotal role that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) plays in managing various business assets and streamlining operations.

If you are still unsure about why you should implement an ERP solution for your business, here’s an alternative approach to understanding it.

ERP is to business as the brain is to the human body. The brain controls all parts of your body by telling them what to do and ensuring that they all work together. Similarly, by integrating and synchronizing all facets of a business including product development, manufacturing, marketing, and sales, ERP helps businesses to gain visibility, increase productivity and operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance competitiveness.

Benefits of Implementing ERP Into Your Business

1. Enhances Business Agility
To help your businesses respond well to the rapidly evolving business climate, an ERP system makes your business flexible, modular, and scalable enough to adapt to the ever-shifting market dynamics.

2. Increases Efficiency and Productivity
An effective ERP system, by streamlining your entire organization and putting your data all in one place, enables more accurate reporting and a more efficient, collaborative, and data-driven work environment.

3. Better Cost Saving
Since cost-saving is one of the top three business goals of the companies, an ERP solution creates efficiencies that make your business leaner as it grows. Businesses are even able to expand without adding additional staff or IT costs, and the cost of implementing an ERP system is easily compensated by the ROI of an efficient, and fully optimized business environment.

4. Improves Accessibility and Security
As you move your ERP applications to the cloud, you are able to scale, extend, and upgrade your business quickly. You can also increase visibility and accessibility even further, by taking full advantage of an ERP system’s capabilities.

The need for ERP will continue to grow every time the business world takes a leap. This also directs towards the fact that Enterprise Resource Planning systems must also evolve and incorporate changes to keep up with ever-rising business expectations. Let us dive into some of the trends that would be an answer to the question – What’s Next for ERP?

Future Trends in ERP Systems

1. Intelligent Enterprise Resource Planning (iERP)
An emerging trend, the Intelligent ERP (iERP) system uses machine learning and advanced data analytics to augment current ERP system offerings. It differs from ERP systems as it features an assistive and conversational user experience.

The system would be able to perform actions that include analyzing information, tracking, and forecasting results, and reporting and managing data. Furthermore, iERP can reuse previous responses when situations call for it which helps ERP evolve from a record management platform into a truly intelligent software.

2. Internet of Things (IoT)
It is normal for businesses to integrate additional smart technologies into their processes, from the manufacturing floor to the office. Furthermore, businesses tend to add more technical and operational data to ERP systems for financial planning as well. Therefore, leaders will turn to the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect all devices used by a company.

The data sharing process between IoT-connected devices and ERP systems will help centralize and analyze data as well as simplify processes. While managers will enjoy additional transparency as IoT and its connected devices follow a product’s lifecycle, automation of processes, like the cost of production and operations would help to know if the business is going overboard with pre-determined product costs. Based upon such cost predictions, the management can then take effective measures to control them.

3. Collaborative Features
Collaborative features have become increasingly important as companies are expanding, either in the number of employees or their global footprint. With the majority of the new team members being from generations who have always had access to connected devices, ERP systems that include social media features will provide benefits to them, such as increased cross-department communication or faster responses to consumer queries.

Personalizing current ERP system features such as creating personalized employee profiles will help managers set up their teams based on the characteristics they require. With social media becoming a primary place for talking to consumers, ERP systems of the future will need to integrate with social platforms, which will help businesses respond faster to consumer queries while producing additional data for company financial predictions.

ERP ensures complete visibility into core business processes and optimizes systems through superior resource tracking and reporting, database management, data sharing, and overall improved information systems.

Various emerging technologies like AI, Machine Learning Automation, IoT, and Blockchain will be introduced to ensure operational efficiency and business growth via next-generation ERP systems. As a result, new systems of intelligence will soon replace today’s systems of records.

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