As cliche as it may sound, there is no denying that Covid-19 has altered the course of everything as we know it and heralded the dawn of a new digital era. As a watershed moment, businesses have taken notice of the need for change and adapted their business processes to welcome all digital disruptions. Even as the business landscape gets more complex with increased operational nuances and an overwhelming number of business processes, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have come back into the spotlight, and for a good reason. Tracing their origins by the Gartner group way back in the early 90s, they are now part of the everyday technology lexicon. Going by its steady growth, the SAP ERP market remains ahead in its expansion game, with its total market size expected to exceed $49.5 billion by 2025 and predicted to reach $78.4 billion in 2026.
With these numbers setting the context on how ERP systems have expanded in scope beyond use cases in manufacturing, let’s delve into the benefits they add to global businesses, more so in a post-pandemic business landscape where dynamic challenges are an everyday affair.
Improved asset management capabilities: We live in a world that breathes and thrives on data. Even as businesses scale, data grows to unimaginable extents, and it gets increasingly challenging to manually calculate and understand sales margins, profit ratios, and other important metrics. One of the biggest benefits of SAP ERP is how employees from across business functions can access the data stored in the ERP software from any location and device. With SAP ERP systems, automation takes center stage, thus allowing greater and quicker access to data, enabling better infrastructure management, and enhancing operational performance. Additionally, it helps address emergencies through timely tracking and monitoring.
Better resource optimization: Implementing an SAP ERP solution provides businesses the competitive edge to forecast customer demand. By centralizing and unifying data from across business departments such as sales, service, and marketing, an SAP ERP helps plan resource allocation by understanding consumer behavior patterns. Simply put, an SAP ERP helps businesses glean insights into customer preferences for customized products and services.
Cost and time efficiency: By reducing operational and administrative redundancies, an SAP ERP solution uses real-time data to optimize operations and minimize unnecessary delays, resulting in better precision. Through automation of huge scores of data, an SAP ERP reduces data duplication, thus amping up efficiency a notch higher. Accurate data free from manual errors boosts transparency within the organization, thus allowing people to focus their attention on more important tasks than mindless manual processes. Complete, accurate, and up-to-date data will help businesses make quicker decisions guided by evidence.
Increased flexibility: An SAP ERP system is designed to provide immense flexibility in terms of its deployment and is not constrained by infrastructural mandates. This helps every business department within an organization to tap its potential by accessing relevant data from wherever they are, in real time, using different devices like mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and laptops. This improves productivity and effectiveness at large.
Greater collaboration: Especially in the age of the remote, it’s important for your business to enable cross-functional collaboration. An SAP ERP solution acts as a bridge to help teams come together and reduce the possibilities of working in silos. Streamlining several processes, it makes communication across the entire organization a lot simpler and seamless. A single centralized database is at the core of this seamless collaboration. This results in improved productivity, reducing time spent dealing with inaccurate, old data.
Increased data security: One of the most important benefits of using an SAP ERP solution is data security, especially in an age where cybersecurity threats and hacks are grabbing headlines worldwide. SAP ERP solutions, both cloud and on-premises, can offer access controls that enable organizations to limit who can share and see data, thus ensuring data integrity and security. Additionally, it also allows for centralized backups of sensitive and critical data.