Your salespeople still carry a personal day planner stuffed with notes and business cards. Your warehouse manager is so busy tracking and overseeing their inventory movement that they don’t have time to talk about improving efficiency. Your services department is full of qualified professionals who cannot seem to fill out their paperwork the same from week to week.

Everyone in your business has their habits and unique hurdles for your growth. How can you understand your sales pipeline without seeing a good metric of what sales are in each stage – or what marketing campaigns brought those sales in the door as a cost comparison? Warehouse efficiency would give control of your warehouse manager’s time back to them, but how do you give efficiency that is easy and usable at a glance? Your services department needs a streamlined data entry system easily available to your workers that they can use anywhere at any time – how will this possibly integrate back to real data and invoicing?

A good ERP system should be able to answer these questions. Here are some additional questions to ask yourself about the software that manages your business:

• Does my current solution help my sales team generate new business and find the most successful venues for future marketing campains?
• Can I as an owner look forward 6 months with reasonable accuracy to see where my business and future growth will likely be? 12 months?
• Is my warehouse saving me money on every shipment?
• How accurate and easily can I review my inventory to know my costs and forecast inventory pitfalls?
• Will my software integrate with outside data collection, allowing me to create streamlined processes for those users that don’t need the “full” software packages getting in the way of day to day operations?

While this is just a short list of many questions that can be asked, it is a good starting point to know your business. Are you ready to weather bad times? Are you ready to handle explosive growth? Do you know which is coming? If you have questions about the possibility of letting your users be the individuals who drive your business to success – while more tightly integrating those individuals to a complete picture you need to see – then perhaps it is time to have a talk with your ERP vendor to find out more. Don’t settle for second-best options when the best will save you time, money and possibly your future as a business.