Businesses are faced with so many external challenges that keep appearing out of nowhere. Whether an organisation can successfully deal with the opportunities and threats of today’s ever-changing environment depends on its ability to react to real-time changes quickly and cost-effectively. An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system can enable a business to be agile and responsive to both internal and external changes.

In this blog, we will show you 3 ways a modern ERP system helps keep your business agile.

1. Digitisation of value chains

The digital value chain integrates sequential processes with previous and subsequent steps, adds visibility by incorporating real-time data into processes, enables customers to easily interact with the organisation across multiple channels, and connects with suppliers to support seamless procurement, production and delivery.

Today’s ERP systems can remove the internal silos with extensive functionality that allows all business processes to be managed through a ‘single source of the truth’. ‘One size fits all’ doesn’t work for every organisation; the configurability of ERP systems provides the tools to extend, build, deploy and manage processes and data from multiple enterprise applications.

That configurability combined with connectivity can also enable data from other sources to be pulled into the ERP system. Machine data, transport information, etc., can be accessed through screens within the ERP system, without the need to log in and consult other systems.

However, your ERP system can help to progress this connectivity by allowing you to leverage customer order history, forecasts, social data, as well as product sensor data, allowing you to manage a demand-driven supply chain and pro-active scheduling of maintenance or other follow-up actions.

2. Real-time data access and analytics

Organisations already generate vast amounts of data, but only a small proportion of this information is analysed and often not in real-time, but with a spreadsheet tool.  Spreadsheets don’t communicate and provide multiple versions of the truth but are still being used to analyse and drive certain processes.

With the right ERP system, data can be accessed from multiple sources and systems across the business and analysed in real-time. User and role-specific dashboards can be set up, allowing consistent monitoring of performance and costs.

However, the ability to access vast quantities of data requires a different approach to analytics, the big question should be ‘what’s the relevance?’. The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ need thought before designing reports and dashboards. The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ also need monitoring, because those questions may have been relevant yesterday, but today’s change may add an extra dimension that may need additional fields to be incorporated into some reports and dashboards (rather than creating additional reports).

The ability to access data and provide analytics in real-time reduces the time previously spent on collating data and putting these into reports, freeing up that time for planning and strategic decision-making.

3. Scalability and flexibility

Scalability refers to an ERP system’s capability of handling an increasing amount of work and accommodating growth. Flexibility is the system’s capability to handle changes in internal processes, external influences and ability to unlock additional capabilities as needs change.

A flexible and scalable ERP system can handle different languages, currencies, legislations, multiple company sites and accounting standards in a single system, allowing for future expansion and regulatory compliance. It should allow organisations to implement with required functions for today but allow unlocking of additional functionality ‘tomorrow’ without the need for disruptive and costly enhancements. And last, but not least it should be accessible across multiple platforms, providing mobility and flexibility for the organisation and its employees.

SAGE X3 – your ERP tool for a changing world

Constant challenges, whilst dealing with current business issues and planning future strategy can be hugely distracting. In addition, the need for investment in new products, processes and technologies can become a constraint to keeping up with change if the growth and/or profitability isn’t where it should be.

An ERP system like Sage X3, implemented to your requirements will reduce workload, increase productivity, allow real-time data analysis to support strategic planning, and be scalable for the future, which can make it a valuable tool to help keep your business agile in a changing world.

Sage X3 offers rich and integrated functionality to support all core business processes on a global scale. It handles multi-language, multi-legislation, multi-currency, multi-company sites, local accounting requirements and consolidation. It is accessible across multiple devices and can be deployed on a private cloud, via a hosted cloud or on-premises providing flexibility and scalability.

Download our guide to discover how Inixion has helped businesses to stay agile here.