7 ways ERP cuts your costs

The current socio-economic climate is proving incredibly challenging for practically every business to confidently navigate.

With no indication as to when the financial unrest will resolve, warehouse-utilising companies are feeling pressure like never before to protect their profits and maintain a stable cash flow.

Desperate to minimise any risk to order fulfilment and profitability, right now businesses are anxious to spend money and make significant investments.

However, in a panic to protect costs, it’s easy for businesses to succumb to the pitfall that is standstill. Operations become stagnant by a lack of innovation and drive for growth. The fear of spending can actually result in as big a financial loss.

Here are 7 ways ERP can cut your business costs

1. Stock Control

A stock-centric ERP system can elevate your inventory management to provide complete visibility on stock levels and locations. Not only this, but it can automatically update varying stock levels in real-time, with this data easily accessible from anywhere.

Real-time stock traceability eliminates the risk of being under or overstocked in your warehouse and ensures the smoother transition of produce from arriving at goods-in to being processed in the warehouse, all the way to despatch and delivery. And if necessary, returns.

2. Business intelligence and reporting

With its powerful data integration functionality, an ERP system ensures you have instant access to company, customer, category and product data. So, while you’re operating, in the background, your ERP is constantly collating, calculating and reporting on your business’s performance.

Real-time data analysis ensures you can quickly address any under-performance and be proactive in resolving it while also effectively allocating budgets, planning campaigns and reducing unnecessary expenditures.

3. Purchasing

With 69% of companies admitting to not having total visibility on their supply chains, managing varying stock levels and categories can be one of your biggest financial losses if not properly managed.

ERP completely streamlines your purchasing and forecasting processes by automatically forecasting demand based on pre-set minimum and maximum stock levels, as well as previous order history.

4. Marketplace integration

Online or in-store, integrating your commerce channels with your warehouse, back-office and logistical operations is essential for businesses that want to protect their profits.

An increasing number of businesses are looking to expand their marketplaces to provide greater flexibility, traceability, control and personalisation for their customers increasing their engagement.

5. Credit Control

With 30% of all invoices not paid on time, late payments are one of the leading causes of lost profits in business.

Through ERP integration, you can regain time and money through automated and strategic credit control processes to chase late payments.

As well as your profits, you also protect your customer relationships.

6. Sales and CRM

Customer service is paramount in any climate. With the rapid growth of commerce channels amping up the competition in an already crowded market, ensuring you consistently meet your customers’ expectations is one of your biggest defences against economic downturn.

ERP software connects your sales and CRM (customer relationship management) platforms to provide visibility on your customer interactions, order history and sales pipelines.

You can utilise this data to enhance customer experience, communication and maximise sales potential through greater insights into your customers’ behaviour and spending habits.

7. Courier integration

If your business despatches and ships multiple deliveries via third-party courier service providers, then you have experienced the complications and frustrations of managing this volume of order data. Especially if you do this manually.

Courier integration removes the need for manual data inputting and provides you end-to-end visibility on your orders post-despatch.

The results of this have seen the speed of courier booking processes increase by 94% and have been reported to save salary costs of £20,000 minimum on manual courier booking.

Protect your profits with OrderWise

Discover how OrderWise’s ERP solution can enhance and streamline your business-wide operations to increase your resiliency during economic uncertainty and protect your profitability.

Book a demo and review our latest assets on controlling business costs.