If you’re an SME owner-manager, you’ll be well aware of how rapidly things change as your business grows. With growth comes more data, more jobs and transactions, and more employees. An ERP solution may be just the thing you need to help you manage everything across your various business systems.
It’s almost impossible for a traditional wholesale or retail business to make the move into ecommerce without some degree of integration between its ecommerce platform and other business management software. Whether the website needs to pull data from CRM, accounting, inventory management or somewhere else, this integration is critical to an outstanding customer experience.
If you’re an SME owner-manager, one of your goals may eventually be to sell your business. However, unless you have decent internal processes, you may struggle to get the best possible price for your company.
Even as long ago as 2013, the proportion of UK business turnover through ecommerce was 20% – the third-highest figure of any country in the EU. And, just last year, an ONS report found that almost four-fifths (79%) of British individuals had made purchases online in the last 12 months.
If you’re a traditional retailer or wholesaler and don’t already sell online, it’s probably only a matter of time until you do. After all, it’s not easy to stay relevant in retail in 2016 without an online shop –some 77% of UK consumers now shop online, according to recent ONS data, which represents a massive 24 percentage-point increase since 2008.
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Ecommerce, in 2016, is no longer just a B2C concern – it’s used by more and more B2B companies, too. For small and medium-sized wholesalers in particular, the online channel is recognised as an efficient and cost-effective way to sell to retail partners, as well as to the end customer.
As your business grows, one of the things you’ll eventually find is that your manual processes don’t cut it any more. A high level of activity is great, but not when it takes you three hours each day to compile financial reports and update your stock levels. Many companies turn to ERP for this reason, as it allows them to streamline their processes and keep all of their business data in one place.
If you’re a traditional retailer and new to ecommerce, you’ll probably eventually find yourself in a position where you need to upgrade your backend systems. The difficulty of having to manage stock across channels, get products to customers on time, and keep your prices and product information up to date can otherwise put a lot of pressure on your margins and customer satisfaction.
If you’re a SAP Business One user, you’ll know that it packs a punch when it comes to reporting. Creating an up-to-the-minute report or dashboard is something you can do in seconds and with ease, and combining the software with an external solution like QlikView or Microsoft Power BI provides an even greater degree of power and insight.
A couple of months ago, we published a blog post on the cost of SAP Business One. This looked at some of the factors that affect the lifetime cost and ROI of a SAP Business One solution, including pre-implementation work, customer-side resourcing, and reviews and optimisation.
