With the growing competition in the business world, companies are constantly under pressure to enhance the quality of their products and services while simultaneously improving their competitiveness. This is why so many companies staff internal research departments or work closely with external Research Organizations to develop new and improved products. Fortunately, new and innovative technologies provide businesses with cutting-edge tools designed to accelerate, track and support their research processes and provide them with accurate project and financial data that they can use to improve their daily operations. One of these technologies is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that is specifically configured for research organizations. For example, with a system like SAP HANA Cloud, you can easily apply the next generation of smart data applications and analytics throughout your organization to streamline and guide information based decision making.
An ERP system will help you integrate and streamline your project planning and reporting processes, associated data, and workflows for improved productivity and effectiveness. It coordinates the flow of information between your project teams and the company’s financial and other departments so that you can have a single source of reference and harmonize operations throughout the enterprise.
With the right ERP system, you can coordinate, plan, optimize and manage multiple client projects as well as corporate internal projects maximizing resource utilization across all operations. Many Professional Services organizations are now moving towards Intelligent Enterprise operations with the use of cloud ERP systems. These organizations include tax consulting., Management Consulting, Audit firms and others. The system helps them to gather the necessary financial and project data to ensure they’re compliant and reduce potential - liabilities. You can even hire a tax consulting firm to explore the possible application of the R&D Tax Credit to defray a portion of the ERP investment cost through applicable tax savings. Having the right ERP configured to support the specific needs of consulting firms provides the core functionalities to scale the organization through an Intelligent Enterprise transformation.
How ERP Systems Benefit Research
An ERP system is considered by many individual researchers and research firms to be a significant technological innovation because it enables them to streamline and integrate critical business processes and information to automate many of the processes on the back office / business side of research. By consolidating and coordinating processes and workflows, the ERP system allows research organizations to access accurate project and financial data quickly so that they can produce accurate financial reports and forecasts that inform important business decisions.
Furthermore, the system seamlessly integrates with a wide range of highly advanced IT devices and services that provide best of bread extension to the ERP software allowing the overall system to better fit the unique needs of each Research Project Based firms.
This type of system will provide reliable, business-ready data from a centralized source while enhancing the safety and privacy of the enterprise and its information. Since the ERP system has integrated machine-learning capabilities, it allows you to analyze sensitive information without putting the privacy of your organization in jeopardy.
It also guarantees reliable performance for all your data needs, allowing you to complete complex research project more easily and promptly. It processes mission-critical information at a proven in-memory rate, thereby providing real-time data for all projects and organizational financials. Its integrated multi-tier storage allows you to manage large volumes of important data efficiently. With this kind of storage, you can easily retrieve data so that you don’t waste time on superfluous tasks.
Because you have quick access to important information, you can make meaningful decisions in a matter of seconds. The ERP system also improves the accuracy of your reporting because it process these massive amounts of data all within an integrated system, limiting input errors and standardizing organization wide controls.
In Summary
The main purpose of implementing an ERP system in a research organization is to improve workflows, minimize errors, and save time and money while providing project and corporate visibility. Therefore, choose a system that will offer you these solutions. To make the right choice, you must conduct a thorough review and analysis of available ERP systems and your organization, its pain points, and its strengths.
Through this review, you’ll understand how an ERP solution will align with the existing systems in your organization and the opportunities it offers in terms of scalability. An ERP system that can’t integrate with your existing infrastructure will slow your research processes instead of accelerating them.
Finally, you need to understand the potential business benefits that your preferred ERP solution offers before you implement it. A good ERP system should help your enterprise streamline processes, become more effective, reduce costs, boost revenue, and scale for development.
