We’re only human. As your employees, we strive to get our jobs done as quickly and efficiently as possible. We endeavor to be productive and innovative while also saving money for the company. And we want to grow the business.
It’s time to face the facts, though, in normal times and even more so now.
As humans, we are prone to error and distraction, no matter how dedicated or focused we might be as individual workers. Keeping up with the logistics and moving parts of running your small distribution company can certainly be a challenge. That challenge is compounded by the many siloed business processes we have had in place for years.
There’s really no delicate way to put this. Outdated business practices and technology are holding us back as a company and making our jobs harder. Our spreadsheets and reliable but antiquated software solutions are prone to errors like double entry and typos. These problems cost us time and money.
We need automation, analytics and easy-to-use reporting capabilities, and we need them delivered through a centralized, scalable solution. We need an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, in other words.
This may seem like a tall order to digest. Yes, implementing an ERP system is a financial investment. And true, using a centralized system for everything from payroll to inventory tracking and reporting may seem like a huge departure from the way we’ve done things around here for years.
We believe the benefits of an ERP system, however, particularly one geared toward the needs of small to medium-sized businesses like ours, far outweigh these perceived barriers.
Why We Need an ERP System to Support Company Growth
There are many reasons we’re begging you to invest in an ERP system. But a few reasons top our list.
1) The Price is Right
We wanted to address the elephant in the room up front, and we bet you weren’t expecting to hear that an ERP solution can actually save our business money. And yet, a cloud-based ERP solution reduces IT implementation and maintenance costs.
Our outdated hardware and software will also be eliminated if we move to a cloud offering, freeing up our IT staff to handle more challenging tasks and participate in long-term company planning and strategy.
Best of all, the large capital outlay associated with our hardware and software investments is switched to a much smaller, revolving operating expense that may be budgeted for accordingly (using our new ERP solution, of course).
2) An ERP Solution Will Scale with Our Business Growth
Ordering volume and inventory fluctuate in a small distribution company like ours. We need an offering that will easily scale up or down to keep pace with this changing demand.
An ERP offering geared toward SMBs will enable us to add or remove users as well as adjust our specific computing needs to match seasonal and other fluctuations at our business. And getting back to the most important point, we will only pay for those resources we use.
3) We Will Benefit from Enhanced Security
A cloud-based ERP solution offers us all the benefits of cloud security, a considerable upgrade from the piecemeal solutions we currently have in place. We will benefit from our cloud infrastructure provider’s data security and loss prevention technologies. Our business will retain full visibility and control of the solution while enjoying data encryption and regular backups. And we will have assurance that our ERP solution is auditable and compliant with regulatory requirements as well.
We don’t want a security incident to put us out of our jobs, so please consider security more closely and get an ERP system to make us secure.
4) An ERP System Supports Accessibility and Mobility
One of the many benefits of an ERP system is the ability to access data and processes anywhere on any device. That means our staff can work remotely and can be distributed across a variety of locations.
This is an important asset for a growing business like ours, offering major flexibility over our current legacy systems. Please unchain us from our desks and allow us to get work done even when we’re traveling, and in the way we’re used to doing things when not in the office.
5) Speed and Agility are Important for a Business
The speed, agility and convenience that come from a centralized ERP solution are invaluable. With real-time access to data and processes, our company will benefit from agility like we’ve never experienced before. We will also be able to easily and quickly connect to new cloud services as we need them, a massive benefit for a growing business.
This agility is important to us, both because we feel a little ashamed when we see our business lagging behind the rest, and because we’re much happier as employees when we are growing and a part of a modern business that is keeping pace with the trends.
We hope we’ve made a convincing case for implementing an ERP system. The last thing we want to do is hold back the growth of our company because of human-level errors. By implementing an ERP system tailored to the needs of businesses like ours, we can centralize and automate a large portion of our back-end processes. That automation will save us time and money, while also giving us valuable insights into all aspects of our business operations.
Perhaps most importantly, it will free up us employees to work on business growth initiatives and strategies, stuff that puts us to much better use than things like data entry. We love data entry, but not really.
We think you will agree that an ERP system is the next step to supporting our business operations and future expansion. We look forward to working with you to choose an offering geared toward our small distribution company, and to finding a trusted consultant to help us deploy and manage our new system.
Sincerely,
Your Employees