As a business owner, you are probably looking to save as much time, money, and labor as you can. Saving is the name of the game. However, while it might save you slightly to do certain things yourself, your time is valuable. Certain processes are cheaper, more efficient and effective when automated.
Implementing the right, easy-to-use, richly featured, cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that will streamline your manual processes will take your organization to the next level. ERP solutions have expanded to encompass business intelligence while also handling “front-office” functions such as sales force automation, marketing automation, and financial automation.
ERP automation is most important in cases where manual entry can be eliminated including duplicate entry or re-typing of information and where outdated requirements can be eliminated. Examples would be manual approvals, manual processing pf paperwork, manual purchase orders, production orders, or accounting invoices.
Here are the tricks:
1. Clean master data is essential to avoid breaking automation due to missing or incorrect data. This includes your customer master data, suppliers and vendor records, material lists, prices and discounts, along with clean financial accounting processes in place.
2. Use ERP system automation rules whenever possible and reasonable. These include built-in authorization rules, automatic price list updates, automated calculations of freight charges, taxes, and available to promise dates.
3. When full automation is not a reasonable option, or it just doesn’t make sense, use scheduled system procedures to create automation equivalents such as customer invoice runs, accounts payable payment runs, supply planning runs, etc.
4. Whenever possible, adapt company procedures to leverage automation possibilities. Examples would be streamlining customer pricing and discounts, using standardized freight charges or using standardized material planning settings.
SAP Business ByDesign is an exception-based software solution meaning that if 100 transactions take place in a day and 90 of them can be automated and flow through the planned process with no issues, then let the system do all these for you and focus on the 10 that need attention. Not only does this streamline your processes, but it minimizes error, and allows users to focus on the bigger picture of your organization.
Automation is moving the needle of business efficiency and simplifying human lives in general. Organizations that embrace business process automation have cut costs, saved time, and asked their manual workforce to solve more intelligent problems. Let SAP Business ByDesign do the rote tasks, while eliminating the chance of human error.
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