Anyone who has ever owned or run a country club knows how complex a business it is. You’re not managing just the members, who often – rightly – have high standards and expect to get their money’s worth from their membership. You’re also managing all the employees who do the everyday work to keep the club running smoothly – from the caddies to the waiters and cook staff and higher up, too – accountants, managers, human resources and more.

The essence of the country club industry is to make sure that everything is running smoothly, even more so than in any other industry. That’s because members are paying good money for access to a world where, upon entering, they can escape the stresses of their everyday lives and experience the relief of not having to worry about anything – because everything is taken care of and running smoothly. This is where enterprise resource planning – ERP in short – comes in.

Consider this. Your country club is working, but important data isn’t accessible to or seen by everyone across all departments. Instead, accounting and those in charge of managing memberships have their own data that only they see and which they don’t share with other branches of the back-office, human resources have their own database for employees, payroll, training of new hires, and so on.

Supply chain management work on their own, as does project management. And that’s the problem. Let’s examine a hypothetical scenario. Your country club is growing and planning on expanding operations – say, by building and opening a new area for golfing as well as a small cafe to serve members. Managers from the various departments responsible for the realization of this project, stressed and perhaps under a large amount of strain if they have a great deal of goals and deadlines to meet in a short amount of time, might very well make errors and mistakes in coordination and planning.

That can cause the planned expansion to be delayed or go off the rails entirely, simply because the back-office system was not integrated and the various departments communicated poorly with each other. The result is that it hits your bottom line, demands that managers invest a lot of time into making sure communication and coordination is happening, and can even impact and disrupt the experiences of the members.

If the country club is a national-level chain of country clubs, then such inefficiencies and obstacles can prove to be very problematic to the smooth running of operations, implementation of new projects, and ultimately – the bottom line.

With these challenges in mind, organizations large and small implement enterprise resource management systems to integrate, optimize, and streamline their operations. ERP systems make sure that relevant data is seen across the company, that finance, human resources, sales, marketing and other processes are consolidated, eliminating the need to synchronize changes and standards between them.

A proper ERP system also eliminates what are known as “islands of information”, the potential effects of which are illustrated in the hypothetical situation above. Instead, real-time information becomes available to management, allowing for better decision-making with less errors due to not having access to one “island of information” or another at a crucial moment. In addition to the consolidation of processes, the ERP system centralizes security procedures and measures, leading to uniformity across the board in regards to the safety of the organization’s software systems.

This is no small improvement, for it allows technical staff and resources to be concentrated on just one security system, not different ones for each department. It reduces the need to maintain and update each individual security system, instead focusing on keeping one central system as safe as possible. Basically, the ERP connects, streamlines, and centralizes the vital business processes of the business in which it is implemented – including country clubs.

Finally, it must be noted that ERP is not a fix or an answer to any and every challenge the country club might face. It can improve data collection and sharing amongst the management and decision makers, but it cannot give those people the ability to make the right choice. It does, however, allow them to make less errors based on outdated or incomplete data, and share and implement those decisions as widely and efficiently as possible within the company’s back-office operations.

Counter-intuitively for some, an ERP system, by centralizing a company’s operations, makes it more agile, nimble, and ready to respond quickly and decisively to any challenges that appear – not less.