The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is required in management of all businesses, no matter how small. An ERP solution may seem like too big of an investment if your business is young or not planning to scale up, but ERP systems can be implemented in any industry and scale of business and is especially useful as a tool for small and medium enterprises who face a lot of competition today.
What exactly is ERP?
ERP serves as the backbone for many companies, offering a central IT system that facilitates optimal business process management.
The software is key in supporting core business activities like product planning, purchase, inventory, order processing, service delivery etc. It is able to monitor and manage functions related to human resources, technology, production and services. Companies use ERP software’s central integration system that allows different applications, processes and information to be streamlined in a single shared database that is interactive. The database features built-in analytics that allow tracking and a controls dashboard.
Why Landscaping Companies Needs ERP
Although there previously weren’t several ERP options that were available to smaller sized businesses, now ERP can be implemented across all industries from retail, banking, chemical, oil/gas to architecture, engineering, manufacturing. This means as an owner of a landscape company you can adopt ERP solutions that you in the past felt were for corporate and large-scale enterprises.
As a landscape business owner, perhaps with a growing business that is small, there is likely a struggle with structure. In the sense that the company’s finance, payroll, accounts for sales, training, task delegation all remain very fragmented.
ERP for landscaping companies offers a more practical solution to keep it all in control, by aligning the company’s accounts and processes i.e. project management all in one to improve efficiency and profitability.
ERP also makes company stats and information more accessible to project managers and marketers or other executives in your landscaping company. This can really help provide better insight for everyone into the way the company is performing and allow the quick implementation of new strategy where it is needed.
While in running your landscaping business, there will be many things beyond your control several steps can be taking to improve those controllable aspects related to how you provide service to customers and how well that is integrated with employee accountability and rate of turnover.
ERP can help your business grow beyond single management dependency and help distribute key roles better in the company. ERP for landscaping companies will aid you in overcoming those proverbial hurdles of the industry in order to get your business to the higher levels of growth.
What is important in this process is the standardization and integration of all operating procedures used in the landscape business. With ERP, your business is systemized and all in one place allowing you to have more control of things that may now seem chaotic. Business systemization will create optimal procedural methods that eliminate any form of vagueness about employee roles. Better monitoring of employees and workflow will keep the business consistent in moving forward and improve turnover drastically.
This increase productivity and profit would require careful planning which the ERP system can provide. Implementing enterprise resource planning across all departments of your landscape company may be challenging but once you have a blueprint for this, that lays out the strategy execution should be straightforward.
A good ERP for landscaping companies will provide firms transparency, allowing all data to be shared between employees in different departments. Having one integrated information system will reduce costs of human resource spent on re-entering and exporting data, eliminate several reporting errors and again, increase overall productivity.
Access to real-time data provide by the ERP system will help your landscaping business management officers to make quicker, more effective decisions. And in this new business environment that would be faster paced, employees can be productive and waste less time on decision-making as they are able to visualize past data and predict issues that may harm the business at any level.
This improved access to data can also be beneficial for marketing teams who will get a better picture of the business growth and know how to implement tactics that may be more successful when needed to shake up levels of business volume.
If your landscaping company is a small business, you would want to invest in the most affordable ERP solution that makes business sense cost-wise for you and your company. You would need to consider how easy the software is to use, how well it meets your needs and whether you can customize it to better suit your company’s requirements. There is a wide range of ERP systems out there and most are scalable to suit any business size. An ideal system will be fluid enough to accommodate changing business models to adapt to your company size as it grows.