Productivity Features to Look for in an ERP Solution

ERP evaluation and decision. It sounds like an awful experience, right? Politicized decisions, long cycles that involve another company sticking their nose into your data, and months of training for a moderate improvement? It doesn’t have to be. Today’s ERP can be intuitive, intelligent, and informative—if you know what you’re looking for.

But—what are you looking for? Nearly every solution out there promises to be the best, the most feature-rich, the most innovative, and even the fastest growing. They claim to have the best partners and they believe they are the bee’s knees. But few deliver. Understandably, there are many ways to evaluate a product, often relying on analyst reports, user reviews, and more.

Will ERP Make You More Productive? Things to Look For

Today, we would like to explore a few productivity features you should look for when comparing solutions and offer a resource to help you stack each provider up. Not only will this help you to decide whether now is the time to start looking at new ERP options, it will help you put each one side by side.

Is it Easy to Learn? Intuitive?

ERP training is likely one of those phases your employees dread. If you’ve ever moved into a new house and stubbed your toe because you weren’t used to the layout, the same goes for ERP. The only difference is that employees are going to have to deal with this every time they want to do something.

However, an intuitive ERP can help your users get up and running without hassles, increase their productivity, and facilitate company growth. 

Is It Accessible?

The last few months have shown us that we can’t just rely on the office to get the job done. We need to be productive anytime and anywhere—and the solutions you look at need to enable this. In order to drive productivity, your solution needs to deliver access to system from any device, anytime, anywhere to facilitate staff working on the road with customers and suppliers, and at home.

Learn more in Collaboration in a Socially Distanced World: Starting to See the Benefits of the Cloud Yet?

Does It Make It Easy to Connect to the World?

As the business world has become more global, your company has had to adapt. This also means that your relationships with customers and suppliers needs to change as well. In turn, this likely requires you to work in new currencies, and communicate internationally.

Knowing this, you can’t spend hours wasting away on currency conversions only to not receive the best exchange rate. You also should acquiesce to customers and work in the language that works for them. Your ERP should deliver. Multi-currency and multi-language ERP can make it easy to work globally without the hassles that go into manually translating and exchanging.

Does it Facilitate Processes?

Everything in business needs to move toward a goal. But even if you and another company have the same goals, your path to the end result may differ.  In turn, you’ve probably already built workflows—who’s responsible for what, what happens when a document is approved, and who that’s routed to. It may be a hassle on occasion, but it does the job.

Your ERP should also be built around workflows. The difference, however, is that it should facilitate these workflows. Rather than manual processes, these workflows could be automated. Rather than sending an email, you check a box and the process continues automatically.

Learn one example of how this works in our article documenting how to get a curbside pickup initiative up and running.

Learn More: Free ERP Comparison Checklist

If you’re looking to make the most of your ERP decision, you need more than this. If you’re looking for a better way to compare solutions, the free ERP evaluation checklist can help. This free resource discusses ten features that make you more productive, the top functionality decisions you need to make, and the most important value considerations you will need to look at.

At Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, we’ve been in this business for a while and have helped countless customers like you to get what you need from an ERP solution. Browse our Acumatica demo videos or contact us for a free consultation.