What is a downtime and related losses?
Downtime, loss of man-hours, disruption to work, and other failures seriously affect productivity. Some companies, though, manage to get their employees to work either from home, office, or factory. When they examine the output, they notice serious flaws, and the quality and quantity vary.
As the system gets disrupted, productivity takes a serious blow. This applies to all the industries including IT, Manufacturing, Production, Packing, Logistics, Oil, and Gas to name a few. Revenue losses occur and companies suffer. Productivity, support, discussions, payments, invoices, approvals, and everything become delayed during a pandemic and the cash flow gets affected finally. Business opportunity losses, delay in receiving payments, inability to offer proper support, unable to pay the suppliers and employees, failure to recover from losses, loss of customers, etc. are some of the impacts of downtime uncertainties.
Here comes the role of an ERP.
What is an ERP and how does it help during a pandemic?
An ERP is a software that integrates all your core processes into a single system to boost the efficiency and productivity of your business operations.
Some of the key modules are;
- HR
- Finance and Accounting
- Marketing and Sales
- Manufacturing
- Purchase
- Supply Chain
- CRM
- Asset Management etc…
Though the importance of an ERP software has been crucially explained earlier by many, this pandemic has emphasized the importance of investing in an ERP software in GCC and its impacts on business. Coronavirus has become a global crisis and businesses are severely affected. Though many countries have lifted lockdowns and eased restrictions with preventive measures, businesses still suffer. There is no cash flow and there are no local or global business trades. Liquidity is at stake and businesses can’t afford more shutdowns. They are encouraging work from home or remote works.
Businesses are forced to adhere to social distancing rules and occupy only minimum employees. An ERP software solution in UAE helps businesses with the automation of their regular tasks and integration of key operations for enhanced performance and uninterrupted productivity.
ERP software digitalizes your business and enhances possibilities of working remotely, yet within an organizational structure. You can make faster decisions, approve things, monitor progress, transfer data, analyze performance, and evaluate business profitability.
What does an ERP do?
A proper ERP will keep the business running by administering business operations with remote access, automating regular tasks, generating one-touch reports, data transfer capabilities, real-time information fetching, tailor-made features, controls, and tools to keep up the productivity and processes intact.
Real-time production monitoring, digitalized operations and controls, online facilities for accounting, payments, receivables, invoices, quotations, approvals, and production progress charts will help businesses to continue their operations.
ERP software can assist you in reducing your efforts, eliminate vulnerabilities, and improve operational excellence by employing business intelligence and artificial intelligence. An ERP software is multi-language oriented and produces end-to-end cross-functional reports and statistics. It also allows you to define user access controls and authorization levels. Since an ERP software is tailor-made to suit different business requirements and styles, it will support you to achieve unique business goals through defined strategies and analytical tools.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter where you are working. An ERP software covers you and your business with a centralized solution to schedule work, monitor progress, create reports, analyze quality, boost sales, redefine strategies, and fully operate a business digitally.
Why ERP is Important
An ERP is essential for businesses as manually compromising or blending into different situations causing downtime, loss of work, and less productivity can be time-consuming and tiring. This will also incur additional expenses and losses. A proper ERP software can instead boost the business in this scenario. The troublesome part of managing such breakdowns or downtime can be effectively managed using an ERP. An advanced ERP is mobile-friendly, is available on cloud, web, and other digital platforms enabling you to work from anywhere and manage resources with precision and plan.
A business can re-plan, re-structure, re-schedule, and re-provision its operations, processes, and requirements to suit the varying needs of the hour or as per the situation prevailing and respective people can work remotely.
Working from home or allowing employees to work from remote places is a major challenge faced by organizations at the moment. A pandemic like Coronavirus demands social distancing and only a minimum number of staff can be active in the office or the production houses. An ERP, like Realsoft, allows businesses to facilitate staff working remotely. RealSoft allows you to track and monitor all your resources (money, accounting, materials, purchase, employees, sales, inquiries, assets etc…) in a few clicks. The centralized database provides access to information and insights. Files and other major documents can be access-controlled. ERP uses business intelligence to collect, automate, compile, examine, organize, and produce relevant information to the key people so that faster and smarter decisions are made outside the office cubicles.
What are some benefits and Features of ERP implementation?
Implementing an ERP will minimize the operational loss thereby preventing revenue loss and productivity loss during such pandemics and outages. Some of the key benefits include;
- Centralized database and access
- Eliminates online security risks
- Secure data and privacy
- Faster decision making
- Feature-rich dashboards
- Notification and alerts
- Automation and reporting
- Access controls and authorizations
- Efficient operations
- Financial controls
- Integrated communication systems
- Real-time information
- Customer satisfaction and interaction
- Agility
- Enhanced decision-making capacity
- Streamlining and digitalizing processes
- Manage workflows
- Customized interface
- International standard
- Easy to implement
- Secure document management system
- Business intelligence and insights
Investing in an ERP will not only benefit during an outage like this, but will act as an agile and dynamic tool forever and will help you mitigate business risks, connect with external libraries, and access information anytime anywhere. It will also act as a core business system that will enhance and maintain the operational processes, leverage effective decision making, and connect with customers, suppliers, and employees always.
