Enterprise Resource Planning

When shopping for Enterprise Resource Planning software, you have to know what features vendors are offering and which ones your company will need. There are countless online articles listing the must-have modules, but what they can’t tell you is what everyone is actually buying. So we took some measures to find out.

Food has always played a highly central and emotional connection in people’s lives. Dating back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, China and India, all were aware of the link between food and health; food and community; and food and life. In today’s fast-paced, modern life that link has not weakened. But, like many other areas in our lives, it’s been through countless iterations and finally transformed into a highly volatile juggling act of ever-changing demands. Issues like health and wellness, shifting lifestyles, changing preferences, food safety, sustainability and technology have all received a heightened amount of visibility.

As anyone who’s shopped for a new car knows, you can’t leave the lot without being asked about add-ons and extras. While these features are convenient (and tempting), a savvy shopper knows to first focus on things like gas mileage, cost of ownership and safety ratings. It’s important to consider a car’s core qualities first before you go broke on custom mud flaps.

For wholesale distributors, careful spending is a top priority. It’s essential that businesses balance the expenses produced by their warehousing operations in order to make sure that they’re offset by monthly revenue. This is no easy task, but wholesale distribution software can simplify the process. It helps to track and optimize key details about inventory and its movements.

Product lifecycle management systems (PLM systems) are powerful enterprise-wide software solutions that manage every aspect of a product’s digital life. These sophisticated systems serve to integrate data, processes, business systems and people in an extended enterprise, facilitating the internal and external collaboration that is demanded by a new manufacturing environment.

Companies today are constantly striving to improve their distribution systems. However, that process can be complicated because of limitations imposed by distribution software.

This is even more common if the software hasn’t been updated for a while.

This is a situation that many companies today find themselves in. Older software is preventing them from implementing new wholesale distribution practices, which makes it hard to keep up with the competition.

The retail industry — perhaps more visibly than many other industries — is perceived as being at a significant crossroads that has and will continue to result in changes to all aspects of the retail landscape. Significantly, the most important market influencer impacting the retail industry is technology innovation and the pace at which it is moving.

Despite globalization and the recent outsourcing trend in manufacturing, some manufacturing sectors have experienced substantial growth over the past five years. Most of them (food and beverage, plastics, and chemicals) have one thing in common: they belong to the process manufacturing sphere. As the name implies, process manufacturing refers to the processing and combination of raw materials and ingredients to create finished products.

As technology becomes more affordable and the manufacturing sector more competitive, manufacturers of all sizes are increasing their efforts to adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology. This is reflected in the growth of the size of the ERP market, which is estimated to reach almost $85 billion in 2021, according to Statista.

It’s always an uphill battle when you’re competing against big businesses. Large budgets and advanced business tools allow large corporations to streamline their operations and provide good quality products at a very competitive price.

In 2018 and beyond, the factors that drive organizations to acquire a new cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) system often begin with a few strong focuses. In particular, product quality, production and process monitoring, an increased use of analytics and business intelligence (BI) applications and the need for greater mobility are becoming necessities for companies adopting ERP.

Don’t you hate it when things are named so similarly that they seem like they’re the same thing? Or at the very least, they’re almost the same thing? Such is the case with MRP and ERP. Unfortunately, although these acronyms are quite similar, in reality, the systems themselves are very different. So what exactly are the differences between MRP vs ERP? Let’s start out with some definitions:

According to a report by Small Business Advocate, of all the companies in the US, 99.7% are small businesses, and that number’s not at all surprising.

Small businesses — also known as small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs — are the backbone of any economy, but they also face some of the most difficult challenges in their day-to-day operations. Challenges such as targeting new customers while retaining current ones, raising brand awareness, finding competent and motivated employees and many more are a daily struggle. And they have to do all of this while keeping a finger on the pulse of the current trends and technologies in their industry.

The year 2018 will continue to present businesses with the supreme challenge of operating in an environment, both globally and domestically, that’s fast-paced, highly competitive and unpredictable. These business conditions aren’t new and they have, in fact, driven many businesses to reassess traditional business models, embracing innovative and, in some cases, unorthodox business solutions.

Anyone who hasn’t been involved in business for a couple of decades would be absolutely surprised by what they see if they walked back into a modern office. Today’s businesses don’t look much like those of the 1980s or even the 1990s, primarily because of new digital technologies that are changing many things about how we work and manage our commercial operations.