Thanks to significant technological advances, even small and medium-sized businesses can have operations that span multiple countries. Traditionally only the largest of conglomerates had to deal with managing global operations, increased competition means that SMEs must follow suit. As a result, an increasing number of companies are turning to global ERP software to help manage their processes. Global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software like IFS for the Enterprise help integrate a multi-national company’s business processes into a single database.
Challenges to Achieving Global ERP
Just like any other digital transformation journey, moving towards a single global ERP has its own set of challenges. Depending on the degree of consolidation required by your organization, the challenge of consolidating IT assets and processes into a single enterprise software and database which can support your organization with multi-company or multi-site visibility can vary in difficulty. International ERP Implementations face many difficulties like:
1). The management of different time-zones, languages, currencies, and reporting structures across multiple countries or continents.
2). The alignment of data, design, and international implementation partners and phases.
3). Executive management teams working in a vacuum without collaborating with their IT or implementation teams.
4). A lack of robust global designs which eventually will require additional time, money and effort.
5). An inability to find suitable global human resources which can help drive your company's growth in key market areas.
6). An inability to manage various implementation phases, and moving from site to site without stability.
7). The use of stop-gap measures to fill in holes like building customized front-end portals, or using data warehousing.
Reasons to Choose a Global ERP
A Global ERP has two major benefits for businesses:
1). By consolidating all of your IT assets in a single place, you can radically reduce your overall IT cost structure. Running multiple enterprise software suites means that you will spend money on multiple expensive license agreements, supporting multiple hardware, and multiple support agreements across multiple countries.
2). Global ERPs can also consolidate your business processes across different business interests across multiple geographic areas. Using an integrated ERP suite ensures consistency of processes and quality. It also helps increase efficiencies by reducing errors like duplications, and streamlining intra-company transactions through complete visibility of all data models across the company.
Selecting Your Global ERP
Moving to a single global instance of ERP can drastically reduce costs, improve international visibility, facilitate faster decision-making and provide standardized, consistent business processes across multiple geographic areas within an organization. Cloud-based ERP software like IFS ERP can handle different currencies, many languages, support various global units of measure, and can span across multiple sites, manufacturing modes, business models, or organizational hierarchies.
The successful selection and implementation of the ERP product is often made easier for companies like yours by partnering with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) like ProV that helps provide custom implementation methodologies based on your requirements and provides post-implementation support often at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house.
ProV helps you move to a global instance of ERP and consolidate your processes with the best ERP software. We offer some of the best IFS Applications pricing and provide best-in-class services for IFS implementations, IFS software support, and IFS customizations. We are a multiple award-winning partner for IFS products and services that helps simplify implementations, integrations, updates, or customizations of your software when you need it most.
To learn about how we simplify IFS technologies for businesses like yours, visit our Resource Library. To get started on your digital transformation journey, request our FREE Consultation today.
