South African organisations are sold on the value advanced ERP can deliver; however, there are certain features and functions that top their list of priorities when they consider solutions.
This is according to Rahana Vally, Director at Brilliant Cloud, a leading Acumatica partner, who says: “We've seen quite an improved uptake of ERP in the last few months, with customers who are looking to either grow their businesses or improve efficiencies. We're also getting a lot of requests to look at improving particular processes with an ERP change. Local customers are coming from an informed place, looking for specific features.”
Measurable value
Vally says South African organisations see particular value in ERP solutions that improve efficiencies, enhance reporting capabilities and enable access to information from anywhere.
“COVID brought a whole new requirement into this space where everybody wanted to be able to do what they needed to do from wherever they were, but also be accessible at all times. Ease of use is another priority, with features like scanning functionality and sign on glass,” she says.
Vally highlights Acumatica cloud ERP as the solution meeting many customers’ ERP needs.
Acumatica offers measurable value, with cost savings and features many other solutions don’t offer, she says.
“The unlimited users benefit offers significant value and savings of up to 50%: Acumatica works on transactional volumes and not user counts, whereas most of their competitors locally are user-based. This means many more people can have access to information, without necessarily buying a licence for each of them. For example, managers can see what's actually happening at a production level. In manufacturing operations, managers, directors and anyone involved in the process can see where something is at that point in time, or where bottlenecks are. Acumatica is also used a lot for visual representations of this information,” Vally says.
“The project management module is another powerful feature delivering real business value, enabling organisations to automate and expedite processes within projects. The projects module is available in all of the Acumatica editions,” she says.
Measurable ROI
Nucleus Research reports that, on average, companies implementing modern cloud-based ERP achieved a positive return on investment in just 16 months with a 200% ROI.
Acumatica recommends that companies set goals for the ERP system, capture benchmarks before implementing the new system and evaluate results after they go live. It notes that ROI can come from many system areas, including licensing reductions, elimination of infrastructure costs, automated accounting tasks and improved marketing and sales activities.
ROI should include tangible results such as efficiency improvements, cost savings and sales growth, as well as intangible results such as employee satisfaction and customer loyalty. Industry-specific ERP applications also offer many unique benefits to enhance ROI.
With Acumatica, these returns can include:
Labour savings, in which ROI can be calculated by efficiency gains, elimination of headcount or avoidance of new employee hires. Vally says some customers have managed to reduce their staff requirements by nearly 70% as a result of moving to Acumatica.
Software and technology savings. By consolidating business platforms and slashing implementation time, Acumatica reduces software and technology costs. Its user-based licensing model significantly reduces licensing costs while extending the value of information access further across the organisation.
Accounting and finance savings. Acumatica workflows and automation improve efficiency and significantly reduce the time required for processes such as invoicing or payments.
Reporting and business intelligence savings. Modern ERP applications like Acumatica provide role-based dashboards, flexible generic inquiries and no-code reporting tools with drill-downs to source transactions and automated notifications
In marketing and sales, Acumatica provides flexible order management and pricing capabilities, embedded marketing and sales automation and suggested items to optimise sales.
Broad business benefits. With modern ERP applications, organisations cut waste in areas such as paper document processing, manual filing and physical storage costs, and in areas such as customer self-service.
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