Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a business management software being able to collect, store, manage, automate, and interpret data from many business activities. ERP Systems can comprise of many modules and features while offering you real-time view of the organizations business process, financial standings, marketing initiatives, and where resources are being utilized. Having the right information and tools would provide an advantage from time savings, expedited business processes, better financial planning, and stronger relationships with your partners.

These systems have been utilized mainly in a large to enterprise organizations around the globe and have been out of reach to small to medium size organizations. These large systems have become more attainable for the smaller entrepeneur in giving them a stronger edge in their business.

With the options that are available to you today, how do you know which one is right for you? How do you know which Software Application Vendor to go with. Having all these options available can be overwhelming and time consuming to sift through.

Are You Currently Running A ERP Application? If you currently using an ERP Application such as Sage 300, SAP, Oracle, and are not satisfied with the applications performance, capabilities, and functionality, you don't have to be locked in and stuck at the hands of that vendor. There are options that are available and could possibly be at better price vantage point, or more dedicated to your market. Changing to a different ERP Solution Application will most likely interfere with the business to a certain degree and possibly create some downtime as well as information will need to be migrated over. Though it may be well worth the transition if the results of the new ERP Solution will ultimately reduce costs, improve the business process, as well as increase productivity.

Will the ERP Solution Align With Your Business Process? Ideally in choosing a ERP Solution would be to find a system that would require zero modification to align with your business, but we all know that would be in a perfect world. So we go for finding one that would need the least amount of modification needed in aligning with the business. Within different industries there are governing bodies, regulatory standards, and ERP Solution should be able to comply and follow these guidelines and deliver these functionality as part of its core offering. Needless to say that this system shouldn't be customizable, it should, and it should probably come with a programming toolkit, or SDK so that your IT Staff would be able to fine-tune the application to bring a tighter fit to your organization.

What are your IT Resources? With many of the small to midsize companies, there is a constrained IT Budget and its resources. Even with some of the larger corporations IT Budget can still be very tight with the limited amount of staff, programmers, and IT Administrators to dedicate to supporting the needed environment. What kind of deployment are we looking to implement, a in-house deployment or a cloud deployment, or a hybrid of the in-house and cloud deployment. Look into what kind of support your ERP Solution provides, look into what your current IT Resources can handle, see if there would be any gaps in between that would need to be filled.

Should We Go In-House or Cloud? Each implementation has its benefits and pitfalls in its deployment. A In-House deployment would arise larger investment for hardware, software, and installation of a system needed to house the ERP Solution. Even though this investment can be come substantial it still may be beneficial to have such a solution due to custom application adaptation, high security, closed network access, and certain regulatory standards. Cloud premise solutions are lower up-front investments and require substantially less IT Resources to keep it up and running, and offer quite the same amount of integrations to third party applications. Determining to go either Cloud or On-Premise implementation can be a dilemma in weighing features, security, regulatory demands, speed, and if it aligns with your business.

What Does The Future Hold? As the Technological era evolves and will continue to evolve how will the ERP System evolve around with it. What is the Application Vendor planning for the future of the software. As your business grows, technology influences, even new laws take affect, we all know business processes will begin to change and evolve, and hopefully for the better. Will the ERP System grow and evolve with you, can it adapt or be easily modified to still be aligned with your business for years to come. From an On-Premise or Cloud Based solution you still need to look at the fact of how flexible is the system and does it show promise of growing and evolving as well as introducing new features of subsets.

After Implementation So what comes after the implementation of the new system. Most of all the ERP Application Systems out there offer many levels of support for an annual fee which usually covers issues directly related to the application. Can they also support you from a Accounting, Data Entry, Hardware, other Software, Networking, and if not you will need support from another vendor. Most of the ERP Vendors out there use Partners to support their software who are familiar with the product and have gone through testing to ensure their Partners are up to date on new features as well as product use.

Working with ERP Systems will be a benefit for most businesses out there, offering them tools that can track, report, analyze, their data in a more efficient way. There are steps involved in any business process, and tracking these steps, following procedures, will oil that process to run smoothly.