Importance of ERP in the Mid Market Segment

In today's aggressive business environment it is essential to be prepared to face a vast and competitive world. In this time of diminishing global economic situation, the most worried sectors are the small and mid market businesses. They are challenged by the requirement of the customer and compliance mandates, effective management of supplier, costs control and finding new customers to grow the business. Relying on internal manual processes have been a serious handicap and more and more organizations have felt the need and are embarking on investing in automation and process enablers.

Most of the mid sized organizations were living with homegrown applications which are non-integrated and on disparate technology architectures. This has resulted in living with redundant technology, loss of support, non availability of critical information at the right time resulting in overall business loss. A lot has changed with the recent emergence of the mid-market segment that has now companies re-looking their processes and procedures, and put in place proper ERP solutions for better, effective and more efficient businesses. For all but the smallest organizations, an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system promises big gains, helping to grow revenue, increase productivity companywide, improve efficiency throughout the enterprise and manage costs. ERP integrates a variety of disparate systems, such as financials, SCM (Supply Chain Management) and CRM, automating time-consuming processes and streamlining operations. With a unified view of cross-company information, executives can ultimately make better decisions about corporate objectives and strategies.

The key drivers of introducing an ERP solution in a midsized company are introduction of industry standard processes which are already embedded in the application, adopting integration across business functions leading to transparency, access to real time information, analytical reporting for business decisions and adopting state of the art technology. Another key reason for the choice of an ERP vis-à-vis a bespoke development is the speed of implementation resulting in achieving a quicker return on investment. The implementation of ERP systems has helped midsized corporations, significantly improve their business metrics by process optimization, improving the entire supply chain process, integration across functionalities and increasing transparency across the organization. The introduction of ERP in any organization has also helped it move up the value chain in terms of market credibility and building the confidence of its stakeholders.
The Drivers to implement ERP in the Mid market segment
• Introduce efficiency and improvement of its business processes
• Achieve transparency and availability of data across functions
• Obtain right Information at right time for effective decision making
• Improve utilization of human capital and assets
• Improve financial management
• Cater to requirements of legislations in financial reporting
• Streamline the supply chain processes
• Improve Customer Relationship Management
• Achieve efficiency in organizational reporting
• Ensure data security and data scalability
• Adopt systems that address changing technologies
Investments in ERP implementation for organizations in the mid market segment is a significant decision. Hence the evaluation of an implementation and benefits accrued is a significant factor in the overall success of an implementation.