28 Nov Business agility within ERP solutions – true flexibility

In today’s challenging business environment flexible ERP solutions are considered as key platforms for building and delivering a very critical business need called agility. As a term agility is defined as the ability to effectively manage and apply knowledge so that a business has the potential to thrive in an ever-changing and unpredictable business environment.

Agility is a core fundamental requirement in the business today. Being agile means being proficient at change. If a business is agile, it is adaptable to take advantage of an unpredictable opportunity and can withstand the unpredictable threat. Agile processes in business are easily changeable, visible, flexible and quickly adjusted. They help to make business-critical decisions in order to respond quickly and cost-effectively to any changes that take place in the variable business environment. Business agility combines four competitive dimensions: cost, quality, dependability, and flexibility, and moves beyond them, with the ability to respond quickly to any unexpected changes in the business processes. Business agility allows capturing new opportunities, with detailed visibility across the business network. It enables a business to maximise the relationships and interactions throughout the business network, forging productive partnerships with suppliers, business partners, and most importantly, with customers. Agility optimises and improves all of the business activities while getting the most out of welcome to the team.

Modern ERP solutions are flexible tools designed to help businesses in building business process agility. By getting the right information into the right person’s hands at the right time they significantly increase flexibility. With best ERP solutions companies are able to operate nimbly, without delay in decision making.

How to achieve business agility with ERP solutions:

• Deliver real-time business intelligence data. Smart ERP solutions will provide you with real-time business intelligence data. Prompt delivery of real-time business intelligence data will allow you to see the company’s internal and external strengths and weaknesses as well as gain insight into the relationship between business processes. Business intelligence applications provide business leaders with the opportunity to gain real-time, accurate insights they require. These applications allow timely and relevant data to be extracted from far-reaching corners of an ERP database and then manipulated as needed.
• Encourage business process improvements. Modern ERP solutions with strong process analytics and business intelligence reports generate credible and incontrovertible real-life information about the current state of processes. They will help you to observe processes that work fine and those that fail so that you can make the required improvements. Being able to make fast decisions when you need makes your business truly flexible and agile.
• Leverage mobile technologies. Mobile technologies in combination with modern ERP solutions will provide your company with the ability to automatically launch appropriate actions across the entire value chain. This combination will help you to save time and money while achieving a greater return on investment. By leveraging mobile technologies, you will be able to reach customer satisfaction and increase sales.
• Offer end-to-end automation. ERP plays a significant role in ensuring business agility by promoting process automation. An integrated ERP solution can automate the collection of data from various functional areas and provide information in the right context for quick decisions. Employees with the capacity for change have the greatest impact on business agility. ERP systems are essentially important in increasing business agility by automating fundamental business activities. By harnessing smart ERP technologies you will be able to develop analytical reports to make better-informed decisions.
• Utilisation of cloud architecture and modular design. Lately, more and more companies which intend on achieving business agility are focused on implementation of cloud ERP systems. They have a modular design and allow to lower any barriers that arise in front of technological innovation.

Business process management software

Business process management software is an advanced system for creating work processes within a company and monitoring them to order to see how they can be improved. Business process management software solutions determine processes that span a company’s operations and then monitor those processes. These tools are also used to help to automate processes or, in some cases, build digital applications for different stages of the process. Business process management software helps to reduce human errors and costs, improve accountability, minimise inefficiencies, boosts engagement with customers, ensure regulatory compliance, renders competitive benefits, and most importantly enhance business agility.

Conclusion

Summarising the foregoing, we can conclude that agility is definitely a key fundamental requirement for all businesses, especially for those that operate in rapidly evolving today’s markets. Agility in business processes significantly improves the ability to exploit opportunities for innovation and competitive action. The more agile businesses are the faster they can adapt to deprive their competitors of any advantage they gain. Be more agile and flexible than your competitors, continuously and successfully implement innovations enables your business to go further than just responding to market changes.

Business agility allows any business to adapt and respond rapidly to any changes happening throughout the business network, accommodating shifts in partner and supplier relationships, customer preferences, and even broader market fluctuations. The importance of being highly agile and more so than competitors is further compounded by the growing number of organisations that are actively working to increase their agility. This growing interest created a race for greater agility, in which the laggards can very well pay a bitter price.

With the implementation of modern smart ERP solutions, your business will gain the agility enabling you to react to business changes in a quick and cost-effective manner.