Why a decision to not embrace new technical and business changes is a decision to grow slower – or impeded growth altogether for an enterprise.

Today’s manufacturer is evolving, moving on from many of the practices they used in their early growth stages.

Right now, a growing number of businesses who adopted off the shelf entry level accounting packages to track the finances of their young businesses are realizing the scope of their operational processes has matured and now needs advanced systems needs to go beyond simply managing day-to-day finance. Growing manufacturers need to be able to better plan, procure, produce, distribute, and sell, as well as to account. They also need to manage more complex transactions, requiring more critical planning and tracking of revenues, greater visibility of customers, and involving more stringent accounting and regulatory standards.

Historically, the transition from off the shelf entry level accounting packages to a more robust solution was an agonizing decision for smaller manufacturing businesses.  

The traditional path involved implementing costly, complex, user-challenging, on-premises ERP software. Often these solutions required long and costly deployment cycles, new hardware purchases, and internal IT resources that simply weren’t readily available. Today, that transition has been eased. The advent of cloud-based ERP software, such as ERPNext on-demand solutions, often called software as a service (SaaS), has enabled companies to better meet the business requirements of the new marketplace. Now they can easily move beyond the simple financial functionality to more effective and comprehensive solutions for the total business.

A decision to not embrace new technical and business changes is for many manufacturers a decision to grow slower – or impeded growth altogether.

When it comes to relying on off the shelf entry level accounting packages, growing manufacturing operations suffer with issues ranging from scalability, narrow visibility, limited functionality and difficult integration to access concerns, currency recording issues, latency and a lack of deeper industry functionality required to facilitate and leverage growth. Fortunately for today’s growing manufacturers, ERP solutions have rapidly emerged as enablers of growth. These solutions eliminate the principle barriers that keep companies from implementing more powerful ERP solutions while overcoming the limitations of point solutions.

Companies looking to replace off the shelf entry level accounting packages have multiple options, but increasingly emerging as the best are cloud-based alternatives.

In contrast, on-premises solutions require that customers purchase a perpetual license, as well as the hardware to support the software upfront. On the other hand, the advantages of cloud-based and SaaS solutions are significant – chiefly easy deployment, mobility, zero maintenance, cyber security and disaster management. For those hanging onto legacy systems, these benefits should provide compelling reasons to explore more powerful options.

Good News: Cloud-deployed ERPNext is specifically designed for manufacturers and distributors looking to upgrade operations by moving from off the shelf entry level accounting packages to a more sophisticated and powerful solution tailored to meet business requirements in today’s rapidly changing global marketplace.