Enterprise resource planning moves forward

12/14/2011 at 1:07 pm by The Sage ERP Team

The end of 2011 is almost upon us, leading many organizations to turn their attentions toward the coming year. This is a good idea for companies considering ERP implementations or those that simply want to update their existing application suites. Each year provides a good framework in which to build plans and create strategies, so have one for 2012 in at least a vague outline.

The Bloor Group, a market research firm, has surveyed users of business intelligence to discover how companies are using software and what the future might hold. There are some interesting findings that can be applied to any enterprise using ERP or other types of commercial software, so use these statistics as a guide for planning any organizational changes that involve applications and computerized systems.

It turns out that around 71 percent of all companies use enterprise resource planning, business intelligence or some form of traditional reporting software. This indicates that more and more companies are beginning to see the benefits of programs that account for resources, materials and products. If a business has not yet decided to take the ERP plunge, it appears that 2012 is the year to do so. However, it's important to act quickly because software vendors might be inundated with implementation requests.

For existing ERP systems, another figure is very interesting – 51 percent. That's the proportion of organizations that have some kind of business software in place and view analyses of it through dashboards. Dashboards are essentially overviews of the results of ERP data and make large, overarching decisions easy to make in a pinch. They can be customized to reflect certain types of data and offer enormous help in efforts to present large idea to planners, managers and executives.

The number one IT priority at most businesses, according to the Bloor Group's research, is the integration of operational processes. This means that different departments, separate efforts and unique types of commercial software should be unified and connected such that they seem to operate as one. When companies can achieve this, they'll be operating with a synergy that can weather quite a few storms and problems.

Finally, the upward swing of enthusiasm that's been present for the past few years is continuing its rise in 2012. It seems that 44 percent of companies that already use business software will be investigating or investing in the cloud a bit more next year than they did this year. Organizations that have avoided doing the same until now should see this as a call to arms if they've been concerned that their hardware and hosting costs have been too high of late.