If you are a warehouse-centric business such as distribution or manufacturing, automating your warehouses using barcode scanners is a must-have, especially, for growing companies. But why? To expedite your fulfillment processes and gain efficiencies. So do I need software to do that? Yes, a warehouse management system (WMS). It is a system or module that allows you to achieve your warehouses’ automation goals. Are they available for QuickBooks users as well? Yes, read on to learn your options.
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While QuickBooks is a great accounting system that provides a quick jump start to your accounting and finance processes, it’s limiting. With it, you might need to manage your operations manually (or with spreadsheets). Its design is not suitable for automating other business processes, such as managing your warehouse or fulfilling your orders.
As you grow, your operational processes could become overwhelming. The amount of churn required to fulfill your orders (or revenue collection being late) is due to the amount of bookkeeping or administration needed. As well as due to disconnected processes. These issues could lead to the need to increase your warehouse staff’s headcounts to fulfill your orders within time.
Even if you managed to increase your warehouse’s labor capacity to circumvent this challenge, some related issues might persist with customer orders. Issues such as customers not receiving the right items or too many customers returning their orders. This could lead to further problems such as an increased workload for your customer service department.
There could be several drivers why a company may look for a WMS add-on, such as 1) the perceived costs. 2) unqualified advice from unreliable sources. 3) perception of disruption to existing working processes. Or 4) perception of bandwidth required to change a component vs. big bang approach.
Why is QuickBooks WMS add-on not the right solution?
Generally, two factors drive the need for a WMS system and why the above problems exist with businesses that use QuickBooks. 1) the need for automation of warehouse processes. And 2) the lack of necessary controls throughout business processes, which might be impacted by warehouse processes.
While challenging, even if you succeed in achieving your automation goals through a WMS add-on, these heterogeneous technologies may fail. But fail in what sense? To provide the necessary control that you would need in your processes.
There are two reasons why lack of control would be an issue with a WMS add-on. 1) QuickBooks is not designed to give control across your operational processes. And 2) unless an add-on is built using the same technology or supplied by the publisher (in this case, Intuit) that developed QuickBooks, the add-on would have limited control over someone else’s software.
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QuickBooks WMS add-on alternatives and their benefits
The right way to solve this problem would be to find an integrated option developed from the ground up for a company of your size. These integrated options, such as Acumatica or Infor CloudSuite Industrial (Syteline), would natively support the accounting and warehouse automation processes out of the box using the same code base. Their operational procedures contain built-in controls to ensure the consistency of items throughout the order-to-cash cycle. And avoid scenarios such as the mixing of orders or items.
If the costs are your primary driver, an add-on might appear to be a lucrative option in the short term. Over time, though, you will spend more due to maintenance costs as you will have to deal with multiple vendors and their terms and contracts. The price for finance modules with software such as Acumatica could be lower than QuickBooks due to their bundled offering. Plus, you have the option to grow with it by adding as many modules as you like, in the same technology built by the publisher as opposed to a third party.
On the other hand, in the case of time and effort. Irrespective of whether you purchase a QuickBooks’ WMS add-on or the integrated option, your accounting procedures are likely to be impacted. Why? Because you are likely to have several ad-hoc processes unique to your business due to the lack of enforcement provided by QuickBooks. The WMS add-on would require you to standardize them as most companies, including these third parties, design their code using standard practices commonly used in the industry. For this reason, whether you consider an add-on or the integrated option, your perception of saving time or money would not be a reasonable reason to buy a WMS add-on.
ERP Selection: The Ultimate Guide
This is an in-depth guide with over 80 pages and covers every topic as it pertains to ERP selection in sufficient detail to help you make an informed decision.
QuickBooks’ design doesn’t support the operational processes of a growing company. It’s a small accounting system designed to jumpstart your accounting processes. Rather than creating patchy architecture by adding add-ons for your critical processes and spending more in the long term due to its consequences, you should find appropriate software for your stage once you outgrow QuickBooks. Adding an add-on will only make your problems worse!
Finding a suitable ERP system for your company and going through the long ERP purchase process could be stressful because of the unforeseen risks and required persuasion. The first time is even more difficult. So, how do you start the process? The first question you might have is about the steps involved in the ERP purchase process.
While the process may vary depending on your industry’s unique requirements or business situation, there are similarities. This comprehensive review will help you understand the commonly used stages involved. As well as your roles and responsibilities in the process, and strategies for championing internally with success.
Generally, the ERP purchase process contains the following phases for an SME buyer:
Introduction call
Detailed discovery with the champion
High-level demo
Site visit
Detailed discovery with individual SMEs
Scripted demo
Optional: POC/Technical integration demo
Optional: Day-in-the-life demo
Scope discussion
SOW walkthrough and negotiation
The 2025 Digital Transformation Report
Thinking of embarking on a ERP journey and looking for a digital transformation report? Want to learn the best practices of digital transformation? Then, you have come to the right place.
The ERP Purchase Process typically begins with an introduction call with an ERP consultant. The purpose? To assess if their products might be the right fit for your needs. This call will identify a few ERP consultants you may want to potentially select for the next round. Most ERP consultants will keep these calls brief for 30-45 mins over the phone.
Tip: If you are not familiar with ERP publishers and resellers’ relationships, publishers produce the product. In contrast, resellers are local distributors responsible for reselling them. Since resellers’ business models allow them to serve their local customers at much lower costs with specific expertise for your industry and geography, most ERP publishers don’t sell directly to consumers like you. For this reason, you need to work with a consulting company or a reseller. You might be able to save some time for yourself by calling a reseller directly. And avoiding the process of a fortune-500 company, as most publishers are relatively large organizations and busy chasing much bigger customers.
As you progress with your discussions, you may want to create a sheet similar to below to keep track of things and your ERP purchase process organized.
Tip: Note that secondary research is one of the most critical columns of this sheet. While resellers might answer most of your questions during your calls with them, the secondary research column would help assess their credibility. And vet their knowledge of the market and their products. We recommend performing this research before contacting them by reading credible blog sources such as ElevatIQ. As well as watching YouTube videos, and reading online reviews on G2Crowd and Capterra.
Some customers like to select five to six consultants initially, while others opt for more. As for the initial screening, closer to five is a good number without wasting unnecessary time while having enough samples for your comprehensive review.
Tip:If a partner seems to be overcommitting with your demands, it’s very likely that they might just be overpromising. And it might increase the risk of delivery. Understanding these nuances could help find the right partner for your project.
After finalizing the consultants’ list for the next round, you might want to develop an initial matrix to compare the consultants’ capabilities. This matrix will evolve as you conduct more discussions. From our experience, the most efficient matrix is straightforward. Focusing primarily on the most critical success factors essential for your business operations.
For example, are some of your production processes outsourced? The product under consideration may not work for your business processes if it doesn’t support outside process management capability. On the other hand, if you have to opt between e-commerce and payroll integration, you may want to select e-commerce integration over payroll if your business is customer-facing, high volume with fewer employees. Similarly, payroll integration may be more critical for you if your business is service-oriented with low volume.
Once you have concluded calls with all of your consultants, you might want to document a refined understanding of your needs. And compare them with your initial secondary research. If a consultant is too far off with their claims, they may not be the best fit. Why? Because they might be overselling their capabilities.
ERP Selection: The Ultimate Guide
This is an in-depth guide with over 80 pages and covers every topic as it pertains to ERP selection in sufficient detail to help you make an informed decision.
After the initial intro call, where the intent is to assess the fit, the discovery call is slightly detailed. The purpose of a discovery call is three-fold:
Continue evaluating if the product remains fit for your business
Alignment on the size and complexity of your project
The initial discovery calls could be up to two to four hrs long with each consultant and the product. During these calls, the consultant will dig deeper into your business processes such as order-to-cash or procure-to-pay. As well as may invite a few subject matter experts with specific expertise to help from their side.
Their purpose is to get enough details from your side to meet the above three objectives. Not sure about some of their questions? Are these discussions highly detailed? You may want to ask a couple of process owners from your side to join.
Tip: most consultants are likely to have similar questions, so you might want to prepare a brief package right after your first calls to save time. However, the meetings are still necessary to make it interactive with each consultant to ensure that you don’t miss critical details and find surprises later.
To provide you a more profound sense of the discovery meeting, below is a sample of questions related to a few business processes the consultants generally ask during their interviews. However, they will tailor these questions based on their understanding of your business.
To use your time effectively, most credible consultants pre-research their customers. They might share their understanding to demonstrate their expertise in your industry and save you time in repeating generic details. If a consultant can relate to your business, he/she is likely to be experienced with similar companies or well prepared.
Tip: if a consultant asks unnecessary questions such as “tell me how you do your business, ” it could be a red flag as it shows their lack of diligence and preparation on their end.
Upon the conclusion of this call, the consultants might ask you to share sample documents such as sample invoices, order forms, etc., allowing them to do the second-level check and eliminate high-risk areas before committing to showing you a demo in the next step.
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In some cases, this step could be part of the stage above, depending upon your preferences and your consultants’ approach.
The purpose of this demo is to show you the product without any configuration or customizations tailored to your business process or data. This demo also helps you relate to the previous step’s questions better and assess if you are still confident in the product’s and consultant’s capabilities.
This demo is for the audience who may have prior familiarity with an ERP system such as controllers, CFOs, or IT directors. By contrast, scripted demos described below would be more suited to the audience without any prior background with the ERP systems to help them relate better. For this demo, you may want to invite only a couple of key members.
The phases that follow the high-level demo would require more time commitment from your team members, so you may want to limit the finalists to 3-4 consultants for the next round. However, you may not want to announce the winners just yet in case the primary ones drop out, or you no longer feel comfortable continuing with previously selected consultants.
4. Site visit
This step is the most critical of the discovery process, especially if you are a manufacturing or distribution business. This step helps consultants visualize and understand your business processes by watching the field crew remove the project risks because of miscommunication or misunderstanding.
Tip: If a consultant does not commit to an on-site visit, you might not want to continue with them. An on-site visit helps acquaintance with your consultant better and aligns the project and processes’ scope.
This visit could also be an excellent opportunity to introduce your team to consultants to get a second opinion. Sometimes combined with the other steps, this stage could be a perfect opportunity to interview each process owner in detail, do an in-person demo, or collaborate in workshops to understand your business processes better.
5. Detailed discovery with SMEs
As a champion, you might want to watch your team members’ time to make the process efficient. The process owners may be busy with their day jobs and might not cooperate with you if you ask for meetings too frequently. For this reason, it is crucial to limit the finalists to 3-4 consultants.
The purpose of these meetings is to get more in-depth insight into high-risk areas. These meetings also allow you to respond to consultants’ previously unaddressed questions and validate your shared details. The consultant might want to have a couple of these meetings depending on your process’s complexity and your consultant’s comfort level.
The consultant might ask to share data from individual process owners for the scripted demo if required. The purpose of this data is to help them visualize the process from their perspective utilizing their data.
This step also provides an opportunity to agree on the demo’s scope and structure/scenarios so that there are no surprises during the demo.
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Learn how Big Country Raw managed the change and transformation despite their limited budget for ERP implementation and eCommerce integration.
A scripted demo helps you provide a better sense of the platform by tailoring it to your business process and data. This step is perhaps the second most critical step of the ERP purchase process. It will also require the most time from your team.
A scripted demo could be anywhere from 4-8 hrs, depending upon the scope of the demo. During this step, the consultant also puts substantial effort, typically 1-2 weeks, to customize the demo instance to agreed sample processes.
This step provides an excellent opportunity for you to invite as many members to offer them first-hand experience tailored to their day jobs. You may like to divide it into phases with specific functional areas (such as finance, manufacturing, sales, and purchasing) and invite appropriate team members to their respective sessions to effectively utilize their time.
This step allows you to uncover risk areas that you may not have thought of before and may want to address before committing to the product and the partner.
After reviewing the scripted demo of 3-4 finalist consultants, you may want to meet with your team to get a second opinion. Their concerns could be about the capabilities that they didn’t quite understand or relate to their functions.
7. Optional: POC/Technical integration demo
This step is typically optional and only applicable if any processes require customizing the product that consultants cannot demo with the out-of-the-box processes.
In that case, you may want the consultant to put together technical feasibility documentation/presentation to ensure that the consultant has thought through the solution and has removed any significant technical risks.
8. Optional: Day-in-the-life demo
This step is also optional and only applicable if your decision-makers can’t relate to the product for their day jobs. In this step, the consultant will sit with your teams, such as sales or purchasing, and show them how they would be spending their day with the product.
Some of your team members may not have had an opportunity to talk during the scripted demo. They might be more comfortable sharing their concerns and opinions in these 1:1 meetings.
9. Scope discussion
Before this discussion, the consultant may have presented the ballpark numbers for the implementation.
This discussion allows you to confirm the details such as # of users required, their roles, and appropriate licenses, the modules you would need. It also provides a chance to validate the processes to be implemented, the systems to be integrated, and the data elements you want to migrate.
These details will help the consultant to put together a detailed quote about software as well as implementation.
10. SOW walkthrough and negotiation
During this step, the consultants will prepare a detailed SOW that will include the following topics:
Scope
Implementation plan/schedule
The final quote of the software as well as the implementation
Each consultant will walk you through their proposal. Your goal here should be to engage with a consultant with the most realistic plan and cost expectations.
Each consultant might propose different models of delivering the project. Some consultants might opt for a fixed cost, other ones might go for time and material, while the rest may have a fixed fee per month or day.
Each model has its pros and cons. While the fixed cost model may appear most lucrative from your perspective, it comes with significant challenges and is not the right fit for everyone.
Reviewing these models and their risks will allow you to make a prudent decision for your company.
Conclusion
As with any expensive purchases and initiatives that require cross-functional collaboration, be ready for ups and downs, and embrace it as a learning experience. Once you have gone through the process and felt the benefits first-hand, the process might not feel stressful and frightening.
When you are ready to go through the process, this review will provide a better understanding of the process and help you avoid potential risks.
“Did you just mean that we have to start as a clean slate with a new ERP? ” Said the customer we were trying to convince on a new ERP. “It feels as if we are starting a new company from scratch. I thought digital transformation meant enabling customer experience. From what angle the customer experience will be superior if we forget everything we know about them? ” He expanded.
If you have gone through a new ERP implementation, you must have felt the same. A new ERP project often meant losing your historical transactional data as migrating it is generally costly and risky. With the advancement of technologies and better collaboration among ERP publishers, some ERP publishers can provide a seamless ERP upgrade experience.
The 2025 Digital Transformation Report
Thinking of embarking on a ERP journey and looking for a digital transformation report? Want to learn the best practices of digital transformation? Then, you have come to the right place.
As far as ERP implementations are concerned, three different datasets are often relevant.
Master and configuration data. This dataset is the master configuration data such as products, customers, vendors, and price lists. The master settings required to conduct transactions
GL balances and active transactions. This dataset is the chart of account balances used to construct your financial statements. The active transactions are open orders and invoices that are yet to be collected and closed.
Historical transaction data. This is the historical transactional data such as closed POs and Invoices. The quotes customers requested in the past. And the leads that approached from specific accounts, and their interactions
From the perspective of accounting and finance, as most people perceive ERP systems as financial or accounting systems, the only datasets that matter are #1 and #2. Why? Those are enough to run a company and move to a new ERP system. However, if you think from the perspective of customer experience or operational planning, dataset #3 is their gold mine.
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What Is ERP Historical Data, And Why Does It Matter?
Without having access to historical data in the traditional ERP implementations, the planning teams circumvented this problem by keeping its snapshot in data warehouses. They combined (in the database terms, making a join) it with the current ERP data to get insight into past sales trends, past credit trends, and supply chain planning, through a visualization tool such as Power BI or Infor Birst.
If the planning team had challenges with the snapshot approach, teams involved in customer interactions struggled more with this approach due to rising customer expectations. Your sales and finance teams need access to historical transactional insight for their daily operations decisions. The more information you have about your customers, the more comfortable customers will feel working with your company. More transactional insight not only enhances customer experience, but it also helps with revenue opportunities.
For example, looking into previous sales history could enable your sales team to remind your customers about an item they may have forgotten to include with their purchase while also creating a cross-sale opportunity for your sales team.
Similarly, your finance team could review previous purchases to determine customers’ likelihood to pay on time and decide on extending the credit. Another example would be visiting a customer and reminding them about a conversation you had ten years back with the help of a recorded interaction in your CRM system.
The list is endless with possibilities in how historical intelligence can help boost customer experience. The value of historical data presented here isn’t new to SME business owners. Still, they had no choice but to sacrifice it as, traditionally, bringing historical data has been prohibitively expensive.
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Digital Transformation Change And Project Management
Learn how Big Country Raw managed the change and transformation despite their limited budget for ERP implementation and eCommerce integration.
You must be wondering why it is such a big deal to migrate #3 if the ERP vendors can bring the #1 and #2 datasets mentioned above. To answer this question, let’s review the process of migrating data.
Typically most business software products such as an ERP control their data integrity through a set of business or accounting rules. The underlying data model is like a spreadsheet that changes with each version. Each product may have its spreadsheet with millions of business rules embedded in it.
If you try to migrate from an identical spreadsheet to another with the same embedded business rules, it is easy. With each version or product having its underlying spreadsheet and accompanying business rules, you need to go through the data translation process when you move from one product/version to the next, even with the same publisher.
The process is still manageable if we talk about non-financial data. With accounting data, however, business rules are even more involved. The accounting data requires us to rewind the whole process of capturing and closing each transaction in their appropriate financial periods starting from year one while resolving issues as you move along due to the interdependencies.
As you can imagine, how cumbersome and labor-intensive the process could be if you have to review and capture each transaction since you started your business. Due to the involved process of migrating this data, ERP vendors typically recommend against it.
ERP Selection: The Ultimate Guide
This is an in-depth guide with over 80 pages and covers every topic as it pertains to ERP selection in sufficient detail to help you make an informed decision.
The other vendors, such as Infor and Acumatica, offer shorter-term solutions for their product families. For example, Infor has done the entire translation project for Infor Visual, Syteline, and Point.Man products if their customers want to move to CloudSuite Industrial, the cloud version of Syteline. They have the capability to take your entire database from these legacy products and convert them into a new database.
Through this approach, you not only get your master and configuration data, but you also get your historical transactional data. These projects were easy for Infor as they understood the data structures of their products well.
Conclusion
Migrating historical transactional data has never been easier. Traditionally ERP publishers have recommended against it due to it being risky and expensive, and SME business owners had to sacrifice it with a new ERP implementation.
The unique approaches have enabled ERP publishers like Infor to streamline data migration across their product lines. As a result, you no longer have to lose your ERP historical data with your new ERP implementation.
Now that you have the option to carry over your historical transaction data without breaking your wallet, you must consider historical data migration as a factor before choosing an ERP vendor.
With the rise of teleconferencing technologies such as Zoom, one may argue that the event management industry is a thing of the past. However, if you closely looked at data from this industry, you would notice that Event management companies have been on the boom for many years. Their outlook is brighter than ever. This industry consists of many different companies. And is not typically known as ERP-focused. So how do events industry ERP systems differ? These 6 events’ industry ERP features are a critical success factor for this industry.
The 2025 Digital Transformation Report
Thinking of embarking on a ERP journey and looking for a digital transformation report? Want to learn the best practices of digital transformation? Then, you have come to the right place.
Event management could mean different things to different people. The companies in this industry could offer services ranging from charity balls, weddings, award shows, and rock concerts. As well as corporate exhibitions such as roadshows, product launches, and corporate sales meetings. Not to mention industry trade shows, pop-up events, corporate announcements, conferences, and sports shows. Anything and everything related to events!
For this article’s purposes, we plan to focus on your exhibition-centric marketing or brand agencies. Involved in planning trade shows and booths, including manufacturing components for different sites and coordination such as training rehearsals.
ERP Selection: The Ultimate Guide
This is an in-depth guide with over 80 pages and covers every topic as it pertains to ERP selection in sufficient detail to help you make an informed decision.
The business processes of Event Management Companies
Event management companies’ projects could involve extremely challenging, time-sensitive coordination, as delivering a seamless experience from an exhibit requires careful planning. They usually entail several sub-projects in wide-ranging technologies such as video production, manufacturing of site components, and site plan engineering.
Highly customized for your customers’ needs, the exhibits contain several engineering and manufacturing jobs that need to go through the production process. Each with its process complexity while receiving continuous feedback from your customers.
With customers’ preferences of paying based on the milestones or the outcome, your billing isn’t straightforward either and requires a system that can handle financials of such complexity.
To ensure project success, your teams need to collaborate with various internal teams and customers. Depending upon your outsourcing strategy, you might also need to collaborate with your suppliers within a project step or a project’s job.
The challenges of high-stake collaboration and heterogeneous processes require distinct ERP features for event management companies.
The ERP features Event Management companies need
Similar to other industries, event management companies require the following standard ERP features:
Financials (AR, AP, GL, Fixed Assets, Currency, and Cash Management)
Order Management (PO, vendor as well as customer management)
By contrast, the following features are unique for event management companies:
1. Project-based Manufacturing
With the need for capabilities to kick off engineering and manufacturing jobs inside the project and track the entire engagement costs, the ERP system that event management companies select must support project-based manufacturing, among essential events industry ERP features.
If you outsource some of your processes to take advantage of their expertise or costs, the system must also support sub-contractor processes within the project and their sub-jobs.
Lack of strong support for project-based manufacturing might pose challenges with tracking your costs and getting the entire engagement’s 360-degree view.
2. CAD Integration
Due to the nature of your business, most event management companies have in-depth engineering and design capabilities. Also, as your projects’ subcomponents’ design is relatively complex, your engineers typically prefer multiple CAD systems, including Autodesk and SOLIDWORKS.
Lack of integration with several CAD systems with your ERP system might require your engineering team to collaborate manually with your other departments. These manual processes could result in financial loss due to the following reasons:
Suppliers or internal teams mistakenly use different versions of a design.
Manual data entry of BOMs in the ERP systems
No single source of truth for design files
To avoid these financial consequences, exhibit management companies require their ERP systems to support tight integration with several CAD systems.
3. Budgeting and Billing
Due to the nature of engineer-to-order manufacturing requiring your sales team to quote for the entire project without access to detailed specifications, most event management companies require complex estimating, budgeting, and billing capabilities.
The risk of going over budget may require your operations team to track costs on an ongoing basis once the customers sign the contract. To avoid the risk of losing their entire investment, your customers may need progress or milestone-based billing using complex criteria.
The limitation of your ERP system to complex billing scenarios might lead to situations of being late in collecting revenue or losing customers if they might not feel comfortable locking in such an expensive project without a non-performance clause.
4. Equipment Rental and Asset Management
Due to the nature of your business, most event management companies carry expensive assets on their balance sheets such as cameras, AV equipment, and tools and machines required in the field. To appropriately account for and charge your customers for their usage of these assets, you need to bill your customers proportionally and depreciate as they age.
The challenging tracking of these assets requires you to select an ERP system that can support complex scenarios of equipment rental and fixed assets capable of accounting with several depreciation methods.
5. Customer and Vendor Portals
As your projects require your customers’ input at each step to ensure alignment with their needs, event management companies need to collaborate with your customers on design. The clients must be able to upload their artwork without manual collaboration.
Since you collaborate with multiple vendors and have significant interdependencies between project tasks, you would not track your projects as seamlessly as you would if your vendors had access to a portal to interact with the processes belonging to their area.
6. Mobile App for Field Technicians
With significant interdependencies across various sites, your projects include time-sensitive tasks for your field technicians. They need to report to your office and record their accurate time and inventory used in the field. Inaccurate time and material reporting may lead to financial consequences, while the inability to report their task status may result in schedule implications.
Capabilities such as route planning, task notifications, and reporting their status through the mobile app provided as part of an ERP package could make coordination with the field technicians easy.
Conclusion
With several ERP benefits to assist with complex planning, Exhibit management companies require unique ERP capabilities. The lack of strong support for hybrid manufacturing and engineering scenarios, including project-based manufacturing, makes the system unsuitable for an exhibit management company’s needs.
If you feel the need to organize your current trade show management processes further, the features suggested in this article will help you understand what you need in an ERP system.
“If a given trade show isn’t pre-planned at the level of the Normandy Invasion, it’s doomed to fail,” – Simplilearn CMO, Mark Moran. Ever managed a trade show? If yes, I am sure you would agree that there is a lot that goes into enabling the brand experience that your customers expect. Manual processes with complex manufacturing and engineering needs could make it harder. This article will help you understand the exhibit management industry ERP benefits. And how they could make managing the trade shows easier.
The 2025 Digital Transformation Report
Thinking of embarking on a ERP journey and looking for a digital transformation report? Want to learn the best practices of digital transformation? Then, you have come to the right place.
When we think of customer experience, we often perceive it as a customer-facing process. Or purely aesthetics. Don’t we? While great aesthetics could enhance the experience, your customers will only find it breathtaking. This is especially true when they receive consistent and immersive experiences throughout their business processes. You can’t fake a good experience. It starts with how your sales team interacts with them and how your operations team delivers it. And how competitive your offerings are.
To explore it from a different perspective, imagine how your customers would feel if they communicated their ideas to your sales team. But received a completely different design with their quote. This issue is likely caused by manual processes or disconnected systems.
A fully integrated ERP system with a customer portal ensures that artwork is tied to an opportunity in your ERP system when customers share their designs. As the transaction moves through the process, customers can track their project status. This seamless communication without manual intervention while collaborating with them would help enable a breathtaking experience for your customers. Therefore, customer experience is perhaps one of the top ERP benefits in the exhibit management industry.
ERP Selection: The Ultimate Guide
This is an in-depth guide with over 80 pages and covers every topic as it pertains to ERP selection in sufficient detail to help you make an informed decision.
Without a fully integrated ERP system designed for project-driven manufacturing, you might have to compile the costing of all jobs and expenses manually. A fully integrated ERP system creates a budget at the project level, which might have several child jobs and tasks. As your team completes these jobs, the system will account for the costs and provide their live tracking, including drill-down at the transaction level.
Such a system not only helps track costs but also enables you to pivot if the project does not proceed as intended. As you gather more data for comparable engagements, you will discover deficiencies in your processes. These learnings will help further optimize your costs and expenses, improving your relationship with your customers. This is especially true if you are proactive in your communication with any expected cost overruns. Finally, it boosts your confidence with future estimates as you can compare your live projects with previously successful ones. And utilize the strategies that you may have used to make them successful.
3. To avoid schedule slippages
The most common cause for schedule slippage is the misalignment in expectations. As well as miscommunication among different stakeholders. The slippage occurs if you cannot track the status daily. Or due to a delay in receiving information. Your job as a project manager could be hard if you need to deal with field crew who may not have as much appreciation for the processes. But why? Basically, this is due to their commitment and interpretation of the importance of the process. And how their inputs might affect the outcome.
Since an integrated system provides real-time status at your fingertips with a notification for any delays or exceptions, you can act quickly and create strategies to avoid slippage.
While the system itself can’t prevent slippage, it can help with proactive communication. As well as setting the right expectations with your customers. This proactive approach helps in gaining trust and building credibility with your customers. Using an integrated system, you can follow up with the field crew or update on their behalf if they might not be as technically savvy or may not have as much appreciation for the processes.
Finally, the system automatically takes care of the communication as it sends appropriate tasks they need to perform each hour so that there is little room for miscommunication and misalignment.
4. To ensure the success of the event
Several factors make an event successful, but the most important ones include how clearly your team understands their responsibilities so that they can perform their tasks on time as expected. By contrast, the issue that might make an event unsuccessful could be mismanagement or mishandling of requests, such as sending the wrong equipment to the wrong site. Such problems occur if you have a manual process or disconnected systems that allow checking out the wrong equipment for a site.
An integrated ERP enables you to define controls that will ensure that such problems don’t occur. An integrated system also allows you to have better backup strategies through live tracking if things don’t go as planned.
5. To provide seamless collaboration among teams
Without an integrated ERP system, you would not enforce the controls that you need for seamless collaboration with your teams. Such collaboration is difficult with manual and disconnected systems. With a lack of control, the ad-hoc processes would provide unnecessary liberty and leave them to their interpretation. With an integrated ERP system, your team will be operating on pre-defined workflows with built-in controls that you need to ensure you have standardized processes across the enterprise.
As the transaction moves from the opportunity to quote and then to order and finally to project and invoice, the integrated system also ensures that each team operates on the same record without requiring duplicate data entries. The end-to-end connectivity of your business transactions would provide traceability for your teams. Since one system hosts all your business processes and teams, these processes will enable seamless collaboration among your teams without conflicts.
Conclusion
A fully connected ERP system can provide that glue that exhibition management companies need to enable seamless collaboration among all their stakeholders and a breathtaking customer experience.
If you have been managing your processes manually or through disconnected systems, having an awareness of these exhibit management industry ERP benefits could help you assess if you may be ready for a new ERP system.
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