How To Improve Service While Reducing Operating Costs Eliminating Silos of Data for One System of Truth INTRODUCTION Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is designed to improve and automate your business operations. Within medium to large enterprise companies, these processes such as quality, production, inventory, reporting, order entry, accounting, purchasing, etc... - are traditionally managed by several disparate, or even manual, systems. Companies that operate with disparate or manual systems often experience many unnecessary costs and delays. Examples include duplicate data entry, data corruption, more training, greater IT support and software incompatibilities. However, the largest impact of disparate systems is the inability to access information timely to enable good decision making. As a result, there is a growing trend toward the use of a single ERP system to manage the entire business. Through this single software system approach, companies can control the details of their businesses by linking all departments together. This maximizes productivity, reduces costs, and increases profitability. With a centralized ERP system, companies can erase information boundaries and deliver the critical information needed for rapid, effective decision-making. This document highlights the top ten business benefits of eliminating silos of data and utilizing a single ERP software system. By understanding these benefits, companies can understand how to simplify their operational processes. BENEFITS 1. REDUCE COSTS Challenged to do more with less, many IT departments are finding that the cost of maintaining multiple business systems is simply too high. With a single software system in place, companies can eliminate many of the costs associated with IT, including high implementation, integration, training, and support costs. Additionally, many companies experience reduction in overall license costs when moving to a single business system approach. 2. SINGLE POINT OF CONTROL Another major benefit of a single ERP system is the “single point of control.” A single software system will be the trusted source of information for an organization. By integrating all business processes into a single system, companies are able to simplify business workflow and increase productivity and efficiency. 3. ELIMINATE REDUNDANT DATA ENTRY Eliminating redundant data entry improves productivity. Companies can also gain organization-wide insight across the applications through one easy-to-use and familiar interface. For example, inventory, formulation, production, and lot and batch control updates are processed once with real-time transactional posting. 4. IMPROVE DATA INTEGRITY As the sole system for all company data, enterprise wide ERP is perfectly suited for organizations that require high levels of data integrity and control. With a single software solution, business information will be entered in one central location and will always be the same across company departments and locations. “Users moving from disparate systems or paper based processes can expect Microsoft Dynamics AX user productivity to increase by up to 30 percent.” “Key benefits from Microsoft Dynamics AX that drove returns... included improved visibility, increased productivity, improved customer relationship management, reduced inventory, improved supply chain collaboration, and reduced costs.” “(Companies) moving from other disparate applications can often redeploy hardware, cut maintenance contracts, and re-devote IT resources to other projects. For example, one customer moving from Oracle to Microsoft Dynamics AX reduced its ongoing ERP support budget by 73 percent.” Nucleus Research, click here to read. 5. BETTER BUSINESS INSIGHT Access to business critical data - no matter where it's located - is needed for rapid, effective decision making. By integrating all departments into one business system, companies have accurate, up-to-the minute information about product costs, sales trends, profit margins, and more. 6. RESPOND TO CHANGING BUSINESS CONDITIONS Responding quickly to business needs can be the key to gaining and keeping a competitive edge. But disparate IT systems can get in the way. A single enterprise wide software system that is flexible and easy to use can play a critical role in helping your business achieve the agility it requires to respond and adapt to changing business conditions. 7. SPEED AND SIMPLIFY TRAINING When utilizing a single software system, user training and adoption is easier and faster. Since employees only have one system to learn and use, as opposed to several different software interfaces, companies save time and effort during the training process. 8. MANAGE SUPPORT One software system means one software vendor, which prevents multiple vendors from passing software issues off to other software vendors. Also, instead of calling multiple support help desks, there is one support team responsible for addressing all of a company’s software questions or issues. 9. MINIMAL MAINTENANCE Overall, since software maintenance is lower, support issues are fewer with a single system. Rather than juggling support issues for numerous systems, a company’s IT department can handle the regular updates and backups for one software system. Single systems also keep network issues to a minimum. 10. EASIER UPGRADE PROCESS In addition to minimal maintenance, enterprise wide systems are easier to upgrade, too. Multiple software systems can conflict when one system is updated and no longer works correctly with another system. These differences are eliminated with single system upgrades. SUMMARY A single software system is intended to improve and automate business processes. By using a single point of control, this goal is accomplished through the benefits detailed above. Overall, the benefits of a single software system fulfill the original intentions of ERP as it allows companies to manage their business as simply and efficiently as possible. If any of these benefit are important to a company’s ability to meet their business goals, MAXCloud ERP an help. Powered by Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, MAXCloud helps provide more business value faster, enables agility and insight in your organization, and helps drive faster adoption, broader usage, and easier maintenance and upgrades through a continued emphasis on simplicity. Couple this with a constant focus on pervasive interoperability—the natural interaction of ERP systems with business productivity applications and IT infrastructure technology— and MAXCloud ERP will help sharpen your competitive edge and empower your people to anticipate and embrace change. “With multiple manual steps and no overall view of company operations, closing the books on operations took more than five days. You’d start work on a new month without even knowing whether you made money last month or not.” “Our processes involved a lot of manual work - people running around with bits of paper. We were receiving a large amount of charge-backs, where money was actually deducted from our invoice, for not meeting the retailers’ requirements. But Microsoft Dynamics AX facilitated a systematic approach to shipping, something our trading partners greatly appreciated. The number of charge-backs we’re receiving is reduced by 80% and our retailers are much happier doing business with us.” “We’re still implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX, and it’s already transforming our business. We couldn’t be happier with our new system.” Bringing Your Business Systems Up To Date, click here to read. ABOUT MAXCLOUD ERP Take advantage of the industry-leading capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX at a decreased cost - without the up-front investments in hardware and infrastructure. With MAXCloud ERP, companies can increase profitability, improve productivity, and reduce IT costs, all without compromising security or functionality. MAXCloud ERP is based on Microsoft's most advanced and feature-rich ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Gartner, Inc. has named Microsoft Dynamics AX a "Leader" in its ERP Magic Quadrant, and Nucleus Research has found that Microsoft Dynamics AX customers achieve returns in areas of increased visibility, increased productivity, and reduced costs. ABOUT MERIT SOLUTIONS Merit Solutions is an Award-Winning mid-sized IT services company with offices in North America and Europe. Our clients are medium to large enterprise businesses that want to leverage Microsoft Dynamics AX and surrounding technologies to standardize business processes and eliminate risk - and then continuously improve their business. Our industryspecific solutions, MAXFood and MAXLife, along with our core Microsoft Dynamics AX, MAXCloud, and SharePoint offerings, enable organizations to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve service - while maintaining profitable growth! Merit Solutions has been a Microsoft Gold Certified partner since 2003, and was recently identified as one of the top ERP resellers of the year. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION As an IT consulting and services organization, we know our success is directly dependent upon the success of our customers. That's why we perform quarterly customer satisfaction surveys to measure our client's success and satisfaction. The "highly professional approach to our project resulted in the results we expected on the schedule promised under the budget estimates. It's hard to beat that combination. Thanks for being flexible in working with our distributed team and for a great result." “The consultants have always met our expectations, and their knowledge of the software and our business has helped us streamline processes… The entire Merit Solutions team has always been helpful, courteous, and has done whatever needs to be done to make our partnership successful. I have never been disappointed by Merit Solutions.”  94% of Customers agree that Merit Solutions team members are able to recommend appropriate and creative solutions to my business needs.  94% of Customers agree that Merit Solutions expectations correctly and deliver on commitments.  94% of Customers agree that Merit Solutions team members treat all of my (customer’s) team members professionally.  88% of Customers agree that Merit Solutions team members respond quickly to any of my requests. “Merit Solutions was able to handle the intricacies of successfully migrating our legacy data, while at the same time building support and user acceptance of Microsoft Dynamics AX within our organization. More than anything else, these two factors are what enabled us to understand what we have to do as a company to meet our goals, and what we could do in the future to improve upon our business.”  94% of Customers agree that Merit Solutions team members met project objectives. Merit Solutions Customer Quotes, click here to read. Below are the up-to-date results of Merit Solutions' quarterly satisfaction surveys for 2012: team members set To see the full results of our annual scores for the Microsoft Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) program, view the Merit Solutions Customer Satisfaction page! Merit Solutions, Inc. 1749 S. Naperville Rd., Ste. 200 Wheaton, IL 60189 W: www.meritsolutions.com P: (630) 614 - 7133 E: [email protected]