4 signs you need a new enterprise system

Many businesses find it hard to know when it’s time to upgrade to a new enterprise system. While some may be wary of the disruption and cost associated with upgrading, these setbacks are often dwarfed by the profit and efficiency benefits that come with the latest enterprise systems.

To help you gauge if it’s time to upgrade to a new enterprise system, we’ve compiled a list of four signs your business may be held back by your current enterprise software:

1. Your system lacks scalability and adaptability

Managing growth is hard enough without your enterprise system limiting what you can do.

Research by Panorama Consulting Solutions reveals only 12% of corporate executives were “very satisfied” with their current ERP solution, and that 59% of global companies were “burdened” by them.

Many legacy enterprise systems focus on specific business areas, but fall short in others. For instance, some are great at managing customers and vendors, supply chains, and inventory, but offer limited accounting functionality.

They may also offer limited scalability as your company grows, leading to inefficiencies as you add new customers and business processes, as well as incremental increases in maintenance and limited-user license fees as your personnel expands.

Legacy enterprise systems may also be unable to help you stay compliant with the latest local and global legislation as you expand into new territories.

2. Limited business visibility and collaboration

Enterprise software plays a crucial role in delivering the critical business information required for informed decision-making.

If your enterprise system takes forever to retrieve KPI data or other complicated metrics – whether related to sales, inventory, shipping orders or accounting – it may be time to consider a modern enterprise management solution.

Communication between your departments may also be limited due to siloed data. They may be unable to efficiently share data, which can lead to duplicate data entry and extra work for staff.

Modern enterprise management solutions can help consolidate data across your organisation and offer business intelligence tools that deliver a 360-degree, real time view of your business operations. You can access key data without delays or having to search across multiple places, and enhance data sharing across departments.

3. Incompatibility with other solutions

For your business to work as efficiently as possible, it’s critical for the software solutions it uses to work together seamlessly.

If your enterprise software can’t integrate with other systems, for instance your CRM system, and therefore can’t automatically transfer data, you’ll be forced to perform many manual, time-consuming tasks.

Modern enterprise management solutions generally boast integration with other systems, to ensure your business processes run as smoothly as possible.

4. You’re forced to use work-arounds

Rather than help make processes more efficient, legacy enterprise systems often force businesses to alter processes to accommodate their system’s inflexibility.

Work-arounds created to compensate for limited and outdated software become untenable in the long term. The longer you put off modernising your enterprise system, the more you’ll miss out on enhancing the efficiency of your processes and business.