Enterprise Resource Planning for Small and Medium Organizations

Author - ComstarISA | Mar 15 2018 12:00

Small and Medium (SME) size organizations looking at optimizing their productivity will need to assess their adaption of Information Technology (IT) within their enterprise. The easier and less complex decisions are related to implementation/selection of processing units, e.g. laptops, access points, network switches etc. Complexity increases when one has to start assessing the security of your IT infrastructure form vulnerabilities from cyber-attacks of various types, it is here expert advice has to be sought from reliable, experienced service providers. Up until this stage, one is working on getting basic IT functionality incorporated into the enterprise to conduct company's activities when that is said and done, we move to the second stage.

The second stage is when the management must focus on human resources' productivity enhancement needs. This, for the effective and efficient functioning of all key units within the enterprise, it is here where you start looking at Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems.

When researching, assessing and selecting ERP systems, organizations end up having to make a critical choice - 'Customize your ERP or Adapt it'. There is no easy readily available answer, key question 'Why might you need to customize your ERP system'.

To take the right decision it is imperative organizations need to seek experts who can work with its management to rigorously identify organization's and management's needs, ascertain critical and non-critical needs. Once that is done, the expert must correlate (Gap Analysis) these needs with the functionality available within a standard ERP system. Once the Gap analysis is completed, and if critical functions identified earlier are not available within the standard ERP, it's here the expert determines the customization effort needed to incorporate these critical functions within the standard ERP (such as Odoo).

At this stage management must take the key decision; is the money needed for customization indeed, is, truly value for money. If yes, then ERP customization should be undertaken, otherwise, management works within the parameters and modules available within the standard ERP.

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