It’s always an uphill battle when you’re competing against big businesses. Large budgets and advanced business tools allow large corporations to streamline their operations and provide high-quality products at a very competitive price. Luckily, ERP for small business gives small operations the tools they need to stay competitive with the big guys.

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Complex software solutions like enterprise resource planning solutions are being adopted by a growing number of small businesses that need a centralized system for tracking numerous activities that are a part of their day-to-day operations. But is it worth it for SMBs to try and implement ERP solutions?

According to a Small Business Advocate report, 99.7% of businesses in the U.S. are small businesses. It means that the real challenge is standing out from the crowd of similar-sized businesses that are all competing for the same customers. With enterprise resource planning (ERP), smaller companies can streamline their operations to the point that they can even rival large corporations in terms of their operation’s efficiency.

What is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software?

ERP is a critical business solution that collects information from various departments in a centralized database, enabling leaders to monitor business operations from a single source of truth. It unifies critical business functions such as finance, inventory, manufacturing, order management, procurement, customer relationships, sales and marketing, project management and human resources. Reporting and analytics is another major feature of ERP that enables organizations to make data-driven decisions.

These solutions provide visibility into company-wide business operations and pinpoint inefficient processes while highlighting growth opportunities. They also support various deployment models, including on-premises, cloud and hybrid strategies. While cloud-based ERP has gained popularity in recent years, your deployment strategy should depend on your business’s requirements.

ERP leverages different modules that address specific business functions. For example, a product-based company may choose to opt for accounting and order management, inventory management and CRM modules. In contrast, a service-based organization may need project management, accounting, marketing automation and CRM modules. Each of these modules pulls information from and pushes it into the central data repository, the primary component of ERP. The central data repository provides visibility into different departments within the organization. Repositories let stakeholders compare and evaluate the performance of different business areas and understand the impact of decisions on these areas.

Benefits for Small Business

Apart from providing complete visibility into business operations, ERP for small businesses can improve your business operations in many ways. They let you expand your business without adding IT or staffing costs, provide a competitive advantage to your business, increase productivity and reduce costs.

ERP for small business can prove beneficial in the following ways:

Agility: In an ever-changing business environment, it’s wise to respond to change as soon as possible. It’s imperative to invest in ERP that’s flexible, modular and scalable enough to embrace changing market dynamics and evolving customer needs. They also give businesses the flexibility to implement specific modules and add on others as they grow.

Analytics: They also serve as excellent business intelligence tools. With the plethora of information available in a central database, you can create reports and dashboards that include everything from income and expense statements to custom KPIs that offer useful business insights. ERP for small businesses helps make data-driven decisions to minimize risks and increase profits.

Improve Business Productivity: ERP for small businesses automates tedious tasks such as manual data entry, timesheet tracking, order processing, monitoring inventory levels and generating reports. It also performs advanced calculations within minutes, freeing up staff members’ time to perform more useful and thoughtful tasks.

Best ERP for Small Business

Small and medium-sized businesses should invest in an ERP system that will keep costs down and reduce the need for employee training. However, it should be straightforward to implement and have the ability to scale as the business grows. That’s the reason small businesses should opt for cloud-based ERP: they are cost-effective, easy-to-implement, flexible, scalable and need limited technical resources compared to the on-premise and hybrid deployment models.

Here is the list of the top cloud-based ERP software for small business:

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SAP Business ByDesign

SAP BusinessByDesign is a cloud-based solution suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises. It serves the critical requirements of a business and offers various capabilities, including financial, customer relationship, project, supply chain, human resources and compliance management.

It integrates with Office 365, Concur, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors to perform advanced functions while offering APIs to build custom integrations. It provides globalization and translation toolkits to adapt to tax requirements, languages, time zones and currencies of over 100+ countries. It protects company-wide data with AES-256 encryption, global auditing, multi-tenancy, single sign-on authentication, activity monitoring and SOC 2 compliance.

Use cash flow management to gain real-time visibility into your cash position.

SAP Business ByDesign provides features like financial management, customer relationship management, human resource management, project management, procurement management and much more.

However, the solution doesn’t have a user-friendly output and requires Excel to treat output data. The production feature under the SCM module doesn’t provide item-wise cost.

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Acumatica Cloud ERP

Acumatica’s Cloud ERP offers features like inventory management, financial management, a technology platform, manufacturing, order management, construction, services, e-commerce support and more.

View important metrics in visually digestible graphs.

This system helps users create customized reports to make better, faster and more informed decisions. It also allows users to tailor reports to meet the information needs of all organizational roles so that sensitive information is only shared with necessary individuals. Users can migrate historic accounts payable and receivable data from a legacy system to the solution, including open balances, original amounts and dates without affecting the general ledger.

Users can leverage business intelligence capabilities to spot trends, identify inefficiencies and make informed decisions. It also facilitates aggregating data from multiple sources, extracting actionable insights for strategic decision-making and creating interactive reports to present them to the stakeholders.

On the other hand, the solution doesn’t offer a free trial and doesn’t provide an action tab on the print screen to save data.

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BizAutomation

BizAutomation is a cloud-based ERP that provides an integrated suite of software applications that includes CRM, financials, e-commerce, distribution, order management, project accounting and inventory management. It caters to multiple industries such as wholesale, retail, e-commerce, services, distribution and manufacturing.

BizAutomation supports demand forecasting against global supply chains. It recommends inventory purchases, supports filtering by location, item categories and more. It supports reordering BOMs based on long-term demand and setting rebuild points to automatically create work orders, save time and increase productivity.

History of sales orders in the sales order management module.

It provides numerous features, including sales order management, multi-channel integration, sales fulfillment and shipping, procurement, warehouse management and more. It supports automatic generation of email alerts to trigger sending an email template to a new lead, follow-up management for leads, email broadcasting, campaign tracking and promotion management.

However, BizAutomation doesn’t have a mobile app or an active community forum where users can post questions.

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Sage 100 Cloud

Sage 100 Cloud supports businesses in various industries such as manufacturing, services, wholesale distribution, construction, chemicals, food and beverages.

Sage HRMS, an add-on solution to Sage 100 Cloud, helps users address HR management challenges. It offers integrated payroll, employee benefits, recruiting, employee self-service and advanced analytics capabilities. Sage Inventory Advisor, another add-on, lets businesses check inventory health, monitor inventory levels, set alerts to take appropriate action, generate accurate forecasts and suggest an optimal investment to achieve target fill rates.

Leverage inventory management to create a new product line.

It offers various capabilities such as financial management, inventory and warehouse management, purchasing and vendor management, sales, customer marketing and much more. It provides access to real-time information on the availability of specific inventory units, item pricing, quantity pricing, customer data, credit limits and credit card deposits.

The solution doesn’t offer any other language support apart from English, and the mobile application isn’t currently available.

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Oracle NetSuite ERP

Oracle NetSuite ERP is a cloud-based solution that caters to small, medium and large scale businesses across industries such as advertising, consulting, education, energy, financial services, FMCG, manufacturing, retail, technology and more.

It offers built-in business intelligence that enables users to combine data with visual analytics to generate actionable insights. The demand planning module allows calculation and prediction based on historical demand, open opportunities and sales forecasts. It generates forecasts using moving averages, linear regression or seasonal-average calculations.

Keep track of important HR metrics with the HR management module.

Its production management capabilities provide real-time visibility into production processes throughout order processing, routing and scheduling, order fulfillment and product costing. The order and billing management module integrates sales, finance and fulfillment teams. It provides an omnichannel pricing system to ensure real-time pricing updates to customers across all channels.

However, Netsuite doesn’t offer a free trial and doesn’t support XLSX files.

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Conclusion

Small and medium-sized businesses should conduct a thorough requirement analysis before selecting and implementing a feasible solution. Ensure the solution meets your current business needs and is flexible and scalable enough to accommodate new changes when the business grows.

Which ERP solution do you currently use for your small business? And how is it helping you grow your business? Please let us know in the comments section below!