For any business, an ERP system is one of the most important concepts in the company and can hugely impact the growth of the business. This is especially true for retail businesses where growth takes place from every sphere.
For instance, as a consumer, we prefer to shop online, through different e-commerce sites. For businesses, meeting these demands and catering to the different modes of sales becomes a little difficult. This is where ERP in the UK comes in and forms the perfect solution. Let us find out how.
What is an ERP system
Enterprise Resource Planning is basically software that is integrated into different sectors of the company in order to facilitate the smooth flow of data across the organisation. What this does is ensures that information is conveyed from one part to another smoothly, taking less time.
How does ERP help
For starters, it straightens out communication, especially when it takes place across different outlets, offices, and stores. This, in turn, streamlines the whole operation thereby leading to a reduction in costs. This contributes hugely to the overall increase in productivity and thus as sales increase, customer relations improve simultaneously.
One of the most efficient tools available to us to facilitate customer relations and promote sales is POS or Point Of Sale. Conventionally every retail outlet has a cash register. This is where all customer and purchase information is noted to be used later. This is replaced by POS now, all thanks to ERP, where all the data is stored on the computer. Here, you will be able to track your orders, make note of purchases, focus on the different offers and monitor the inventory. When ERP brings in the idea of mobile POS, this becomes an even more fruitful idea.
Talking about inventory management, ERP provides one of the best solutions for that. This is not restricted to the inventory only, but also extends to in-store operations. Some of the tasks made easy by this tool include stock counting, categories, and grouping products, working on different offers.
Just having the right quantity of goods at the right time is not enough for running a successful business. You will need a group of efficient staff, managing them is easy when you use ERP. While maintaining a staff roster online, you can track their work cycles, schedules and lead to a reduction in staffing costs.
However, the ultimate goal is to keep your customers happy. With the help of ERP, you will now be able to monitor customer data and find a trend in their buying habits. Thereafter, it will make it easier to make offers specific to the customer groups to keep them content.
ERP works towards increasing the overall efficiency of the company while focussing on streamlining the workflow.
