by Ian Mowbray Sage Product Specialist

Why your ERP business case matters - and what we can do to help

Producing an effective business case for an ERP system really does matter. That business case evaluates the benefits, costs and risks of implementing an ERP solution for your business - and ultimately justifies the potential investment by detailing the potential benefits of your proposed ERP system.

In short, an effective business case will do most of the legwork when it comes to getting a new ERP system across the line with key stakeholders in your business.

But knowing where to start in compiling that business case isn’t always so simple. To bring clarity to that process, we’ve developed the Datel ERP Diagnosis App - a tool that produces a custom business case for your organisation and its ERP requirements.

Available on the iOS App Store or online at www.erp-diagnosis.com, the ERP Diagnosis App provides a framework with which to assess your processes across eight key areas of your business:

• Boardroom
• Customer service
• Sales & Marketing
• Information technology
• Purchasing
• Manufacturing
• Warehousing & Distribution

Once you've evaluated the functions relevant to your business, the ERP Diagnosis App then produces a custom business case as a tailored PDF document, which details issues, suggested remedies and a guide to calculating your ROI.

How you can use the Datel ERP Diagnosis App

To point you in the right direction, we’ve compiled a list of things you could do with the ERP Diagnosis App - and your custom business case PDF:

Talk to us. We created the App - that means we have a team of people dedicated to helping you produce the best custom business case possible. Our ERP experts can help you put together your custom business case over the phone.

Present the document to key stakeholders within your business. The PDF report produced by the ERP Diagnosis App can act as an initial case on which to assess and justify your potential ERP implementation. The app is specifically designed to be shared by email - share it with key stakeholders to demonstrate the benefits of an ERP system.

Crowdsource expertise from across your business. Having a single person assess every department in detail isn’t necessarily realistic. To help, the app saves assessments in progress. By sharing a single log-in within your business, department heads can jump in to rate their respective function - allowing you to later produce a single reporting that covers every aspect of your business processes.

Prioritise your ERP requirements - and plan accordingly. ERP implementation doesn’t have to be all or nothing solution - the benefits of Sage can be introduced to your business in small, incremental steps to meet your budget and resources. If in your PDF you find that one department has a particularly large number of issues, it might be worth investigating the benefits of phasing the implementation across departments..

Start a conversation. This conversation might include talking with your team internally to speaking to one our ERP experts. The information produced within Datel’s ERP diagnosis app will help you identify discussion points when identifying a potential solution. The report will also give you a strong idea of what that solution could achieve. In other words: you don’t know what a solution can achieve if you don’t know what questions to ask.

Return to the App during different parts of your journey. The ERP selection process can prove to be an extended journey for some businesses - that’s why the ERP Diagnosis app archives every report you produce, no matter how old. As you assess your requirements, you may decide to rate different functions within your business differently. You might discover a particular department has more pain points at second glance, for example.

What you can do next

Your business case matters. It dictates the direction you want to take with your ERP system - which informs your selection process, ranging from the systems and add-ons you assess to technology partners and IT requirements. Establishing your requirements as much as possible before you begin that process will allow you to focus on assessing solutions that can positively impact your business without breaking the bank.

The custom business case produced by Datel’s ERP Diagnosis App can become the bedrock for identifying your business needs when it comes to selecting an ERP system.

You have your business case - now what? Talk to us. Using that custom business case, we can help guide you on the best ERP solution for your business - and make sure we maximise the productivity potential of Sage for your business and your industry.