- What types of resources does a company have?
Materials, machines, money, and employees.
As companies seek to accomplish daily tasks
and plan for the future,
knowing the resources available to them at any given time
is quite valuable.
What do companies use to track their resources?
One of the primary tools companies use
to capture and store data is called ERP.
That stands for Enterprise Resource Management Systems.
ERP systems are tied to nearly every process
in the organization.
Material purchases are tracked
so we know what was bought,
from which company, and how much was paid.
New hires are tracked.
Salary, position in the organization,
and personal information is all captured.
Machines are tracked.
Which machines do we own?
Are these machines scheduled for use?
The maintenance record for each machine
should also be tracked.
Even customer transactions can be tracked.
What was bought, by whom, when,
what did we pay?
As you can see, valuable information
related to time, money, people, machines,
is all being captured and stored by the ERP system.
This information can be available
to anyone in the organization.
Sales, operations, HR, anyone.
This can help a company make informed decisions
about future purchases,
about the types of employees we have,
and the types of employees we need to hire.
It evens tells us about
how customer's patterns are changing.
In a data driven world,
having an IT system
that is tied to our processes
and our resources is vital.
While you may be at a small company now,
it's never too early
to start utilizing an ERP system.
Is your company utilizing an ERP system?
If not, the folks in marketing, sales, HR,
finance, accounting, basically everyone,
they probably don't have the data they need
to maximize the performance the company.
Data analytics is vital
to maximizing performance in the modern world.
Be sure your company is collecting
and storing the data needed
to make meaningful data analysis possible.