ERP for SMBs: Luxury or Critical Strategy?
Question of the day: How do you grow your business without getting bogged down in aspects of the business, such as accounting and IT, that have little to do with what has made you successful in the first place?
The answer: Implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution as soon as you can. That’s what the Aberdeen Group found in their recent research. See what they discovered—and concluded—in this paper: Changing Perceptions on ERP Strategy.
Syndiant is a great example. They’re a semiconductor company in Dallas, Texas, and they design chips that enable even very small consumer electronic products, such as cell phones, to project big-screen images.
It took five years to get their product ready for market, but by 2009, they were ready. They knew they were going to be “fabless,” meaning they would contract a semiconductor foundry rather than produce the chips themselves. But how to avoid the massive IT infrastructure and accounting systems investment that most organizations inevitably acquire with growth?
See how Syndiant grew its business fast, with minimal capital investment.
Their answer was ERP. They implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP. In two years, Syndiant was able to go from selling two units a week to 5,000 a week. Today, they’re winning awards, winning business contracts, and building a reputation for outstanding innovation and leadership. And they still just have around 50 people in their organization.
An ERP solution can help you stay focused as you grow. In Syndiant’s case, the focus is on research and development—nurturing the minds and ideas that gave the company a reason to exist in the first place. Read the Aberdeen paper, and see what I mean.