Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are enterprise wide systems that, because of their integration, automate all of a company's business processes. ERP packages are increasingly becoming the industry standard for replacement of legacy systems. Effectively implemented ERP systems can reduce operating inefficiencies, reduce stock-out time, optimize inventory levels, improve process cycle times, and most importantly, make the right information available to executives at the right time.

ERP implementation can also be an opportunity to re-engineer processes to improve process efficiencies. Here are a few questions that will help an executive ask oneself, to understand the benefits of an ERP implementation for his or her organization:

1. Are you able to enquire to see the status of an order or an invoice today, without emailing or asking anyone else in your organization?
2. Do you have to repeatedly remind your employees to invoice your customers for services that are rendered, or for orders shipped?
3. Without asking around among your employees, can you find out the expected deliveries of orders for the next few days?
4. Can you run a report to find out your profitability at project, customer, or order level?
5. Do you know what percent of each employee’s hour are spent on administration, overhead, or productive, or billable service activities?
6. Do you have a system that reminds you to follow up on overdue payments from your customers?
7. Do you find yourself repeatedly entering the same set of data in multiple systems and spreadsheets?
8. Have you inadvertently overpaid your vendors? Do you have a mechanism to check this, after-the-fact?
9. Have you paid your vendors inadvertently for services or shipments that were NOT delivered yet?
10. Is there an Asset Register for your organization that ties into the Ledger?
11. Do you have fixed fee projects that have billing based on performance milestone?
12. Can you run a report to see the major components of your organization’s operational costs?
13. Do you spend considerable amount of time closing books at the end each financial period and year?
14. Would you like to auto-generate Purchase Orders for back-ordered items?
15. Can you see all of your customers activities such as ordering, shipments, invoicing and payments at glance in one of your systems
16. Do you have multiple computer systems that are not integrated in a near real-time fashion?
17. Do you have a system where employees can report their time against their allocated tasks and projects?

If you are looking for an enterprise system that can achieve the above mentioned advantages for your organization, you may want to implement an ERP solution such as CorpEssence that integrates most operational and managerial functions.