The Importance of a Business Process Review
By Glenn Hofmann, KES Managing Director
Investing in an ERP system is a significant decision for most organizations, so we recommend protecting this investment with an annual ERP health check to ensure the core system is running smoothly and a business process review to improve optimization. Read part one of our ERP optimization article series: The Importance of an ERP Health Check.
Part Two: Business Process Review
Your ERP system must run smoothly for you to operate your business successfully; however, it's equally vital to operations to ensure your ERP processes are aligned with company goals and optimized to keep up with growth. An annual business process review can help you evaluate your processes, analyze metrics, KPIs, and reporting, and plan for upcoming company changes that could impact your ERP configuration or processes in the future.
Evaluate Processes
As companies grow, typically more process flows are introduced, and both the individual process flows and interaction between flows become more complex. For example, expanding from one warehouse location to three locations could entail:
- managing transfer orders between warehouses,
- rate shopping to find the cheapest warehouse from which to ship, or
- deciding which warehouse to replenish when handling POs.
As operations become more complicated, process management/flow within your ERP may no longer be as effective as it once was. If you find employees complaining about a lack of visibility or reverting to Excel to track processes, there is a good chance you need to revisit your ERP processes.
"If you find employees complaining about a lack of visibility or reverting to Excel to track processes, there is a good chance you need to revisit your ERP processes."
Analyze Metrics, KPIs, and Reporting
Determining which metrics, KPIs, and reports are essential for your company is critical. These should be vital to business operations, easy to understand, and provide a clear picture of your organization's well-being. Whether you want to see inventory turns, subscription churn, or past-due trends, your ERP system must be configured to deliver these key metrics and reports. Many companies struggle with identifying which metrics are vital to their operations, so we recommend starting with management team discussions to ensure alignment and then working with your ERP consultant to develop an implementation plan.
Plan for Upcoming Company Changes
Finally, as your company continues to grow and evolve, it's important to keep an eye on how your systems and processes will be impacted. By planning ahead, you can avoid unnecessary stress during times of change. Surprisingly, we see many organizations that are excellent at planning from financial, staffing, and even data perspectives, but completely overlook the impact of business processes. Don't make the same mistake. By looking to the near-term future and planning accordingly, your company can experience a smooth evolution.
Schedule Your Review Today
At Kraft Enterprise Systems (KES), we are big believers in annual business process reviews for our clients’ NetSuite environments, which is why we include them in our Customer Care Plans (except the basic plan). We will conduct your annual business process review alongside your health check. This process allows us to review findings from both assessments, discuss challenges and pain points, metrics and reporting needs, and future company plans with your management team. This combination of the health check and business process review will help you establish priority areas for the upcoming year, including “low-hanging fruit” easy changes and larger, longer-term initiatives, if necessary.
Contact us if you ‘d like to schedule a business process review, so you can take full advantage of NetSuite’s capabilities and get the most from your investment. Also, check out our Customer Care Starter Plan for new KES customers that includes both a health check and business process review.
“The health check that KES completed for us as part of the KES Customer Care Starter Plan was quite the eye opener. They found multiple areas where we could make improvements, including a number of low-hanging fruit items that could be completed very quickly. The larger items they found were then discussed in detail as part of the business process review and putting these together, we were able to create an extensive plan to change the way we use NetSuite to get significantly more value from the system.”
Levi Sweeney
Fayette Industries
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