Will Your Legacy ERP System Define Your Legacy?

How Making the Switch to an Industry-Specific ERP Can Secure Your Business and Your Reputation

What do you want your legacy to be? It’s a big question. One that demands a big answer. We just want you to think about it. To consider it. To imagine what your legacy looks like.

No matter your answer, one thing is certain: position and prepare yourself now, and success is bound to follow.

A legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, by definition, is an outdated software application that relies on old technology to manage current business requirements. It’s a system you’ve always had and that you keep just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

But if you don’t transition in time, your business could lose valuable opportunities and profits. While your current ERP system may have brought your business into the modern age years ago, it’s likely your legacy software isn’t helping you reap the rewards that could be found through leading technology available today.

So how do you know if your legacy ERP software is at risk of damaging your business and your legacy?

Conduct a software audit to see if your system includes the critical features, functionality and tools that modern supply chains use to drive optimal efficiency and profits.

Consumer Goods Functionality: Deploying the Best Practices to Manage End-to-End Business Pprocesses

Your ERP system should be able to manage your entire supply chain from the point of origin to the final destination.

That means it should be fully integrated. Should reach as far back as your manufacturing plants or third-party suppliers and as far forward to your retail partner distribution centers. And in between those two endpoints, your ERP should enable you to more efficiently manage overseas shipping and container building, warehouse inventory management, logistics, sales, finance and compliance.

Simply: your ERP should have the functionality to navigate all areas of your importing and distribution business. Can your legacy system calculate your true landed costs at the product level? Our industry-specific ERP considers container fees, broker fees, custom charges and other costs, then distributes them across purchase orders to help you assess landed costs by product, cost ratio, weight ratio, cube ratio or unit ratio. Not only is this more efficient, but it can help you understand your real profitability.

Speaking of profitability, does your legacy ERP system include a profitability scorecard to help you understand your real margins after calculating all your below-the-line costs? Our distribution ERP dissects profitability by customer, supplier or product and considers cost outliers such as rush freight, damage write-offs, chargebacks, special deals, duty, royalties, commissions and other costs.

Knowing how individual suppliers, products and trading partners measure up against each other can provide valuable intelligence that can be used to identify problems and opportunities in the supply chain and business relationships. With the right software, you have profitability intelligence you need to make confident decisions, all while eliminating the need for multiple spreadsheets and manual number-crunching.

Unlike legacy systems, leading-edge ERP software enables you to work from the desktop, laptop, or on-the-go. Now more than ever, remote access to your data is critical. Accessing your business data wherever you go helps you gain deeper business insights that can help you make better business decisions.

In fact, leading-edge business intelligence (BI) tools offer you an at-a-glance snapshot of your key performance indicators. Your software should provide a rich graphical experience with a colorful, easy-to-understand executive dashboard. Look for tools that also give you associative intelligence so you can see data connections and mine relational data on sales and operational performance issues. Social collaboration tools let you share screenshots, insights and decision notes with other stakeholders for faster decision-making.

There’s no denying: your distribution business is evolving at a rapid pace. And changing market conditions risk leaving your business in a constant state of flux. Which is precisely why you need to update your old legacy system for fully-integrated, cutting-edge software.

You can create workflows and alerts on every process within your ERP to ensure process consistency across your operations. These workflows maximize efficiency while minimizing the possibility of errors. Our ERP software includes powerful alert tools to help your users stay abreast of changing conditions, including product approvals, quality assurance concerns, revised shipping dates, and all manner of activities essential to your business.

Integration: Complete Visibility and Information Sharing

Chances are good your legacy ERP software relies on many bolt-on applications to manage the activities of your business. Bolt-ons sound like a good idea—it's a quick fix. A workaround that gives you exactly what you want. That is until you consider the added time and cost your IT team faces to manage, maintain and upgrade separate applications. Then there's the visibility issue—or lack thereof.

Trail-blazing software covers your business’s end-to-end needs while providing all your users, no matter where they’re located, with complete visibility into your business data.

For consumer goods companies importing from Asia, visibility may be on the plant floor or in container loads and shipping vessels earmarked for transit. Innovative ERP software gives insight into your products, whether they're on the water, in customs, in the yard, or on their way to the warehouse. The right ERP software will also provide visibility into every other aspect of your business.

Integration provides other benefits too. Fully integrated software will give you a more accurate picture of your margin numbers. That's because financial software that is fully integrated throughout your business considers all your cost drivers from manufacturing processes through order delivery. An integrated ERP system that captures and tracks all this data can serve as a powerful tool for better understanding and correcting recurring procedural errors that are costing you money.

Tracking your profit trends over time and comparing those results on measures such as write-offs, markdowns and defectives can drive the necessary process improvement changes your consumer goods company needs to boost its bottom line.

Power: Secure System Performance

Leading-edge software should grow as you do. Should be able to scale along with your business needs.

Industry-specific software should contain tremendous out-of-the-box functionality to perform the unique requirements of your industry. But front-line software goes a step further by enabling you to extend the application when business rules or proprietary concerns dictate a more personalized software experience.

With our software, you have easy-to-use personalization tools to help you perform necessary customizations— like renaming fields, changing tab orders, and disabling and hiding fields to match your business preferences, all while eliminating programming time and costs.

Our ERP software gives you fast processing power to quickly deliver data to users when they need it. You’re no longer using the rear-view mirror when it comes to your data. It’s in real-time, ready to be used however you need it.

Aptean’s Innovative ERP

Our ERP system will get your consumer goods business wherever it wants to go. It’s a solution that’s as unique as your business is.

As relentless problem solvers, we immerse ourselves fully in your specific challenges to see your organization from all angles and deliver unique services to your consumer goods business. And as by-your-side partners, we provide the critical support you need every step of the way.

Don’t let your legacy ERP define your legacy. Let your products, your customer service, your financial success, your teammates.

Let that be your legacy. And let us help you get there.