Modern problems require modern solutions, as they say. But we suggest, modern businesses and software development require modern management and planning tools in order to succeed.
It is essential to find and learn new ways of making your business grow faster. For many companies, the desired results are achieved with the use of ERP.
What is ERP?
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and is a platform that allows to keep and manage business related data in a unified database.
This allows everyone on the team or within the company to have access to that information, depending on what their position or department is.
ERP has all the data analyzed, organized and the system itself is divided into modules that allow automating things like finance, accounting, manufacturing, sales.
Benefits and drawbacks
There are many reasons why companies and businesses choose to use ERP software. Enterprise Resource Planning handles all business-related issues with minimal human impact.
But let’s take a closer look at what are the benefits and drawbacks of developing resource planning software.
Benefits of custom ERP system for business
- It’s easy to use. ERP software development lets you design and create the product for your business’s needs. When using third-party planning software, you need to choose one among many offered, and then adapt your business processes to it. And sometimes, none of them will meet your expectations or solve all the problems. In this case, if you build an ERP, you decide for yourself what features it has to have and what it will look like, which leads us to the next benefit.
- It lets you create tailored modules. Developing a custom ERP system, lets you create and choose modules that will be built specifically to support your company’s departments. This way, you and everyone on the team won’t be confused with unnecessary features and data, which can only slow down the work. In addition to that, this method prevents you from having your data leaked.
- It’s easy to learn. It will be easier for yourself and the people who work for you to learn using ERP software if it’s made exclusively considering your company’s specifics and your employees’ needs.
- It’s easy to maintain. When something goes wrong in third-party software, you have to contact a support team, explaining what happened and hope that they’ll fix everything as soon as possible. And if you have a custom ERP system, developers already know its specifics and can solve the problem for you in the shortest time.
Even though the development of the ERP system has significant benefits and is a great investment, there are some drawbacks you need to be aware of.
Drawbacks of developing custom ERP solutions:
- Price. The biggest drawback of custom ERP system development is its price. It is great to have everything in the software designed specifically for your business, but you have to pay for the ease of use. Custom ERP software development will cost you a lot more than subscription to third-party solutions, which are often cheaper. However, you need to compare the pros and cons, because in most cases, the cheaper ERP solution can lead to having to turn to more expensive problems resolving in the long run. Because of that you should find out how much you need to spend on a custom system and decide whether it is worth it.
- Time. Tailored resource planning software requires a lot of time in order to be correctly developed. It needs to be well planned, designed, and tested. And after that, you’ll need to spend some time teaching your team how to use it.
- Finding ERP developers. Finding the right tech partner requires a lot of time and resources. You’ll need to check their background, previous works, tech skills, and expertise in order to make the right choice for your ERP system development.
Now after you found out about the benefits and drawbacks, compared all pros and cons, let’s proceed to learning about the ERP system development life cycle.
There are 6 main stages in the development of an erp system:
Stage 1: Developing your idea
It is impossible to create ERP software if you don’t define your idea and goals beforehand.
So at this stage, you should make clear what your company does, what its structure and business processes are, so the developers will have an understanding of how everything has to logically work.
You should define the scope of the work and have clear expectations of what you want to get in the end.
Stage 2: UI/UX Design
After having your ideas and concepts written out, it is time to get to the UI/UX design stage. This stage is essential if you want to have a user-friendly and easy to use ERP system.
The design will cover things like charts, navigation elements, interactive components, so users will understand how everything works, and where to find what they need.
At this stage, even properly designed wireframes mean a lot because they will show what your future ERP software will approximately look like and what blocks require changes.
In ERP system development every step is important because even choosing the right colour scheme, size of buttons, and the right font can make a huge difference in how the user uses and perceives the software.
And all these small elements will determine if your ERP software will quicken or slow down the working process. So remember that the right UI/UX designer will help you with analyzing and creating exactly what you need.
Stage 3: Tech stack
The first step will help you here because choosing your tech stack you have to be exactly sure of what your ERP software will be for.
You should start with deciding which platform your system will be developed for. Is it for macOS or Android? Will your ERP have a desktop version or mobile-only, or both?
It is important to understand which platforms you will need it to build for because it determines what kind of developers you need to find.
For example, if your ERP system will be for desktop only, then developers will be using C++/C# for Windows or Swift/Objective-C for macOS.
And if you’re thinking about building a cloud-based ERP, it will also have different requirements. The most comfortable option is to use web-based ERP, because it will work in the browser, regardless of the operating system, whether it is a phone or a computer.
So you build one application, and you can use it in different ways.
Having at least a little knowledge of what you need regarding the tech stack for ERP software development will help you along the way and make it easier for you to understand why you need certain things, what kind of professionals you have to hire at an ERP software development company, and with what skills they should have.
Step 4: Development
If you’ve done the previous step, then at this stage you completely trust the people who are developing your ERP system.
The development of custom software is anything but an easy goal to have, but the right people will help you with achieving it.
During this stage, the developers write the code for the system and make sure of its quality and correctness.
Step 5: Testing
Together with the development stage, goes another responsible step called quality assurance (QA). This helps ensure product quality throughout the ERP system development process and prevents from having to deal with large issues in the end.
This step will show you whether everything works correctly and whether the system is aligned with your expectations and requirements. You can examine how comfortable other people are while working with your ERP software.
Step 6: Going live
Finally, we have come to the last stage of the ERP system development life cycle. This is the most exciting one because it is when you finally finish all work and can start using your custom ERP software.
You can present the system to your employees, show how everything works and explain how this solution will help them in managing and organizing business processes.
After the software goes live, the distribution of duties on the team may change, but it only means that your employees will have more opportunities to work with new technologies and put small repeating tasks in the hand of the ERP system and focus on solving more complex problems.
This will make the work more efficient and help with getting better results.
Summary
A great number of companies are using ERP software in their day-to-day business operations.
Every day during working on different tasks, helping your clients, more and more problems may arise if your employees don’t know how to manage these operations, data or other information. It can result in reduced efficiency of work, which is definitely not benificial.
Because of that, an ERP system is a great solution to these problems. It will not only help with small tasks but will also boost the performance of your team.
We showed you the main benefits and drawbacks of building the ERP software for your business processes and the main stages of the system’s development cycle.
Developing your ideas right, knowing what and who exactly you need for this and remembering to be attentive to every detail during this process, will definitely result in an ERP system being built perfectly for your business processes.
