The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses to embrace innovation and digital technology to sustain and then grow their businesses. Enterprises have to be operationally agile with efficient processes and effective reporting structures irrespective of their sizes. These challenges become crucial for small and medium enterprises as they lack the large resources to grab opportunities to grow in the modern digital economy.
To survive and thrive in a competitive marketplace, small businesses have to adopt new technologies that will enable them to make decisions faster and provide better services to their customers. Small and medium businesses need to set up processes that help them tackle complexities as they grow. However, the budgets available to them to upgrade from dated technologies are significantly smaller.
Challenges Faced by SMEs
- SMEs struggle to quickly transition into a digital-first world
- Planning for the future can be a challenge; forecast needs and requirements
- Embracing change and preparing for ad-hoc occurrences in the market
- Lack of resources to closely monitor customer behavior and adapt to their demands
- Improper resource management: A sudden increase in demand cannot be handled.
The challenges of medium and small businesses just begin with taking a great idea and putting it into motion. Whether it is about the lack of in-person networking due to the pandemic, unexpectedly having to leave the brick-and-mortar business model, lack of work-life balance, increased shipping costs, the downturn in the creativity of resources, the blips in production, these businesses need the right technology and infrastructure to organize themselves.
According to Statista, SMEs likely spent about $654 billion on IT services as against $490 billion spent by medium-sized businesses. While SMEs invest in IT services to meet their short-term needs, medium-sized businesses look at long-term investments.
Why Do SMEs Require SAP Solutions?
SAP’s small and midsize business management software helps businesses to automate manual tasks and allows them to conduct easy analysis of data, thereby making the enterprise more intelligent. The portfolio of SME solutions, which include SAP Business One, SAP Business by Design, SAP Predictive Analytics Integrator, SAP Analytics Cloud, have all been specifically designed bearing in mind the needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
Let us discuss this with an instance. A wholesale distributor was using QuickBooks to manage his accounting system and MS excel to generate reports, analytics, and customer data. As the business began to grow the incidence of errors caused by manual entry began increasing and this cascaded into the rest of the reports generated. SAP Business One helped this wholesaler streamline and assimilate the core business functions including sales, CRM, inventory, finance, and operations. By implementing SAP Business One, a comprehensive 360o view of the business was obtained allowing complete control over costs and improved efficiencies.
SAP solutions help eliminate complexities of day-to-day operations in growing businesses which is critical for their success, be it acquiring new customers, improving revenues, building customer and employee loyalty, managing cash flow, all while increasing efficiency and productivity in the business. With SAP solutions, every function and department of a business can work in tandem to connect processes from across the business, allocate resources appropriately, and ultimately simplify work.
Advantages of SAP Solutions
ERP Solutions: SAP offers on-premise and cloud solutions related to accounting, inventory management, procurement, or reporting. It allows automation of key processes that deal with financials; customer relationship management, supply chain, and procurement, thereby helping business owners track costs and scale efficiently with growth.
Analytics: SAP offers various analytics solutions, ranging from data management to predictive analytics, by connecting, transforming, and analyzing real-time data into actionable insights.
HR & People Management: Specialized cloud-based solutions that can be easily incorporated to develop a complete Human Capital Management (HCM) solution including recruiting and onboarding requirements, staff processes automation, payroll, performance and benefits management. This frees up bandwidth for resources to concentrate on business growth and as well as their contribution and personal growth as against chasing support processes.
Procurement and Expense Management: SAP Concur makes it easy for businesses to automate and manage travel, expense, and invoice management processes in the cloud.
Overall, SAP’s Digital Platform helps businesses increase the pace of innovation by making processes more efficient in the cloud. Businesses are assisted to decide the timeline and scale at which they should run optimally.
If you are an SME planning to deploy SAP solutions, Gemini Consulting & Services, can help you. As a global partner, we offer implementation, customization and support to all the SAP solutions. Contact us to know how you can address operational challenges and improve efficiency with SAP solutions.
SAP’s intelligent ERP solutions enable businesses to integrate end-to-end cross-functional next-generation business processes for small and medium businesses to quickly adapt. Some of these solutions include e-commerce ERP software, ERP software for small manufacturers, and retail ERP solutions.
SAP provides a single platform that allows businesses to sync in real-time with the help of rapidly evolving technology to simplify processes that become naturally complicated with growth.
Smaller businesses are looking to harness digitization to increase revenue while being able to accommodate operational requirements complex as some larger businesses. ERP systems help make sense of all the chaos by providing analytics, management, and other programs in an all-in-one SAP solution.
The migration of many business operations to the cloud also makes communication and integration more manageable. SAP solutions can transform SMB’s asset intelligence by connecting them to a network of organizations; helping solve everyday issues like risk assessments, cost fluctuations, and performance monitoring.
