How mobile ERP impacts the way we do business

January 31, 2018

Can we imagine a world without mobile? Absolutely, No! This small handy device has impacted our lives so much that we cannot live without it even for a couple of hours. Be it checking emails, paying bills online or even buying groceries, mobile has impacted every realm of human existence.

However, from a business angle, mobility is slowly seeping across every domain, be it HR, finance, marketing and more. In fact, modern mobility has become indispensable in our day to day operations and hence considered a vital asset for your business transformation. With right utilization, it can eliminate unnecessary barriers and empowers people to perform their jobs effectively and deliver superior customer experience.

With companies embarking on rapid digital transformation, the traditional ERP systems are undergoing sea change in tune with the growing customers’ expectations. One of the transformation that is quite perceivable in recent times is the influx of mobility in the traditional applications. In other words, offering services, anywhere, anytime, be it a social application or a business driving application like ERP has become a major necessity in the modern world. With mobile ERP, you can access services offered by any ERP software through a mobile device on any compatible platform – be it Android, iOS or Windows.

There are several factors, which has made mobility in ERP indispensable – offering superior customer service, improving RoI and last, but not the least is accentuating the revolution of mobile workforce.

The trend of mobile workforce has caught up much earlier in US and Europe almost 3-4 years back. However, Indian organizations are slowly embracing this concept. The concept of traditional office, where employees sitting at their respective desks and slogging for 8 to 9 hours a day is slowly fading away, which is being slowly replaced by a mobile workforce. This entails the companies to strategize and device a suitable roadmap to rapidly mature and embrace the mobile revolution.

Against this backdrop, new mobile strategies are beginning to take shape in the ERP space for small and medium enterprises. More and more organizations are rapidly jumping the bandwagon of mobile adoption, encouraging their workforce to adopt mobile ERP solutions on the go.

Let’s examine some of the typical benefits from an employee and business (functional) perspective:

Enhanced quality of service:

With mobile ERP solutions, employees can enhance quality of service offered to customers by providing them access to appropriate information.

Increased productivity:

With sizeable time spent outside, many employees can utilize this time in a productive manner by leveraging a mobile ERP solution, helping them access a variety of tools & information on the go. This way, an employee can save his/her precious time, accomplish tasks much quicker and overall can be a big asset to the organization.

Strong business relationships:

With access to key data on their fingertips, employees can foster strong business relationships and ensure quick response times.

Greater accuracy in data capture:

A mobile ERP software can help employees to enter all relevant data perfectly that they collect in the field without the necessity of entering this data at the backend. This way it eliminates errors, thereby enhancing productivity.

It is now estimated that one third of employees will no longer access corporate applications from their office desktops and would instead be working from home, fields, hotels, airports, etc. This will lead to the shrinking of workspaces be fifth by the end of 2020. According to a recent report, spurred by the employee demand, 91 percent of the organizations worldwide shall adopt mobile work styles that lets their staff work from anywhere. This trend prompted most of the ERP vendors to offer mobile enterprise suits.

Now, let’s examine few scenarios, where mobile ERP may impact a business.

Human Resources (HR): A mobile HR solution has several direct benefits to the employees. Employees can leverage the application to remotely submit expense claims, time sheets, manage their holidays, taxes, loans and more, anywhere, anytime. This leads to a more happier and engaged staff, who can be more productive.

Supply Chain Management (SCM): This is one of the critical areas of business, where ERP has a wide range of applications. Applying mobility to SCM can work wonders for production & operations managers, wherein they can track the flow of raw materials in transit or breakdown of machinery, apart from receiving alerts or notifications to take any corrective actions. On the other hand, managers can authorize changes to work orders or deliveries, while finance managers can receive alerts pertaining to the implications of supply or manufacturing issues, leading to better decision making.

Sales & Marketing (S&M): Using a mobile ERP solution, sales personnel can instantly track their entire customers’ information on the go, while complete integration of ERP may even help the sales managers to gauge the profitability of a deal, generate reports, analyze the sales trends, track the sales performance and much more.

Finance: ERP in finance offers tremendous benefits. It provides support to decision making, since it guarantees reliability and complete security to the accounting data. Apart from that it also makes the work of external and internal audits much easier, offers flexibility to do research on historical information and much more.

Considering the above scenarios and more, mobile ERP would not only open a real time access of an organization’s operations to its staff on the move, but over time organizations would also experience lower transaction costs, improved cash flows, improved relations with customers & more importantly satisfied & happy employees.

To know more about mobile ERP and how we can help you get started in this digital transformation journey, please get in touch with us at marcom@localhost or call us at +91 40 – 69000226 .