In recent years, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software has become crucial for mid-to-enterprise-sized organizations. As your business grows, it's essential to have a centralized source for data collected across departments and teams. In addition to sharing data, providing workflows for specific employees, robust reporting options, and cloud deployment all help create more efficient and effective critical decision-making for your business leaders.

However, implementing a large, new system can be challenging and sometimes frustrating when your employees don't understand how this change helps them achieve business goals. Adopting new software is one of the most significant roadblocks to a successful deployment. Training takes time and effort, and if it's not implemented correctly, adoption is low, and frustration is high. Let's look at the most common adoption issues and how Acumatica addresses them and ensures a smoother transition for your employees, teams, and departments.

Training & Implementation

When implementing a new ERP system, your staff needs to be trained quickly to guarantee a smooth transition. In a perfect world, companies would devote 100% of staff time to training and ensuring each employee understands the ins and outs of their specific workflow and how it affects larger workflows like reporting, product management, and customer management. However, customers don't want to wait for everyone to get up to speed on a new system. They want their checkout process to remain seamless, products or services delivered on time, and the personalization they've come to expect from your company.

Learning a new system while maintaining high customer service levels can overwhelm employees and decrease productivity and efficiency. Therefore, adoption is essential to consider when implementing a new ERP system. This means providing the best support and training to get employees and teams up and running quickly.

Acumatica has built an ecosystem of support beyond producing help articles and hard-copy training materials for employees to go through on their own. Instead, Acumatica provides a support community that offers solutions to common issues, gives insights into the functionalities, and helps employees and teams to get answers to their struggles quickly. The Acumatica Community comprises partners, value-added resellers, and end-users who frequently answer questions, provide insights, and offer practical solutions to help companies adapt to Acumatica ERP and provide the best possible service to their customers. For example, suppose the Acumatica Community cannot answer a specific question. In that case, users can take advantage of Acumatica's support program, including online case management, chat help, email help, and emergency after-hours support.

Customer Service Suffers

During the initial implementation, it's inevitable that elements of your organization will have setbacks. Of course, you don't know what you don't know, and that's okay. However, one of the most significant setbacks is customer service. Moving from the current workflow structure to a new one takes time to execute and for employees to use. Therefore, it's crucial to have plans to maintain customer service levels and not lose customers or opportunities for new ones.

Even with a backup plan to mitigate issues with customer service, you need to communicate with your customers that a significant change has happened internally and to bear with you while the changeover is happening. One of the main ways you can do this is by heading to social media. Post the great news about adopting a system to enhance the customers' experience, respond to customer frustrations, and direct them to places to get help. These can be company forums, knowledge bases, and blogs.

ERP Software Costs

Let's face it, implementing new software is costly. You're making a significant investment in your business, which needs to perform well to get your money's worth. When introducing a new solution and convincing the decision-makers, it's essential to show that the benefits outweigh the initial costs. There are a few points to consider when discussing and agreeing to spend money on the new system.

1. Develop a budget– This may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies look to new software and get caught up in how great it is without calculating the cost. Not only do you need to consider the cost of the software itself but calculate equipment costs (if the hardware is needed), staff training costs, and the cost of time spent developing, training, and fixing bugs.
2. Find the right consultant– Research software and find a consultant that can provide direction on meeting your business needs, develop a change management plan, and work with you throughout the project to ensure that it meets your needs.
3. Create an implementation team– Your implementation team isn't just developers and engineers. It's a group of individuals from every department that can help manage the technical needs and non-technical users like sales teams, customer service teams, etc.

The cost of new software isn't just a matter of purchasing the product. It involves the cost of time, effort, and fixing issues you didn't plan for. In addition, training and adoption take time. Budgeting for these helps save money in the long run because the downtime experienced is much shorter with the right people than without them.

Making Room For Growth

Implementing an ERP system aims to improve company processes, increase efficiency and production, and increase profits. The promise of current and future growth is usually at the top of the agenda. However, implementing a powerful enterprise ERP system can create friction between those who look to the future and those who feel the future is coming too soon. The right ERP system should meet somewhere in the middle. It needs to adapt to the current business needs but be flexible enough to handle the business changes as the company grows.

As you grow, the targets and expectations move, but if you have the wrong ERP system, you may be unable to meet these challenges with the current system. Many developing companies find that they have requirements that aren't compatible with the current solution. To address this issue, you must ask questions before and during the implementation process to guarantee that the software can grow with them and provide customizations to offer the tools necessary to continue the growth. The right consultant can point you toward the ERP system that best meets your needs.

Acumatica Cloud ERP Alleviates These Struggles

Now that we've covered some everyday struggles when implementing a new ERP system, we can talk about Acumatica Cloud ERP. Acumatica is highly customizable and flexible enough to meet any business's needs, an all-in-one cloud solution. It has out-of-the-box functions to get you up and running quickly, and the app store offers additional features and functions to grow as you grow.

No Programming Knowledge Needed

Acumatica is built on an xRP development platform that requires little to no code experience to create generic inquiries, user-defined fields, and the ability to make changes to forms. Non-technical staff can build generic queries to run reports and view workflows to focus on increasing business success. Acumatica has a mobile app with ease of creation that can mirror these dashboards. In addition, forms and screens can be customized and changed to meet specific individual, team, and department needs.

Flexible Hosting

Acumatica has deployed on-premises, cloud-hosted, and Software As A Service (SaaS) options. Depending on the data security and type of business being managed, Acumatica has a deployment to fit your needs. In addition, these deployments are adaptable, allowing you to move between them as your needs evolve without sacrificing performance or security.

No matter how you deploy Acumatica, you can choose if and when to install upgrades. In addition, you're not tied to a specific schedule, so upgrades can be done when they won't affect your business processes or operations. This flexibility allows you to manage your ERP on your terms instead of being tied to an upgrade that may cause issues or slow down processes.

Community Support

Acumatica has created an ecosystem of collaboration and connection. It has a robust community of users, developers, and programmers that postfixes, workarounds, and other general knowledge of Acumatica customizations. The main contributors to this community are not only Acumatica employees but also their partners.

You'll find a customer portal that offers product downloads, a searchable knowledge base, and product documentation within the community. All are designed to help you and your staff navigate challenges adapting to the new Acumatica system. And if you can't find your answer in the community, Acumatica provides a support program that includes online case management, chat help, and after-hours emergency assistance.

Let Kensium Help

Acumatica provides all the functionality you need in an ERP system with the flexibility to help you grow. Acumatica delivers a solution for almost any business with industry-specific modules to fast-track out-of-the-box implementations, and Kensium can help pave the way. We have the most significant number of certified developers in the industry and pride ourselves on having industry-specific knowledge to help you build an ERP system that will solve immediate needs and future-proof your business. Kensium is here to help make the process easy with implementation, customization, training, and support. Contact us today to learn how Acumatica ERP will work for you.