There are many distributors and manufacturers that are using AS-400, equivalent legacy ERPs, or home-grown systems. And if you are still using these systems, it’s because you understand the pain and risk of transitioning an ERP. You have seen the disasters, you have seen people get fired for the mismanagement of this incredibly complex operations evolution.
Your patience has paid off and your moment has arrived.
The recent advancements in the speed of software development have now made it more economical and reasonable to keep your legacy ERP system, connect your data to an external intelligent dashboard, and automate operations to achieve the efficiency that you need to help your team scale.
The systems that historically have been a competitive advantage for distribution are now holding back the potential that lives within them. An area that is ripe for improvement is the manual handoff between systems. Every distributor has people that spend a large part of their day looking up data in an ERP or CRM to type into another system, report or email. Critical decisions are being made on fragmented data and communication is limited to what a person sees on the screen. Our people are our superpower. Giving them a full picture of the complete data set and the bandwidth to focus on making complex, nuanced decisions is what will drive revenue and reduce cost.
Distributors already have the data they need to operate intelligently. It’s not a matter of getting a new or different system so you can have better data. Activating the data you already own in a way that is uniquely meaningful to your team is the way forward, and a new tool or system migration is not the answer.
Once your systems are connected, you can automate tasks and operations and route data to the correct people to make decisions. You can create comprehensive data-driven strategies, have configurable dashboards that give teams the information that they need, and track effectiveness in real time. Building a system like this is best done in small steps, starting with repetitive actions that are low risk. And then build one automation, one connection, one report at a time. The intelligence and efficiency will compound as you connect more systems, automate more tasks. And the guardrails can apply to all operations but you can also customize rules that are system specific or task specific to really dial in the effectiveness.
As in most areas of life, restraint and specificity will drive success. And with the most recent developments in technology and the speed of iteration, what would have taken months or years to implement historically can be configured in days and weeks. The bottleneck used to be how fast developers could code and this is no longer the case.
Market changes are in full effect and many leaders are worried about getting left behind. Don’t jump into a new system or tool thinking that it will insulate you from the changes that are occurring. The pace of change is the exact argument against investing hundreds of thousands of dollars and a year of pain to transition to a new system. Use what you have. Connect your systems. Extract your data. Write your rules of operation. Automate what makes sense. Add intelligence only where needed. And you can customize exactly what that looks like for your company without the custom software pricetag or time investment of the past.
