In today’s competitive environment, your company needs internal resources focused on your core business and competencies. Whether you choose to deploy in the cloud or on premise, the key is positioning your business to scale for growth. Growth happens really well by leveraging cloud-based ERP – and letting go of QuickBooks.
If today’s small and mid-sized manufacturer is to sustain growth and thrive in today’s global marketplace, they must evolve from some of the practices they used in their early stages. Case in
point – QuickBooks. A huge number of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) adopted the use of QuickBooks to track the finances of their young businesses. However, many manufacturing businesses soon realize that to manage the business, the scope of business systems needs to go beyond finance. It needs to include the ability to plan, procure, produce, distribute, and sell, as well as to account. In addition, today’s business climate demands more complex transactions, requires more critical planning and tracking of revenues, greater visibility of customers, and involves more stringent accounting and regulatory standards.
The dynamics of today’s markets have changed the competitive landscape for manufacturing businesses large and small alike.
Competing in global and emerging markets, once the domain of large global multinationals, is now within the scope of virtually every commercial enterprise. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a manufacturer that doesn’t somehow interact with today’s global manufacturing supply chain. Technology has broken traditional barriers and flattened the world. This flat, new world has sharp edges. Yes, opportunity is greater for all; but so, too, is competition. To compete successfully, companies must have the technical confidence to communicate, collaborate on, and record transactional activities on a scale that promotes flexible, collaborative growth and peak operational performance. What’s more, growing manufacturing companies must accommodate an increasingly dispersed workforce, as well as complex, multi-tiered, nuanced supply networks that span continents and are subject to different regulations, taxes, currencies, and so on. While small and mid-sized businesses are empowered by these new market developments, they face greater challenges than their larger competitors because of capital and personnel constraints.
Historically, the transition from QuickBooks to a more robust solution was an agonizing decision growing SMB, including rising manufacturing companies.
The traditional path involved implementing costly, complex, user-challenging, on-premises software. Often these solutions required long and costly deployment cycles, new hardware purchases, and internal IT resources that simply weren’t readily available. Today, that transition has been eased. The advent of cloud-based, on-demand solutions – that’s right, we’re talking Software as a Service (SaaS) – took things in a new direction. With SaaS, growing manufacturers can easily navigate beyond the simple financial functionality of QuickBooks to more effective and comprehensive solutions for the total enterprise. This is a good thing, as the limitations of QuickBooks are pretty damaging when it comes to taking a manufacturing business to the next level.
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What limitations?
Scalability: QuickBooks lack of scalability can be an impediment to growth. Companies that implemented the solution as a start-up find that as they have success, the use of QuickBooks can become a limitation. Even enterprise editions of QuickBooks constrain the number of user licenses to 30, making access for all employees that need it difficult in growing businesses. Further, the pressures put on IT when forced to work with (or work around) inefficient software may close or limit opportunities for new business. Businesses that thrive and survive stay ahead of their employees need for technology, rather than struggle in trying to catch up to it. Efficient solutions scale easily as growth occurs.
Point solution orientation: QuickBooks accounting-only orientation provides little insight into business opportunities, decision support for client management, or full understanding of the quote-to-cash cycle. Other applications are needed to provide these needs. This proves problematic in a number of ways. Multiple applications are used in order processing, and multiple entry of information is time and cost consuming. Further, the reconciliation of client and billing information can be a serious hassle. Among the unwanted—billing, service, and forecasting problems; impeded cash flow; and unhappy workers and clients.
Narrow visibility: Since the data in QuickBooks is limited to financials, the information needed to make better-informed decisions across the business typically resides in other applications. The holistic visibility essential in today’s marketplace simply isn’t available through QuickBooks; there is no real-time view of operations. Often this results in excessive use of spreadsheets, a time-consuming and error-prone practice that fails to deliver a current picture of developments. By the time a spreadsheet is in hand, in today’s accelerating and often-volatile environment, the information is dated. This is not a prescription for good decision support. To have a clear understanding of how the business is performing, much more is needed than what QuickBooks provides.
Limited functionality, difficult integration: With QuickBooks, companies adapt their businesses to the solution, rather than having the application respond to the growing and changing needs of the business. Leading companies are leveraging multiple applications, such as Financial Management, Product Management, Operations Management, Supply Chain Management and eCommerce, to automate and precisely track customer interactions in today’s dispersed markets. Rather than having to chase and input data from multiple sources, these applications are integrated to provide users within the business a global view of operations and customer relationships. QuickBooks’ limited integration capability does not easily adapt to this holistic approach. Worse still, due to the limited and horizontal nature of Quickbooks functionality, best practices for critical manufacturing workflows aren’t provided by default, creating a burden on organizations to define manual processes that have become “norms” in the manufacturing space.
Access concerns: Not only has the marketplace changed dramatically, so too has the way workers engage in their jobs. Today, many companies must provide staff remote access to and input into financial information, which is not something QuickBooks lends itself to at this time. QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions was designed to be deployed on-premise, and lacks built-in remote access capabilities and key security features to protect sensitive financial data. Further, as companies grow, so too does the need to track financial metrics – revenues, expenses, profitability – across multiple locations. QuickBooks lacks the ability to easily gather and consolidate this information.
In today’s busy manufacturing environment, where real-time information is increasingly essential to respond to ongoing projects, trends and developments, the difficulties QuickBooks presents in delivering immediate data across the enterprise is massive shortcoming.
Growing manufacturing operations simply cannot afford to operate with dated information, constantly looking for spreadsheets and waiting for reports to print. Information must be available where it is needed, and when it is needed. QuickBooks struggles with this capability. Paper trails, manual operations, forecasts based on yesterday’s numbers will not cut it for today’s growing manufacturing businesses. For growing manufacturing firms, being tethered to an outdated solution will promote a lack of deep business transparency.
Fortunately for growing manufacturing operations today, cloud-based ERP solutions have rapidly emerged as enablers of growth in the new marketplace. These solutions eliminate the principle barriers that keep companies from implementing more powerful ERP solutions while overcoming the limitations of point solutions such as QuickBooks. Companies looking to replace QuickBooks have multiple options, but increasingly emerging as the best are cloud-based alternatives. Cloud-based ERP deployments typically afford benefits such as easy implementations, zero maintenance, workforce mobility, automated upgrades and, with data security in mind, security tools updated to maintain typically better security than local data centers.
Cloud-deployed Epicor ERP is specifically designed for manufacturers and distributors looking to upgrade operations by moving from point solutions like QuickBooks to a more sophisticated and powerful solution tailored to meet business requirements in today’s rapidly changing global marketplace. Ready to learn more? Contact CompuData today!