Overcoming the Top Three Types of ERP Waste

Eliminating waste in your operation wherever you can is a must. However, there are many moving parts in any business, so it can be difficult to know where to begin. To start, we recommend taking a look at the core foundation upon which your business is built: your ERP.

Avoiding ERP Waste

Your ERP touches every part of the customer-to-cash cycle. From order allocation and fulfillment to customer management to shipping, your ERP has a hand in all of these steps, and is a determining factor in your order management efficiency. So we ask you this: Are you getting the most out of your ERP?

To help answer this question, we’ve outlined the top three pain points for businesses across industries that can be traced back to your ERP. We’ve also included the solution for each, and how you can unlock your team’s potential.

Waste #1: Defective Products

Whether you’ve shipped the wrong product to your customer or an item is broken during shipping, the result is the same: a costly return and an unsatisfied customer. Paying for return shipping and a new product is a loss of profit you can’t afford. Moreover, receiving a defective product leaves a poor impression on customers, who may decide to take their business elsewhere.

The Solution: Workflows

Unfortunately, you can’t always avoid this type of ERP waste, but you can take the necessary steps to prevent it as much as possible. The first of which is to increase your pipeline visibility.

Maintaining a high-level view of your inventory at each stage of the allocation, fulfillment, and shipping process is key to ensuring customers are getting the right products. Create workflows to track and control every order in your system, and you’ll significantly cut down on errors while boosting your order processing speed.

Waste #2: Product delays

Backlogged orders and inventory stuck in the picking and packing stages aren’t doing anyone any good. Worse still, bottlenecks can delay shipping for days, disappointing your customers who expected to receive their orders on time. Speeding up the customer-to-cash cycle is critical to running an efficient operation, exceeding customer expectations, and avoiding ERP waste.

The Solution: Automation

Relying on manual processes is a surefire way to let inefficiencies creep up on your team. Instead, embrace automation to accelerate your customer-to-cash cycle immensely. From order entry to fulfillment to EDI to invoicing, there are myriad opportunities to automate tedious processes and cut down on waiting waste in your operation. Not to mention the improved accuracy you’ll see, and minimized opportunities for human error.

Waste #3: Wasted motion

Another means of speeding up the customer-to-cash cycle is to cut out or modify unnecessary processing steps that aren’t getting your orders closer to their destination. A disorganized warehouse, manual picking and packing processes, and poorly planned driving routes can all contribute to motion waste.

The Solution: Inventory Management

Running a successful operation starts in your warehouse, which means not just tracking your inventory, but managing it. To do the latter effectively, you need a clear view of every piece of your inventory, what stage of the order management process it’s in, and a well-organized warehouse. Inventory visibility is key, as are effective strategies for picking, packing, and shipping, that don’t involve blindly wandering aisles and manually checking item data for every order.

From a lack of visibility of your inventory, to unnecessary delays in your order management processes, to inefficiencies in your warehouse, pain points are costing you money. You can’t expect to eliminate all forms of waste, but optimizing your ERP to work for you in the best way possible is an excellent place to start, because you’ll see the benefits trickle down to every aspect of your operation.

Cavallo is the all-in-one solution to your operational inefficiencies. Increase pipeline visibility, minimize human error and bottlenecks in your order management process, and watch customer satisfaction rise exponentially when you implement our solutions for Microsoft Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365 Business Central. Transform your ERP from “It gets the job done” to “We couldn’t live without it” and unleash your company’s potential. Get in touch with us to learn more.