Will Your Legacy ERP System Define Your Legacy?

While your current system may have brought your business into the modern age years ago, more likely than not, your legacy software isn’t helping you reap the rewards that can be found through leading technology available today.

So how do you know if your legacy software is at risk of damaging your business and your legacy?

Conduct a software audit to see if your system includes the critical features, functionality and tools that modern supply chains use to drive optimal efficiency and profits.

Consumer Goods Functionality: deploying best practices to manage end-to-end business processes
Your ERP system should be able to manage your entire supply chain from point of origin to final destination.

That means reaching as far back as your own manufacturing plants or third-party suppliers, and reaching forward to your retail partner DCs or other shipping locations.

In between, your ERP application should be able to do some heavy lifting in the areas of overseas shipping and container building, warehouse and inventory management, logistics, sales, finance, compliance and more.

But what really counts are the features and tools that help you manage processes within those areas of your business.

Can your legacy system calculate your true landed costs at the product level?

Leading-edge ERP applications take into account container fees, broker fees, customs charges and other costs, then distribute them across POs to help you assess landed costs by: product, cost ratio, weight ratio, cube ratio or unit ratio.

And getting to the detail level of your true costs can help you understand your real profitability later.

Speaking of profitability, does your legacy system include a profitability scorecard to help you understand your real margins after calculating all your below-the-line costs?

Leading-edge software can help you understand profitability by customer, supplier or product, by taking into consideration cost outliers such as rush freight, damage write-offs, chargebacks, special deals, duty, royalties, commissions and other costs.

Knowing how individual suppliers, products and trading partners measure up against each other can provide valuable intelligence that can be used to identify problems and opportunities in the supply chain, and in business relationships.

Leading-edge software will give you the profitability intelligence you need in a few simple clicks, and eliminate the need for multiple spreadsheets and manual number crunching.