4 ERP Challenges to Avoid

There are no shortages of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions on the market, and many of them claim to be well-suited for the intricacies of a fresh produce business. However, a surprising few actually deliver the sophisticated integration that growers, shippers, and distributors need in order to effectively manage all business processes and have clear financial visibility in one, single system. All too often, that reality sets in only after companies already made a large financial investment and spent hundreds of man-hours in implementation and training.

There are four key areas that should be heavily researched and understood before choosing an ERP partner.

1.    Avoid Superficial Implementations

Many well-known ERP’s commonly employed by fresh produce companies take years to implement, yet result in a disappointing level of cross-departmental integration. The software functionality, while promising in the early stages of planning, actually doesn’t perform beyond a basic level. This leaves companies with the need to continue maintaining spreadsheets or external, stand-alone software services in order to adequately handle all planning, inventory, sales, production, and accounting tasks necessary to maximize profitability.

2.    Avoid Reliance on General Ledger Level Profitability

Many ERP’s are limited to profitability reports based strictly on the total cost of inventory and overall inventory sales price. This complicates visibility into trouble spots when it comes to customer data and product data. Your ERP solution should be able to provide much more powerful analysis at the click of a button so that you can drill down into specific profitability by customer and profitability by item.

3.    Avoid Reversed Implementations

Older “green screen” systems that require minimal key entry and no sophisticated user knowledge sometimes win the implementation battle when the new ERP system fails to live up to expectations, especially after a painful and tedious training process. Empower your team to get behind a massive systems migration by ensuring that you’ve chosen an ERP that is powerful enough to handle the complexities of a fresh produce business.

4.    Avoid Systems Without Activity-Based Costing

One of the biggest limitations ERP’s can put on your profitability reporting is a lack of consignment-based pricing. A good system will provide an accurate accounting of varying consignment values based on your own product handling costs as well as the final customer sales price so that you can pay your suppliers accurately. On the flip side, this level of activity-based costing also ensures accurate sales order profitability on each customer transaction.

Prophet is a fresh produce focused ERP that delivers the technology, software design, and industry knowledge for a winning implementation. Our robust platform has been built and perfected with the help of many fresh produce clients over the years to provide granular, pallet by pallet, consignment by consignment inventory control for all aspects of data processing and profitability reporting.

Call us today at 661-200-7812 or email at info@prophetize.com. We are here to answer any questions or schedule a demo with you.