Can you imagine that clicking just one button runs the whole process of preparing invoices, daily and monthly reports, all your customers receive the proper notifications and so on? In fact, ERP system is a huge kit of software tools that really does these activities. But it needs only a few seconds for such action when the employee may need a week or even more.
However, there may be not included some of the functions that you expected to. What’s next? Should you skip with this ERP system and move forward with another one, or make some changes to your dashboard and ask to add them? Today we’ll take a closer look at what’s the difference between the ERP configuration and ERP customization. And what’s worthy?
Customization and Configuration of ERP. What’s the difference?
Let’s imagine that you’ve just bought a relatively expensive car. Getting into your car, the first thing you see is lots of switchers and dials that turn particular devices on. Some of the dials don’t work properly and pressing the button doesn’t open the window as fast as you want. In this case, people usually bring their car to service and have all, let’s say, bugs, fixed. The same applies to the enterprise systems: if something works wrong – just contact your personal assistant or technical support.
So what particularly ERP customization is? The customization implies the specific modification of existing appearance and functions of installed ERP software according to the business requirements and strategy the company stick to.
Pros
- The local team of engineers is not involved into the coding process
- The software is tailored specifically for the particular business, analyzing all its aspects
- There is no need to waste the valuable for business time on testing whether the software is nicely meets the requirements, once it’s finished – it’s ready to go
- The cost of default version is lower
- The quantity of errors are minimal due to less human power is involved into this process
Cons
- Some features may stop working properly after system updating, but it happens quite rarely
- Creating new features may take some time
Choose customization if:
- Your business involves more than 250 employees
- Your business spreads over a few countries, cities, warehouses etc and you want them to interact with each other
- It has a consistent process workflow that should be constantly tracked and it influences on the final product quality
- You want to make your business more efficient and to optimize all the processes within each department
Before you start dealing with the ERP software you will require some additional adjustments that make your system performance much faster and efficient. Unfortunately, for this purpose you should have a licensed specialist who can do that and show you and your workers how to work with it. Thus, ERP configuration has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Pros
- Once the configuration of your account is done, it will always work properly
- There is no additional coding that takes time
- The proper adjustments may increase your business efficiency and income
- Less manpower is required
Cons
- The configuration requires a special license to do any adjustments
- It’s not process focused
Choose configuration if:
- Your business is of small or medium size
- The business requires minimal process automation
- The business requires basic set of tools to help increase the final product quality
Ok, now, so what should I move forward with and why this is the best for my business?
In fact, the larger business is, the more features it may require. For example, your business is a logistics company that may consist of a couple storage buildings. Each building is a separate structure with numerous departments and processes that should be tracked, too. Moreover, each storage building depends on the other one. In this case, you should merge all the processes from all the storages into one system, however they still should remain independent as well. Do you think it’s impossible?
Not at all! These things can be put into practice and they will work properly. So, when it’s necessary all you need to do is to press the only button that will form the necessary report. In addition, the workers will be focused on effective working rather than brainstorming and bringing together the digits wasting much valuable time.
On the other hand, there can be a juridical agency. It does have lots of customers whose cases are in progress. Oftentimes, the cases may be prolonged up to years and it’s quite difficult to track their status and check whether there is a solution. The most terrible thing when the specialist leaves the agency and a deputy has no idea what’s happening – there is a huge risk to lose customers. Luckily, there is an ERP system that stores each step and prompts to a specialist what to do next. The only thing is you need to do is to adjust some settings in the ERP system.
Both situations are pretty common in daily life and for those purposes Sage, MS Dynamics and Acumatica are recommended options. However, it may be quite hard to adjust advanced or local settings. In addition, for this purpose there should be a certified specialist who has already practice with adjusting the settings.
What’s the most time-consuming part: implementing or adjusting?
The most obvious answer is adjusting. However, believe it or not, it happens that adjusting may take quite a long time. As a result, the business efficiency along with the income will gradually decrease while one of the “switchers” or “dials” doesn’t work properly.
For sure, you don’t want to trap in this situation! Thus, you should analyze what indices should be corrected and what formula should they based on. If you don’t know how to do that – don’t worry! There is an ERP development services company FiduciaSoft that can do that instead of you.
What’s the hardest task to implement?
Whether you need customization or configuration, there might be some challenges. Thus there is not confident answer which one is easier. However, in order to give you a hint, here are some parts that involve customization, configuration or both simultaneously.
Configuration:
- Setting up location, time-zone, currency, language, dashboard layout
- Changing names of files, fields, objects, default security email, the customer’s profile templates
- Issuing the access to particular employees and specifying their roles
- Report modifications
Customization:
- Extending the abilities of existing features
- Implementing new features
- Connecting the existing ERP system with third-party system
Customization and configuration:
- Creating Business Process Automation (BPM)
- Adding new forms, templates, reports
- Implementing new actions to reports, templates, profiles, importing, storing, archiving data etc
What FiduciaSoft has already improved in customers’ ERP systems? What benefit the customers have received?
- Developing the mobile extension of cloud-based ERP system Acumatica that enables to scan the bar-code of items with mobile device and then upload their data to the ERP system. This application is able to work offline, thus the workers stay connected to the ERP system at any time and the warehouse workflow status is constantly updated. Moreover, it’s available for both iOS and Android.
The Customer’s sales growth was significantly increased just within a month. - Pairing the Acumatica ERP system with third-party Magento software allowed the customer to extend the abilities of his business.
- Retrofitting the existing ISV solution for heavy machinery and equipment dealers from Dynamics AX 2012 to MS Dynamics 365. The existing solution was quite irrational and the code made it to work not as fast as it was expected. The FiduciaSoft has made proper changes to the legacy code base that significantly improved the code quality and its performance respecting the modern requirements.
As a result, the customer’s engineering team is comfortable to work with the new code and made the customer more attractive to their customers.
If you want to set the wheels to your business or make it more effective, then, probably, something should be reviewed in your processes or software you are working with. If it’s something wrong with your software, FiduciaSoft can make it work as you want!