Tag: ERP solution
What makes Odoo the best ERP solution for your business?
As business leaders, you may find that you’re spending too much time running your company rather than growing it. You may easily get bogged down due to exhaustive paperwork, long spreadsheets, or have to assemble discrete software to actually work together. This is where the open-source Odoo ERP comes to your rescue. With its vast suite comprising over 40 business productivity applications, Odoo provides a smoother and simpler way to run your business. The range of business apps offered by Odoo is highly comprehensive, fully-integrated, easy to use, and supports numerous different industries. Fingent, utilizing its partnership with Odoo ensures their clients are leveraging one or more apps from Odoo to boost their business efficiencies.
With Odoo, you can easily create your professional website, manage your relationship with customers, design and launch your own marketing strategies, and manage online payments through e-commerce. You also have Odoo apps to manage your warehouse, accounts, and invoicing behind the scenes.
Whatever be your business needs, Odoo provides apps that work together seamlessly. Though a relatively young contender, Odoo comes packed with powerful ERP features and a user-friendly interface like any other market leaders such as SAP, Oracle, MS Dynamics, and so on.
Read more: Odoo CRM Vs SAP CRM: How to Choose Between Them
Here are 5 distinguishing features of Odoo that make it a reliable ERP for any business.
1. Easy to set up and use
Odoo has a very clean, consistent, easy-to-use interface. It is also easy to set up and configure. You can effortlessly carry out an entire transaction all the way from a quotation to the sales order, invoice, and payment due to the consistency between the various applications within Odoo. It helps you to get started within no time.
2. Powerful communication tools
Odoo has powerful inbuilt communication tools. They use messaging systems to keep track of internal communications on either your sales orders, invoices, or purchasing. So if you have a question on your sales order, you can write a message to all the followers of the sales order at the bottom of the documents. Thus, you can attach notes and messages and communicate directly from within the document giving you a great audit trail. All the team members stay on the same page both literally and figuratively!
Read more: Meeting Your HR Requirements with Odoo
3. Integrated front-end and back-end tools
You can have a full-blown website builder with a single click. So, once you install the web platform, you can use it integrated with all the other Odoo applications. Odoo provides powerful e-commerce tools that integrate with your website and are completely tied-in to the web framework. Moreover, the shopping cart looks clean, is built-in to the e-commerce app, and is ready-to-go. Another interesting feature of Odoo is that even if a customer didn’t make it to checkout and has just added items to his cart, you can view it as a draft in Quotations instead of a full Sales Order.
4. Great mobile support
Though Odoo is completely web-based, it looks pretty good on mobile phones and tablets. You even get a mobile preview to check how your website is going to look like. So, unlike a lot of legacy accounting systems that are still trying to catch up, Odoo was founded as a three-tier mobile application platform and it has continued to improve.
5. Powerful enterprise and cloud solutions
Odoo has very powerful enterprise and cloud solutions. You can host it yourself or on Amazon, or on digital cloud. You can also use Odoo.com or Odoo’s own hosted solution. Thus, there are a lot of different ways to host it as Odoo is very cloud friendly. Fingent extends support for deploying Odoo on web servers like AWS and other secure environments.
Other factors that make Odoo unique
Odoo is highly customizable, completely open-source, utilizes Industry Standard Libraries, and is written in Python. The backend database is PostgreSQL which is also open source. Another important aspect is that you can build custom Odoo Applications without modifying the source code. You can easily upgrade or extend without breaking things.
Read more: A 3-day Odoo CRM implementation story!
Conclusion
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that going digital is no longer an option, but a necessity. Choosing the right ERP that suits your business requirements and unlocks the returns on your investment can help you get there. The modular framework has given Odoo a wide functional scope. While using Odoo, enterprises do not need to resort to 3rd party platforms or use additional bridging software to build fully integrated websites. Thus, Odoo supports the uniqueness of each business. This ability to customize every aspect of your system gives you a competitive advantage. And all this can be done at minimal cost, compared to the other ERP systems available in the market. As enterprises have to look at the eventual ROI before implementing an ERP system, Odoo shines because of its functionality, scalability, and affordability. Fingent’s partnership with Odoo ensures your projects are tailored for easy adaptability. Get in touch with us to plan the next dependable Odoo application that will assist in your daily business operations.
Accelerate Your Transition to SAP S/4HANA With These Tips
Increasing digitization has caused businesses to face a multitude of challenges in their working environment. In order to map business processes and forecast better business decisions, your data and work processes to be analyzed in real-time. SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent ERP software designed to cover all your day-to-day enterprise requirements. It integrates crucial functions from various lines of businesses as well as industries and incorporates parts of SAP Business Suite Products.
SAP will be offering its support for its ECC ERP software until December 31, 2025. Any business that seeks continued support from SAP will need to migrate to SAP’s flagship ERP software, SAP S/4HANA. Prior to performing SAP S/4HANA implementation or migration, you need to define your business needs and priorities. Having an appropriate migration strategy is crucial for achieving your goals with minimal disruption.
Here are a few tips that will help you ensure a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA.
Tip 1: Analyzing The Right Platform That Addresses Challenges
Switching to SAP S/4 HANA successfully requires businesses to first analyze their requirements and budget.
With the on-premise deployment of SAP HANA, the user gets to manage the entire HANA database, applications, OS, middleware, servers, networking, data centers, and virtualization. On-premise deployment of SAP S/4 HANA thus ensures control in addition to maximum risk reduction. This requires choosing a certified SAP HANA appliance from a hardware partner of SAP. Additionally, SAP HANA’s TDI (Tailored Data Center Integration) helps in reducing infrastructure costs.
Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA
SAP S/4 HANA Cloud integration which is the SaaS version of S/4 HANA can function without the need for hardware, databases, or IT personnel. SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud is SAP’s very own cloud offer and provides improved flexibility, and scalability.
TIP 2: Providing User Support For Improved Decision-Making Process
The simple data model provided by SAP S/4 HANA makes it easier for decision-making and performance improvement. Hence, analyzing and identifying master grids in the system, specifically the key values that were not being used even after a key date provided by the user. This will prevent errors happening in the future. These benefits and necessary changes need to be provided to the users for better support to enhance the decision-making process.
TIP 3: Real-Time Insights From Prepared Data To Ensure Reduced Down Times And Costs
Real-time insights are crucial for businesses to be able to optimize various processes involved. SAP S/4HANA platform involves a simplified data model that makes data migration quick and simple. SAP HANA provides advanced analytical tools that help in analyzing large chunks of data in real-time. A preparatory activity of cleansing data is crucial to avoid risks of licensing, downtimes, and so on.
TIP 4: Creating A Deployment Group Of SAP Experts
A proficient group of SAP experts is the key to ensuring a successful transition to SAP S/4HANA. The deployment requires conducting workshops on functional planning, which can be performed by an SAP partner or can utilize internal resources with adequate training as well. Getting the deployment group of experts on board might even require prototypes and test systems to be installed. This can be done quite inexpensively with the cloud.
Related Reading: SAP HANA Technology: The Game Changer
TIP 5: Creating A Detailed Road-map For Business
Mission-critical applications can now be separated from peripheral LoBs (Business line applications) with the SAP BIModal IT. These applications are developed on the SAP cloud platform and allow SAP S/4HANA to perform as the digital core of organizations. Additionally, SAP business services provide technical support services during implementation.
TIP 6: Planning Migration with High Industry Standards
All actions from the planning phase to migration are critical and require to be methodical. The SAP must be in its latest version for a smooth transition. Also, it is equally important to have backups and archive points to avoid unnecessary risks.
TIP 7: Create SAP Sandpit Environment Initially As A Proof Of Concept
Implementing a proof of concept is vital before performing the actual migration process. This helps in identifying various issues and resolving risks if any. It also supports the decision-making process and improves the overall performance of the project.
SAP S/4HANA is the future of SAP. Ensuring a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA is crucial for outcomes concerning data processing, analytics, overall performance improvement, and improved profitability. Get in touch with our SAP expert to get free guidance on migrating to SAP S/4HANA seamlessly.
When you think, storage and analysis of data, the first thing that comes to mind is spreadsheet software. It has rows and columns and it has basic features to manage the data. So, why think of anything else, right?
The need to think of something else arises in the context of an ever-growing business scenario. Indeed, spreadsheets have the capability to maintain basic records and they help analyze information quickly and effectively. But as the size of the information grows, it becomes difficult to manage and interpret.
For startup businesses, it could be sufficient to use a spreadsheet, as they can avoid the initial cost of deploying a whole ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. However, after a certain point or in cases of mid-sized to enterprise business concerns, it is impractical to use a spreadsheet software.
Besides that, spreadsheets have other disadvantages. So if you rely on spreadsheets for your business activities, here is some food for thought:
Errors
Several studies have shown that a majority of spreadsheets contain errors, whether intentional or unintentional. Since a lot of the information in the spreadsheets is entered manually and since it is handled by many people, human errors like typing in a wrong key etc. are likely to happen and they can be difficult to trace. These can end up costing companies huge amounts.
Difficulty to Analyze and Operate
Time-Consuming AnalysisThe larger the volume of data, the more time it takes to analyze and arrive at solutions or conclusions. Hence, making it difficult for decision makers to make relevant and prompt decisions. Sometimes a formula entered in a spreadsheet may have to be re-entered every time specific information is required.
Duplication of Spreadsheets
As the spreadsheets are emailed from one computer to another, it gets stored in a number of systems and ultimately, you lose track of the original version.
Lack of Security
A spreadsheet may not be as secure as an ERP system. Even though it is possible to set a password for access to a spreadsheet, it may not be encoded as an ERP package.
Inability to Track
A spreadsheet created by one person can be edited by another person and hence it would be difficult to trace the changes as to who made the last change leaving the spreadsheet vulnerable to changes.
Using an ERP solution for the management of various areas in an enterprise will not only help eliminate such problems but also comes with a lot of advantages of being cloud based. It provides automatic backup of the data, which results in lesser chances of loss of data. It also enables real-time sharing of data among all users and generation of important business reports. So as you can see, there is no reason why you shouldn’t choose an ERP solution over spreadsheet software.