Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
This famous quote of Henry Ford leads to identify that starting from days of the assembly line, how this concept diluted human interaction with all the sectors of an economy. As we know, in previous decades, the major affected area was Manufacturing, but nowadays after an evolution of the computer, many other sectors like Service, Supply Chain and Marketing are a victim of it. There must be something good about that, therefore it’s radius is expanding more and more. Here we are trying to explore that after implementing Automation in your ERP system how it can help you to grow your business.
Can Achieve Accuracy to Minute Level
To implement Automation in ERP is not a small thing at all! As ERP is supposed to be integrated with all the areas of businesses, while making any process automatized, you need to make sure that each and every area of that particular process has been covered. By taking an example to maintain a certain level of inventory, one needs to consider Sales, Purchase, Delivery Time, and at certain level, Accounting too. Considering a current scenario, there will be a different person assigned to manage those jobs in ERP. So we know that where there is human interaction, chances are very high, that there will be more or less error while managing those details. Now, after doing right analysis, if we are able to manage those jobs to run automatically, means we make sure that ERP itself comes up with the decision, (based on pre-defined algorithms, obviously), will make work more faster and quite accurate.
Cost Related Benefits
“To manage a quite large system, you may need as fewer persons as possible” With this phrase, we can imagine that after achieving Automation, we can get quick results (and information) from ERP system, which many time can play a crucial role in taking a decision. The reason is to implement all related changes in whole ERP, all the things will be done by the system itself, and there will be no waiting time for a human to make those adjustments. So final result can be seen in the final cost of an outcome.
Integrating Departments can speed-up Actual Process
Let's go through one scenario. An order is placed on one online shopping site, an order is automatically integrated into your ERP system, it's related shipping order is also generated, and your 3PL is being notified to deliver the right product to the right customer. Meanwhile, this process being executed, Invoicing and Accounting related part is also being managed from a separate process. How exciting it is! All this process can be achieved in no time, and this leads to a happy customer. Here we can see that there are many different departments which are related. Starting from Sales to Warehouse, Accounting and your 3PL.
Leading up to Smart Marketing
Continuing above example, as all the things being done from Automation, we can assign an auto task to ERP system after a certain period of time, communicate with customers, and ask them for feedback, inform them regarding the release of your new products and so on. Many such things can be achieved through Automation. As we all know that it's about doing an analysis of all the data and based on that, you can take a decision that what will be the future marketing strategy. But for that, you may need to gather all the data, do analysis, and then do the above process manually. With the smart algorithm, one can get these things done from a system. And we all know it's importance as well.
Having a conversation with Ford, one of the communist mention that after Automation there will be no worker working in your factory. Then after to whom you will sell your cars? And it's abstract version can be seen in 1950, when one of his factory workers protested calling it as Frankenstein. The very same situation arose when the computer started taking over all the human work. Recently in an interview, Bill Gates said,
“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed . . . If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”
Those example shows us Mr. Hyde of it!
In near future, this could be the case, but as we all know that this is part of an Economic Cycle, in near future, this may lead to not so good situation, but in a longer run, things will start fall in line and the cycle will move on! What will be that scenario, we may not be sure, but the Economy Cycle will keep moving in it's the same manner, that is 101% sure!