The ERP And Big Data Challenges

ERP is turning out to be a vital need for all the emerging small-to-medium businesses. In this cut-throat competition, running a business is not as simple as it used to be. First off, there has been a meteoric rise in the number of SMEs over the last decade and the latter is tend to rise in the coming years way more than we can probably imagine. To remain in this intensifying competition, the companies are willing to try every possible gimmick or else, there are plenty of businesses that we see failing every now and then. In this age of technological advancements, you need to make sure that your firm has an ideal business model where innovation, management and technology, all go hand in hand. ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning brings forth such business model which helps in streamlining your business in the best way possible.

Big Data Analytics has a crucial role to play in ERP management. As a matter of fact, all the small-to-medium businesses produce massive chunks of data on regular basis. Managing, analysing and optimizing such enormous data is a challenge in itself. That’s where Big Data Analytics come to the rescue. Big Data Analytics is a process of examining, analysing and processing large data sets that are so complex that the traditional data processing softwares are inadequate for their processing. Big Data when combined with ERP, gives your business the run for its money. But is important that you make a wise and judicious use of the both. So in case you are likely to implement Big Data Analytics with your existing ERP system, you might want to make sure you follow these few steps.

Also read Big Data To Help Public Sector Build 360 Degree View of Consumer.
 

Action Plan

In case you have made up your mind to integrate Big Data Analytics with your ERP system, it is must that you make an effective action plan before doing anything else. The first thing is to set your goals, priorities and future plans. These plans will help you choose an ideal Big Data Analytics solution that best suits your business requirements.

Critical Success Factors

After making a sound action plan, it’s time for deciding and setting up the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for your forthcoming business projects. A Critical Success Factor is a term or entity which lays out the list of some crucial factors that are necessary for the fulfilment or attainment of an objective. It is highly recommended to set up these CSFs before you start working on a project.

Data Requirements

Once you are done with the above two steps, it’s time you should make a list of your existing data resources and rough estimation of your average data consumption each day would be worthwhile. This will help you decide the sensitive areas of your business that consume and produce maximum data on daily basis and then you can implement the Big Data solutions to extract the maximum value out your data resources.

Choosing The Right Big Data Software

Now comes the most crucial part where you actually have to choose a vendor keeping in mind all the basic requirements of your business. Make your decision wisely since your entire business counts on it. So apart from keeping in mind all your business requirements, it is highly recommended to perform a proper research on the current market trends of Big Data and the various Big Data and ERP vendors. Also, it’s not necessary that a single tool will fit perfectly for all your business areas. You might have to take different Big Data solutions for a different domain to ensure a perfect balance and smooth work flow.