The imperative for fast growing enterprises to achieve operational excellence has never been greater. Success and continuous growth require more than just a great product and great value proposition.

Equally critical is an operating model that enables profitable expansion and competitive agility. 

As smaller enterprises grow in complexity and scale, pressures mount to sustain high levels of performance and excellence in how they go to market. To help meet these challenges growing organisations are turning to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. 

An ERP solution is defined as an integrated solution that manages all core functions of an enterprise including tangible assets, financial resources, materials and human resources.

ERP solutions aim to support four broad business goals:

• Facilitate rapid and effective decision making
• Enable business process efficiencies across the enterprise
• Extend and/or accelerate competitive advantage
• Adapt to evolving business needs on a cost-effective basis.

Growth Strategies
As business conditions improve and the outlook becomes more optimistic, growing enterprises are embarking on a range of initiatives to improve revenue growth and profitability. Among these initiatives is a focus on solidifying the core business through programs that strengthen the customer base. These initiatives make sense as most organisations recognise that acquiring new customers takes incrementally more effort and cost than retaining the ones they have.

Enhancing Customer satisfaction without increased customer service costs
Acquiring new customers is expensive.  It is far less costly to focus on customer satisfaction and customer retention.  By introducing flexible and efficient business processes organisations can improve customer service and increase satisfaction levels without generating additional costs.

Enabling greater adaptability that cuts the cost base
Reacting quickly to changes in customer needs, tastes or wider market developments can offer midsized businesses a key competitive advantage over larger organisations. Streamlined automated business processes can support this adaptability and simultaneously lower the overall cost of business.

Maintain operational efficiency
Operational efficiency and continuity are essential to business success.  This is particularly the case for midsized organisations that may be working through a business transition driven by growth, technology needs or market developments.

The right solution
Midsized businesses are well positioned to be more flexible than larger competitors due to their size.  This flexibility however must be enabled within the context of their relative resource and budget limitations.
When reviewing the software functionality required to meet business objectives some of the key  components  to consider are;

• Is the core solution or footprint delivered from the one ERP vendor, or is it 'cobbled together' with dealer and 3rd party applications. 
• What is the long term cost of having an system that requires interfaces rather than a fully integrated ERP.
• What scalability have I got within the application when the business develops and changes over time.
• What modifications are required to have the application meet my business requirements
• What local support can be expected to be provided by the vendor and what experience does their team deliver.