Optimizing Enterprise Time Management: Your ERP Can’t Handle Your Unique Time Use Case (2/3)
The majority of Fortune 500 companies use some form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation to keep their operations running as smoothly as possible. Still, with the quickly changing landscape of the modern workplace, the ERP implementations that these companies have come to rely on are failing to adapt to the level of innovation, accessibility, flexibility, and ease-of-use required to stay competitive. And, without any major advances in ERP, the time and effort it costs just to maintain these systems continues to increase, especially when it comes to maintaining and optimizing your enterprise time management.
In the first segment of our three-part series on optimizing enterprise time management, we discussed the ways in which your ERP implementation is likely outdated and wasting considerable company time. Today in Part 2, we’ll cover the specific ways your ERP lacks the proper design to meet your organization’s localization needs, and is ultimately fragmenting your enterprise time data:
Localization needs go unaddressed
To ERP vendors, time is just another feature with one general, catch-all use case. However, for the geographically-spread, multi-location businesses of the world, there’s not so much one use case, but thousands. The more a business grows and expands past its initial headquarters, the more difficult it becomes to continue to fit their own business-specific reality — complete with different localization needs — into their ERP’s plain-vanilla use case for time management.
Band-aid solutions create data silos
ERP investments can date back 15 years or more, and the further back the initial investment, the more convoluted and difficult it becomes to maintain. ERP change management becomes a vicious cycle with companies seeking disruptive and expensive band-aid solutions to bridge gaps in their ERP. Companies employ CRM, HRIS, PSA, and additional solutions to fill gaps in their original ERP solution, but in doing so isolate the information held in these systems to each separate system. These data silos make it challenging and time-consuming for executives and managers to get a holistic view of time data and other metrics across their enterprise. It also often requires significant administrative overheads and manual intervention to even get close to a centralized view.
The bottom line: All of this hinders effective time management across your enterprise.
Legacy ERP implementations and patchwork solutions have left enterprise time data fragmented in multiple systems – in ERP, CRM, HCM, BI, and even Excel. Businesses lack a single source for collection, which makes harnessing and managing the time data a tedious process that ultimately costs businesses significant overhead. This lack of visibility and control over enterprise time data then spills over into payroll, client billing, and shared services and can result in continuous errors, correction overhead cycles, and payroll and revenue leakage.
Make sure to stay tuned for Part 3 to hear some solutions to these common challenges.
