Verde Blog & News

Those operating the warehousing and distribution components of various businesses are sometimes gently ribbed for doing nothing more than ‘moving boxes’ or ‘box dropping’. However, drop the ball in distribution and the warehouse and substantial problems quickly appear: the movement of goods from origin to point of consumption is far more difficult and expensive.

Like many businesses across New Zealand, manufacturers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, essential raw materials are in short supply. On the other, finding workers is a growing challenge, with reduced immigration for various reasons including reduced immigration owing to Covid policies.

For some time now, organisations across New Zealand and of course the world have steadily moved from on-premise software to more modern cloud alternatives. This increasingly extends to core Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, the ‘crown jewels’ of the applications that help run the business effectively.

When a business graduates from basic accounting software to a more comprehensive end-to-end approach to financial management, it immediately gain real-time visibility into all its financial data, encouraging better decisions at the right time.

Every company that buys, sells and/or uses physical products deals with the pains of keeping accurate inventory records. The recent uptick in eCommerce sales, evolving customer preferences, and unanticipated supply chain disruptions have converged to make inventory counts especially critical for manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and eCommerce companies.

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is like the central nervous system for a business, collecting and organising key information to support lean, efficient operations, even as it expands. The ERP platform automates business processes and provides insights and internal controls, drawing on a central database that collects inputs from various departments.

As anyone who has ever involved themselves in the implementation of enterprise software will attest, choosing the best software is an important step. But here’s the thing: it isn’t THE most important step.

You probably don’t need the likes of us to explain that manufacturing is a complex undertaking. Whether producing aluminum boats or gumboots or water tanks, there’s – sometimes literally – a ton of materials, processes, people, and logistics involved.

One of the most important factors in a growing business is making sure it has systems that can support it as it expands. Small businesses often try to squeeze as much performance from their existing systems to delay investing in more powerful systems.

Today a small business can connect a number of third-party cloud programs to their accounting software that will replicate many of the functions of an ERP. While there may be similarities on paper, an ERP has several advantages.