The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way we do business, from customer behaviour to how organisations manage work, processes, and people.

Due to the lockdown and stay-at-home orders, organisations have been forced to:

• adopt remote work policies for their employees
• find ways to deliver their services and products remotely since customers could not visit retail shops and offices
• diversify their supply sources

While the crisis has led to the dissolution of many organisations, most likely, the companies that’ll survive in the long run are those that’ll adapt to the change and adopt new ways of managing the business. It’s organisations that’ll deploy technology to their advantage and scale their operations to current conditions using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

ERP will help your organisation survive the impact of COVID-19 in the following ways:

• Managing rapid changes. Whether internal or external, changes will happen fast and companies need to respond quickly. ERP makes this a possibility, like using analytics for rapid management decision-making.
• Automating routine manual processes and approvals. This allows management to focus more on contending the impact of the crisis.
• Enabling remote working. Modern ERP solutions are able to connect with other business systems to give users remote access to business data and enable them to work from home.
• Reducing reliance on human labour through the application of automation. And with capabilities for providing an integrated business process, enhancing customer service and warehouse operations, and even powering eCommerce, ERP packs the functionality that’s needed to keep human intervention low.

To enjoy these benefits, it’s necessary to take the following steps:

• You need to enhance your ERP system to work efficiently under the new normal. This may require moving to a more robust software or upgrading your current solution to deliver more powerful capabilities.
• Companies with traditional ERP systems should exchange their on-premises projects for cloud-based solutions that can provide continuity from the current and future crises. Why? Because the more digitalised your business, the more assurance of continuity when facing both internal and external crises.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as COVID-19 has a long-term impact, your ERP should provide you with the tools to create an environment for examining current business practices in order to ascertain long-term operational efficiency while improving existing processes. Your ERP should support managing business data in a way that workers can have remote access as well as support creating a system where business processes, workflows, and approval steps can be initiated and completed without the need for lots of physical contacts.

Your ERP should support horizontal automation, workforce management (both contingent and full-time), business intelligence, dynamic reporting, supply chain flexibility, and sourcing agility.

This is where using a powerful cloud business management suite like NetSuite comes in handy. NetSuite’s robust capabilities and enormous flexibility allow it to be customised or configured in a way that supports new purposes such as remote information management, people management, and business management in all aspects.

By moving work to the cloud, you’re putting your team members first, safeguarding their health, and providing them with a reasonable work-life balance that allows for happier employees and better quality of work.