ILMA Compoundings June 2017 - 27

T

he proliferation of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) and
customer relationship management (CRM) applications has put more
data than ever at our fingertips. The rise
of new technologies, including these
applications, has resulted in business
leaders expecting to have all relevant
information available to them within
seconds. With the help of ERP and
CRM systems, companies have the
ability to collect and store data easily
and inexpensively, which has created
massive amounts of data. However,
the vast amount of data collected leads
businesses to ask several questions:
What do we do with all this data? How
do we know it is correct? How do we
maintain it? What should we keep, and
what should we discard? How do we fix
it when it's inaccurate or outdated?
Many of the aforementioned
questions can be answered before
they become an issue if your business
implements the right software. There are
many ERP and CRM solutions that can
collect and present large data sets with
the goal of allowing you to analyze your
business at both a macro and micro level. Industry-specific solutions are a better
choice than multi-industry solutions, as
they collect and present the data you are
looking for when you need it.

"Analyzing data and metrics serves many purposes,
including identifying important trends and tracking
whether the company is meeting expectations."
ERP and CRM applications that
are industry specific can present data
tailored to your needs. While all ERP
and CRM solutions collect a vast
amount of data, a good system will
combine and collate the data into
meaningful representations of the key
metrics for making business decisions.
For example, if you are a lubricant
manufacturer, your needs are different
than a company that manfactures
furniture; you look at yields verses
pieces made.
Furthermore, these systems will
give you the ability to drill down into
the details to see the underlying data.
Analyzing data and metrics serves
many purposes, including identifying
important trends and tracking whether
the company is meeting expectations.
For example, you might notice that
there has been an increase in the volume of goods being sold but not the
sales dollars; volume up and sales dollars down means downward pressure
on prices. If your business implements
the right ERP and CRM systems, people within your business can analyze

the relevant metrics and other detailed
data to identify and analyze key trends
as they occur.
Another important feature these
systems have is exception reporting.
These are alert events that notify users
when something is out of the norm,
such as a missed order or a drop in
production for the day. You can't look
at every piece of data, so having a system that does the heavy lifting for you
and helps you sort through the data
can make a substantial difference.
It is important to note that information is not correct just because it
comes out of a computer. While analyzing data is important to the success
of your business, it is only helpful if
the data you are analyzing is accurate.
One reality of life is that people make
mistakes, and computer systems retain
everything, including mistakes. So,
how do you stop mistakes and how do
you correct mistakes so that they don't
distort your analysis? Implementing
a process to stop data mistakes before
they get into your database is the best
place to start.

27
ILMA Compoundings June 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ILMA Compoundings June 2017
