What to Look for in an ERP Software Development Company
The ERP solution you want to develop for your business should be able to accommodate the required functionality, account for the industrial metrics, and be proficient enough to support the business in the near and distant future with the help of next-gen technology.
Enterprise resource planning is a monumental step that a business takes when they want to revamp and enhance their operations. Charting a plan to move your business to an integrated and customized ERP system can be a mammoth task, and a very complicated one at that.
The ERP solution you want to develop for your business should be able to accommodate the required functionality, account for the industrial metrics, and be proficient enough to support the business in the near and distant future with the help of next-gen technology.
The first step in this process is to find the perfect ERP solution provider, who can proficiently take care of the ERP development process. This is primarily because the off the shelf ERP solutions are very expensive to maintain, and require a multitude of customizations based on your requirements to build the best-suited workflows for your operations.
Instead, hiring an ERP software development company is a much more efficient way to ensure that all your needs are met, and your business is able to fluently transition into the ERP system. The company would be responsible for designing, coding, testing, updating, implementing, finding bugs or problems with the system, providing support, and enhancing your ERP software.
Hence, businesses must be extra careful while looking for an ERP software development company. Let’s take a look at what elements you should look for to make a calculated choice for hiring a company to develop your ERP software:
1. Ability to Understand Multiple Business Use Cases: The main function of an ERP software is to address the imminent and future needs of various different departments in an organization. Hence, it is imperative that the ERP software development company is proficient in not only understanding business use cases across different industries, but also cohesively building an ERP software that accommodates all of your requirements.
Usually, ERP developers have a good grasp on the holistic understanding of inventory and sales. However, the developers also must understand the need of an ERP software for their clients, and the business justification of getting one. Any feature that is encoded into an ERP software plays a huge role in enhancing an organization’s functionality.
Hence, it is crucial that the tram of ERP developers in a company are efficient in identifying and realizing the true potential of the ERP software for their clients. Understanding business use cases is the first step towards building the best-suited ERP software for a client.
2. Proficient Record in Data Integration: One of the greatest advantages of an ERP software for any organization is having a centralized database for a multitude of applications. However, during and after the development of the software, the organization’s data is still required to be integrated throughout the ERP system to make its functioning successful.
Moreover, in many cases, organizations use many external applications and tools that must be connected to the ERP software as well, since they mostly have their own unique sets of requirements. Hence, an ERP software development company should present expert solutions in data integrations, to ensure that their clients are able to utilize the full potential of the ERP system in their organization.
A software development company with experience in integrating data with all the various external applications, legacy systems, and multiple modules of an ERP system is a necessity to successfully build the best-suiting ERP software for your organization.
3. Can Handle Multiple Types of Users: Designing the user interface of an ERP system is an equally important task for a software development company. Hence, it must be assessed by businesses if the company has the ability to build a flexible UI for the ERP software that can serve multiple types of users.
An easy to use UI is an important predictor for the adoption of any software, but especially for an ERP system, because it is used by multiple departments of an organization. The management of an organization will have different expectations than the operations staff, and to comprehensively meet their expectations, an ERP software development company must accommodate for this diversity.
For instance, an accountant might need a predictable set of multiple screens that helps them in avoiding any human errors so that their tasks are completed reliably consistently. Hence, it is crucial that your software development partner is not biased towards any department, and creates ERP software with a UI that flexibly identifies any and all types of users to serve them individually.
4. Immaculate Project Management: Any authentic ERP software development company has its project management statistics on its portfolio. Without a competent project management in place, no software development project can be executed successfully.
Hence, as a business, you must assess the company’s processes, teams of experts, and the tools they use for the ERP software development process. This will help you in realizing if the company has the potential to accommodate for the complexity of the ERP software you require.
To take this assessment further, you can ask the company about some of their most complex and extensive projects they’ve taken yet, and carefully analyze how they executed them. The number of modules used, how many teams of expert developers were deployed for the development process, what bottlenecks they faced while developing the software, and how long did it take them to build the software are all the elements that you must ask the company.
This would provide you with an intensive overview of how the software development company captures the specifications provided to them, and how successfully they are able to turn these specifications into comprehensive features. You can even ask the company about demonstrating any of their previous tests of the various software they have developed to get an even deeper look into how well their project management is.
Conclusion
An ERP software development company can only be as good as its team of software developers. However, that’s not where the train of requirement stops. As a business, you must be thorough in your evaluation of a company’s ability to execute such a complex project that can define how well your business operates in the future.
Now that you know what exactly to look for in an ERP software development company, it's time to put these points to work and find the best company for yourself!