5 Reasons Your Manufacturing Company Needs a Unified Software Platform
Your manufacturing business relies on great software for great success. Without it, meeting your growth goals will be almost impossible. What is great software? To many manufacturers the software they are currently using is great because it's keeping them in business and might even help them see small growth. To others, features such as reporting, having a manufacturing module, or the ability to manage inventory might be their cream of the crop.
All these things can be good but if I may, I'd like to add unified software platform to the list of what makes manufacturing software great. Here's why:
Real-Time Visibility
The first way to improve your business is by knowing your business inside and out. The best way to do that is with a unified software platform such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that provides real-time visibility into the inner workings of your organization. Business Central integrates with other popular Microsoft software such as Dynamics 365 Sales to allow you to do things such as performing production planning in real time. Pair Business Central with Microsoft Power BI and your able to view stunning visuals of information from different angles to help you spot trends and make better decisions. There's really no limit as to what can be achieved with Microsoft software integrations.
Sharing and Integration of Data
By choosing a cloud based unified software platform for your manufacturing business integrating data and sharing that data is effortless. For instance, Microsoft has data centers all over the world that house and back up your data which allows their integrated software to pull your data as needed to allow you to work in different applications. For example, a sales person could be in Outlook and receive an email asking for them to update a quote. With Microsoft's ability to share and integrate data there is no reason to switch to from Outlook to Business Central because Outlook will recognize an update to a quote is needed and allow you to edit nd update right in Outlook.
Reduced Errors
With a unified software platform a reduction in errors is a certainty. No more will an employee have to enter information into software and then transfer into different software. No more will reports be inaccurate because of not having real-time data. No more will inventory counts be wrong causing you to have more than enough or not enough supplies. Reduced errors means more profit for your manufacturing business.
Security
Each year that goes by cyber attacks increase. In fact, there have been numerous hacker attacks since you've begun reading this article. Unified platforms such as Business Central are easier to protect than old legacy systems. Microsoft spends billions of dollars to prevent cyber attacks and keep your business safe. So I ask you, why wouldn't you want that kind of R&D on your side to help combat cybercriminals?
Customizations
Having business software customizations are almost a given for any manufacturing organization. These customizations can come in the form of object changes, added extensions and/or added apps. When trying to add these customizations on non-unified software platforms you may have to use multiple versions of code, multiple extensions, and multiple apps. This can be time consuming and costly. With a unified platform adding these customizations require the same and usually only 1 app or extension.
The Future is Now
Manufacturing has seen tremendous improvements over the 5 years with cloud based unified software platforms and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. A good unified platform such as Business Central grows as you grow. There's minor updates every month and two major updates each year that are installed automatically for you. This means you'll always have the latest most technologically advanced software available.
