While Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are a crucial component of running your business and organizing your production data, when it comes to managing your supply chain, they aren’t sufficient on their own.
That’s where supplemental tools and integrations can make a big difference. With software integrations that supercharge your ERP, you can improve visibility of your supply chain operations, enhance communication with suppliers, minimize order discrepancies, automate manual processes, predict whether goods will ship on time, and make it easier to adapt to changes in supply or demand.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common problems base ERPs present and how integrations with tools that are specialized and built specifically to handle different areas of the supply chain can help.
Problem #1: Inefficient Collaboration Between Global Supply Chain Teams
The world we live in is globalized. The supply chain can often be tracked across different time zones, countries, and even continents. That adds complexity to your supply chain and makes it difficult to centralize your information and find a single source of truth.
With so many different stakeholders working in the same supply chain, you need to have a system that ensures that everyone is working together and towards the same goals.
Solution: Centralized Supply Chain Collaboration
Supply chain management software like Anvyl can help bring together disparate teams and create a single source of truth that everyone with ERP access in your supply chain can reference.
When you have an SCM integration for your ERP system, order changes are updated automatically across both systems and are shared with key stakeholders in real time. This keeps everyone on the same page and working with the same information which erases the friction in your supply chain operations.
For instance, with Anvyl you can link your Gmail, assign tasks to internal or external members, and use the platform as a centralized place for sharing files to increase team collaboration.
Problem #2: Lack of Visibility
Another common problem is the lack of visibility into the supply chain that ERP provides. When you only use an ERP solution, you don’t have the same collaboration tools and access to the real-time information you need to truly understand the breadth of your supply chain. But with additional software integrations, you can improve on this lack of visibility and help provide crucial end-to-end insights.
Solution: A Single Pane View into Your Supply Chain
Properly visualizing the supply chain is essential to make it easier for your organization to identify and resolve any potential issues to prevent delays and keep your processes moving forward. Solutions like Anvyl can help in many different ways, like having logistics visibility that offers more insight than your ERP to connect supply chain managers to manufacturers in a way that improves communication across teams and enables smarter decision-making. Additionally, you can get a full view of your order from PO issuance all the way through logistics to the end destination.
Problem #3: Manual Tasks and Data Entry
One of the biggest challenges that ERP users face is getting bogged down by manual entry across an array of disparate systems. Our own data shows that of all POs issued in 2022, there was an average of 5 files uploaded per order. Additionally, 56% of those orders had revisions made to them.
When you consider that many organizations issue dozens of orders each month, having to manually update supply chain information in the ERP can lead to data errors and discrepancies, some of which can be quite serious.
Solution: Utilize Automation to Minimize Errors
A supply chain management solution like Anvyl can eliminate manual tasks and minimize potential errors with automation tools specifically geared toward solving supply chain issues. It can also automate tasks, for example, when a “Proforma Invoice” is uploaded it can automatically be assigned to your bill payables to issue payment.
When you connect Anvyl to an ERP system, users can automatically share actions between the two platforms. For example, you can import purchase orders into Anvyl and issue them to suppliers, manage and update POs so the information automatically updates in the ERP, and assist with three-way matching to further reduce errors.
Problem #4: Order Delays
A single order delay can have major impacts on your supply chain. And when we dug into our proprietary database we found that of all POs that were supposed to ship in 2022 and have shipped, only 55% were on time.
Reducing order delays is key to the success of your supply chain and your business as a whole. But an ERP system doesn’t have specialized intelligence or machine-learning capabilities that can assess when an order delay is potentially going to become a risk for supply chain teams.
Solution: Machine Learning to Enhance Intelligence
Machine learning (ML) can help supply chain teams understand what orders will be delayed even before a shipment takes place. Solutions like Anvyl use ML to analyze communication within the platform and recommend changes that will help you stay on top of the journey your orders are taking.
This helps teams stay on schedule and address delays immediately — rather than after the fact when it’s too late. Your teams will also be able to predict lead times with greater accuracy and provide better solutions to potential delays.
Problem #5: Accuracy of Financial Reporting
If you only use an ERP without additional tool integrations for the supply chain, it can lead to serious problems for your finance teams. Financial reporting can be challenging for supply chain and procurement teams, especially when orders and shipments aren’t always accurate. The items you order aren’t always the ones you receive, creating billing issues when closing out your books at the end of the month.
Solution: Confirm Orders Match Shipments
Your ERP software is critical for financial reporting, invoicing, forecasting, and making payments. Integrating with Anvyl can help your teams be confident that they pay on time for what was actually produced and what was shipped and received.
Anvyl ensures that orders and shipments are the same and that all received goods have been paid for. Brands will then have the ability to update the PO to match the shipments to close out their PO. This helps finance teams move forward with confidence when closing out books.
Reaching Supply Chain Success with Intelligent ERP Integrations
In the modern business world, supply chain operations are all about speed, accuracy, and visibility. Staying ahead in an increasingly competitive global market requires the best tools and solutions to achieve your goals and outperform your competitors. More often than not this means having the right integrations to allow your tech stack to reach its full potential.
With the right supply chain management tools you can fill the gaps that base ERPs present and reach new levels of visibility, collaboration and predictability to achieve a highly efficient supply chain.
At Anvyl, we focus on providing a supply chain management system that helps you improve supplier relationships, streamline your important business practices, and monitor and manage your global supply chain. Get a demo of our product today to discover how we can help bring your business processes to the next level.
