Best ERP for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs)

And so are your business processes because they have evolved organically with your business over time.

Then there are checklists and templates (e.g. email templates, invoice templates) relevant to different business processes and sub-processes.

 

And there are other software applications your organisation may be using and the way they need to integrate and interact.  This is key to making all applications work in tandem as part of an unified system, which is what an ERP is about after all.

Let's face the bitter truth now. No ERP Software, however expensive it is or tall its claims in marketing pitches, could have ever anticipated all these and built into their offering.

Although in all fairness, most software application, ERP or not, allow 'some room' for customization, key determinants are how much 'room' and at what cost those customizations can be made.

Someone may have built an 'ERP' for an 'Animal'. Someone else may have gone ahead and built one that can be customized for an 'Elephant' or a 'Zebra'.

But what if your business have attributes of both or more, with some characteristics of 'spider', 'apple' and 'moon' thrown in for good measure.

The best ERP for SMBs is which a set of highly customizable building blocks you can pick from and customize to suit your unique business processes, needs, size, complexity and liking. 

But with the way Information Technology, particularly the Web Technologies have evolved, tons of smaller, nimbler and smarter players have been emerging on scene.

APIs and Webhooks have become common place and help data flow seamlessly among applications, even if from different vendors.

With these developments, the traditional notion of ERP stands shattered, with no regrets! The new paradigm for ERP is more liberating, self-paced and business-enabling, particularly for SMBs.

Gone are the days when you had to buy all those 'building blocks' (e.g. HR, Accounting) from the same vendor, even if some of them either wouldn't be used by you (because you don't need or like them) or used only reluctantly (because you don't like them but can't afford to 'double-buy' something from another vendor even if their offering is better).

 

More often than not, organizations ended up with a white elephant for an ERP and 75% of big ERP implementation projects failed.

If you're a SMB, you don't any reason to rue the old regime and every to embrace the new paradigm!

Today you can have an 'ERP' without buying an 'ERP'. You can build up your own truly-functional ERP by smartly choosing the best-in-class and most cost-effective customizable software ('building blocks') for each aspect of your business all of which need not be bought en masse from the same vendor...

...and seamlessly integrating them, leveraging the power of APIs and Webhooks.

 

This ability to cherry-pick, fully customize and glue together individual software applications places enormous power in the hands of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) to optimize, standardize, automate and integrate their workflows, resulting in world-class business processes that are at par with or even better than Fortune 500 companies' without burning a hole into their pocket.

Cloud-based or cloud-hosted means you don't run your software applications and store your data in your own servers but in those owned and managed by 3rd parties. 

For example, when you're using Google Sheets, you don't download or install it in your computer but you access and work on it using browser just like you do GMail. It's the Google servers that run these programs and store the data.

• You don't have to invest upfront in hardware. You only pay monthly or annually for the hardware resources you plan to use.
• You don't have to hire people to manage the servers and other hardware.
• You don't have to worry about a lot of other support structure required to maintain, upkeep and update the hardware, e.g. physical security, digital security against virus attacks, connectivity and bandwidth, temperature control.