1.Organizes all maintenance activities.

It doesn’t take much experience to know that prevention is the best repair and that’s why this is the very basic necessity your EAM solution should be satisfying. If you are working with an EAM solution, most of your requirements and activities are going to involve organizing maintenance of your assets. Proactive and regular scheduled maintenance to repair wear and tear reduces risk and saves on labor costs when things do break down. There are a lot of simple tasks that your EAM solution is going to rearrange and organize and present to let you know when the time comes to get cracking and start tuning things up. If the time does come (knock on wood) for an unscheduled repair, your EAM should provide either your employee or a contractor with all historical and performance information about the asset, making it easy to begin the process of getting things back to normal and prevent downtime.

2.Provides management with information for making decisions.

The main concerns for management when setting up an asset management strategy are planning for new purchases and setting performance benchmarks. When hammering out an asset lifecycle plan, where all assets are accounted for from cradle-to-grave, the EAM solution needs to provide management with analytical reports that establish the foundations of their capital budgeting decisions. This practical and accurate information is key in determining the timing of new assets being introduced to the lifecycle as old ones are retired. Beyond buying and selling decisions, which are not routine events, management will also need information to set benchmarks and analyze performance. This makes the process of determining workflow recommendations and managing work orders grounded into hard evidence.

3.Easy-to-use Interface

Most EAM end-users, such as technicians or field engineers, will not be nearly as comfortable using the management software as they are using the assets. That’s no fault of theirs, but it does put emphasis on setting up an EAM solution that has time saving functionality and simple navigation. After ongoing training and internal communications reinforcing the benefits of using the software, ease-of-use will be a key determining whether an organization is getting full use out of the software. It’s no surprise that usability is one of the major trends in EAM in 2011, as end-users interactions with the software continue to add to the company’s knowledge base. That’s the collection of invaluable historical data used to make decisions, which takes us back to management’s role in analyzing reports during asset lifecycle planning.

4.Filing all the documents

This point goes hand in hand with the proactive approach preached for asset maintenance strategy. Assets come loaded with documentation, from vendor information to technical specs and manufacturer’s warranties, and its up to users to keep these accessible and organized. While accessing and using these documents may not happen often or be any person’s particular responsibility, there are few instances when the importance of these documents becomes crucial. These include major breakdowns, when service agreements need to be examined, and analyzing vendor relationship during the purchasing process. In terms of the other benefits highlighted above, this may seem trivial, but in the spirit of saving time and getting the most out of your investment, it’s a great feature to demand and use.

5 Things to consider when choosing an ERP Solutions

1. Define your business processes to find the ideal ERP solution.

It sounds simple: study your business processes blueprint (as-is), analyze potential of ERP solutions (to-be), and pick the one that takes you from where you are to where you want to go. Analyzing the gap gives you a good measure of how far you’ve improved from your current position, and you have a quantifiable measure of your ROI decision of implementing an ERP solution. Simple enough, right? But in reality, as a small and medium business you most likely don’t have neatly organized processes and building a blueprint is a project on its own. Do it! It will already lead to improvements in performance (prior to any ERP solutions) and will make it easier to identify pain points that you want your ERP solution to target. An ERP solutions won’t tell you how to run your business, much less how you have been running it, but getting one will force you to clean house and organize your processes.

2. Understand the questions you are trying to answer with an ERP Solution.

We don’t get into projects of large scale without ambition to address and finally leave behind what has been nagging at our success. Any project starts with identifying the pain points to your success and prioritizing the order in which you are going to tackle your problems. These problems will serve as a measure of scope and success for your project. And when you are asked what would you improve about your operations, hopefully you go beyond “grow revenues, increase productivity, and improved efficiency” (all worthy goals, but symptomatic and not causal). If you are seeing ERP solutions as a magical tool for these generalizations, you are missing the opportunity to make this venture custom to your needs and wants. To get at what is causing the issues you are looking to solve may be straightforward or take a full-on discovery process. The important thing to remember here is that this is about you and your organization getting somewhere and the reasons why we set out shouldn’t become fuzzy during the journey.

3. Changing Business Solutions provider is OK and may be worth your while.

You probably already license some kind of information management system to help you run your business. Maybe you’ve invested in some off-the-shelf accounting software, or online-based CRM, or other legacy system. These were adequate when the economy was booming sending clients your way and hammering out your vision for the future seemed almost self-fulfilling. Now that urgent times mean new solutions, don’t be stuck based on the decisions you made in the past. Consider all options, all providers and software. Installing or redesigning your ERP solution is a major step, a rite of passage, and it’s important that you enjoy it and that again, you make it about your needs and your wants to get you where you are going. It’s not about what you’ve done, but what you are going to do and the ERP solution you choose should reflect that, even if it means letting go of systems you’ve had in the past. In the long run, it will be worth it.

4. Who will be your team?

Even though ERP is an IT solution, it hardly concerns the IT department alone. When planning for investing in an ERP solution, keep in mind that it will require a lot of people resources for it to take you to your dreamland of results. A good mix of top management, those that understand how everything is going to fit together through your organizations business units, and selected end-users, will keep you on track so that your overall tactics match the objectives you are going after. Who will be your project leader? Who will be the sponsor? In the end, decisions are going to have to be consistently made, and a well defined hierarchy will ease the pain when deadlines start to loom closer.

5. Understand the total cost (and benefits) of choosing and implementing an ERP solution.

The cost of an ERP solution may seem (and be) a huge hurdle for a lot of growing businesses. Again, it’s important to know the value that you are gaining from it. Understanding your business processes and issues you are targeting will highlight the benefits, but you still have to understand the costs. Look here for a good summary of the total costs and benefits. As you can see there are a lot of costs that are indirect, people hours, maintenance, phasing out old systems, so it’s important to carefully understand and analyze these costs to make sure no surprises affect the project, or the user’s perspective of the solution.