If you took a marketing class in college, you’ve heard of the four P’s of marketing—product, price, promotion, and place—and how they worked together. Now, however, your distribution business has moved past marketing 101, and into the real world.
Today, there is immense focus on business transformation, in which you position your organization to compete in a new landscape where speed and precision are the name of the game. Companies that can focus on profitability, process, productivity, and positioning are the ones who can thrive. For many companies one of the paths to achieving all four of these is to leverage cloud enterprise resource planning—or ERP.
The Four P’s of Business Transformation
This blog will explore the role of Cloud ERP in helping companies maximize profit, ease processes, enhance productivity, and position themselves for growth.
Profitability
A healthy business is a profitable business, and contemporary ERP solutions are often just the answer for getting companies on track. How so? By decreasing costs, labor, and effort needed to manage the basics, and allowing employees to put more focus on improving the business in other areas. This one-two punch of decreased costs and increased productivity combine to enhance profitability at growing distribution firms. In fact, Aberdeen discovered in its SaaS and Cloud ERP Trends and Observations research that more businesses with cloud ERP managed to stay within budget; in contrast, organizations with on-premise solutions ended up 12% over budget.
Process (Improvement)
Where can you cut costs? Where can you speed up workflows? How can you identify opportunities for improvement? All of this is part of process improvement, and a business with the right processes in place can simplify their workflows and look towards the management side of the business.
Productivity
With processes automated and employees focused on the bottom line, productivity is the next layer in business transformation. Are your employees manufacturing as efficiently as possible? Would performing steps differently increase output? Cloud ERP gives business leaders the tools to analyze issues like these and implement solutions throughout their organization.
Positioning
After you’ve taken care of the basics, it’s time to position yourself for the next steps, adjusting to marketplace demand and tailoring strategies to fit. While there are many ways to look at this, this almost always involves consciously projecting a cohesive image of the company to consumers and tailoring marketing campaigns to designated audiences. The right customers might have trouble finding your product if it’s positioned poorly, so don’t overlook this vital piece of the puzzle.
Get the Full Guide and Learn More
Now that you have laid the groundwork, it’s time to shift your focus to a fifth, and possibly most important “P,” Performance. To learn additional strategies for making this work download the entire guide, The 4 P’s of Business Transformation: Revolutionize Your Business for Less, written by Acumatica and provided to you free of charge by your local distribution industry ERP partner, CAL Business Solutions.
