Why would a relatively small business choose to make the significant investment needed to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system? There are many answers to that question, including streamlining engineering processes, improved inventory management, better costing knowledge, and more efficient financial reporting. This information is often extremely difficult to extract from legacy manual systems that rarely talk to each other.
Selecting the right ERP system is just the first step. Management commitment is needed for the software, training and implementation time required. The following shows how implementing an ERP system allowed Butler Automatic to reduce its lead times for building machines, as well as improve its financial reporting.