ERP in logistics or enterprise resource planning, it has now become a boon for the various industries. Talking about the logistics sector, several functionalities provided by the ERP software have made it convenient for the users to handle cumbersome tasks. These functions help in creating sales orders, invoices, purchase order entries, a complete view of the supply chain, vendor portals and a much more. All this helps in reducing the human effort and saves a lot of time and cost.
The major ways in which ERP benefits the logistics sector are:
Inventory management:
As per a research, ERP system increases the speed of the overall working by 23 percent. It helps in managing the inventories on a personalized dashboard with convenient view of orders, sales, and deliveries for a centralized location. It gives a better decision-making ability to the companies with proper analytical understanding. This helps in making accurate predictions about future orders based on the sales trends.
Apart from the sales predictions, the companies also get a hang of the out of stock inventory, inbound orders from suppliers and outbound orders from customers. For all this the user need not necessarily be in from of this computer, this can be handles through a smart phone as well.
Staff management:
ERP is a great tool for work force management as well. It helps in streamlining the process related to payrolls, contracts, attendance records etc. This also allows the users to access the data in case of power failure, natural disaster or security breach. Once we set the ERP module it becomes easy for the management to pull data together into reports. Since the large parts of daily tasks can be automated it saves a lot of time. Any kind of human error like duplication of data or incorrect entries can also be avoided through this.
Better distribution network:
Handling a huge number suppliers, distributors and retailers is difficult. But ERP helps in making the process smoother. It makes the distribution management flow better for the users. The multiple programs gather datasets from multiple sources – in house records, the internet, social media etc. and display information through maps, charts and graphs. This data is further used to handle the delivery of goods from their distribution center and ensure that customers receive their orders on time. They also send live information to the drivers and can also track the location their material through live tracking system.
Enterprise resource planning has now become a necessity for the companies in the logistics sector. It helps in inventory management, betterment of the distribution system, staff management, live tracking of the material, scheduling maintenance, vendor and customer user friendly portals and a lot more.
Logistics industry also faces a very high count of the attrition rate; thus, such a system is important for the freight operators to make the process streamlined. More and more industries as planning to adopt this technology and thus it is predicted that the market for the ERP applications will reach $84.1 billion by 2020.