In the past, the ERP midmarket customer tended to have to wait their turn — sometimes a long turn — in order to reap the key ERP benefits of technology. Previously, large businesses had the money and the people-power to transform advances pretty quickly; they could make investments where needed, while midmarket customers waited until ERP technologies became more widely available and thus affordable. Today’s quick changes to technology development and agile implementations have upended the status quo; now midmarket companies can grab tech and IT changes that benefit them soon after they’re available.
That’s good for business because it helps midmarket companies grow when they need to scale up their employee headcount or production capacity. However, this sometimes results in doing without upgraded technology to save costs. With a renewed focus on the midmarket, ERP providers need to scale their systems to accommodate the midtier budgets. Growth and evolution are both the cause and effect of an ERP implementation. Companies grow and need new systems and licenses. New systems provide the ability to scale and move to the next stage of the growth lifecycle.
This also means that technology companies would be remiss if they avoided marketing and scaling their offerings to midmarket firms; they’re missing a pretty lucrative set of potential customers. We remember an instance, years ago, of walking up to SAP at a trade show and as soon as they found out we were a mid-market company, they summarily dismissed us. Today, that just wouldn’t happen as the large tier ERP cannot ignore smaller customers.
Significant ERP advantages that the midmarket seek include improved reporting and forecasting, legal and regulatory compliance, and most importantly, improved customer relationships. Besides reduced costs, technology vendors need to focus on advancing the value they bring to the midmarket clientele and continue to align with important improvements that their software tools bring to a midmarket customer.
How does all this play together to benefit midmarket companies with ERP software? This graphic lays out the current key ERP benefits for the mid-tier firm.
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Via Salesforce