Why your CFO’s input is crucial when choosing an ERP system

As a CFO, you’re constantly searching for that single source of truth about the financial situation in your organization. You know that if your financial systems aren’t connected to your production, procurement, or logistic processes, how can you provide real-time business intelligence for fast decision-making for your company? 

Don’t waste time collecting data that’s already out of date.

The objective of a digital transformation is to obtain a single source of truth, and finding the right ERP system is key to obtaining that true business-critical information. As a CFO, you will most likely benefit from a new, effective ERP solution since everything a company does ultimately flows to the bottom line. It takes a lot of resources and time to collect, compile and report relevant data from multiple systems. In the end, the financial department must collect data and prepare financial reports.

When your systems aren’t integrated and can’t report data in real-time, that becomes a barrier to fast decision-making. When finance and operation are tied together, you get transparency into the operational KPIs driving your financial indicators. As a CFO, you can quickly dive into relevant data when you need to identify the root causes of financial issues, allowing you to be more hands-on with your business challenges.

Looking beyond the numbers: Elevating the CFO as a strategic partner

The goal for the CFO of any business should be to move away from the role of a numbers cruncher and more towards being a strategic asset for the company. As a rule, it’s the financial department’s responsibility to serve the executive team with data and information about the state of affairs on a daily basis. Still, the time spent on this task can and needs to be managed wisely. 

As the financial leader, there are valuable insights you need to provide the executive team for them to be able to steer the ship, and financial resources should not be used to collect data. Here, automation of financial reporting can play a crucial role, eliminating many of the time-consuming and mundane processes required with manual accounting. By automating financial reporting, you also have the potential to diminish errors prone to human intervention and streamline the reporting process. Thus, with an effective integrated ERP system, you can automate many repetitive tasks and free up space to focus on strategic business decisions.

The real cost of an ERP system 

As a CFO, you'll be interested in and often asked to review the cost and return on an ERP investment, and here are two major aspects that are important to consider before deciding on a system:

• What are you actually paying for on a monthly basis?
• How long will it take before the version you buy needs to be upgraded, and what will that cost you?

Many system providers advertise with a low monthly cost per user, but what is often not clear are the costs associated with start-up fees, licenses, hardware, maintenance cost, and internal IT resources each month to support the system: The expenses pile up. 

Therefore, when considering an on-premise system, many often forget that a company has to maintain the IT infrastructure and competence requirements for in-house IT experts to follow up on the system. Whereas a Software-as-a-Service deployment model may have a higher monthly cost per user, there are no requirements for licenses, and the system is delivered via the cloud, so there are no hardware requirements. The overall maintenance is included, meaning the final price is often much lower. 

Another big advantage that is music to any CFO’s ears is that with a SaaS solution, there is no build-up of future technical debt: Instead of straining your organization each time you change your ERP system every five or so years, there is no system version with a SaaS solution - there is only today's version. New releases are regularly updated, meaning you'll always work in the latest system version.

Read more about which questions you need to think about when evaluating different ERP deployment models.

Why RamBase?

RamBase is a cloud-based ERP solution that helps businesses within manufacturing and distribution gain control over their entire value chain, from sales to production to delivery. Built on a future-proof platform, RamBase is a Software-as-a-Service solution with rich industry features and a flexible subscription model.  Delivered by certified partners with extensive industry knowledge, we are eager to talk with you about how RamBase can be a perfect fit for your business.