BUSINESS AND ECONOMY : BY STARTUPS: WILL YOU ADOPT ERP ?

BY ROBIN GHOSH ,

(ECONOMIST AND BUSINESS MENTOR.)

KOLKATA, 30 MARCH 2024:

Startups go through many dilemmas. One such challenge is to decide whether to install ERP solutions in their company?

This problem stems from the fact that you are short of time. You have an idea. You want to get into the market quickly. You want to capture your customers B2B or B2C at the fastest possible time. And time is very important for you.

Another bundle that consumes your valuable work hours are issues of data, security, compliance and so on.

The in-house IT team most of the time is unable to manage the complexity and the volume of data, devices and applications.

Any company that has to grow has only one choice. Induct technology. Whether be it on production, marketing or backend.

Otherwise, your manpower cost will escalate. Systems will not work. Without technology you are in troubled water.

So where are we?

Well, if you are planning to scale up, go to the next level, you have to take enterprise solutions.

Take the case study of Waycool Foods.This company procures fruits, vegetables and dairy products from farmers and manages the supply chain to serve B2B customers.

The company, having been in operation from Chennai and Bangalore for four years, wanted to expand into other states and small towns. You will appreciate that this would generate huge data points and complexity and disruptions.

The company realised that it will be beyond in – house IT team’s capability to handle the case, and therefore, they went live with SAP enterprise solutions.

Another example worth mentioning is the case of PayNext.This is an end to end digital and automated payment solution company.
PayNext provides solutions to Banks and solutions for business with PoS, QR code etc.

Once they diversified into digital services, the existing IT framework could not efficiently handle the load. And PayNext migrated to Oracle Cloud.

This migration enabled PayNext to improve application performance, availability and scalability.

While startups moving towards unicorn realise the gravity of this transition – they feel cost would be a bar, a barricade. This has been a genuine fear among startups.

But the situation has changed. Enterprise solutions companies like Oracle are offering solutions that fits the pockets of small companies.

At present, the choice is : Build in- house solutions or go for experts.

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