Companies in the digital economy are only as good as their tech stack. Your software capabilities give you an edge over your competitors, so it’s not surprising that you feel the constant stress to upgrade or change business-critical systems like your ERP ecommerce platforms.
But making any changes to either of these systems is not something you should do lightly.
Your accounting, shipping, warehousing, and other teams live in your ERP every day to keep track of orders, contact suppliers, and retrieve payment for services or products.
At the same time, your marketing and sales teams are dependent on the ecommerce platform to help them test messaging, generate fresh leads, nurture and upsell current customers, and convert prospects into paying buyers.
While these simple explanations of who uses your systems barely scratch the surface of what your ERP ecommerce platforms can do, it’s easy to see how any disruptions could anger team members, ruin business processes, and potentially bring your business to a screeching halt.
No one wants to see any of that happen, which is why you need to strategize on when and how to implement changes. You can do that by leveraging the right investment strategies that achieve business goals and cause the least amount of disruptions to your business.
How to Get the Most ROI from Investing in Your ERP Ecommerce Platforms
When it comes to investments in either commercial off-the-shelf or custom software development for your ERP ecommerce platforms, you can determine your ROI with the following formula.
ROI = Business Value/Technology Solution
In other words, before investing, you should ensure that the business value you hope to get out of a technology solution meets the return on investment (business goals) requirements you want to accomplish.
But what is “business value?”
Think of business value as what you get out of solving a business challenge. For instance, imagine your business faces issues with managing inventory, including miscounts of items and a high rate of pulling errors. To solve this challenge, you invest in custom software development to upgrade your inventory management software. The potential business value could include increased awareness of accurate inventory numbers and significantly fewer errors.
Consider your own business challenges. For example, some of the biggest business challenges today for ecommerce companies include:
- Competing with other suppliers that have more advanced technology
- Streamlining business processes to improve order fulfillment
- Managing supply chain problems
- Providing customers with top-notch service in the digital marketplace
After you identify your specific business challenges, ask yourself how solving those challenges could deliver value. Be specific with your answer to align that value with a reasonable business goal that has measurable results.
For example, let’s say that you faced the challenge of marketplace competition. You want to be more competitive, and solving this business challenge could get you a better position in the marketplace, allowing you to reach a wider group of potential customers and increase revenue. Therefore, you choose to invest in advanced technology for your ecommerce platform to compete and outdo your competitors
Plugging this example information into our previous equation may look something like the following:
4 Investment Strategies for ERP Ecommerce Upgrades & Maintenance
After nearly 2 decades of serving our customers and providing custom software solutions for ERP ecommerce platforms, we’ve heard a wide range of concerns and questions on how to invest and implement solutions. While every business has unique challenges, we have noticed some commonalities related to the problems our partners have faced and the types of business value they want to get out of their investments.
At AltSource, we’re not a transactional vendor. We’re a business partner, so we take a holistic approach with all our partners and prospects to help them find the best solutions for their current and long-term business goals, even if that solution has nothing to do with us.
Our desire to help ecommerce business leaders make sound decisions inspired us to put this article series together to help you better understand the pros and cons of different technology investment strategies, and the ROI you can expect from implementing these strategies.
Over the next several weeks, we will be releasing a series of articles addressing the four investment strategies for ERP ecommerce platforms that we have seen work best for our customers.
Each strategy is presented in the form of a question, asking whether you should choose one option or another:
- Keep legacy ERP systems or buy something new?
- Best-in-class software or all-in-one solutions?
- Use a “Big Bang” spending strategy or go for incremental growth?
- Pick off-the-shelf solutions or invest in custom software development?
Want All of These ERP Ecommerce Investment Strategies?
After the series is published, we plan to combine all the info into an e-book. Stay tuned to find out how you can download your free copy.
By the way, if you’ve got questions about anything related to ERPs and ecommerce platforms, reach out to our team members today: sales@altsourcesoftware.com.
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