Cloud 9 ERP Solutions Blog

As always, the holiday season left retailers scrambling to keep up. Even in the midst of a pandemic, lockdowns, and recession, money flowed in, beating the -1.4 percent month to month sales projection and resulting in 2.9 percent more sales than December 2019 and a 4.0 percent over Q4 2019.

2020 is over, but the challenges that go alongside it remain. After the wild ride that was the last year, many are wondering whether the coming year is going to be better, worse, or more of the same.

One of the greatest selling points of ERP is its ability to evolve with your business. In fact, one of the greatest ways to reduce risk is to start small and add more as needed. The right partner is going to support you long after go-live. If you're looking to flatten the learning curve and ramp up the benefits, learn more about FastTrack and Cloud 9 ERP Solutions.

Lockdowns aren’t going away, and employees are getting more and more used to working from home. But as we discussed in the past couple months, many companies took a temporary approach to setting employees up for remote work. Processes were likely disjointed and people likely are looking for something bigger and better. To get there, however, you need to look for ways to empower them, rather than simply provide access.

After a huge 2019, 2020 was a shock to the system. No one expected this to be one of the toughest years in recent memory, but here we are. But what does 2021 hold? How are companies in retail, distribution, manufacturing, AV, and more planning to survive and thrive?

Wholesale distributors often stock and sell thousands of inventory items. These items may be similar, with only slight variations in size, style, or other attributes for each family of products. But your customers don’t care about the other items, they work with you to get the items they need.

Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy, edit and paste… Only to find out… something is wrong. Guess who's in for a long night? All too often, business leaders come to us with this challenge. After taking all the right steps—offering a great product/service, hiring the right people, and providing ample pay, benefits, and perks—they realize that something is amiss.

Remember when working from home was a luxury? Remember when salespeople could simply drop by on a Friday afternoon to update the CRM? Remember when you could survive on an occasional email about the status of a facility? Business no longer works like that. In fact, it hasn’t worked like that for years.

Though it may still be two months away and you still have a lot to get through before the end of the year—HR departments still have to lead employees through insurance enrollment, retail companies and their value chain partners need to handle holiday rushes, and many still are yet to file PPP loan forgiveness—the year-end close is rapidly approaching.

So many ERP options, so many moving parts in each product, and so much flexibility in configuration, many organizations seeking out cloud ERP software suffer from paralysis by analysis. This is only made harder when each vendor seems to have an endless cavalcade of partners who can put the solution into use. Too often, companies will get almost everything they need from a product—only to find out that their partner can’t put it into action. With timeframes measured in years or decades, ERP is all about getting long-term value from a solution.