Industrial SME: choosing your ERP software

Choosing an ERP software for your small or medium-sized business

Definitions

An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a software that enables computerized management of your industrial company. This tool aims to help you optimize your factory through productivity gains and more effective management of your activity. In other words, it is a kind of Swiss army knife for your business whose primary purpose is to ensure your growth. An SME (Small or Medium-sized Enterprise), according to French statistics institute INSEE, refers to a company generating annual revenue of less than 50 million euros and employing fewer than 250 employees. Each SME has its own specificities linked to its activity, its organization, and its processes, which distinguishes it from others: thus, the ERP choice must respond to very precise needs linked to the trade and issues specific to each industrial SME. The purpose of an ERP software is to have a positive impact on your daily productivity and to improve the performance of your SME, by acting on production management, commercial management, or even accounting management.

Today, every company can choose between various existing solutions on the market, some very well known, others a little less so. The important thing is to choose an ERP that is adapted to you and that will allow you to reach (or even exceed) your growth objectives!

"The ERP is a central tool in companies' Information Systems. This management software is synonymous with performance, cost and resource optimization." — Actualité Informatique - actualiteinformatique.fr

What is an ERP software?

ERP, CPMS, the heart of your factory

The objective of an ERP (sometimes called CPMS - Computer-aided Production Management System, or IMS - Integrated Management Software) is to allow you to improve your productivity by effectively managing all of your processes by bringing all of your data together within a common database and making it intelligible and accessible in real time to all collaborators, thereby facilitating management and optimization.

An ERP sits at the heart of your activity and has numerous features:

• Production and process management
• Accounting management
• HR management
• Inventory management
• Business Intelligence
• CRM
• And others...

These features are traditionally organized into modules that can be chosen to add to one's solution, which de facto generates additional costs and implementation (and often optimization) timelines.

The types of ERPs that exist on the market

Custom ERP: this is an ERP solution created directly by the company itself, which generates fairly significant setup costs, but allows for software adapted to its activity and its issues.

Open source ERP: this is freely accessible software that can therefore be shaped in your image, but on the condition of having the IT skills necessary for its customization and implementation.

All-in-one ERP: this is a complete solution including in particular a CPMS (Computer-aided Production Management System) software and a module enabling customer relationship management (CRM).

Proprietary ERP: this is software and support offered by ERP giants such as SAP or SAGE, whose drawbacks include in particular the complexity of use requiring support. Traditionally, this type of ERP is oriented toward mid-sized companies of more than 250 employees and generates on one hand high development costs and on the other hand customization timelines that are too significant for an SME.

SaaS ERP: offered in the form of a turnkey solution, sometimes based on no-code technology and which fits into the best-of-breed logic.

The best-of-breed ERP: the optimal ERP for an industrial SME

A best-of-breed ERP (which is also SaaS) focuses on a key feature, with the aim of offering an excellent solution in a given domain, versus an average solution that touches on everything. Best-of-breed software focuses on a particular part of the company, for example Hubspot on the CRM side, Pennylane for finance, or Shopify on e-commerce, and fits together very easily. We have dedicated an entire article to explain this approach and how it fits into the life of a French industrial SME.

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