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The rapid growth of your manufacturing SME may be called a “good problem to have.”

But the challenges of growth may also lead to a near-death, or even fatal, experience for your business if they’re not approached with the right skills and tools.

Fortunately, your growth, like that of babies becoming adults, has recognizable stages of development with common and foreseeable problems in finance, management, and systems.

When business owners understand ahead of time what challenges to expect as their business grows, they’ll be much better equipped to overcome those challenges.

To run your business sustainably, information is vital.

And not just any information. It must be reliably right, and available at the right time.

When your information strays from these parameters - when it’s less accurate, less timely - you increase the risk and cost of your data-supported decisions. In a growing business, where a fast-increasing number of components is moving in different locations, the consequences of these decisions increase accordingly.

Food and beverage businesses that want to stay healthy for the long term need to monitor their vital signs in real time.

When you’re shortlisting ERPs for your food processing business, what key features should you look for?

Your team, of course, is consulting your list of requirements. But remember, as a food processing business, you have special operational requirements. So you want to make sure your shortlisted ERPs have the particular features essential to supporting and simplifying growth in your industry.

Your company president sees the cloud ERP implementation you propose as a cost, an expenditure that will reduce the SME’s bottom line.

But as the financial leader of the company, you clearly see it as an investment, an outlay of capital and labour whose ROI will significantly increase the productivity and value of the business.

So to move the company forward, you need to build a business case for your boss. The following discussion offers a broad outline of the areas to look at in your business when building your case.

Your small business is growing nicely.

To support your growth, you’re considering simply upgrading the accounting system with which you’re managing your business, e.g., QuickBooks, Xero, or Sage 50cloud.

You’ve heard, of course, of the business benefits of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. You understand that ERP systems deliver a lot of powerful functionality — which you would love — but they seem a bit pricey and involve a months-long implementation process.