Streamline operations
No matter where you create, manufacture, and deliver products, the need for integrated operations is always inherent in manufacturing. Using the intellectual structure originally cultivated by Leonard E. Reed in the early 80's, consider an American company offering the simplest of all static "products"; A yellow number two pencil.
In today's case, the final product often still involves interactions between linear supply chains that span the globe, from wood delivered on the Pacific coast of the United States to graphite from South America to rubber materials produced in East Asia. However, in addition to these core components, today's manufacturing environment often contains other localized dependencies called business "notches" that provide further home-level support for each secondary pencil producer.
Given that the global interest today is to make "something" in one country and then sell that product elsewhere in real-time, in the past, this coordinated honeycomb required a great deal of intellectual, operational, and financial "sweat" to ensure that raw materials always arrived at the right place at the right time. However, with today's ERP systems, this set of headaches has been alleviated, and in some cases eliminated; Because ERP platforms allow everyone in the production chain, big or small, to have the necessary conversations and interactions in a common digital game environment.
Increased productivity
In the same way that ERP systems deliver enhanced operational value in terms of strategy and tactics, business productivity has experienced similar advancements. For example, consider a production line in the textile industry that involves extensive raw fabrics, dye batches, color curing requirements, QA validation, final packaging requirements, and time-sensitive distribution processes.
In the past, each of these core production steps had to be manually integrated and managed, often involving paper-based scheduling processes that were error-prone and difficult to handle daily. Today, however, a relatively "simple" ERP platform installed in the cloud allows all of these processes and many more to interoperate in parallel, allowing the constellation of moving parts to be viewed and responded to in real-time.
The result is that the entire process is faster to manage and less volatile because production challenges can be resolved upstream, long before shop floor gridlock affects revenue productivity downstream.
Information security
This last benefit is perhaps the most critical of all ERP values, as today's manufacturing processes are highly threatened by bad actors that can force businesses to their knees. As an inherent advantage, cloud-based ERP developers have been at the forefront of information security, especially with multi-channel network providers such as AWS. This means that regardless of your business 'threat' level, vulnerability, and information density, there will always be someone 'present' to ensure the security of your operations.