For any company starting out in their chosen sector, keeping track of their operations is normally handled via the use of spreadsheets. But while Microsoft Excel can serve as an excellent stopgap solution when a firm is still in its infancy, there plenty of reasons why it is bad for business in the long run.
As soon as your company begins to expand its customer base and grow its operations accordingly, it’s time to look for a more future-proofed way of doing things. Thankfully, such an option is eminently available in the form of MRP software from Katana. Unsure what MRP is and how it can help your business? Read on to find out more.
The limitations of spreadsheets
Although they can serve a valuable purpose for smaller companies, great companies don’t run on spreadsheets. Why not? Well, for one thing they’re rarely user-friendly, leading to a disgruntled workforce. They’re also different to share across multiple team members and doing so runs the risk of the data being altered or deleted accidentally, thus flushing away your only record of your operations.
Even more frustratingly, they don’t present the information in a way that is conducive to deriving any sort of useful insight from it. When presented with a stark representation of your company’s incomings and outgoings in figures alone, it’s not easy to work out what it all means. Although visualisation tools (like pie charts and bar graphs) can help, they still don’t tell the full story.
What is MRP?
Thankfully, there is a better way of doing things. MRP software, or material requirements planning software to give it its full name, allows you to assimilate all of the raw information connected with your business and store it in one place. This allows you to see, at a glance, which raw materials you have in stock, which will be required for upcoming orders and which need to be replenished.
In fact, the sophisticated software provided by Katana even lets you integrate all of the above, meaning the system will automatically allocate your raw materials to the orders which require them, as they’re placed in real-time. It will even prioritise the use of materials nearing their expiry date and automatically alert you when supplies are running low, meaning you never need to worry about your inventory again.
Making software work for you
In a practical sense, this allows you to delegate the number crunching and bean counting that are tiresome but essentials tasks to a computer, freeing you for more engaging (and more lucrative) endeavours. It also ensures that your company runs the tightest of ships, so that you fulfil all orders and never miss a delivery deadline ever again.
In today’s increasingly competitive business climate, that could be the all-important difference between success and failure. After all, recent research reveals that 84% of consumers would be reluctant to give their custom to a company that had let them down with regard to the last mile of the delivery in the past. Fortunately, with Katana in your corner, you can wave goodbye to missed deadlines at the same time as you bid farewell to spreadsheets.
