Truth Behind IT Costs

11th January 2018

No matter what industry you are in, one thing remains consistent: cost saving is essential. This is particularly true in the case of retailers who are having to find new and unique ways to not only attract and retain new customers but also to cut costs in the meantime (without sacrificing quality, of course).

IT and technology can be expensive but they can also be an opportunity for improvement and to save money in overhead and operating expenses. In this post, we look at the biggest costs that technology can create in your business and how a single solution can help to eliminate them.

Direct costs:
Though it may be obvious, having many different software means that you have to pay for all of it. For those that require an ongoing subscription, this can quickly become a major expense that shows no signs of diminishing.

Indirect costs:
If you have lots of different technologies going on to make sure that your business continues to operate smoothly, you can expect to spend a fair portion of your revenue in maintaining, upgrading, and integrating these different solutions to make sure they keep doing their jobs.

Opportunity costs:
Or missed opportunities. When your employees are spending time switching between applications or your IT team is constantly having to fix or upgrade things, it’s not only their cost of time, but your cost of agility. A disparate business is not one that is able to quickly respond to opportunities and demands, so costs can continue to be felt far beyond the platform in itself.

To eliminate all these costly IT expenses, many businesses find relief with an ERP. Broadly speaking, as an ERP can take all of your major operations, bring them together in a centralized location, automate some, and track it all. This leads to better daily processes and clearer long-term planning – which means major cost savings today and far into the future across your business.

In terms of IT expenses in specific, having an ERP can be helpful in a number of ways. Some of the most important ones include:

Visibility: if you know what is going on with all of your different technical processes, be it managing your ecommerce, mobile app, or ensuring that your POS is online, you can intercept any problem before it creates issues and also see everything that is going on in a single place. One place to monitor requires less resources.

Standardization: it’s well known that having consistent and standard processes that are replicable save both time and money. An ERP can help your IT team in this sense by ensuring that this standardization is applied and maintained, often automatically.

Centralization: We’ve mentioned this before, but it is so hugely important that it is worth mentioning again. Having everything together means easier maintenance for IT and easier usage for your general employees.

Having all of these things together in a single platform can greatly improve your efficiency, leading to lower costs across the board, but particularly in regard to IT expenses. Even though upgrading to an ERP can feel like a huge undertaking, the end results will make the ROI very much worth it in the end.

Another major cost that is saved by having an ERP is that it is a single vendor and partner to work with. This means that you can have the same point of contact in an ongoing manner to not only help simplify your transition but to also help bring all of your employees up to speed on the usability and maintenance (for the IT guys) from the start.

If you’re interested in getting started on your path to ERP IT cost- saving happiness, make sure to write to us marketing@levtechconsulting.com to learn how we can help you today.