With the hurdles of growing competition and a slow economy in their midst, many organizations are looking for ways to cut costs, streamline business operations, and improve their bottom line. If business owners are trying to find a way to deal with these challenges over the long term, the smartest investment is to incorporate an ERP system (enterprise resource planning). An ERP system can help your business run efficiently and effectively. For smaller businesses, justification for an ERP system may be hard since often there are high costs upfront and long implementation times. Fortunately through the rise if software as a service (Saas) these concerns of high upfront costs and long implementation time can be bypassed. Additionally small businesses can greatly benefit from SaaS ERP.

What exactly makes an SaaS system different from a normal ERP system? With SaaS ERP, the software vendor hosts, manages, and provides customers access to the software as a service over the Internet. This model offers a wide range of financial and operational benefits for smaller manufacturers and distributors. Some of the benefits include the following:

- Less money required upfront
- Predictable ongoing costs
- Implementation takes less time
- The cost of ownership is lower
- Better reliability
- Improved support
- IT is simpler

Essentially the SaaS ERP system is able to give smaller businesses the functionality and all the benefits in a lower cost and lower maintenance way. In order to avoid high upfront costs, the SaaS ERP customer is requires to pay a subscription fee over a certain length of time rather than buying it outright in the beginning. In addition, implementation is less complicated since there is no hardware to setup or software to install. Additionally, this means a faster return on investment for the small business.

The SaaS ERP is beneficial since it requires no support or maintenance on you end, the vendor does that for you. This eliminates the need to have someone knowledgeable in IT to be monitoring the system closely to make sure it is running. In addition, who better to maintain and support your software than the people who created it?

SaaS ERP is a great solution for smaller organizations who want the benefits of an ERP system without the high investment in a traditional ERP system. You will now have more time to focus on business strategy and other opportunities once the SaaS ERP system is in place.