How small manufacturing CEOs can contain cloud risks

Many CEOs and owners of small- and mid-size manufacturing operations are guardians of family-grown businesses, keeping a close eye on day-to-day operations while trying to control costs and seeing where the future holds opportunities and threats for them and the working families that help their enterprise grow.

Technology that speeds estimating time and accuracy, improves workflow, and brings more profit and satisfied customers is always a part of the CEO’s or owner’s field of vision. However, getting to those benefits can be painful. While large manufacturing enterprises have big budgets to throw at fancy new enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems, small- and mid-size manufacturing companies must carefully choose their shots.

What is the cost of installing the new technology? How long will it take? How much effort will my team have to expend to make the software work the way we want? What if the benefits don’t materialize? And what else could I have spent money on while waiting for all these technology benefits to materialize? The technology-expenditure risks to manufacturing companies with slim margins are considerable.

Enter the cloud – the great equalizer between smaller enterprises and larger competitors with traditionally bigger IT budgets. One of the biggest balms to a small company’s concerns is that cloud-based services offer them a less costly path to the functionality they need – there is no new hardware to buy and no long implementation time. Instead, you can be up and running in a few days. Next is the issue of how the new software – including training and configuration – will impact the team, its productivity, and the balance sheet.

The good news: Today’s cloud solutions can be more easily tailored to the way your enterprise works. This lessens the financial exposure of having to invest money and time – beyond the costs of purchase and initial implementation – to customize the solution to do what you want. Upgrades happen automatically; there are no teams of IT folks to schedule for maintenance, incurring costly interruptions and delays.

All small manufacturing organizations want the benefits of new technology that lets their team see and control the manufacturing process better – from the bid to the invoice. However, until now, cost risk has been a major impediment.

Today there are options that require no software installation or servers to purchase and support. Tailoring the cloud to your needs is here.

KeyedIn Solutions
www.keyedin.com

About the author: Ralf Suerken is the executive vice president, sales and marketing at KeyedIn Solutions. He can be reached at 952-835-1041 or rsuerken@keyedin.com