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28 PalletCentral • January-February 2023 palletcentral.com which can help identify and address issues quickly, reducing downtime and increasing productivity. Overall, using an ERP system helps pallet makers to streamline their operations and make data-driven decisions to improve their business." Empowering Change Implementing something new systemwide is often fraught with fear and misconceptions and leaves a team to feel ill-equipped or uninformed to take on the task. Information from your ERP provider can help with this. It is important to choose a company that you can communicate well with and rely on for the long haul as you develop your system. Yet, gaining your team's support to tackle the challenge together can mitigate fear as you work together toward common goals. It is key to provide information and knowledge to empower confidence in your team to adopt the changes. "While the biggest challenges to any implementation are always time and money," says Hachtman, "the bigger commitment is the time needed for proper design, set-up, testing, and ultimate implementation. Without true commitment from all involved – from the owner to office staff to production employees – the system will not be utilized to its full potential." "One of the biggest challenges that companies face when implementing new software systems is getting buy-in from middle management," shares Philip Varley, Pallet Connect. "Many managers may be hesitant to adopt new systems, as they do not see the full benefit of the technology. Educating them that cloud-based ERP systems can track the progress of their employees and see the positive impact that the technology is having on their business, can help to build buy-in and support for the system." Any sweeping change to processes and procedures needs to include as many employees as possible, early in the process. "If the changes are coming at people faster than leadership's ability to solve problems and remove roadblocks along the way, the implementation is bound to struggle or fail because people will not see any value in the change," adds Wenner. "is leads your team to gravitate toward workarounds that enable them to get their job done in the short term but may be counterproductive to the implementation." When thinking about software solutions or process changes in general, scalability is also important to evolve with company growth. Everyone agrees that if growth is on your list of goals, whether you are a small, medium or large company, ERP can likely help you do it. "Scalability is a big benefit to ERP," says Rob Zesch, Pallet Insights. "As the business grows, ERP software can be easily scaled to meet the needs of the business without additional infrastructure costs." "I can say without a doubt that despite the challenges, our system has empowered us to grow at the pace that we have, and it has been worth the work," he says. "Software, like any good business system, requires work and discipline to implement and maintain," says Kevan Grinwis, e PalMate Group. "We like to remind everyone that implementation is a process and that those users who are honest about what they want to accomplish, given their available resources, tend to be the most successful. One common misconception is that it will be too difficult to get the right inputs and outputs to provide accurate data that will be usable. Yet, at the end of the day, many businesses are already working much harder to get lesser data from antiquated systems and processes, double fingerprinting information, communicating on multiple platforms, and using systems that they've long since outgrown." Executing the Details To put in place an effective ERP, it is helpful to have an idea of where you are now and where you want to be as a company. Your goals, business processes and procedures, and duties of employees may need to be restructured as you connect systems in your organization. During the process of exploring your options, there are some advantages to becoming a well-oiled and organized business. Something as simple as creating The only thing worse than no data is bad data, that is inaccurate, inconvenient, or inaccessible. – Nick Wenner, President, Pallet Service Crop/Grove Lumber iStock/The best photo for all

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