Challenges of Small and medium size business

SMEs and their staff can now create their goods more effectively and better thanks to a wide range of automation technologies and techniques. Excellent tools with huge potential include Factory Automation, Design for Manufacturability, and Six Sigma Quality. However, unless they are combined with efficient forecasting, planning, and scheduling processes, none of them will ever reach their full potential. The solution is enterprise resource planning (ERP), which is a natural progression and expansion of manufacturing resource planning.

Big industrial houses proceeded forth on the uncharted and expansive path of ERP adoption towards the end of the 20th century out of necessity rather than by simple choice. Their non-standard, out-of-synch data, misaligned and broken information flow, combined with their crude business processes, were starting to pose a serious obstacle to their expansion.

However, SMEs frequently believe that ERP is better suited for large-scale industries because of its high ownership costs, implementation's complexity, and ensuing maintenance costs (commonly referred to as Big White Elephant). But over the past ten years, as technology has gotten easier to use and more widely accessible, ready-to-use off-the-shelf ERP packages have emerged with shorter implementation times, cloud computing has emerged (with a pay-as-you-use option), requiring a minimal in-house skill set, and the possibility of becoming a leaner and more effective organisation now appears to be a possibility for SMEs.