How poor ERP support can cost you – and what you can do about it

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are vital for any construction project. They save time and money by streamlining workflows, automating admin, and helping you plan ahead for bottlenecks.

However, if your ERP support is inadequate or fails, it can lead to hidden costs, negatively affect your project, and possibly even make it unviable.

One of the main tasks a good construction ERP system will undertake is ensuring that everyone on the project has clear instructions and knows what they are doing at all times. In contrast, poor support will do the opposite.

Delayed instructions, confusion on site, and a disrupted workflow will follow. Unplanned downtime and productivity losses will result, and that costs you time and money.

You might even see indirect financial costs. A good support system will identify opportunities for efficiency or spot admin tasks that can be automated.

Poor ERP support, on the other hand, will not do that, so you will not even be aware that you are missing out on efficiencies that could save you time and money.

Employee frustration and turnover

Job satisfaction is enhanced by workplaces which operate smoothly and where people can get the job done to the best of their ability. Good support makes this much easier to achieve.

On the other hand, inadequate support can create the opposite conditions on site, and employees can quickly become disillusioned and unproductive.

If that leads to high staff turnover and demotivated workers, you will experience another hidden cost of poor ERP support that can negatively impact your project and business as a whole.

Productivity losses and employee frustration are recipes for a decline in the quality and speed of your work. This will, in turn, lead to client dissatisfaction and damage to your reputation.

Once your reputation is damaged, getting more work in the future is harder, making this one of the costliest hidden consequences that poor ERP support can inflict on your business.

Compliance and legal risks

Finally, poor ERP support can even land you in legal trouble regarding regulatory compliance. Good ERP support can responsibly automate much of the administration involved in legal compliance.

That includes controlling data integrity, data security, audit trails, and other monitoring tasks needed to show that you have been operating legally on your project. If you don’t keep everything up to date, you could face fines and other punishments.

This can potentially be the most significant hidden cost of poor ERP support. Even worse, you might not even realise until it is too late to fix the problem.

The best solution is to choose an ERP provider that offers the highest quality support and backs it up with a deep knowledge of the construction industry.

Strong ERP support like this will allow you to avoid all the hidden costs detailed above and get the following benefits on top:

• Proactive problem resolution

• Personalised customer care

• UK-based support teams

• Customer satisfaction and productive long-term relationships

Choosing a provider with strong ERP support is one of the strongest, most profitable decisions you can make in construction. You will see instant benefits and put a stop to all of the hidden costs that poor ERP support is currently imposing on your business.