Small Business Meet The Cloud: Cloud Business Applications are promoted to be the right choice for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB / SME), is this true and why?
In the below article you will learn how Small Business Meet The Cloud, and the truth about the total cost of ownership for implementing business application and the reason why cloud business applications are the right choice for several small and medium companies.
Business Applications cost had been a dilemma for small businesses, if they will be able to carry the cost of implementing and running business applications or not? For many years it had been known that only big companies can implement business automation applications like ERP and CRM, because of its complexity and its required technical knowledge it and its long time of implementation, so it reflect a huge cost.
These factors of knowledge and time has a very huge cost for small companies considering the low capacity number of employees, so these automation projects cannot be small companies priority as the small number of employees usually have many things to do in their small businesses.
So, the question that may jump to your mind now, are there any benefits from implementing business applications like ERP and CRM for small business? And are they will be able to afford the cost?
The straightforward answer to this question is YES, small businesses will get several benefits from implementing business applications like ERP and CRM.
Some reasons will be listed in the below points:
The power of knowledge
Small businesses can act differently if they know their areas of losses and take several actions to reduce these losses, so they can improve their performance.
Increase sales by spotting the lost opportunities
Small Businesses doesn’t recognise the lost sales opportunities because they don’t have any tracking for their leads and opportunities or marketing activities, so spotting the lost opportunities and take the required actions to enhance sales process can result of more sales and more profit.
Reduce indirect losses
Small businesses have several indirect losses like inventory losses because of the delay or reorder level of small amounts with high shipping cost, currency exchange rates losses, product cost losses…etc. although the indirect losses can affect the business growth and performance, small businesses are not recognising these losses as they were unable to track these losses or know about its existence, so reduce indirect losses can result of huge cost saving for small businesses and direct this saving to fund other activities inside the organisation.
Implementing Business Applications in small business
The problem in implementing business applications in small business usually is the license cost and cost of implementation, it used to be huge with traditional systems, so small businesses cannot carry such a huge cost and considered a burden, although it becomes not the case with the cloud applications.
Implementing Cloud Business Applications
How Small Business Meet The Cloud?: Considering all the previous point, small businesses is mostly preferring the cloud business application because of the below points:
Low cost of entry
Implementing cloud business application does not require a huge investment in the beginning, as it eliminates cost of hardware servers, licenses and has short time to implement, so it is considered like a normal expense as employees’ salaries with simple monthly payment.
Time of Implementation
Cloud business applications have very short time for implementation compared to the traditional systems, so small businesses can start using the application immediately and feel the impact of implementation without huge time or resources investment.
Grow any Time
With cloud business applications, small businesses can grow the number of users and open new branches anytime on the same system without the need of extra investment or extra waiting time.
Use any time any where
Small businesses will have the benefit of using the could business applications anytime from anywhere using any device connected to the internet with full security, without any extra cost for the network like secure VPN.
Stay up to date and fully covered
Using cloud applications, small businesses can guaranty staying up to date with the latest technology, with extra business application features developed everyday by the cloud application provider and technology upgrades and updates with full technical support from the cloud application provider, without any extra cost or burden on the small business.
Conclusion
Small Business Meet The Cloud:
Small businesses can grow their businesses faster and enhance its performance by spotting lost sales opportunities, plus saving a huge cost from resources dissipation by using cloud business applications with minimal upfront investment and fast implementation time, with full cloud provider continuous support.
For more information about cloud business applications, you may check iXERP (Cloud ERP for SME)