Business Management Blog

The opening up of the global economy has led to a significant development of the small and mid market segment. This growth has been across industry verticals in the manufacturing, retail, services, pharma, telecommunication and information technology sectors. This growth and along with that the new competition and quest for enhancing total market share has led the companies to re-look at its processes and procedures. Now, companies are trying to utilize their all resources effectively to make business more efficient and effective. 

In this case, companies are looking for enterprise software and other quality techniques. Companies are implementing different practices to utilize their resource effectively viz. business process re-engineering (BPR), six sigma, enterprise resource planning (ERP), just in time (JIT), Kanban and other quality improvement systems. All these techniques are good and helping companies to provide better quality and lower cost, which is the key factor to sustain a business in this competitive environment.

The implementation of ERP systems has helped small and mid sized companies, significantly improve their business metrics by process optimization, improving the entire supply chain process, better inventory control, better reporting to take decisions, integration across functionalities and increasing transparency across the company. Purchase department can see the sales department data, Sales department can see inventory data, and top management can see any data on a click of single button.

The introduction of ERP in any company has also helped it move up the value chain in term of market credibility and building the confidence of its customer, stakeholders and vendors. Most of the small and mid sized companies were living with in-house developed applications which are non-integrated and on disparate technology architectures. This has resulted in running with redundant technology, loss of support, non availability or less availability of critical information at the right time resulting in overall business loss. 

The key drivers of introducing an ERP system in a small and midsized company are introduction of industry standard processes which are already embedded in the application, adopting integration across business functions leading to better transparency, access to real time information, analytical reporting for business decisions and adopting state of the art technology. Another key reason for implementing an ERP vis-à-vis a tailor-made development is the speed of implementation resulting in achieving a quicker return on investment (ROI). 

Read Benefits of ERP and Definition of ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning system. 

Bum Marketing has become a popular term among affiliate marketers. It is very easy and cost free promotion method for affiliate products. But all your efforts will be fruitless if you have not selected the right niche keyword. Selecting the right niche keyword is one of the most difficult tasks for most Bum Marketers. The keyword should be profitable but doesn’t have a ton of competition. 

One of the main reasons behind the failure of the bum marketers in selecting the niche keyword is the lack of understanding for this term. They are not exactly sure what a niche is. Before going in depth about niche marketing I would like to make you familiar with the potential of the niche marketing. There are many keywords that don’t have much competition but have good traffic and targeted visitors. This market is comparatively easy to catch. 

In other words we can say a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

Let’s take an easy example. The term ‘exercise’ is not a niche but the term ‘lower back exercises’ could be a niche. But is it profitable? You bet, but it also had a modest amount of competition.

The goal of the Bum Marketing is to find a niche where there isn’t a lot of competition, but there are enough buyers to make it profitable. If there are lot of competitors around, it will be very difficult for your product page to come up in the search result. But on the other hand, if there aren’t enough people actively searching for a product similar to the one you’re promoting, as a result you’re not going to make many sales and earn much in the way of income. So you need to make a proper balance of the two.

So where do you find a niche that has enough buyers but not enough sellers? 

Go to the free version of Wordtracker keyword tool and look up the main keyword of the niche that you want to tackle, say ‘music’ and then take a look at all the related keywords to that niche. Ultimately, what you're going to find is that as you go down the list, there are going to be keywords like ‘children's music’ that don't have a lot of daily searches but also don't have a lot of competition. How do you find this out? That is the next step.

The next step is to go to Google and look up the keyword phrase that you've found to see how many competing sites there are. If you find that there are less than 50,000 competing sites for that keyword phrase, then you have most likely found a niche that you can crack.

You can also find a niche keyword from goarticles.com – one of the popular article directories. Look the most viewed articles and you will get an idea what people are interested to read. Then follow the same procedure discussed above to confirm that the selected topic is the niche topic.

Some other places you may get ideas of niche keywords include online forums, television, newspapers, advertisements, conversations, wanted ads and so on. All in all, simply keep your eyes and ears open and a pen and paper handy, and you’ll come across more niches than you could ever utilize. 

If you too are serious about learning this Advanced Bum Marketing Techniques, be sure to grab a copy of this Advanced Bum Marketing Tactics & Techniques Report.

Enterprise resource planning software requires full support from top management at the time of implementation, selection, customization etc. During implementation, organization may require to change some business processes to meet the software standards, which are industry specific standards. Business process can not be change without top management support.  It is quite necessary to change some of the business process. It helps in implementation. If you are not willing to change any business process you may go for customization.  But, customization is costly and not good for any ERP project. Little bit customization is ok, but too much customization will affect your ERP project. It will increase your project duration, budget, and increase the risk of implementation failure. 

It will be better to change some business process if possible, rather than customizing. When an organization changes their some business processes, change management expert is required. People resist change. Change management expert will guide how to change, and explain the benefits of changes to the employees.  ERP system helps in changing the process; it is designed and developed by adopting best practices of specific industries.

Internal Change Management: An ERP implementation entails changes in business processes and reporting structure. Addressing this paradigm move is a process that the organization has to go through. This will help in achieving the acceptability of the ERP users.  

Employees: Employees are the key players in any ERP implementation. The employees of the organization will be in the capacity of process owners, software users and administrators of the ERP software. The main challenge of an ERP implementation is to achieve the acceptability of the system to the employees and for them to perceive the benefits to the organization and to their way of working. 

Process: One of the returns on investment (ROI) is adopting business best practices by virtue of an ERP system. Little change in the business process will reduce the chance of implementation failure. Minimum or no customization is very good for any ERP implementation. These processes impact the effectiveness levels to be attained by the organization. 

Technology: Implementation of ERP system automatically entails adopting technology that will address easy scalability, eradication of distance and upgradeability to latest technologies. 

Organization Commitment: ERP system has to be viewed as a process enabler rather than a software package to be installed and run. The implementation process is a journey towards achieving organizational effectiveness. This demands a very strong commitment of the top management throughout the entire process. 

Read information on ERP Implementation Strategy and fundamentals of ERP. Know more on SAP Business One Implementation.