My professional experience includes working in a rice industry. Typical functional areas of our industry included Purchase, Production and Operations, Inventory and Warehouse Management, Sales and Marketing. Each of these process had to be started simultaneously. Procurement began with buying paddy as raw material from the suppliers. Then accounts payable will be recorded. Once paddy is processed to rice, it will be stored in the warehouse for transportation. Now as soon as we have orders from the end customers, we deliver the goods according to order, and record the accounts receivables.
I feel it is very overwhelming to head all these business process from procurement to selling of goods by single person. This was even one of the main reason why this startup had failed. Therefore, after listening to my first class of ERP, I understand that apart from having a good idea, it is also very vital to have a effective execution strategy. So compartmentalizing and setting up a particular workforce to work on each of these process will allow them to run efficiently. Complementing these will be the integration of process through ERP systems by breaking the Silo effect between the process to allow running of the entire workflow efficiently and effectively.