When Your ERP Isn't Doing What Your Organization Needs
Your organization invested in an ERP system to run the business: finance, payroll, purchasing, projects and more. But somewhere along the way, it stopped keeping up. Teams work around it with spreadsheets. Month-end reporting means hours of exporting, copying and reconciling. And when leadership or a client asks a straightforward question, a trustworthy answer takes days instead of minutes.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
A common problem in every industry
ERP systems are built to serve thousands of organizations, so they handle the common case well. But no two organizations work exactly the same way, and the gaps tend to show up in the same places:
- Processes the ERP doesn’t fit. When the system doesn’t match how your people actually work, they fall back on manual entry, side spreadsheets and duplicate data.
- Reporting for internal planning. Leadership and finance need a clear, current picture of the business. When the data is spread across modules or across more than one system, someone has to pull it together by hand, and by the time the report is ready, it’s already out of date.
- Reporting for your clients. Clients expect accurate, timely reporting in the form they need. Standard ERP reports rarely match, so your team rebuilds them manually, period after period.
- Systems that don’t talk to each other. Time tracking, HR, client systems and other applications sit beside the ERP instead of being connected to it.
We’ve seen these challenges in healthcare, skilled nursing, construction and engineering, and IT organizations. The industry changes the details, not the problem.
The usual answer: replace or upgrade the ERP
The typical response is a major ERP upgrade or a full replacement. Those projects are expensive, take a long time, and disrupt the people who rely on the system every day. And even a new ERP is still built for the common case, so the same gaps can reappear on the other side.
A better approach: build on what you already have
Often the better answer is to let your ERP keep doing what it does well, and build targeted solutions around it for what it doesn’t. That’s what Pathagility’s Development and Integration Services are for:
- ERP Extensions: purpose-built extensions that add the capabilities your core systems are missing, without costly upgrades or replacements.
- Custom Apps: web-based applications designed around how your people actually work.
- Integration Projects: connecting your ERP with your other systems and your clients’ systems, so data flows where it needs to without re-keying.
- Reporting & Analytics: reporting and dashboards that bring your data together into a clear, consistent picture for leadership, finance and clients.
- AI Development: AI-enabled solutions and intelligent automation that turn your data into action.
We don’t start from scratch
Custom software has a reputation for being slow and costly, often because every project starts from a blank page. Ours don’t. Pathagility has a common framework that we’ve built and refined across projects, so we can hit the ground running on each client’s use case. Instead of rebuilding the same foundations every time, our time, and your budget, go to what’s unique about your organization.
A supported solution, not a one-off project
What we build doesn’t end at delivery. It’s a supported solution: Pathagility stays with you to maintain it, support your team and adapt it as your needs change. You won’t be left with an application that no one can support when something changes.
Faster and more cost-effective than an ERP replacement
Put it together, and the difference adds up. A solution scoped to your specific problem, built on a proven framework and integrated with the systems you already have, takes less time and costs less than a large ERP replacement or upgrade, with far less disruption to your people along the way.
Real projects, real results
Here are a few of the projects we’ve delivered:
- Time tracking for a nursing home group. Staff time meant a lot of manual entry. We built a web-based time-tracking application integrated with the group’s ERP. Management now tracks staffing and hourly rates without manual manipulation, finance gets better reporting from the ERP, and it was more cost-effective than upgrading or replacing the ERP.
- Unified financial reporting for a construction and engineering company. The Controller manually manipulated data from two ERP systems to produce financial reports. Our custom reporting application brings both together, giving leadership and finance more real-time reporting, again more cost-effectively than an ERP upgrade or replacement.
- Payroll software for a healthcare services company. Custom payroll software integrated with the company’s time-tracking, HR and financial systems, delivered on budget and ahead of schedule, with payroll processing time cut by 40%.
- Modernizing an unsupported core application. A complete modernization of a dated application, including its integration with the organization’s largest client, a Fortune 100 company, now backed by Pathagility’s support.
See all of our custom project examples
Let’s talk about your ERP challenge
If your ERP isn’t doing what your organization needs, or your reporting isn’t giving leadership and clients the answers they need, we’d like to hear about it. Tell us about your use case, and we’ll show you how we can help.