POS doesn’t mean ERP. But, the fact is- they are better together.
Point of Sale vs Enterprise Resource Planning
As the definition implies, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is a software solution responsible for managing day-to-day business operations, such as formulation, procurement, sales, R&D, quality, compliance, etc.
Binding individual yet dependent departments together, ERP ensures smooth flow of informational data between them.
By gathering a company’s shared transactional data from multiple departments, ERP systems prevent data duplication and offer data integrity with a single version of the truth.
Selecting the right and quality ERP solution, not only simplifies business processes, but also results in streamlined operations, reduced costs, increased productivity and improved overall customer experience.
On the other hand, Point of Sale (POS) is the new generation or computerized cash registers. It keeps track of various types of payment forms, records and tracks customer orders, manages promotions, offers, discounts, loyalty programs, generates an invoice, and much more.
On top of this, it can integrate with other systems, such as multiple printers, or connect with networks and databases to improve the retail business experience, and allows to accept multiple payment processing options.
Moreover, apart from processing sales transaction, it can also handle inventory tracking, provide analytics, sales monitoring and reporting as well as offer customer data management, and role management through secured access – all in real-time.
When ERP meets POS…
When you integrate an ERP with a POS system, then you deal with a horse of a different color.
Information at fingertips:
An ERP integrated POS system provides immediate access to real-time information including customer information and purchase history that helps staff members to make better recommendations.
This improves cross-sells and upsells.
Options:
By integrating POS system with your ERP platform, you can well handle omni-channel sales.
That means you can fulfill demand from various touch-points ditching delays, reducing returns and increasing sales, al at the same time.
Maintenance of ledger balance:
The integrated system helps you identify ledger balances and determine the cash flow for your business with ease.
Reduction in risk:
When you integrate your ERP software with a POS system, you ensure that the data entered into both systems is accurate, thus dropping the chances of data mismatch.
The integration ensures real-time upload and download of data giving you information from a single pane of glass.
Better Demand Supply management:
Offering a holistic view of business, ERP and POS integration helps you determine the sales, inventory, and revenues.
This in a way, helps to accurately plan and maintain adequate stock level shunning situations of over-stock as well as under-stock.
Now definitely, we can say – POS doesn’t mean ERP. So if you are into Retail, wholesale, restaurant or such business, and if you haven’t integrated your ERP and POS then, you are losing your time and money. Irrespective of what you Google and find out there – there is no ERP system that is a POS and vice versa. Period.
