ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning software is a program that helps businesses in the effective planning and management of their resources and processes. In organizations worldwide, ERP software is used to simplify and automate organizational activities such as project management, supply chain management, procurement, customer relationship management, and risk management.
ERPs are widely used by organizations to take care of their manufacturing, supply chain, trading, sales, finances, and human capital. This helps businesses improve efficiency, streamline key processes, manage resources better, and gain greater overall visibility. Statistics suggest that 95% of businesses that have implemented ERP into their organizations have witnessed improvement in their businesses process, which speaks of their effectiveness.
Today, there are a lot of ERP tools readily available for businesses to choose from. They can be generic or specialized based on your business needs and can be cloud-based or on-premise solutions depending upon your requirements.
CREST ERP is one such solution that is specifically designed keeping in mind the needs of manufacturing and trading industries. This ERP software has been used by several leading brands and has won multiple awards for Customer’s Choice ERP, User Experience, Best Value and Top 20 most popular ERP providers in India.
Let’s find out what makes CREST ERP work so well for business and how it helps businesses perform better.
Introduction to CREST ERP
CREST by Xmplar is a unique ERP solution created for the trading and manufacturing industry that helps them manage, track, and streamline multiple business operations and functions. This ERP solution can be deployed over the cloud for easier access to business functions and better data security and control.
CREST is one of the few notable ERPs that come with built-in integrated modules for managing Point of Sale (POS) and E-commerce functions, which are extremely useful for corporations dealing with trading and manufacturing verticals. You can have all data related to your Products, Prices, Price rules, Promo Rules, Vendors, Leads, and Clients stored within the database itself, which can be used for transactions directly. Additionally, it is integrated with Clear Tax that takes care of Online Tax Compliance and makes sure that all local and government tax calculations are done from the system itself, saving your organization much time.
How CREST ERP helps organizations?
CREST fosters better team collaboration and performance through its HR, Finance, and CRM functions. It features an easy-to-use user-interface and mobile application and boasts of an integrated ChatBot system that assists users to go to a specific function or gain visibility of a particular business function/vertical from anywhere. CREST not only helps you manage your inventory, procurement, and warehouses, it also allows you to monitor your sales teams, projects, workflow, maintenance, business transactions, and sales forecasting. Thus, all business operations starting from procurement to the final sales can be managed from a central platform using CREST.
CREST helps managers within an organization automate the goods procurement and purchase approval processes based on their history and performance. Quotes for a particular product can be requested simultaneously from multiple suppliers and the final supplier can be awarded a task and get paid from within the system itself. It also facilitates real-time financial tracking, asset tracking and stock tracking, making it a must-have for any manufacturing business.
Key Modules in CREST
CREST contains both core manufacturing as well as general organizational modules that help an organization manage both their core and additional tasks simultaneously. You can view all data related to sales, stocks, branches, and production from a single dashboard based on organizational hierarchy and generate a multitude of reports based on your needs.
Here are a few key modules that take care of core business tasks:
1. Production Management
CREST offers organizations with multiple options to manage their production and manufacturing tasks. Users can create standard or special production orders and allow for manual or backflush of components based on the Bill of Materials. The system allows real-time updating of stocks and financial accounts as components get issued for Production Orders.
This module also has a good receipt and issue control feature that helps in issuing materials manually or based on the receipt of goods. You can also have better material and capacity planning and scheduling of overall operations through the MRP functionality.
2. Procurement Management
This module has several functionalities for smoother procurement by streamlining the agreement process according to business needs. You can not only gain 360-degree visibility of your supplier relationships, performance, and risks, but you also get insights about the spending performance and identify saving opportunities.
This module offers several features that help you streamline and simplify the purchase approval mechanism, source-to-contract process, and the overall procurement process.
3. Project Management
One of the key modules of CREST, this section contains several tools for integrated project planning and tracking. This module ensures that you have complete control over your project issues and changes, providing real-time project status and issue management functionalities. This module contains self-service functions according to organizational hierarchy so that tasks can be added and assigned to specific teams/individuals and their progress can be measured by their manager.
By enabling better visibility into project budgets and determining their overall financial health, this module helps in reducing losses and optimization of resource utilization for improved profitability.
4. Inventory Management
This module helps in the real-time tracking of inventory and stock movement, thereby improving operational efficiency and warehouse optimization. Using this section, you can standardize both your technical and non-technical assets and effectively track them as they move across locations.
5. Sales and CRM
This module is immensely helpful for companies in eliminating duplication of efforts and increasing efficiency of their ordering, packing, shipment, and sales invoicing processes. There are powerful reporting and control tools as well as alerts that help you shorten the order-to-cash cycle and manage the entire sales process from a single interface. You can also ensure accurate and effective pricing and margin maintenance through this module.
The CRM module helps you in both creating and tracking leads, and helps you channelize your resources to convert them. You can track all activities against a specific lead by your sales team and also get to know when they have been converted. Moreover, you can manage events and campaigns through this section.
6. Financial Management
This module in CREST comprises a flexible Automatic Accounting Schedule (AAS) feature that greatly simplifies the accounting process. You can configure multiple tenants under your organization and set up Multiple Legal Entities with their own currency and calendar. The system further streamlines the invoicing and payment process by generating automatic account transactions.
CREST also provides cash and bank accounting through this module and allows room to add complex statutory requirements. Additionally, it helps in better asset tracking and management using geolocation and calculates the depreciation for assets.
7. Human Resource Management
CREST houses a dedicated module for managing employees and carry out daily HR activities. Here, you can maintain and manage all information about employees and their life cycle within your organization. You can view their basic profile, qualification, training details, assignments, leaves, etc.
You can also manage, track, and approve leaves based on hierarchy and track assets assigned to a particular individual.
8. E-commerce Management
This module helps you in creating and managing product catalogs and categorize products based on their features and attributes. You can also categorize products into Standard, Variants, and Configurable goods. The system also allows you to search and sort each facility to find products with specific attributes.
CREST also has a provision to set up multiple pricing options like list price, promotional price, geographical pricing, and pricing for specific customer groups. You can also set up promotional price rules and promotional guidelines. Additionally, it features a user-friendly checkout, payment, shipping, order tracking, and order history viewing functionality. However, the best thing is that the e-commerce platform integrates seamlessly with the sales and inventory module of core ERP.
9. Vendor & Customer Portals
CREST also has a Vendor portal that gives a comprehensive view to the vendors about the inventory which the company holds and about the dues from the company. CREST’s Customer portal enables the customers to view the orders placed by them along with the delivery status, view stock position for a specific item, and the Payment details (payments made by the customer to the company).
10. AI ChatBot
One of the most unique features of this ERP software is that it comes with a ChatBot powered by artificial intelligence. CREST’s ChatBot Creya is a self-service bot that helps you have all knowledge at your fingertips. Creya can be controlled by voice commands and help you get great insights in seconds. It can predict both texts and speech and can guide you in doing tasks and pulling out reports easily from the system.
11. Sales Force Automation (SFA)
This module is hugely beneficial for tracking sales force efficiency and improving productivity. It contains the following features:
- Order Management: This feature provided you with a simple and precise order creation process with exhaustive product and price selection options. You can also edit orders and cancel the products as per your convenience. This sub-module also has a flexible wild card search option.
- Lead Management: This functionality is very useful for capturing leads and adding lead information to the database. There is also a lead approval process based on organizational hierarchy and the option to capture a single order for a lead.
- Activity Management (DAR): This section helps you to record and track the activities performed by each salesperson. Features like accurate time logging and activity approval process make it very useful for organizations with huge salesforces.
- Sales targets: This section facilitates a target-driven sales process by helping you assign flexible targets to sales agents and allows high-level analysis on target achievements.
- Permanent Journey Planner: This section allows you to allocate work to employees and help them plan their work journeys. After salespersons add their journey plan for a particular period, the person they report to can approve their plans. This ensures that there is no duplication and that salespersons can work according to the plan approved for them.
The above features can make it much easier for an organization to manage and streamline their business operations and functions. However, we got in touch with Xmplar, the creators of CREST and they have plans to add more features and improve it even further!
New Features to Be Added – October’20 Updates
Effective October 31st, 2020, CREST will be adding the following features to their long list of utilities:
- Configurable Dashboards
- Configurable Approval Workflow module
- API – Exposing all Services as APIs for enabling easier integration & for extending the product using other technologies
- WhatsApp Integration
- Soler Integration for Enterprise Search
- Integration of BIRT Reporting tool
- Service & Warranty management system
Final Words
CREST ERP has an exhaustive list of features that come together to ensure organizational success by improving process efficiency. This ERP helps organizations manage their financial transactions, sales, purchases, clients, inventory, assets, projects, maintenance, and employees through a single intuitive portal.
Easy to use, scalable and flexible, CREST is the ideal choice for manufacturing and trading organizations of all sizes. Considering the services it offers, the pricing is economical and can be customized too. Also, CREST offers a free trial and is easy to integrate with existing systems. There’s no doubt that CREST is a smart solution that can help businesses gain a competitive advantage and improve bottom-line results exponentially!
You can know more about CREST ERP from its website or its SoftwareSuggest Product Profile Page.
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