Why we're not an ERP, and why you probably don't need an ERP for your business

An ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, is like the brain of a business. This software helps companies manage all their different tasks and resources in a single platform that anyone in the organization can access. When you have the right ERP, you essentially have a highly organized digital assistant keeping track of everything from displaying sales quotas to managing your CRM. It might also be what your company uses to assess inventory and even manage their human resources. An ERP is what you need when you find yourself relying on numerous systems and software to keep your business running.

What we commonly see: business owners discover they have maxed out the capabilities of things like Quickbooks and are relying on a dozen different applications across a dozen different departments. Of course, none of these applications speak to one another in a universal language, and when you can share information between them you often need to do some kind of formatting. The result? You've grown from $10K sales a month to a $1M a week (good for you!) but your warehouse is printing through five reams of paper every day to keep track of the purchase orders. This is the same paper your operations team uses to allocate inventory and order more product, and the same paper goes back to the accounting team to reconcile with Quickbooks.

The odds of the information being consistent across all of that paper? Slim. Business moves fast. It's time for something new. You need software that can speak to all areas of your business: sales analytics, marketing analytics, inventory management, and more. At this point, many advisors would suggest you switch to an ERP - enterprise resource planning software.

Many ERPs will import your historical data and may even plug into existing databases so you can assess the health of your business, reconcile inventory with accounting, and even track your company's performance against market trends so you can make strategic decisions. Our clients use Nextworld to replace numerous applications across their company. When they can centralize data and streamline how it is updated and accessed, there's nothing left to do but grow.

An ERP can add value, but only if it is supported by the right tools. And this is where we notice some trouble.

It's no secret that for an ERP to sustain itself, improve features, and deliver quality products it needs to have a LOT of users. Scale is everything in the tech world, which means you can't make the perfect app for everyone. While an ERP can promise total integration and connectivity across all aspects of your business, you may find that they can deliver, at best, on 90% of this promise. Your business is unique, but their product is universal. When the software company has to compromise, so do you.

The question is: can you compromise that last 10% of your business the ERP doesn't gel with?

This is why we don't consider Nextworld an ERP. Rather, we're an EAP.

An ERP is great for the day-to-day operations and standardized data - finances, inventory counts, sales quotes - which are processes that serve most of the market some of the time. For those who are forward-thinking, and innovative, and want to create something that can support the unique complexities of their business, an Enterprise Applications Platform foots the bill. EAPs will work right out of the box, just like ERPs, but we also equip our customers with the tools to build whatever they can imagine for their business.

If your business needs larger, more complex software applications to keep you competitive, we'd love to show you how an EAP can get you there.

Rapid and secure development, without the code.

We build products and tools for a no-code environment because while you may need advanced applications to run your business, you might not be in the business of creating advanced applications. With our no-code interface and our allegiance to supporting a culture of citizen development, Nextworld EAP allows anyone in your company to create and deploy applications for any purpose you can imagine. Our no-code platform is so powerful and adaptable that we use it to create and deploy products to our enterprise clients.

In other words: it's only good enough for you if it's good enough for us.

Fully custom. AI-enhanced.

Imagine sending data to and from any department without having to worry about formatting, file size, or outdated information. Imagine nothing getting "lost" in the wrong folder or drive. Even imagine automating the tedious, manual processes that so often result in typos and errors. At Nextworld, we love it when you imagine, because it means there is no end to what our EAP can do for you. Not only are we developing applications to help our customers effectively handle tomorrow's business, but we are also creating AI tools that let you give new life to your historical data. We believe your next competitive edge is hiding somewhere in the deep well of data your company creates and adds to every day. Why not leverage an AI-powered tool to make the best use of the most valuable thing you have?

Great today, better tomorrow, always seamless

With an AI-enabled no-code platform, you are no longer limited by what you need, want, or can imagine for the here and now. Not only are your applications monitored for today's anomalies and variances, but you're protected on whatever comes next. Imagine the kind of platform that not only creates what you need now, but what you might need next. Not just what you need in the here and now, but tools that let you expand into new revenue opportunities, markets, and products. Well designed for today and to seamlessly integrate into tomorrow. Every upgrade, release, modification, and protocol change is accounted for and matched so you can keep your bandwidth on the business.