How can a company looking to scale up operations and prepare for the future know if WMS or/Order Management System and order management system is more useful for them than ERP?
All systems should facilitate process flow, and one's process should reinforce business strategy. A balance of speed, quality and cost makes one's process unique. One's performance improvement approach, like using value stream map, should take these elements in account beyond process improvement however, how can a value stream map highlight gaps in information flow that makes software implementation imperative?
One way is to use process boxes to measure process times, quality, manpower for information flows as well. That is, rather than having process boxes at the bottom of a value stream map, have similar process boxes near information flow lines in a value stream map as well. In this way, you can use a single value stream map to pioritize software or the usually process improvement opportunities. More importantly, being clear of your current information flow process times allow you to measure new process times.
Of course, if you have a good sense of what you want, you can go ahead to implement whatever software you think is useful, it is nevertheless still very useful to have your process documented and measured for benchmark, adding new customers and development of new services. Expand your value stream to cover financial flow and sales as well so that you know clearly the trade-offs between functions.
How about cheaper alternatives to softwares? There are plenty of cheaper alternatives around, using handphones as bar code scanners, and customizing excel are some examples. Cheaper, customizable softwares is attractive in its own way compared to established systems with lots of company references.
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