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Jetting away from the office? Here’s our top ERP best practice tips to ensure you can switch off properly.
As we enter the holiday season, with the out-of-office emails set, you may find your team a little lighter than usual – or you may be the lucky one jetting off yourself. Either way, a reduced workforce over the summer months doesn’t have to mean a reduced performance – it’s all about working smarter, not harder.
While members of the team might be heading for sun loungers and staycations, the required output sadly doesn’t get to hit pause. Orders still need processing, cash flow still needs monitoring and approvals still need approving but your enterprise resource planning system (ERP) carries a number of great features for keeping the ship sailing while members of the team are away.
Leading ERPs such as Sage 200 (with additional modules from Sicon also helping) and SAP Business One can help your business run smoothly through a few best-practice tips. We’re sharing our practical tips and ERP best practices for the holiday season to help you stay productive and resolve any issues caused by common out-of-office mistakes. Firstly, let’s start by exploring those common mistakes to look out for before we tick off some best-practice actions.
As with many things, prevention is better than cure, so ensuring that everything is where it needs to be before heading to the airport carries importance. By briefing your teams properly and using your ERP to ensure everything is where it needs to be, you can go a long way to preventing any disruption while you’re on the sun lounger. Here are the most common slip-ups that can take place while you’re in holiday mode.
Forgetting to delegate approvals is one of the most common – and costly – holiday season slip-ups. Take Sage users: without an alternate approver set in Sage 200, purchase orders or expenses can sit in limbo, delaying projects and disrupting operations. With Sicon Approvals, you can easily assign out-of-office cover or automated escalation paths, ensuring nothing gets stuck waiting for sign-off while key people are away.
In SAP Business One, you can set up approval workflows that automatically redirect or escalate requests to an alternate approver, helping your business keep moving, even with a reduced team.
Another common risk during the holiday season is having no out-of-office cover for key workflows – whether it’s approving purchase orders, authorising expenses, or releasing production jobs.
In Sage 200, using Sicon Approvals and the Holidays module allows you to set up delegated approvers and automatic escalation rules, so tasks don’t stall when someone’s away. Similarly, SAP Business One’s approval workflows can help reroute or escalate requests when a user is unavailable, helping your business stay responsive and avoid operational delays.
Unplanned gaps in scheduling can cause serious disruption during the holiday season – especially in manufacturing or distribution where production relies on resource availability and accurate planning.
With Sicon Manufacturing in Sage 200, teams can access real-time visibility of capacity, staff availability and job schedules, which helps planners adjust workloads before issues arise.
Similarly, SAP Business One supports forward planning through resource planning tools, enabling businesses to forecast demand, allocate labour and prevent production bottlenecks caused by staff absences.
These three common mistakes are easily avoidable with a little planning – and the right ERP setup.
ERP best practice starts with using your system to plan ahead – and to encourage your team to do the same. A few smart decisions made in advance can prevent unnecessary disruption during periods of annual leave.
For Sage 200 users, this means making full use of the system’s forecasting tools to plan production schedules and manage stock requirements. This is especially important in sectors like retail and manufacturing, where seasonal fluctuations can have a significant impact on stock levels. By planning ahead, you not only avoid last-minute pressures, but also give the wider team a clear, data-driven view of what’s coming – even if key team members are away.
In SAP Business One, teams can use the demand planning and MRP tools to forecast customer needs, manage stock levels and align production schedules – again, all best practice actions before key staff head off on annual leave. By building in buffer stock or adjusting supplier timelines in advance, you reduce the risk of delays and keep operations running smoothly, even with a reduced team.
With Sage Intacct, finance teams can create budget scenarios and use real-time dashboards to monitor cash flow and expenditure across the business. Planning ahead allows leaders to flag potential risks, prioritise spend and ensure financial visibility doesn’t drop – all even more vital for when key decision-makers are out of office.
The overarching message here is that a few hours of planning within your ERP or financial platform can remove days of stress later. Spending the time now to plan for different scenarios can give you more peace of mind throughout the holiday season.
Within the Holidays Module and Timesheets module for Sage 200’s Sicon Approvals addon, there are capabilities for reassigning tasks, editing and changing assigned user, and managing holiday requests based on annual entitlements and conflicting user checks. Approvals for purchase orders, expenses, timesheets and manufacturing requests can all continue to move in the right direction, even if the original approver is away. As a team, with careful planning and the use of Sicon’s additional modules, you can prevent backlog and delays across the supply chain.
In SAP Business One, you can also build flexible approval processes that help maintain control and responsiveness when team members are away. Using the built-in approval templates, businesses can set up alternate approvers or automatic escalation paths based on time or value thresholds – ensuring that purchase orders, expenses and other key requests don’t stall when someone is out of office.
Both ways of working are smart ways to reduce bottlenecks and keep momentum, without needing manual intervention from unavailable team members.
Having a fully integrated setup really comes into its own while teams are at a reduced capacity; an integrated setup means clear visibility. During periods of holiday downtime, this connected approach becomes a real advantage. Here’s what this may look like for Sage and SAP.
To start with Sage 200, the Sicon Holiday module grants a clear visibility over who’s on leave and can connect directly to workflow routing. This ensures that approvals, tasks and escalations are always sent to the right person. What’s more, within Sage 200’s Sicon Manufacturing module, you can help keep production on track through the integrated MRP and scheduling features, so resources and timelines stay aligned even with reduced staff.
Similar to Sage 200 – within SAP Business One you’ll bring together finance, operations, inventory, sales, and HR into one unified system.
With integrated approval workflows, purchase orders, production requests and expenses routed automatically – it reduces the hold up while key team members are away. You can also set up alternate approvers or escalation paths based on value, urgency or availability, reducing the risk of bottlenecks or missed deadlines during downtime periods.
SAP Business One’s MRP and inventory management tools also stay in sync with live data from sales and purchasing, helping to manage stock proactively and avoid over-ordering or shortages. And because SAP Business One is designed to connect with third-party tools like payroll, HR systems, or ecommerce platforms, your business can continue operating efficiently without constant manual oversight.
One major way of managing the unexpected when members of the team are jet-setting is down to the in-browser visibility. From anywhere on the globe, as long as you have an internet connection, you can access dashboards and workflows from mobile or the browser. This’ll allow for checking KPIs, approving spend, tracking orders – all from beside the swimming pool.
Remote-ready systems such as Sage 200 web Screens or SAP Business One’s Web Client let you manage the unexpected even when you’re away, should you need to, of course. Taking ERP mobile has never been easier and it’s a great way of managing any of the team’s emergencies should it be required.
The dust has been blown off the passport, you’ve finalised the packing for the kids, the taxi is booked for the airport, but you may still have one or two last-minute requirements in work to ensure your team has everything it needs while you’re away.
Considering all of these ERP best practices, we’ve put together a handy holiday checklist for you to run through prior to setting your out of office. It only takes a few minutes to tick off the essentials, with these best practice steps helping your business to stay on track while you’re taking a well-earned break.
With the right ERP setup and following these tips, you can step away from the office with complete calm and confidence in knowing that the team are well briefed. Through this advice, you’ll avoid summer backlogs, keep approvals flowing and maintain complete visibility – whether your team is fully staffed or sunning it up in Spain.
ERP systems are the glue that keeps it all together; they really come into their own in the holiday season, as they help to pick up any slack that may need picking up in a team that has reduced hands on deck.
Everyone likes a good holiday, but you can switch off even faster through optimising your ERP in your absence. For more information on how to optimise your ERP system for doing more with less, simply get in touch.
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