In my previous article regarding the Singapore Budget 2020 and Supplementary Budget 2020 that was announced on the 18 February 2020 and 26 March 2020 respectively by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Mr. Heng Swee Keat, I mentioned about the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) which was enhanced from 1 April 2020 onwards to provide a higher support percentage to enterprises in Singapore.
In fact, for enterprises, besides the enhanced EDG, Singapore Government announced the new enhanced Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) as well during the Supplementary Budget 2020. Similarly, the support for PSG has been enhanced to encourage enterprises to continue their digitalisation and productivity upgrading efforts and the from 1 April 2020, the maximum funding support level will be raised to 80% instead of the 70%.
Additionally, to the COVID-19 ongoing pandemic, the scope of the Generic solutions is expanded to includes business continuity measures and solutions.
The aim of PSG for enterprises is to help enterprises to continue their digitalisation and productivity upgrading efforts which aligns to the goal on catching the upturn wave when the coast of pandemic is clearing up.
Hence, majority of the solutions listed are targeting towards Accounting/ Finance system, trading & distribution system, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Point-of-Sales system and etc and these are the sub systems of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Importantly, enterprises should know what their needs are and choose the various sub-systems or they can choose a complete suite such as an ERP system. Having to choose an ERP system, enterprises can always choose to implement sub systems which they need it urgently and choose to implement the rest at the later stage instead of a big bang. This will help to lower the initial cost of investment as well as to reduce the stress of the workers drastically.
Another important factors is that most enterprises have overlook is the flexibility of the ERP system where it allows the users themselves to configure the system because of the changes along as the business evolves or enterprises have to rely heavily on the solution vendors even to create a new report which is often time consuming and costly.
One good ERP system is the Multiable M18 ERP where it provides flexibility to the users to configure the system as the business evolves as well as creating user-defined fields and reports creation by the users themselves without any programming efforts.
With the downturn and enormous support by the government, I strongly encourage enterprises to make good use of the current support to start their journey on digitalisation.