Every fast-growing enterprise is striving to find the best business system to manage its expanding business. As a result, various applications are installed in different departments in various functional areas. resulting in inefficient business processes and the emergence of software integration requirements. But how do these problems first arise and how can they be avoided?
A typical isolated business system architecture
Fast-growing companies may quickly fall into a complex application architecture. When embarking on a business system deployment, companies typically install accounting software such as QuickBooks to meet their short-term need for financial accounting.
As business requirements continue to grow and more customers are managed more effectively, the company typically increases the purchase of additional sales opportunity management systems and independent customer service support systems. It is inevitably accompanied by different software and spreadsheets to handle inventory management, order management and fulfillment systems.
As businesses expand further, many companies are opening new offices and diversifying their sales channels, making the company's business management process more complex, such as e-commerce integration, cyclical billing management, and financial consolidation. Additional business software that supports these processes may appear as standalone applications for different vendors, enterprise-owned development applications, or workarounds using a variety of spreadsheets.
Companies that have long deployed their business management systems with this strategy will find that their architecture can only partially meet the short-term tactical development needs, and in the long run, actually limit the company's effective development. It inhibits flexibility and productivity, ultimately slowing down the company's growth capabilities.
Business challenges from Siloed software systems
When a fast-growing company has multiple isolated applications, there are often many business challenges. The following is a summary of the five main issues:
wasting your employees ' productivity: when a company is in growth mode, each employee must work at its highest output state. Important processing (such as order Processing, invoicing, cost audits, etc.) can take longer to complete and often make mistakes. For example, an employee may spend several hours manually entering order information into the accounting system and invoicing system, while other employees transfer the same information from the CRM system to complete the order fulfillment process and calculate the sales commission. During this time, if any order is canceled, your employees must sift through piles of data to ensure consistency of information. This labor-intensive and manual work reduces the agility required for your company to grow.
lack of real-time visibility: When a software system is not integrated, you have multiple databases that overlap, and you can't easily see enterprise performance in a timely manner. Because it takes a lot of time to find, extract, and analyze the data, most companies simply give up on regular access to that information. For companies that regularly get that information, they spend countless hours trying to integrate irrelevant, error-prone, and outdated information. As a result, companies are either slow to make big decisions based on inaccurate information, or simply intuitively making hasty and risky decisions.
integration complexity and cost: because there are many different applications, IT departments spend a lot of time and money on integrating, maintaining, and acquiring new versions of these applications. Often, once a new version of the software is purchased, more integration and maintenance is required so that all versions of the software can work together. The result is a waste of valuable time that could have been used to make the business more efficient, while at the same time causing soaring maintenance costs.
customer churn rate increased: acquiring customers and increasing revenue are key pillars of your company's continued success. If customers can't quickly get their order status information, they won't be able to solve the problem in time, or they have to deal with out-of-stock products frequently, they will be less satisfied and less likely to continue buying from you. Integrated software systems not only ensure that customers receive the right information and customer experience in a timely manner, but also ensure that your employees have immediate access to all the customer information they need to serve their customers and sell to their customers.
Benefits of an integrated software application
To keep your business growing as you plan, you must integrate your business software applications around integrated code libraries, databases, and business processes. The advantage of designing your system in this way is that it can not only significantly save costs, but also improve business efficiency, including:
Process efficiency:
In daily operations, such as order management, fulfillment, invoicing, cash collection, fee review and financial consolidation. This process automation enables you to eliminate the staff required to manage these processes and redeploy employees to higher value activities to help you achieve business innovation and growth. In the study of ROI for customers using NetSuite (the world's leading integrated cloud Business suite), Nucleus Research, an independent analysis firm, Nucleus found that by using the integration suite, these companies reduced their financial closing time by 50%. Increased sales efficiency by 12.5% and increased inventory turnover by 50%, plus other efficiency gains.
Significantly improved visibility:
Real-time visibility is important to make informed decisions in a timely manner. When information is accessed almost instantly from anywhere without wasting resources on data extraction and trying to integrate data from disparate sources, employees can better understand the situation and make decisions more accurately and faster.
Save a lot of it time and costs:
When the IT department no longer needs to procure, install, and maintain multiple systems and the various integrations between them, it can significantly reduce operating costs, while it time can be used to improve business operations. For example, it costs $75,000 a year to get rid of siloed systems and migrate to Netsuite,kardia systems.
Accelerating growth:
Integrated systems seamlessly integrate order management and financial management processes and unify business data and financial data to a single platform, enabling companies to quickly expand their multi-organization, multi-location and multi-channel sales channels. Because of increased visibility, companies can more effectively upsell and cross-sell their existing customer base.
User-driven Innovation:
With rapid implementation of process changes, terminals can apply the business domain expertise they specialize in developing tailor-made systems to improve their productivity. At the same time, it resources can be freed up to focus on building the bottom-up, innovative, high-value solution for the entire organization.
Today, companies in almost every industry are driving growth through the use of complex business software, but many companies still struggle to maintain growth and effectively control costs, resulting in process bottlenecks and employee productivity issues due to mixed-use discrete functional systems. The integrated business software suite is changing the way companies operate and enabling them to move beyond the initial stages of development that have previously hindered their business from achieving the next level of profitable growth.
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of UF ERP software system and the advantage of integrated business software system