Every fast-growing company struggles with decisions about the best business system to manage its expanding activities. Proper planning of an integrated business management software system often catches up with short-term goals for sales acceleration. As a result, different disparate applications are installed at different times in different functional areas, resulting in inefficiency of business processes and challenges for software integration. But how did these problems come in the first place and how can they be avoided
Every fast-growing company struggles with decisions about the best business system to manage its expanding activities. Proper planning of an integrated business management software system often catches up with short-term goals for sales acceleration. As a result, different disparate applications are installed at different times in different functional areas, resulting in inefficiency of business processes and challenges for software integration. But how did these problems come in the first place and how can they be avoided
Architecture of a typical business system
A fast-growing company can quickly become entangled in a complex application landscape. At the start, companies first install accounting software so that they can manage their accounting.
In the search for more customers, companies then deploy stand-alone opportunity management systems, along with separate systems for resolving customer support issues. Inventory management, order management and fulfillment systems are tackled with dissimilar software and spreadsheets.
To increase sales, many companies will open new office locations and embrace additional sales channels, resulting in more advanced e-commerce integration processes, recurring billing, financial consolidation, among others. Additional business software to support these processes can take the form of stand-alone applications from different vendors, proprietary applications or a variety of spreadsheet solutions.
Companies that evolve their systems in this way over time may have a poorly planned architecture that does not optimally meet tactical needs in the short term, while the company is efficiently protected against scaling up in the long term. This confused web of siled corporate software systems, often referred to as "software hairball," slows down flexibility, productivity, and ultimately the company's ability to grow.
Business challenges caused by having a software system
When fast-growing companies have multiple applications, there are many business challenges that arise. These challenges can become so serious that they can paralyze growth. Here is a summary of the five most important issues that can hamper your growth if you have a business with different business software systems:
Wasted employee productivity
When your company is in growth mode, every employee must work at optimum productivity. As your employees get bogged down in inefficient and inconsistent processes, this increases errors and takes time away from their more important core tasks. Important processes such as order processing, invoicing, expense claims and execution, to name a few, can take much longer to complete and are often incorrect. For example, your employees can spend hours manually re-entering order information in the accounting and billing system, while other employees extract the same information from your CRM system for their order handling processes and to calculate sales commissions. If, in the meantime, orders are canceled, your employees must search data to reconcile this information.
Lack of real-time visibility
When software systems are not integrated, you have multiple overlapping databases and you cannot quickly get a picture of the business performance. Reports that show the performance of your finance, sales, marketing, service and fulfillment departments are crucial to giving you an integrated view of your company's activities. Most companies simply give up obtaining this information based on the amount of time it takes to collect, extract, and analyze this data. For those who do, countless hours are wasted binding together unrelated, error-prone, and outdated information. As a result, companies either slowly make important decisions based on inaccurate information, or make hasty and risky decisions from their instincts.
Integration complexity and costs
With so many different applications, IT wastes an enormous amount of time and money on integrating, maintaining and acquiring new versions of these applications. Often, when new versions are purchased, even more integration and maintenance must be performed to make all different versions of software work together. That is why valuable IT time that can be used to make the company more productive is wasted, while maintenance costs rise.
Increased customer turnover
Customer acquisition and revenue growth are important pillars for the continued success of your company. In fierce competition, it is essential that your company offers an exceptional customer experience or runs the risk of customers moving their company elsewhere. If customers cannot get information about their order status quickly, cannot solve problems in time or often have to deal with products that are not in stock, they will be less satisfied and they will continue to buy from you less quickly. An integrated software system ensures that customers have the right information and customer experience and that your employees have immediate access to all customer information that they need to provide service to your customers.
Benefits of integrated software applications
To grow your business at the dramatic rates that you plan, it is essential to integrate your business software applications around one codebase, database, and business process. The benefits of designing your systems in this way deliver huge cost savings and improved business productivity, including:
Process efficiency in your organization
There are several important processes that you may encounter in your daily activities, such as order management, fulfillment, billing, collection, expense claims and financial consolidation, to name just a few. By automating such processes, you can avoid new employees who would otherwise be needed to manage these processes, and re-deploy staff to higher value activities to help your company innovate and grow. In an ROI study by the independent analyst firm Nucleus Research, of customers using NetSuite, the world's leading integrated cloud business suite, Nucleus discovered that using an integrated suite could speed up their financial closing times by 50%, sales productivity by 12 , 5% and increases the stock turnover rate by 50%, in addition to other efficiencies. In the same study, another customer, Advantage Sign Supply, reduces the processing time of the order by 66%.
Dramatically improved visibility
Real-time visibility is important when making informed decisions. When information is accessible almost anywhere, without wasting resources on data extraction and binding data from different sources, employees are better informed and can make more accurate and faster decisions. For example, by having all their company data available in real time, König Wheels was able to track the workloads of their suppliers in real time and double their activities in four years while saving $ 120,000 annually.
Considerable IT time and cost savings
With IT no longer having to purchase, install and maintain multiple systems, as well as the different integrations between them, a significant reduction in operating costs can be achieved while IT time can be spent on improving business operations. Accelerated growth: with an integrated software system allows expansion to multiple locations and additional sales channels to be achieved much faster thanks to uniform order and accounting management processes and data. Companies can also sell better and cross-sell to their existing customer base because of the improved visibility that they gain. Beyond the Rack, a company that was only founded in 2009, was able to grow rapidly to serve 4 million customers by deploying an integrated system, NetSuite OneWorld.
User-driven innovation
Because process changes can be implemented quickly, everyday business users can apply their functional expertise to adjust processes and applications in a way that improves performance. In the meantime, IT is free to focus on strategic initiatives that can add value to business results by developing innovative solutions with added value.
Conclusion
Today, companies in almost every industry use advanced business software to drive their growth, but many are still struggling to track their growth and control costs effectively due to a mishmash of non-functional functional systems that cause process bottlenecks and employee productivity problems . Integrated business software suites change the way companies run and enable them to overcome the growing pains that previously held them back to bring their business to a higher level of profitable growth.
Sofco
Sofco develops online software that can be linked to existing internal systems. For more information contact the Sofco professionals.