Introduction
Every high-growth company struggles with choosing the ideal management system to control its expanding activities. To achieve short-term revenue acceleration goals, proper planning of an integrated business management software system sometimes takes a backseat. As a result, many disparate applications are installed at various times in various functional areas, leading to ineffective business processes and difficult software integration. However, how did these issues start, and how can they be avoided?
Typical Siloed Business System Architecture
A business that is expanding swiftly may find themselves soon mired in a complicated application ecosystem. To handle their bookkeeping when first starting out, businesses first install accounting software like QuickBooks.
Companies then implemented stand-alone opportunity management systems as well as separate systems for resolving customer support concerns to gain additional customers. Systems for inventory management, order management, and fulfilment are handled by various programs and spreadsheets.
Several businesses will build new offices and adopt more sales channels in an effort to boost top-line revenue, which will lead to more complex processes for e-commerce integration, recurring billing, and financial consolidation, among other things. Extra business software to assist these operations can come in the form of independent apps from various vendors, custom software developed in-house, or several workarounds utilizing spreadsheets.
Companies that build their systems over time in this way risk having a poorly thought-out architecture that only partially addresses tactical needs in the short term while impeding long-term growth. This complex network of compartmentalized business software program, sometimes known as a “software hairball,” hinders productivity and, in the end, hampers the company’s capacity to expand.
Business Difficulties Resulting from a Siloed Software System
Business issues abound when siloed applications are present in high-growth firms. These difficulties may become so severe as to hinder growth. Below is a list of the five primary problems that can prevent your business’ growth if you operate it using various business software systems:
Wasted Employee Productivity: Every employee must be working as productively as possible when your business is expanding. Your staff will make more mistakes and spend less time on their more crucial core responsibilities if they are bogged down by ineffective and fragmented systems. Crucial procedures can take a long time to complete and are frequently inaccurate, including order processing, invoicing, expenditure approvals, and fulfilment, to mention a few. For instance, some of your staff members may spend hours manually inputting order information into the accounting and invoicing systems, while other staff members use your CRM system to access the same data for order fulfilment and commission calculations. Your staff will need to go through mountains of data to reconcile this information again if any orders are cancelled in the interim. Such time-consuming and laborious tasks decrease the agility that your business needs to expand.
Lack of Real-time Visibility: When software systems are not connected, there are various databases that overlap each other, making it difficult to gain a quick overview of how well your firm is doing. To get a comprehensive picture of how your business is operating, you need reports on performance from your finance, sales, marketing, service, and fulfilment departments. Due to the length of time it takes to gather, extract, and analyze this data, most businesses simply give up trying to get this information on a regular basis. For those who do, countless hours are lost trying to connect unconnected, clumsy, and out-of-date pieces of information. As a result, organizations either end up making crucial decisions slowly and based on incomplete information, or they make snap decisions that carry a high risk of failure.
Integration Complexity and Cost: Because there are so many different apps, integrating, maintaining, and buying new versions of them costs IT a lot of time and money. The maintenance and integration required to make all the various software versions operate together after the acquisition of new versions is frequent. As a result, the firm loses out on important IT time that could be used to increase productivity, and maintenance expenses soar.
Increasing Customer Churn: The success of your business is dependent on both customer acquisition and revenue growth. Due to the intense competition, it is crucial for your organization to deliver an outstanding customer experience or risk losing clients. Customers will be less satisfied and less inclined to make more purchases from you if they can’t easily find out the status of their orders, can’t have problems fixed in a timely manner, or constantly deal with things being out of stock. An integrated software system makes sure that your employees have immediate access to all the customer information they need to serve and sell to your customers, as well as that your consumers receive the proper information and a positive customer experience.
Integrated software applications’ benefits
Your business software applications must be integrated around a single codebase, database, and business process if you want to maintain the rapid growth rates you anticipate for your company. The benefits of doing so include significant cost savings and increased corporate efficiency, as well as:
Effectiveness of Processes Within Your Organization: In your daily business operations, you can come across several crucial activities, like order management, fulfilment, invoicing, cash collection, expense approvals, and financial consolidation, to name just a few. By automating these procedures, you can reduce the need for new hiring and redistribute staff to higher-value tasks that will aid in the innovation and expansion of your company. The world’s top integrated cloud business suite, NetSuite, was the subject of a return on investment (ROI) study by independent analyst firm Nucleus Research. Nucleus found that using an integrated suite allowed businesses to increase their inventory turns by 50%, increase sales productivity by 12.5%, and accelerate their financial close times by up to 50%, among other efficiencies. In the same survey, a different client, advantage Sign Supplies decreased the time it took to handle orders by 66%.
Much Increased Visibility: Making prompt, informed judgements require real-time visibility. Employees are better informed and can make decisions more quickly and accurately when information can be accessed instantly from practically anywhere without wasting resources on data extraction and tying data from many sources together. For instance, König Wheels was able to monitor the workloads of their suppliers in real-time and increase their business in four years while saving $120,000 yearly since all of their business data was accessible in real-time.
Substantial IT Time and Cost Savings: By freeing up IT from having to purchase, install, and manage several systems as well as the different integrations between them, operational expenses can be significantly reduced while IT time can be used to enhance business operations.
Faster growth: Thanks to centralized order and accounting management procedures and data, an integrated software solution makes it much easier to expand to new sites and sales channels. Due to their increased visibility, businesses can also upsell and cross-sell to their current clientele more successfully. By implementing an integrated system, Work 365, Beyond the Rack, a business that was only founded in 2009, was able to quickly expand to serve 4 million consumers.
User-Driven Innovation: Because to the speed with which process modifications may be made, regular business users are able to put their functional expertise to work in customizing procedures and software to enhance performance. While this is going on, IT is free to concentrate on key projects that can boost profits by developing creative value-added solutions.
Conclusion
Nowadays, businesses in almost every sector use sophisticated business software to drive growth, but many still struggle to keep up with expansion and efficiently manage costs due to a jumble of interconnected functional systems that impede workflow and reduce worker productivity. Integrated business software packages are revolutionizing the way businesses operate and allowing them to get over growing pains that have traditionally prevented them from expanding their operations in a lucrative way.
Work 365 is an automated billing system and subscription billing services for Microsoft partners to streamline recurring revenue.