Implementing the right and efficient business systems has been the most crucial decision that every high-growth business grapples with to handle its expanding operations. Embracing an automated and integrated ERP system often takes a back seat to short-term revenue acceleration objectives. As a result, several disparate tools are installed at different points in time in multiple functional operations, leading to business process incompetencies and software integration challenges. Let’s have an insight how did these problems arise, and how can they be avoided?
Business Challenges Caused by Outdated Software System
When the growing enterprises have multiple siloed applications, there are many business challenges that arise. These challenges often become severe enough to cripple growth. A brief summary of the most prominent issues that can obstruct your growth in case you run a business having disparate software systems is mentioned:
Wasted Productivity of Employees: Every employee of your company must be performing to its best when your company is in growth mode. Inefficient and disharmonized processes may hinder your employees’ performance, and it may increase errors and may leave them with less time to perform more important core duties. Necessary processes like order processing, expense approvals, invoicing, etc. to name a few, may get delayed and can often be erroneous. There are several labor-intensive and manual tasks that can cut down the agility that your business need to grow.
Wasted Resources & Time in Multiple Integrations: Having so many disparate tools, business wastes an enormous quantity of time, effort and money on integrating, acquiring and maintaining new versions of these applications. Many a times, when new versions are purchased, more integration and maintenance has to be performed for all these versions to work together seamlessly. As a result, valuable IT time that could be spent in the productivity of the company is wasted, with skyrocket maintenance costs.
No Real-time Visibility: When your software tools are not properly integrated, you may witness various overlapping databases, which obscure the real business performance and cannot give a view of the real-time business performance. Reports manifesting performance across your marketing, finance, services, sales, and fulfillment sections are vital that gives an integrated 360 degree view of your company’s operations. Majority of companies just do not opt for accessing this information regularly as it may take lot of time to source, extract and analyze the data. As a result, businesses either make slow critical decisions, driven by inaccurate information, or make hasty and risky decisions, based on their gut instinct.
Increased Customer Churn: Revenue growth and customer acquisition are cornerstones of your company’s consistent success. Due to fierce competition, it is imperative that your business offers an excellent customer experience or bear the brunt of having customers take their business to the competitors. If you’re not able to quickly provide customers the information on their order status, resolve issues on time, or deal with products being out of stock often, they will not be satisfied and may not continue purchasing from you.
ERP Solutions
For the growth of your business, it is important that you have your business software tools appropriately integrated within a single codebase and database. This is where ERP system comes into picture! It yields tremendous cost savings and improves business productivity, including:
Improves Efficiency Across Business: There are many core business processes that you have to deal with in your daily operations, like fulfillment, invoicing, order management, cash collection, expense approvals, to name a few. Automating these processes allows you to avoid deputing new resource to manage these processes, and staff to higher-value processes for the growth and innovativeness of your business. By using integrated suite, businesses can stimulate their financial close times, increase sales productivity, and also increase inventory turns, amongst other efficiencies.
Valuable IT Time and Cost Savings: With business no longer having to install, procure, and maintain multiple integrated systems, a major reduction in operational costs can be witnessed while more IT time can be invested in improving the business productivity and other operations.
Improved Visibility: It is necessary to have real-time visibility to make timely and informed business decisions. When data and other information can be made available instantly from almost anywhere, without wasting time and efforts on data extraction and assembling data from different sources together, employees are more informed and are able to make faster and accurate decisions.
Speed Up Growth: When you have an integrated software system, expansion to various locations and additional sales channels can be done a lot faster due to unified order and accounting processes and related data. You can upsell and cross-sell more proficiently to your existing customer base with the improved visibility you obtain.
User-based Innovation: As process changes can be deployed faster, everyday business users can be able to use their functional expertise to customize processes and tools to improve performance. Meanwhile, you will be able to focus on strategic goals that can strengthen the bottom line of your business by erecting innovative value-added solutions.
These days, businesses in every industry are leveraging sophisticated business software like ERP to fuel their growth but several are still struggling to keep up with their growth and manage costs effectively due to the unintegrated functional systems leading to process bottlenecks and employee productivity complexity.
Integrated ERP suites are transforming how businesses run, and allowing them to overcome growing pains that earlier were holding them back from pushing their business to the next level of profitable growth.