Companies need to consider each of the options it has for sharing information across the business to enable more collaborative working and implementing a single integrated suite of applications across the business.
Faced with mounting economic pressures, companies are having to improve how they coordinate activity across their organisation in order to maximise the value they deliver to customers as well as minimising costs. But this requires integrating discrete departmental information in order to facilitate collaborative working.
Whether a company achieves this by linking together existing departmental systems or implements a single integrated suite of applications across the business depends upon their particular situation. The most common approach in attempting to share information across a business is by having staff key the same data into multiple applications, a very ill-advised means of providing critical management intelligence.
Supporting disparate departmental systems entails significant costs. As well as having to provide technical support for multiple applications, separate training packages need to be delivered for the different software packages involved as each will typically involve users in working with a very different interface. The cost of the time and effort required to identify and address the source of any such problems can be significant.
Before a company decides simply on cost grounds to share information across the business by linking existing departmental systems together, it needs to ensure that this course of action really will represent the cheaper option in the long run.
The final option a company has for making data available across the organisation is to implement one single shared system containing applications for each part of the business in one complete software suite. As well as a core set of key business applications, such suites also typically provide a platform into which extra optional modules containing additional functionality can be plugged in to enable the system to be further tailored to an organisation’s particular requirements.
The Integration Solution
The Sage 200 suite integrates CRM and ERP processes together in one system, and anyone can readily monitor activity right across the organisation. Therefore, the performance of cross-functional processes can be viewed end-to-end, enabling any problems to be swiftly identified and appropriate corrective action taken.
In addition, data on any aspect of the organisation can be made available to anyone within the organisation in a form tailored to their role so that they can coordinate their activity accordingly. For example, sales staff and customer service agents can have immediate access to customer records, stock information and credit history. Both sets of data can be accessed from one screen, enabling a customer order to be taken, credit-checked and scheduled for delivery in one uninterrupted transaction.
Likewise, by using a single integrated suite of applications, data entered in any part of the organisation instantly becomes available to any other department enabling the company to respond to changing conditions in real time. So, for example, customer-facing staff could use information on actual stock levels to target discounts on ‘near end of life’ items.
As well as enhancing operational agility in this way, the use of a single integrated suite of applications also offers major benefits when it comes to system development and support. With all the applications residing in a single suite, there is no need to work on developing links between applications to enable data to be exchanged between them. As a result, development times and costs are reduced dramatically compared to attempting to integrate existing disparate departmental systems.
Using a single suite of applications shared across the business avoids any compatibility issues between departmental systems, is much cheaper to maintain and upgrade and can be more easily adapted to deal with changes increasing business agility.
