Streamlining the operations and cost footprint of a business organization is one of the most important management considerations and its demands are on the rise as businesses face more competition, narrow profit margins, changing regulations, and shifting market conditions. At the heart of this streamlining process is integrating or consolidating the IT systems used within the company together with the business workflows created and maintained by its employees.
The idea of having systems integrated is so that they either can communicate and feedback to each other or be accessed and controlled from one centralized interface and access point. The latter is the reason why many small to medium businesses are using what is called ‘Enterprise Resource Planning’ software or ERP in short.
What is an ERP?
An ERP is basically a suite of applications and systems that can share some data and can be accessed from one interface or dashboard that employees sign-in to using different access rights depending on the role and responsibility within the company. For example, an ERP could allow access and sharing of data between accounting software and sales data, or human resources and finance departments, sales and marketing, commercial and operations, and so on.
Bespoke System Integration
Another way of achieving this is through a bespoke system integration solution. While an ERP software is an off-the-shelf product that works as a one-type-fits-all sort of thing, having two or more of your systems integrated or interfaced together through a software development company, is a more specialized and professional way to do it resulting in far better benefits than an ERP software would.
What are the benefits of a Bespoke System Integration?
Some of these benefits include:
- Overall net profit and bottom-line cost-savings to the business because a more coherent and streamlined business operations can save off expenses usually incurred through extra man hours and other resources utilized in inefficiencies, double input of work, incongruent data, and so on.
- Greater systems integration and streamlining create a leaner and more agile business decision cycle as decision-makers can make use of better centralized data and reports that can quickly give an overall account of the business status rather than relying on silos and partitioned information usually retrieved through reports by the different teams using different systems.
- Yet the most important benefit that comes about from having your IT systems more integrated and streamlined is better workflows.
Business Workflows
Workflows are those business processes that make up a chain or flow of tasks that an individual, team or entire company do in order to achieve a goal, whether it’s reaching a target, making a sale, developing a product or maintaining the day-to-day operations. A workflow can be very inefficient, resulting in poor quality output, resource wasting, inefficiencies and frustration on the part of the people carrying it out.
An example of Business Workflows
An example of a simple workflow is that of a sales process in a complex service-oriented company. Let’s say the sales agent is looking after a new business lead in order to make a sales contract and get closer to the month’s sales targets. He is using different tools to first access client information and reach out. For instance, using the CRM in order to retrieve and save information about the client. Then he logs into another internal portal to see if there were any price updates and then calculate a price quotation based on a number of factors asked by the client. He makes sure about policies and legal terms and conditions by chatting with a more senior colleague. After closing the deal, he asks the accounts department to issue an invoice but they are way too busy doing reconciliation work. He also needs some changes to the default contract and has to make sure that everything is organized by another team before the arrival or event date of the contracted service. All this and more make up a workflow. It could be inefficient or waste time and money because it is fragmented across different teams, systems, access points and dependent on the availability of the other teams involved.
A more efficient workflow could be created through interfacing some or all of the systems used by the sales agent into one centralized access. The beauty of this approach is that not only does it directly improve the workflow of the sales agent but also decrease dependency and time used from other teams and personnel involved. The agent now didn’t require to ask other people in other departments for more information, or wait for them to put in place a step in the process. He was more empowered and autonomous in going through a workflow with less friction and better results.
KaapiSoft's Case Study on Business Workflows
As another example of how systems integration can help improve business workflows, at KaapiSoft we created a case study from one of our projects for a business client, BMIT.
KaapiSoft was engaged by BMIT’s technical team to deliver a custom-made system integration solution that would enable a better workflow and productivity between two of their main teams – the customer support and the technical team. See the case study here.
For more information, get in touch at hello@kaapisoft.com or if you’d prefer, call us on +356 79046188.