Integrated business software systems eliminates the need to deploy a siloed application across the business organization and often proved to be a cost-efficient and time-effective solution for fast-evolving companies. Let’s understand what integrated systems are and how they help manage business requirements right from one single location.

In this article, we will elaborate:

– What is an Integrated Software System?
– Problems Enterprises Face with Siloed Software Applications
– Inefficient Employee Productivity
– Incompetent Data Management
– Risks Losing Customer Loyalty
– Siloed Data is Prone to Errors
– Advantages of Deploying Integrated Business Software Systems?
– Efficient Process & Productivity
– Greater Visibility, Better Insights
– Growth and Expansion Opportunities
– Reduced Software Costs, Less Maintenance
– Improved Customer Relationships
– Why Does Your Business Need an Integrated Software System?

As technology evolves, new innovative software applications take the lead and ensure highly productive outcomes for the business. Due to intense competition, businesses are looking for new ways to gain a competitive advantage. Undoubtedly, companies are rapidly moving to integrated software systems for handling day-to-day business activities.

Small businesses sometimes avoid the necessity for integrated software systems fearing revenue acceleration and consider installing several disparate applications in different functional areas.

However, over time, these applications lead to inefficiencies and high operational costs. Sooner or later, business organizations start realizing the importance of an integrated business software system that allows managing all organizational functions from one comprehensive location.

Good to Know – Stats & Figures!
With more and more businesses moving to integrated software systems, the global revenue from the IT integrated systems market in 2018 was 12.03 billion US dollars, which reached 14.23 billion US dollars in 2019. By switching to an integrated business software system, a business can:

– Speed up their financial close duration by 50%
– Eradicate order processing times by 66%
– Improve sales productivity by 12.5%
– Surge inventory turns by 50%

What is an Integrated Software System?

An integrated software system is a collection of productivity software applications developed to work on interrelated programs. The suite combines commonly used functions of different software applications into one package.

One commonly used integrated software is Microsoft Office Suite that includes Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint.

In the digital age, business processes are layered with complexities. Yet, you can’t neglect to ensure that all your organizational operations are in line to keep the business productivity on track.

This is when the integrated software system comes into play. Not just it allows better collaboration of business processes but ensures the best compliance, governance, and risk management.

Problems Enterprises Face with Siloed Software Applications

Instead of having an integrated application system, if the organizations choose to use multiple components for handling different business operation; it’s entire time and cost consuming. High-growth companies need to adopt a profitable approach to growth and expansion.

– Inefficient Employee Productivity
When employees begin with the next business task, they need to enter information about the previous task repeatedly into different software panels. Employees will feel too tired to perform productive business activities while moving forward.

– Incompetent Data Management
Storing and retrieving data from different locations not only results in inconsistent data management but also leads to security breaches. Also, the company won’t be able to explore data to its full potential as it is difficult to analyze it properly.

– Risks Losing Customer Loyalty
When data flow is inconsistent, businesses will fail to meet the ever-growing demands of the customers. Every business – big or small, fears the risk of losing the customer base. Most importantly, companies are on the verge of risking customer loyalty and retention.

– Siloed Data is Prone to Errors
With siloed software applications for different departments, employees will be required to perform additional tasks. They will be fetching data across various locations as well as entering data to multiple systems. So, siloed systems are prone to errors and security lapses.

Advantages of Deploying Integrated Business Software System

Regardless of the size, nature, and volume of the business, every organization needs at least one integrated software system to balance and manage processes effectively. In today’s digital era, when companies accumulate tons of data, integrated software ensures seamless data connectivity, giving easy access to information.

For achieving an optimal level of productivity across business departments, organizations must deploy an integrated software system designed around a single database and codebase for quick information availability. Moreover, having an integrated system means reduced proneness to human errors and manual mistakes.

For small business firms, utilizing an integrated software package that includes core business applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations can be ideal. These solutions are available at affordable pricing, while larger suites may cost higher.

– Efficient Process & Productivity
Are you dealing with order management, cash collection, invoicing, financial consolidation, expense approval operations through siloed software? If yes, you must understand the challenges that arise from disparate software applications. By using an integrated software system, companies experience higher sales productivity, and better inventory turns that leads to improved productivity.

Siloed software applications often cause intensive rework, human errors as the staff needs to enter the same information repeatedly into different systems. Since integrated software stores data from various departments and locations in one single place, they eliminate re-entering data repeatedly.

Greater Visibility, Better Insights

Real-time visibility to business performance is crucial for making data-driven and informed decisions. When your business information is available to access from anywhere, anytime, your employees will be able to make more accurate decisions. Moreover, the staff doesn’t require wasting time on data extraction and fetching data from different resources.

Integrated business application systems incorporate tools that extract useful data from centralized databases and libraries. This data allows for creating a defined business roadmap and developing better business strategy.

Growth and Expansion Opportunities

Integrated software, with unified accounting management processes, allows for better collaboration of various departments, locations, and sales channels. It offers improved visibility which further increases upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Handling operations easily across different departments leads to sustainable growth and fast expansion.

A centralized data repository of integrated software application eradicates inaccuracies and discrepancies. When all the reports are available in one single location, business analysts will find it easier to use data incorporated in reports for making data-driven decisions.

– Reduced Software Costs, Less Maintenance
Siloed software across multiple locations results in recurring, duplicate costs that include integration costs, hardware/software management cost, upgrade costs, application maintenance costs. With siloed software or legacy systems, businesses are spending extensive budget and time on managing the IT ecosystem.

When businesses don’t have to spend widely on procuring, installing, maintaining, and managing IT applications, it reduces IT efforts. The business management and IT teams can think about expansion and growth opportunities.

– Improved Customer Relationships
By giving you a clear picture of your organization’s performance, an integrated application system enables you to interact with your customers efficiently. Integrated systems provide a comprehensive, real-time, quick view to complete business data and performance dynamics that help improve services.

With integrated applications, businesses can develop more affordable pricing models based on customer feedback. Moreover, deploying these systems means better customer relationships and improved sales.

With integrated systems, you can focus on the quality of your IT teams and not their size or volumes. Automated processes eradicate the need for hiring new talents as your existing team will be able to handle all the tasks efficiently. In short, you get the opportunity to invest time in more important tasks that will take your business to the next level.

Why Does Your Business Need an Integrated Software System?

Let’s understand why you should deploy an integrated business software system in your organization.

– Inaccurate and scattered data collected across disparate sources can bring chaos and security issues. While integrated systems, you can ensure a quick and smooth availability of crucial, meaningful data.
– The integrated system facilitates smooth business customer interaction, which, in turn, helps improve customer relationships.
– Consistent data flow empowers employees to address customer queries quickly and efficiently using data-driven statistics.
– Access to centralized data repository gives a more accurate and data-driven understanding of business operations.
– A single modification in data automatically modifies the linking documents or reports, reducing the chances of incorrect analysis.
– Business analysts can make better predictions and can make informed decisions for improving business processes and operations.
– With a quick view of operational processes and their performance, the management can dump obsolete tasks that bring no productivity or add no value to the business.
– Having an integrated system means no need to spend on software licensing, installation, upgrades, maintenance over a regular period of time.

Final Thoughts

In the digital era, the business must play at the front-foot to gain competitive advantage by deploying innovative technology solutions. Eliminate all additional operational costs that add to your budget and enjoy running your business just flawlessly with happy employees, satisfied customers, better productivity, and much more. What else do you need as a rapidly-growing company?

So, take a quick move and transform your business processes!

Deskera All-in-one platform is a perfect integrated software application that collaborates functions across different organizational departments to help businesses boost their productivity. You can access, handle, and manage accounting, payroll, CRM, HR, emails, expenses, sales, marketing, etc. right from one single solution.