Businesses are often inundated with many repetitive, mechanical tasks and processes. With their access to ever-expanding pools of data, it can be difficult to manage everything individually, especially when systems and processes are not aligned. This is true of all businesses, but even more so for larger businesses with significant operations.

For instance, accountants ordinarily spend a lot of time following up on accounts receivable and payable, as well as the invoicing process. This will often involve going to and fro between documents and systems or applications. The end result is often lower productivity and greater expense for the business, since the accountant is saddled with low-value mechanical tasks.

But when the accountant has the ability to manage each of these processes in one place, he can spend less time between documents and be more productive. This, in simple terms, is part of the advantage that systems integration & data management can afford businesses.

Time and resources are vital tools for every business, and the more a business has, the more profit it can make. Systems integration & data management solutions help businesses save both time and resources by improving efficiency and reducing cost.

Systems integration and data management are two separate concepts. However, they function together to achieve the same goal: saving your business valuable time and resources.

Systems integration is broadly defined as the process of connecting different sub-systems into one unified larger system. Specifically, systems integration solutions link various IT systems, services or software together in order to enable them function together. The goal with systems integration is to get the different processes and IT systems that make up an organization to “talk to each other” by integrating them with each other. This speeds up information flows and reduces operational costs for the organization.

Data management is also described as integrated data management, and for a clear reason – the primary goal of data management is also to integrate several data sources together in order to centralize their shared value.

As with the example of the accountant, businesses will often have to collate data from several sources. For instance, data relating to accounts payable and receivable will be important to calculating tax returns and assessing business growth. That data, and more like it will not always be available from the same source. Data management solutions help the organization link these data sources together so there will be less effort spent on collating them and more spent on producing insights from them.

Systems integration and data management, taken together, help companies streamline their internal workflow processes by collating data from various sources and generating reports. In other instances, systems integration may be accomplished at the business to business (B2B) level in order to deliver increased functionality. For instance, it may benefit your e-commerce platform to include an integration that allows customers to track shipping that is delivered by a third party.

When is Systems Integration or Data Management Necessary?

High-growth businesses commonly grapple with the question of which business system can manage their operations best. However, few take the time to plan an integrated business management software system because of more immediate short-term revenue acceleration goals. As a consequence, various, and often disparate, applications may be installed at different points to address specific problems. The company may install an accounting software first, then discover it also needs one for inventory management and customer support issues as it grows.

Before long the business may find itself with what is often referred to as a “software hairball.” This hopelessly entangled mass of disparate applications leaves the business with less flexibility, loss of productivity and eventually slows down the ability to grow. Even if you’re not already at this “hairball” stage, you’re likely already relying on too many disparate applications for comfort. Don’t wait until you reach that stage before you reach out to a competent systems integrator.

Systems that are not integrated can cause more problems than they are intended to solve. HR departments of large enterprises can use up to 90 different systems to manage their employee data. A systems integration and data management solution allows organizations to maximize their technology investments and streamline operations.

• Faster decision making: Multiple unintegrated software systems produce overlapping databases. With such fragmented information, it can be more difficult to get a timely view of business performance. Many companies give up on acquiring this information on a timely basis because of how long it takes to source, extract and analyze the data. An integrated system enables real-time visibility of crucial performance data and this in turn facilitates timely and informed decisions. When information can be accessed instantly from almost anywhere, businesses can make more accurate and faster decisions.
• Process efficiency: Integrating key business processes will result in efficiency across the board. Daily operations such as order management, fulfillment, and invoicing can be very time consuming if they have to be collated across separate applications. Integrating and automating these processes will help the business avoid spending on new hires that would have been required to manage these processes.
• Boost productivity: Integrated solutions help organizations boost productivity since their employees are no longer wasting time on low-value activities. Staff can be redeployed to higher value activities more geared towards helping the business innovate and grow. A survey by Nucleus Research found that companies using an integrated suite were able to increase sales productivity by up to 12.5% and increase inventory turns by 50%.
• IT time and cost savings: Managing disparate and numerous software systems can result in high cost and complexity. When updates are made to each software or new versions are purchased, even more time must often be spent in getting all the different versions of the disparate applications to work together. This will result in the loss of valuable IT time and skyrocketing costs. Integrating these systems will leave IT with more time to improve business operations and reduce overall operational costs.
• Accelerated growth: Many businesses underestimate the power of a central business management system. With such a system, the business can expand to multiple locations and additional sales channels rapidly due to unified order and accounting management processes, as well as centralized data. Businesses will be able to cross-sell and up-sell more efficiently with their improved visibility.

We do System Integrations like no one else

The dangers of losing sensitive and valuable data are significant when undergoing systems integration. But having spent a lot of time helping businesses overcome integration challenges of various sizes our superstar consultants can handle pretty much anything.

In our more than 20 years of experience, we have helped businesses achieve integration on a scale that was all but impossible. Today, our consultants have deep experience with most of the leading technology and data platforms available in the market.

Whatever your needs are, we are capable of thoroughly meeting them. Contact us today to start a conversation.