We’ve all seen companies fail. From the inside, it starts slowly: Sales miss an important deal, engineering can’t get the product out the door, and revenue starts to slip. In the end, failure boils down to one or more of these problems:
- Insufficient Demand: Buyers simply don’t want the product, or it’s too expensive.
- Competition: There is a superior or cheaper product on the market.
- Failure to Control Costs: Wages, debt, materials, parts, and office space are adding up.
- Market Decline: The market shifts due to technology advancements.
Internally, we ask: Couldn’t someone or something have avoided it? Why don’t buyers like the product? Why is it too expensive? Why can’t we undercut the competition, reduce our run rate, or innovate faster?
Where It Starts
Companies rely on systems that ultimately play a role in success or failure. Most organizations believe their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a vital tool. A multitude of functions makes using an ERP feel like there’s nothing it can’t do. But, ERP systems are not integrated with dispersed systems—and they need to be. Without good integration, you don’t have visibility or agility, and you end up with inconsistent or missing data.
Gartner says that over the next few years integration costs will increase by 10 percent. This is impactful because when a business implements a new system, half the cost of the project goes to integrating it with existing software.
Why is this? Why, after more than a decade of adopting ERP systems that expose standard interfaces—and after the increasing adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS)—is integration still such a burden? The reasons have to do with inefficient integrations that rack up unnecessary costs and hold companies back from realizing their full potential. Any time systems aren’t well integrated, the success of the business is on the line. Poor customer experience, reduced efficiency, and inaccurate data are only the beginning.
How To Stop It
On the other hand, when real-time information can be accessed throughout an organization, and integrations are handled quickly, companies develop better execution with end-to-end visibility to their processes. This allows businesses to adapt to changing workloads, prioritize according to objectives, engender greater customer satisfaction, and improve response times.
To learn more, download our new whitepaper on how your organization might suffer from inefficient ERP integration.
