There is a new trend in 2019 as more smart businesses are rapidly deploying modern and intelligent business applications. Why? In this article, we investigate the reasons ..
Businesses are currently facing new headwinds
As the Digital revolution continues to plays out, business are rapidly trying to evolve and are struggling to stay on top. What is surprising business experts is the fact that the business processes and application tools from the past – instead of helping, are now turning out to be the root cause of the struggle. Especially, businesses like yours have been reporting experiencing steep challenges with their business management applications – the Customer facing CRM systems as well as the Employee and Partner facing ERP systems.
Here are the Top 3 reasons:
Legacy Systems – Trapped In A Time Warp
It is nearing 20 years that the last generation of ERP and CRM business applications were first released. Though launched post-Y2K, they were a step up from the monolithic green screen legacy applications; most of these siloed grey screen applications are still trapped in an age before the Four forces of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud ushered our business world into the 4th Industrial Revolution and the resultant need for modern and intelligent customer and enterprise experiences.
Siloed Systems – Single Trick Ponies
As business grow, they usually tend to acquire best-of-breed systems and applications. While this solves some of their capability requirements in the short term, this soon creates a mangle of disconnected systems, information silos and a plethora of unsustainable workarounds of manual processes. What starts as an effort towards technology automation soon regresses back to complicated and undocumented manual processes that are heavily dependent on the implicit knowledge of key individuals. Sounds familiar? It is mind blowing how many times I have seen this scenario playout in corporate America. These siloed systems combined with their slow and complicated patchwork of workarounds rapidly start creating friction that keep you from delivering the experience your customers expect and ultimately can put your business at risk.
Insufficient Reporting – Flying Blind
The most dangerous outcome of these legacy and siloed business applications is – you guessed it right – poor business reports and insights. It is a classic case of being drowned in so much disparate data – that most businesses are overwhelmed and miss the resultant key actionable insights.
It is astonishing how most businesses are flying blind, when these end-to-end reports and insights can help them catch important customer, vendor or employee trends in time and course-correct their business strategies.
Early warning signs your legacy, siloed and reactive applications are putting your business at risk
While each of the above 3 reasons by itself can seriously jeopardize a smoothly running business; a combination of these is a knock-out punch. Here are some of the early warning signs to watch out for and make a proactive change:
- Time consuming routines that make you switch back and forth between multiple business applications
- Manual processes that do not scale even when you add more manpower, loss of productivity, duplicate data, multiple versions of truth, errors that result in lost sale or customer dissatisfaction
- Missing KPI/Metrics dashboards and collaborative insights. Creating these reports from multiple applications is difficult, time-consuming and often inaccurate
Smart businesses are switching to Modern Intelligent Business Applications
If you see these early signs in your business, you are lucky to have the awareness and courage to realize the problem. Most businesses do not – and they try to continue to plough through without even realizing what hit them. The compounding effect of technical debt and technology obsolescence have killed many business -fast.
On the other hand, Smart business have succeeded due to their higher business maturity. While they do deal with the cost of consolidation and change – they are successfully able to realize that the real cost of trying to maintain a system that is no longer keeping up with demands. Whether the result is lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, or compliance risks, failing to update your technology can be a costly decision. The right business maturity to recognize this issue and make a bold investment into their sustained future by moving to modern intelligent business applications – and growing their business rapidly.
In this article, we have discussed WHY Smart Businesses are moving away from legacy, siloed and un-insightful applications and instead deploying intelligent Business Experience Applications to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Now the key question is – will you?
If you need more help; please feel free to contact me: ravi@tranzforms.com. I will be happy to understand your specific business needs and share my experiences to help you succeed.